The picturesque, upper New York town of Bradbury is memorable only for its nice views and long, freezing winters. It's the sort of town that adults describe as quaint and wholesome, and most youths describe as an isolated black hole that will suck you in for life if you don't get out as soon as possible. It's all subjective, of course, but even adults find it hard to argue that it can get pretty boring on a Friday night. Sure, there's the odd pizza joint or bowling alley, but once they get to a certain age, teenagers avoid these like the plague; and the owner of the one bar in town seems to know everybody in town -though that's not a very difficult task- and trying to get a fake ID past him only results in a ride in a police car and an awkward conversation with the parents.

Given the above, the one place that teenagers seem to gravitate towards most is the aptly named Bradbury Mall. With an arcade, a movie theater, an impressive food court, and almost twenty stores ranching from clothes to comics, Bradbury Mall is busy every night of the week and packed out on weekends. The cool September night on which our story starts is no different. Adult pushing strollers with sleeping toddlers, gangs of kids too young to be high schoolers but finally old enough to enjoy the freedom of hanging out without parents hovering constantly nearby, teenagers talking and laughing in twos and threes and fours; for the most part, it all looked the same as any other mall would look on any other night.

One aspect, though, was notably different; dotting the crowds were people in yellow tee-shirts with 'The Sharing' printed across the chest. There were men and women, teens and adults and the elderly, people from every walk of life whose only shared qualities seemed to be their shirts and the wide smiles they wore. Though just less than one year old, some one hundred and fifty of the town's four thousand or so population was already a member of the group. Every Friday for months they'd been at the mall, handing out colorful brochures and recruiting.

Though their persistence and almost eerily cheerful manners annoyed and even unnerved some, even most who didn't intend to join could understand the appeal. It was all about togetherness, doing community service, and enjoying the company of friends and family. When they weren't helping out around town and doing food drives, they were organizing camping trips and cookouts, all without any added fees or requirements. Particularly active members were even promoted to the somewhat secretive 'inner-circle'; though, even few in the group knew exactly what being in it entailed beyond gaining extra leadership roles within the organization.

Of course, even the members of The Sharing would be clearing out soon. It was nearly ten at night, nearing curfews for most. Those without curfew would only have until eleven before the entire mall closed. For most, the night was very nearly over; however, for five teenagers, it was only just beginning.

It was growing late, and, as usual, the darkness and the hour bade Max pay that much more attention to her phone.

The grayish thing was supposed to be chrome, but the ten-year-old hand-me-down, a flip phone from the prehistoric era, still had its uses. She didn't use it much. In fact, she only had a handful of numbers in the programmed into the phone, anyway. Her mother's cell, and the number for Bradbury Grace Memorial where she worked (because phone bills went unpaid just slightly more often than either Max or her mother felt comfortable with). The house, cell, and work numbers for Jim Darcy, the middle-aged widower who lived down the hall from their small apartment at the north end of town. The apartment super, and the number at the boys' preschool downtown.

Shooting Stars Preschool and Daycare was open to Jack and Cody Jackson on a scholarship that was supposed to put them ahead when they started kindergarten next year, which basically had Max over the moon, even though she knew her little brothers well enough to know they didn't need a fancy school for all that. But it made her feel better about leaving the boys with their mother on days when Dominique came back from a triple shift too exhausted to tell the twins apart. They'd been at the preschool for a couple months now, and seemed to like it. And they got free lunch and breakfast there, so that was cool.

Meanwhile, their fifth birthdays were next week, and Max had left BGA -- Baile's Gymnastic Academy -- an hour early to get to the mall in time to find them something suitable. She'd been saving up for two months (pretty easy when you didn't go out much, anyway) buy them gifts. Ideally, loud, with flashing lights and motorized, moving parts.

That way, she could play with it, too.

But the fates had thus far conspired against her. Almost an hour and a half here at the mall, and she hadn't found anything but cheesy t-shirts, sticker books, and last year's best sellers from the $2 DVD bin. Also, a cup of frozen yogurt, a giant pretzel, and two cookies...but that had all been for Max. She'd be getting home too late for dinner. Probably.

