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chapter thirteen: pictures of you

a/n:

disclaimer that i have no idea what animals were actually in the como park zoo in 1996.

tw(s) -- bullying, charlie's a loser (affectionate) lol

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When Rick decided to skip class to go 'have fun', he failed to mention that they'd have to sit in the car for over an hour.

So, when he declares they're just over halfway to their destination and pulls into a rest stop, she is one of the first to get out of the car. Road trips have never been a strong suit for her (her family was bigger on taking a thirty-minute flight via their private jet than they were on going on two-hour drives) and she's pretty sure that she's getting motion sickness, though that might be the breakup finally settling with her body. Adam was right after her and immediately went to her side, looking sick enough that she held his hand in hopes of being of any comfort; Rachel, after getting out, declares with a tired sigh that she's going to attempt to get into the bathroom and tells Scott to get her a snack and a drink. Scott then, as she walks away, turns to Rory.

Rory waves a dismissive hand because she knows what the inside of Rachel's fridge looks like. "I've got it, don't worry."

"Thanks." He stands on his toes to stretch his back. "Did you see that? How she was cuddling up to me?"

Half-amused, Rory nods. "God. It's almost like she has a super obvious crush on you, or something."

Adam snorts a laugh and Scott rolls his eyes. Neither of them comments on the slight blush on his cheeks.

Rick joins them only moments later and Rory is jostled by his infallible ability to glow wherever he goes. He started the day off being punched in the face and, yet, here he is, smiling that Richard Riley smile like nothing happened. She eyes him as subtly as she can, but she can find nothing wrong about him—— he's frustratingly perfect, not a hair out of place as he slings an arm around Scott's shoulders and shakes his (still blushing) best friend, and she stares on with pinched brows.

(It's only a scientific curiosity, of course. The urge to put him under a metaphorical microscope and pick him apart to just finally understand him as much as he seems to understand her was the same kind of urge a biologist feels about a strange sample, truly.)

"Where are we going, Rick?" She asks as they finally start to walk toward the little convenience store that's attached to the gas station.

Adam gently swings their hands between them as Rick looks back at her over his shoulder.

"Como Park Zoo." He says, "You'll love it. They've got a bunch of animals and an entire garden full of plants you can read about—— no horses though. Sorry."

He finishes that with a wink as if that's an inside joke between them. Rory's face flushes.

(She had no idea that he read up on stuff about her, too.)

"I don't like horses that much." She grumbles indignantly, but that's her only complaint.

A morning at the zoo sounds like great fun.

"Oh, man. I haven't been there in forever. What about you, Banks?"

Adam shakes his head when Scott addresses him. "We only ever go when my brother comes by with his family."

"Huh. Cool. I had no idea you had a brother."

Adam just shrugs. Rory squeezes his hand because she gets the need to hold your secrets close to your chest.

"Rachel's going to hate it." Rory interjects to get him out of the hot seat.

"I wouldn't worry about that." Rick says as he holds the door open for them, as if he'd never go this out of his way to bother his sister. "There are penguins. She'll probably stand there and cry about them for half an hour at least."

Rory can't help but smile. There's something strangely endearing about Rachel's favorite animal being penguins, and the fact that Rick knows that about her, and what Scott says after.

"Shit. Looks like I'll be spending my day in a freezer, I guess."

"That's what you get for liking my sister."

Rory and Adam drift away from the boys as that dry comment dissolves into an argument (with Rick being insistent that he knows and Scott failing to deny it), Rory going for the coolers to get Rachel a drink for Scott and Adam desperate to not get sucked into it.

She doesn't think that she's been in a store like this since they left Los Angeles. There was just far too much going on in her life once she returned to Michigan—— Oliver's wedding, Ellie's birth, the drama with the scholarships, and her grandfather withering away right in front of her, to name a few—— for her to have time for self-soothing. She wasn't even allowed to leave the house without the accompaniment of a security team and the permission of a PR individual.

The last slushee she had was given to her by Charlie of all people, who broke out of the event center just hours before her sixteenth birthday party and smuggled the drink in for her to enjoy while the makeup artist tried to make her look like she hadn't been crying all morning.

Her thoughts of him have a bitter twinge as she pulls the Coca-Cola spigot.

Why is it so hard for him to understand? Why is it so hard for all of them?

