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“Who’s that?” Amelia asks, clearly not having been paying attention to a word Ginny was saying to her about blocking. It’s annoying, Ginny had somewhat foolishly expected her seniority in their theater to get her even just a little respect from the younger actors, but so far that doesn’t seem to be the case. She can only hope that she wasn’t so blatant about her disinterest in the technical side of things when she was Amelia’s age.
Still, she can’t just ignore her question, so with a sigh she turns over her shoulder to see who could have caught Amelia’s eye. Her irritation turns into a small bout of excitement when she sees a head of familiar, honey blond hair standing near the back row of seats.
“That’s just Neil’s friend Todd.” She says simply, and though she isn’t facing her freshman counterpart, the confused sound she makes is loud and clear. Ginny almost laughs, but she’s old enough to know that would be pretty rude.
“Alright, but who’s Todd?” She asks. In lieu of saying anything Ginny goes to call out to him, but, predictably, Neil runs up to him down the main aisle and begins dragging him backstage before she can. He talks animatedly the whole way, the hand that isn’t wrapped around Todd’s wrist gesturing wildly; Todd following along as intently as ever. She huffs, though she should have seen that coming, and turns back to Amelia as they disappear into the wings. When she goes to give her an answer, she's more than a little shocked to find that she doesn't actually have one.
No one’s ever really asked who Todd was before. Not because they don’t care, they all adore Todd whenever he stops by, but because they just never had to. One day in their Freshman year Neil had just walked into the theater with him in toe, patted him firmly on the shoulder with a grin, and said ‘This is Todd!’. No one had questioned it, stranger things had happened that day alone, and from then on Todd was just sort of a part of their routine. Any underclassmen were never bothered by his presence, or got used to him quickly enough that it didn’t matter.
He tends to do his homework in the audience—second row, third seat from the end—when he isn’t actively needed. If she had to take a guess it’s probably English, spurred on by the seemingly never ending surplus of books he brings along each week. If it isn’t English then she hasn’t got a clue what it is, but on that same note she isn’t exactly sure what kind of English class would require that much reading in the first place. Probably an AP one, but she’s also never been in an AP class. Chris always tries to tell her to sign up for at least one, constantly claiming Ginny’s more than smart enough for it, but she doubts it’s ever going to happen at this point.
Once a year he’ll help with the costumes. He can’t really sew, and he’s honestly one of the least fashionable people that Ginny knows from the little she’s seen of his casual wear, but after every winter break he shows up with no shortage of different fabrics for them to use in the spring. She doesn’t have any clue where he gets them from, they don’t have a fabric shop in town, but it helps keep their costume budget low for the season. According to their director, it helps him feel a little less useless, even though they’ve all tried to tell him that he isn’t useless, and even if he was that they all like having him around. Even after all this time it still hasn’t gotten through to him, unfortunately. He pretends he believes them, though. Ginny isn’t sure if it’s just to be polite or not, but it never fails to dampen her mood a bit.
He’s never acted, seems to lose a piece of his soul at the mere idea of being asked to try out for a part, but he does a damn good job on lights and is a pretty efficient set painter so it’s not like anyone could complain about him being around in the first place. If asked, very rarely and only if everyone else is busy, he’ll sit on stage to run lines with Neil. Sometimes she’ll hear them laughing about nothing in particular instead of actually rehearsing. Owen—a redhead that brings poprocks to every rehearsal without fail and never shares them—had asked him to do the same once, but he’d frozen up so harshly and looked so much like a deer in headlights that it was the last time anyone that wasn’t Neil ever did.
He’s nice, too, though sometimes Ginny can see him having to hype himself up before saying as little as four words. Once she heard his voice crack on the word ‘okay’, and then she didn’t hear him speak for the rest of the month with Neil acting as his personal translator. He still lets out quiet breaths of relief when he gets through the word without mishap, which is as endearing as it is humorous. Ginny doesn’t think she’ll ever meet anyone as geared up as he is for the rest of her life.
