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They grow apart fast but not easy. Neither of them expects any resistance, and that's probably what makes it the hardest. By the time they're both seventeen, Jimmy's already got three quarters of the town in his pocket and Sean's on another pole entirely, kissing the proverbial ass of a million out-of-state colleges, combing his hair into order and dressing real nice and straightening himself out so starch-sharp you couldn't see the wrinkles where people like Jimmy used to fit in. Jimmy takes this with a flippant life-carries-on disposition; assumes Sean wouldn't care or notice much if he didn't have that delinquent Marcus kid at his heels anymore. Sean tries to blend in still, pretend he hasn't changed, but ultimately falls prey to the wrenching brand of self-doubt that only Jimmy and sometimes memories of Dave have managed to fish out of him. He tries to blend in but it's not until he's hit with it in literal terms that the gravity of it sinks in. He's come back from some interview and when he meets Jimmy for their customary late-night Jack Daniel's marathons on the curb under the overpass, he can't process the look he gets back.
"What's wrong?" Sean greets the unaddressed look in the other boy's eyes; it takes a moment, but sure enough, Jimmy cracks a typical grin.
"The fuck're you wearing?" he says with a laugh.
Sean looks at himself, nearly having forgotten. His white shirt, though rolled at the sleeves and undone to the fourth button, exposing the wife-beater underneath, is still crisp and smells a little bleachy. He's got black pleated pants and dress shoes on and is generally overdressed for a night of underage public drinking.
"You can take the kid outta the Point…" Jimmy trails off, and Sean trots over to punch him in the shoulder.
"Shut up, okay, I didn't have time to change. I go home now, my folks'll never let me back out."
"You were counting on your folks to let you out?" Jimmy scoffs, incredulous, and then with a fresh wave of fiendishly delighted realization, adds, "Is that how you got here now? Asked politely? Promised you'd be real good?"
"I said shut your fuckin' mouth." Sean is smiling when he says it, grabbing for the bottle that Jimmy manages to keep out of reach with seemingly no effort; still, Jimmy only relinquishes when he can tell Sean means it.
"B'sides," Sean yields between hefty, draining swigs, "I've got a tie in my car too. Coulda worn that and I didn't, so. That's on you."
Jimmy's smile has always been the saving grace that keeps his features from crossing the line into grizzled, a thing he'd been in danger of from very early adolescence. It's never been a conscious thought, but Sean stores a hope in some far-off place in his heart that maybe that part of Jimmy will prove unreachable; will never allow itself to be beaten out of him.
They talk for too long about nothing, how's your family and are you still with that one girl whatsername and can you believe the bullshit they're playing on the radio, Jimmy using a concentrated gaze to will each approaching car past them.
"We used to do this all the time," Sean says once he's drunk enough that regret can't catch up with him. "Before you got your fake, even."
"We'd steal shit outta cabinets…" Jimmy shakes his head slowly, almost incredulously; uses 'we' either in error, or as a favor to the memory of a thirteen-year-old Sean, whose parents never kept enough alcohol in the house that some could be stolen and not missed. "Meet out here when everyone else fell asleep."
Jimmy looks up abruptly and says "I miss that," as if it's not what they're doing now.
But then, Sean understands as he feels the thought die in transit to his lips: it isn't.
He says, "Me too," instead.
"How's all your college shit been, by the way?"
Sean leans his face laboriously on one hand as an answer.
"Come on, man, you can't be serious. You're wicked smart." His tone was the sort that could have been called tender, had it come from anyone but Jimmy Marcus.
"I don't fucking know, okay, it's like they're looking for… the whole picture. Or whatever. Like they'd take my credits and my record and all that shit if it was pasted on somebody else's life, but so long as it's me… I could walk in with a goddamn Nobel Prize around my neck and they'd still be looking at some jerkoff kid from Boston, y'know?"
"You do look like a jerkoff in those fuckin' clothes," Jimmy contributes helpfully, lighting a cigarette.
"But I mean… you do know what I mean, though?"
"Jesus Christ. I am some jerkoff kid from Boston, Sean," he says, in all seriousness. "I never expect anybody to look at me like nothing else."
Sean doesn't say anything. Part of him thinks fair enough, but it's some different part that leaves him staring angrily into the dregs of Jimmy's whiskey bottle.
By the end of the evening, Sean's drunker than he meant to be -- drunker, even, than Jimmy, who insists that if anybody should be driving, it should be him. Sean hands over the keys eagerly and starts to head for the passenger seat but stops when Jimmy stays in place, eyeing the overpass with a bizarre amount of detail.