(In what world is she rationally comparing those kids she loved to Rick Riley?!?!?)

"What was that about the horses?"

"Hm?"

Adam is looking at her when she glances up at him. His eyebrows are knit together and he seems to gnaw on the inside of his cheek.

"The horses." He repeats himself with the faintest jerk of his head back over his shoulder.

"Oh, uh, I did an interview when I was little." She turns the machine off and puts the cap of the cup on. "I said my favorite animal was horses, but that's only because my dad had bought me a pony. I think it got sick, like, a year later because of poor breeding, so they put it down—— Anyway, I told Rick I used to read old magazines about him, and he's being cheeky."

Adam blinks his way through the processing of all of that information and then nods hesitantly. A moment later, after he picked a drink and they turned to pour over snack choices, he finds his bearings.

"Are you... okay?"

"I'm fine."

"Okay." Adam definitely doesn't believe her. "You know you can talk to me about anything, right?"

"I know."

Adam nods again. It's Rory's turn to gnaw on her cheek.

"I, uh, I don't know. Really." She swallows thickly and looks at the chips so she doesn't have to look at him. "I think, maybe, I wanted to love him because that would make him, I don't know, stay?"

Adam doesn't say anything but the words keep pouring out of her.

"The goodwill games made everything so easy. We were all just, like, American kids working for the dream, and our differences kinda melted away. But here? Where we have nothing uniting us and everybody knew that they were different? Yeah. Things were doomed to fall apart."

Rory wonders if he can tell how guilty she feels.

"I'll be fine." She finishes. "In a few weeks, this won't even bother me. It'll roll right off me like water off a—— over stones."

The corner of Adam's lip twitches up, slightly, at her slip-up. Before he can say anything, though, his beeper goes off, and he immediately checks it.

She lifts an eyebrow as a blush creeps up his neck.

"Who's beeping you?"

"Nobody." He says, then glances up at her. "Bobby."

"Bob—— Oh."

The grin that breaks out across her face only makes his reddened face redder.

"No way."

"It isn't anything, yet." Adam hurriedly assures her. "I just—— he's really nice, and he likes me a lot, but I'm not sure that I'm ready for anything, y'know?"

Rory nods along his with his hushed rambling.

Being in love with a boy who didn't (or, simply, couldn't) love you back for the better part of six years sounded like hell to her.

"I think you should go for it."

"Really?"

"Yeah." Because what can one secret date with some big, dumb boy who really likes him hurt? "You deserve to be happy."

"So do you." Is his quick response.

It makes her smile but it also makes her start to think so much it makes her nauseous.

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Charlie Conway, although he would never admit this to anyone (not even Hans or his mother), uses a picture of Rory as a bookmark.

It's one that Julie took back in Los Angeles. A candid shot of Rory in the middle of a conversation, smiling toothily and fiddling with her hair, that Rory hated so much that she gave it to Charlie because, according to her, he was the one that she was talking to. He doesn't know when Julie took it, or whether or not he actually was the one standing just out of view, but he does know one thing and that is that it's his favorite picture of her to ever exist. He felt wrong for having it, though. Rory is (was?) his friend's girlfriend, and, more importantly, his friend. So, it lived within the signed copy of Gretzky that she got him for his birthday, never to leave his bedroom or to be seen by anyone but him on the nights he opened the book he'd already read just because he missed her that much.

Or, at least, it wasn't going to leave his bedroom until he unconsciously shoved the book into his bag the morning everything went to hell.

He's the first to arrive in the cafeteria and the first to sit at their table, so he pushes the lunch he wasn't entirely interested in to begin with to the side and pulls out the book. It's then, as he opens it, that he remembers what was keeping his place. Her face, her smiling face, nearly blinds him, his blood pressure skyrocketing as he shut the book again just as quickly.

Oh god, Charlie thinks, oh dear god.

Not so surreptitiously, he glances around to see if he's been seen. His eyes land on Guy, who has been standing across the table from him for an indiscernible amount of time.

Guy says something, but all Charlie can hear is Rory.

"What?" He asks, face scrunched as his hearing comes back.

"I think that there's something seriously wrong with Rory."

Oh.

"What do you mean?"

Guy shoots him a look across the table as he sits down. "What do I mean? Dude, you were there this morning. She's not doing too hot."