Geared up or not, Ginny is endlessly grateful for the several times Todd, when working tech, had taken her to the side and talked her down from freaking out for any number of reasons. Whether it was the stitching of her costume rubbing against her skin the wrong way, or her makeup just not setting right, or even not being able to remember one stupid line, Todd was there as a calming touch and a guiding voice. It’s probably the only times Ginny has seen Todd totally and completely sure of himself, and while that begs the question as to how he’s so good with people having panic attacks, she’s never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Still, knowing all of that about him, she’s suddenly hit with the realization that she doesn’t actually know anything about Todd. In fact, the things she knows for sure about him are as follows: His name is Todd, he goes to Welton Academy, and he has social anxiety. She finds it kind of funny that one of those is an educated guess, another is just plain old common sense, and the final she only knows because Neil told it to her.
As strange, and maybe dehumanizing, as it is to think about a real person, Todd exists entirely within the confines of the theater in her mind. It’s sort of odd how impossible it is for her to imagine him anywhere else.
He’s a lot different from Neil, who she knows almost too much about despite rarely ever speaking to one another outside of the theater; if only because he speaks so damn much. She knows his mother’s maiden name, and the name of his pet hamster from when he was eight. She knows his shoe size, and that he has a barely noticeable mole on the heel of his right foot. She knows that he’d almost been named Jeremey before his grandmother said that was a stupid thing to name someone, and that dogs are his favorite animals, but that he thinks he’d be a far better cat owner. She knows that he likes poetry, but doesn’t think he’s all that great at writing it himself. She knows that he was scared of pool filters until he was nine, and that his father takes him to a boring New Years party every December thirtieth without fail. She knows that he sprained his wrist trying to do a cartwheel in the seventh grade, and that he actually doesn’t mind older country music despite how mediocre newer country music can be.
She knows that when he was thirteen, he’d done something stupid that’d sent him to a hospital for three months, and makes him get a distant look in his eyes when he thinks about it too long.
That particular piece of information is one she prefers to pretend she never learned in the first place.
But the point is, Neil, to her, is a person, whereas Todd is an extension of Neil—only ever around when he is. It feels wrong to think that, but she can’t help the truth. Nothing she knows about Todd isn’t something that doesn’t directly connect back to the very building they’re all standing in, or even just an inference from observing his behavior over the years, and everything she doesn’t know about Todd is something that would give him the layers to make him his own person. Maybe that’s to be expected, with how much he keeps to himself, but it doesn’t make it any less weird.
When she really thinks about it, she doesn’t even know for sure the nature of Neil and Todd’s relationship with one another. They’re friends, obviously, but why he’d initially been dragged to rehearsal is a mystery. She’d always just assumed that Neil had offered and Todd had said yes, a simple ordeal, but the more she thinks about it the more she realizes that couldn’t be the case at all.
For one, in hindsight, Todd hadn’t so much as followed Neil into the theatre that first day as he had been dragged in by the elbow. He’d been subtly glaring at the side of Neil’s head most of the day, even as Neil either pretended not to notice or didn’t care at all and swung an arm around his shoulders. Neil had also directed every single joke towards Todd, an attempt to lift his spirits and get him out of his funk most likely. Honestly, if it weren’t for the obvious tells, you could have assumed Neil had just picked some random stranger up off the street.
That theory was discounted by the fact that they were wearing the same school uniform—the blazer with the red and black tie and white button up—and the fact that when Todd’s irritation had melted away, he would ever so slightly lean into Neil whenever someone got a little too sociable with him. Even the assumption that they’d been friends for years at that point doesn’t really have a lot of evidence. It was easy to come to that conclusion because of how well they seemed to play off of each other, and how they just seemed to know what the other needed, but Ginny vaguely recalls Neil saying that Todd was a ‘totally welcome change of pace’ from the other friends he’d talked about before.
It’s endlessly curious that Todd, an at the time brand new addition to Neil’s friend group, was the one Neil chose to share his self-appointed favorite thing on Earth with. Charlie, of whom Ginny had only properly talked to once and yet who she could still tell you more about than Todd, was Neil’s best friend of over a decade at this point, and he’d only been around a total of four times. Not counting each of the productions that Neil was in—He and the rest of Neil’s friends were always in the audience of those, cheering louder than anyone else in the crowd when the curtains fell. Well, them and some middle-aged man that tended to speak like a wise old sage, for some reason. Apparently he was an English teacher, though, so perhaps it made sense.