"Hey, I thought you said you're driving! You're… no, you're, you have to drive me. I might throw up or something." Sean shrugs, then relents, "Yeah, I'm gonna throw up, probably," under the pressure of a fresh, stronger wave of nausea. He waits, then calls out "Jim?" again after the figure cast in shadow, dwarfed by the mild 3 AM traffic above him; walks towards him as steadily as he can manage.
"I don't think we should do this again, Sean," Jimmy says quietly, without turning around.
Sean thinks of the first time his parents had caught him sneaking out of the house; feels the memory rush over his brain like liquid. He'd been thirteen, and it had fallen on the first week of summer and left him grounded until two weeks before school was back in session. Logic and reason and the fact that he was only thirteen and his parents weren't stupid made it obvious that it would have to happen sometime, but it wasn't until it happened that he felt truly aware. He could look back at everything that had happened before, those months he had spent being invincible, but could never have them anymore.
"Okay," comes out of his throat thickly. He knows now more than ever that he will throw up before the night is over.
The look Jimmy gives Sean when he turns to face him is one of restrained sympathy. He tosses a single hand lifelessly in the air.
"You're gonna be a… a big man, okay, Devine?" His lifeless hand takes on brief promise: points at Sean with a swaggering conviction. "You are. And that's not ass-kissing, all right, that's an order."
Sean tries to laugh but feels too punctured. He imitates it, though, some estimation of amusement, hearing the noise come out of him, foreign and vapid.
Big man. He feels his lips touch briefly around the words. You're gonna be a big man, Devine.
"You walking home?" Jimmy calls from the driver's seat; now it's Sean standing alone under the overpass, staring blankly out at the sleepy intersecting street where he'd parked.
"I'm coming," he says in a voice that comes out weaker than he'd meant it to, then vomits all over the gravel next to him. Jimmy's laugh throbs in his ears, washes bluntly over his skull. This reminds me of when we first came here is what Sean might say, given the breath and courage. They'd both gotten real fucked up the first night they'd found their spot by the overpass, the night when Jimmy had tried to kiss him while insisting 'I ain't no queer or whatever,' and wouldn't let Sean kiss him back until he promised, 'yeah, me neither'.
They'd been fifteen when that had started, Sean remembers. That is something else that had come crashing down around him, he remembers too.
"I swear to God I'll pull outta here without you," Jimmy threatens. "And I'll keep the fucking car!"
Sean stumbles pitifully towards the passenger door but stops halfway there to throw up again.
"Come on," Jimmy says when he's finished, gentler this time. "Puke out the window or whatever. I'll drive slow."
He takes Sean all the way down to his street, but parks around the corner from his house -- "tell your folks you took a cab. And if you say anybody drove your car, don't fucking tell 'em it was me."
"Jesus, I'm not retarded," Sean mumbles, refusing to take the car keys Jimmy tries to hand him. "Keep it tonight, I don't care. I could go out, um… I'll go get it tomorrow, I dunno, jus--"
"I'll walk, Sean."
The finality in Jimmy's statement doesn't go unnoticed. Sean palms his keys awkwardly, almost unsure what to do with them, before cramming them into his pocket.
"So, uh. Here we go. I guess." he gropes, both figuratively and literally, a loose, sweaty fist still closed around the keys in his jeans.
He holds Jimmy's typically darty, calculating gaze for a moment, and it's weird, like a concession, almost. Like Jimmy truly gave him that look; let him keep it, fleetingly, as some final favor.
"I'm really drunk," Sean says aloud in an attempt to shake off such stupid thoughts. Jimmy's smile reappears, and this time it hurts to see, but then it hurts not to see it too, and Sean's past the point of articulating, even mentally, the way that makes him feel. When it disappears, it's such a simple gesture but suddenly so monumental. Flashing up, surfacing, and then letting itself be carried back under.
It's a look he never receives again. Not from Jimmy, anyway, who walks off with a simple "night, Sean," and leaves echoing footfalls for miles. Not from Jimmy, who is destined to marry some girl called Marita, whose name means something about the sea in Spanish and who grinds raw every memory he has of ocean and takes them all under with her when she dies. Certainly not from the man Jimmy becomes, who carries a heavier smile that appears only rarely and is always bogged down by clusters of awful things that cling to it beneath the surface.
Sean Devine thinks a lot about Jimmy Marcus as he walks a solemn procession to his front door and is forced to continue the rest of his life.