Charlie swallows thickly because, yeah, he remembers what happened this morning very well.

(Selfishly, the fact that she looked at him with nothing more than apathy in her eyes is sticking with him more than the fact that she was mean to his friend.)

"Maybe talking about her here isn't the best idea."

Charlie jumps and looks at Kenny. When did he get here?

"Maybe not." Guy concedes. "But, like, there's gotta be something wrong, right?"

Kenny nods, the bob of his head, and his face crumples into something so guilty that Charlie wonders if he looks the same.

"I'm kinda starting to think we're the something wrong."

Guy doesn't have a response to that. Charlie's just glad his heart has stopped trying to leap out of his throat.

All conversation about the Rory thing effectively comes to a stop when Averman, face swollen but doctored up by the nurse, arrives. But, because everybody wants to talk about the Rory thing and they're all too scared to do so, no real conversation happens at all; Charlie slips the book off the table and into his bag when nobody's looking, and pushes food around on his plate while he tries to seem interested in Fulton's comments about their homework.

Their bubble of uncomfortable silence is burst by Russ, whose eyes grow comically wide as he stares over Les' shoulder.

"Hey, y'all, don't panic, but Biff and friends coming straight for us at twelve o'clock."

And, of course, everyone turned to face the three varsity boys who were shoving their way through the crowd to get to their table.

"Oh, god." Kenny says as Dwayne sinks down in his seat.

Charlie recognizes all of them. He's been doing research.

At the front, holding a shoebox in his hands, is Cole. On his left is Bobby Brown, another enforcer whom he's seen hanging out with Adam an awful lot, and on his right is Dominic Labine, presumably the voice of reason in this scenario.

The entire table braces themselves for the oncoming verbal onslaught.

But they were preparing for threats that never come.

"Hey, Rugrat." Cole drawls as he comes to stand behind Averman. "Congrats, man. You've been dumped."

Unceremoniously, the much larger boy drops the box onto the table in front of Averman, who winces at the same time Charlie does.

"Yeah, we're like a singing telegram—— except we aren't singing, we're just here to tell you that, if you talk to her again, Bobby's going to kick your ass."

Averman looks away from Dominic to give a grinning Bobby a brief glance.

Charlie grabs Fulton's sleeve so hard his knuckles turn white to keep him from getting up. On Fulton's other side, Julie does the same thing.

"Why didn't she just give this to me?"

"Because she hates you?" Dominic asks rhetorically. "Because you broke her heart? Any of this ringing a bell?"

"Hey, man," Connie finally says, "lay off him."

They—— as if they've been strictly warned to just talk to Averman—— barely even glance at her.

"She also walked off campus, like, two hours ago, man, so she couldn't have, even if she wanted to."

"What?" Averman asks, voicing the opinion of all the rest, who share confused glances around the conversation they're not really a part of.

"Yeah," Bobby shrugs, but he's smiling like he's so very thrilled by this information, and that makes Charlie's heart drop to his stomach, "she's skipping, man. Rick's taking her out to cheer her up."

Averman's face slackens and becomes ashen. Bobby gleefully snickers and Cole gestures with his head for them all to leave, Dominic giving the shell-shocked boy a rather condescending pat on the back.

(Taking her out? Charlie thinks, horrified. What does taking her out, mean? Does that mean a date? So soon after the breakup?

Rory wouldn't do that, right? She wasn't into jerks like Rick Riley, was she? No. Not his Rory. She'd never.)

(Still, he can't shake the sinking feeling in his gut that all of this has already spiraled so far out of his reach.)

"Oh, man... I have to tell my mom, now. Do you think she's told her dad yet?"

Goldberg reaches out to actually rub his friend's arm.

Charlie, meanwhile, tastes the metallic burn of vomit in the back of his throat.

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"It's crazy how smart they are." Rory says thoughtfully, arms crossed as she reads a plaque on the wall beside a gorilla enclosure. "Like, look at this—— they've been known to use tools and grieve loved ones."

Rick, however, is watching the animals with furrowed brows. "I wonder how it works..."

As annoying as it is (and though she will never admit it), Rick was right. Rory has been immensely enjoying the zoo.