And Ginny didn’t want to perpetuate any harmful stereotypes here, she’s in theater for Christ’s sake, but she had to admit to herself that the two of them were far more physical with one another than one would expect from two teenage boys. Rarely would you find Todd without Neil’s arm around his shoulders, and vice versa you’d be hard pressed to turn and find Neil without Todd’s arm around his waist. As a matter of fact, Ginny swears she saw them holding hands once before they were both called in different directions to help with this or that. The hand holding she had almost brushed off as just a show of casual platonic affection—she and Chris held hands all the time, after all—but considering her personal dilemma with Chris, that didn’t do much to dismiss her point.
Once she’d walked out into the hallway to find the two of them forehead to forehead, Todd’s face in Neil’s hands as silent tears made their way down his cheeks. Never before had she heard Neil’s voice so gentle, quiet enough she could hardly make out what comforting words he’d been using to bring Todd back down to Earth at all. The sight had frozen her to her spot, both because of the discomfort that came with seeing Todd in such obvious distress and the fear of being caught having seen it, but they’d been too caught up in each other to notice her. No, Todd, who she had come to know as someone downright allergic to eye contact, was too busy staring into Neil’s eyes with this look that finally managed to break Ginny out of her trance. They’d come back into the theater fifteen minutes later, standing even closer than usual.
In fact, that look might just be the most incriminating piece of evidence she has, though she hates to use that word about something like this. She couldn’t count on three dozen hands the amount of times she’s caught them just… staring at one another. That alone wouldn’t be so staggering, Neil’s had a staring problem for as long as she’s known him, but the look they both get in their eyes that makes it feel like you’re intruding by being in their general vicinity is different. It’s so smitten, like they can’t believe what they have right in front of them and how lucky they are to have it in general, and more often than not it happens when the other isn’t even looking. Todd in particular seems to wear it most when Neil’s performing, his face shrouded in darkness and hard to see.
At this point they’ve done just about everything but officially confirm that they’re dating, and sure the logical next step would just be to assume they are—like Ginny’s certain most of their fellow thespians have—but she doesn’t want to do that. Not because she’s against it, who would she be if she was, but because she doesn’t want to possibly crack that dynamic. Dating or not, drawing attention to certain behaviors is almost always a surefire way to get them to stop; even if that hadn’t been your intent. No teenager Ginny knows likes being told their emotional vulnerability is on clear display.
Then again, Neil and Todd have never been like most of the people Ginny knows.
But regardless, whoever Todd is to Neil, Ginny isn’t totally sure. Frankly, whoever Todd is to her is sort of up in the air. They aren’t quite friends, but they definitely aren’t strangers, and acquaintances doesn’t really fit either. Todd’s in this weird limbo category of people that Ginny knows, and she doesn’t know how to get that across. How are you meant to describe someone with no concrete presence or part in your life? She hasn’t got a clue.
Neil’s raucous laughter echoes from backstage, followed by Todd’s much quieter chuckle, before they both abruptly stop. That can’t mean anything good, knowing Neil’s track record of tripping over his own feet when he’s excited, but right now that isn’t her problem. She’s sure Joey will deal with it. Maybe. Hopefully.
She shrugs, setting her eyes back on Amelia after maybe a bit too long of a silence, and finally answers, “He’s just… Todd.”
It's not nearly detailed enough to truly convey just what role Todd plays in their theater, which is so convoluted and so lacking in any real substance of who Todd is as a person it'd do nothing but make everyone involved more confused, but it's the best Ginny can come up with at the moment. She can't help but think Neil would have some choice words about her phrasing.
This answer obviously doesn't suffice, which is evident by the pout Amelia gives her in response, but they’ve already been talking about this long enough—and if Ginny keeps thinking on it she isn't so sure she wouldn't spiral—so she interrupts Amelia before she can ask anymore questions, “Right, now did you hear what I was saying about making sure you don’t turn your back to the audience?”