The other three disappeared very quickly into it, Rachel deciding that she had to see the penguins and departing with both Scott and Adam's arms in hers, throwing the vague plan to meet back up at the entrance later over her shoulder. Being left with Rick was, decidedly, not the worst thing ever; he went along with what animals she wanted to see, and didn't complain about how long she lingered at each one. There were a handful of jokes, but none at her expense, and he mostly just listened to her talk.

He even bought her Dippin Dots, which she'd never had the pleasure of eating before, and which she still hasn't finished as of their stumbling upon the gorilla exhibit.

"How what works?"

Rick watches her eat a spoonful of her ice cream and stops leaning on the banister, looking down at her with a stupid grin. "How it works. I mean, look, there is a clear difference in size, there."

"Ugh."

He laughs as she hits him on the arm.

"You're so gross." She grumbles, blush creeping up her face as she drags him away via the sleeve of his jacket. "It's sexual dimorphism. It has to do with mating and adaptation and stuff."

"Spoken like a true scientist."

"Well, I don't know for sure. History is my strong suit."

"I know." Rick's eyes are alight with life as he eats a spoonful of his ice cream.

Rory's traitorous face just gets redder.

"...You know an awful lot about me."

She's not sure that she means to say it. Or, maybe she does, because it comes out hesitantly, like she's testing the waters.

"I just pay attention to you. That's all."

Rory swallows for a reason she can't quite discern. "Yeah, but... I don't know a lot about you."

She finds herself wanting to smack herself after that.

What a pathetic thing to say.

How mean to ask him about things like this when he's already shared so much about his home life.

When she slowly lifts her eyes from the floor, though, Rick's soft gaze quells most of her panic.

"What do you want to know."

"I don't know." She had no idea she would get this far. "What's your favorite animal? Your favorite color? Just, like, the cute, not-so-heavy stuff, I guess."

Rick nods and sucks his teeth, thinking for a moment. Rory's heart rate struggles to come down.

"I don't know about my favorite animal but my favorite color is green. Like, really dark green, y'know?"

Rory nods.

"Uh, oh! I haven't applied to a single college yet even if we are just weeks away from the deadline because I don't know what I want to do with the rest of my life."

That makes her give him a face. He just smiles, bright like the sun.

(They'd have to talk about that again later.)

"If you look really closely, I have a scar on my face." Rick points to it for emphasis."Split my forehead open trying to do a trick on the ice a few years ago. Had to get like six stitches. My dad was royally pissed."

She has to squint to see it, the faintest line right above the hair of his eyebrow.

It's then, as she's studying the lines of his face, that he says something that has her stopping in her tracks.

"And I think that you're the prettiest girl I've ever met."

(Her heart, for the record, also seems to come to a screeching halt.)

"What?" She laughs, a little breathless.

Rick just shrugs. "You are." He's smiling again. "I thought you might need to be reminded of that right about now."

Rory swallows again and tries to breathe.

(Oh, no way, she thinks.)

"Really?"

"Mhm."

"I—— wow—— Thank you."

"You're welcome."

They continue on as if he didn't just say that, and Rory's heart skips a beat every time their pinkies brush against each other. After finishing their breezy tour of all of the enclosures they don't have to go out of their way to see, she follows him to the Gift Shop, allowing him to force her through a photobooth to 'commemorate the trip' (in which they are so very close to each other and after which he slips his copy of the pictures into his wallet for safe keeping) and buy her a horse stuffed animal (he says that one is because she's sad, too.)

Her mind is heavy and her cheeks are red when they regroup with the rest, and she's quiet for most of the ride.

(And later, when she's in bed with her stuffed toy and the picture of them, she'll stare at his face pressed next to hers until her heart stops leaping at the sight of it.)

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a/n:

word count — 3396

"isn't she moving on a little fast?" I once, when I was rory's age, watched a girl swear she was never going to fall in love again after the boy she lost her virginity broke up with her and then start dating a new boy like not even two weeks later. (also, though i would never ever admit this to her face, i think she was already kinda emotionally cheating on averman a while ago LMAO)

anyway,,,

the picture of rick and the picture of rory??? rory and charlie giving each other books???? i want to scream why did you people let me write this omfg

adam is my favorite character in this book, actually. he's just sitting here like... "?!?!?" and he's a mood.

writing this fic for myself at this point but it's fine
bc I'm thoroughly amused by it.

comments and votes are super appreciated! they let me know that you guys like my writing and I cannot stress how much they motivate me to continue! thank you