She was about to give up and just head home -- shopping or not, she hated leaving her mother and brothers home alone so long...especially when her father was in town "on business" -- when she spotted a familiar face through the sea of yellow 'Sharing' shirts, and brightened.

Calmly, politely pushing past the gently insistent brochures-with-legs, Max barreled through one couple and two groups of middle school kids, ("Oops...sorry. Sorry! I...um...forgot!") to catch Iikka and Jason Bertrand before she lost sight of them again.

"Jason! Iikka! Wait up! It's Max! From school! Where we all go together!"

Mario
Nova Roma was the best pizza place in Bradbury, although that would not be too difficult to claim because Nova Roma was the only pizza joint in town. Mario’s Great Grandfather had established Nova Roma and it had run in the family ever since. Now, both his Grandfather and his father ran the business. While Mario’s father always wanted one of his sons to follow his own footsteps into the pizza business, he knew that Mario had his mind set elsewhere. Mario would be the first person in his immediate family to attend and complete a bachelor’s degree.

Every Friday, after the last track practice of the week, Mario and some of his friends on the track team would grab a bite at Nova Roma. Along with Mario were four other friends, two guys and two girls. There was once pair of twins, whose name was Jack and Jill (they almost get as much flax for their parents’ naming choices as Mario did). The other guy’s name was Matthew. He was the class clown to an extent, although he knew how to make jokes about Mario (and the twins) without pushing the wrong buttons.

The last person in the group was Melissa. She had blue eyes and light brown hair. Mario felt like he was in limbo with her: they were good friends (although nowhere near BFF’s), but Mario wanted more out of the relationship, or rather, he wanted to have a relationship with her, as boyfriend and girlfriend. However, he just did not want to make a mess within his friends on the track team if they would have some sort of a fall-out if the relationship goes sour. Therefore, Mario was in constant indecision about whether to pursue such a relationship.

They would always get the house special, the New York-style pizza with everyone on it, except for mushrooms. And whenever they would get that type of pizza, Matthew would always interject a joke about mushrooms and Mario. It was not always the same joke, but it had the same intended meaning. In the Nintendo games staring Mario, mushrooms would increase Mario’s size and allow him to be able to take one additional hit from enemies. If you could have thought of a joke involving this situation, Matthew probably already had said it before.

After the five friends finished their meal at Nova Roma, they crossed Main Street and entered the Bradbury mall, just so they could walk off all the fattening foods they had just eaten. The mall was infested with people wearing yellow tee-shirts, who apparently were associated with an organization called the ‘Sharing’.

Once Mario pushed his way through a pack of yellow-clad mall-goers, he realized that his friends were nowhere in sight. And soon he would realize why.

"Jason! Iikka! Wait up! It's Max! From school! Where we all go together!"

It was not that they did not like Max; she was actually a pretty nice girl. However, she had a reputation for getting hyper and absent-minded. Mario feared what would happen if she was on a sugar high. She probably would be bouncing off the walls if she could.

”Wait guys! Mario is over there! Let’s invite him, too!”

Mario sighed. He was hoping that she would somehow overlook him, but that was not the case. Suddenly, his cell phone started to vibrate. He had just received a text message and it was from Melissa.

“Did you get caught by Max?” The text message read. Mario gave another sigh and replied “Yes” to the text message.

"Damn..." Jason glanced down at the flapping corner of denim hanging from the back of his right calf. He'd been climbing around on the shelves looking for a certain type of rebar for a customer, and snagged his jeans on the way down ripping the leg. "These were my good work pants, too."

He wasn't talking to anyone in particular, and often there wasn't anyone to talk to. He shook his head as he fetched a flat trolley to load the rebar onto, and went about fulfilling the order. "Had to do this one last thing. No, couldn't just leave early. Had to do my job and rip my damn pants..."

"You could just run safety pins up the rip, it'd be punk," said the girl at the cashier's counter sympathetically. He handed her a ticket for the rebar.

"Nah... Not for work."

After wrapping up the loading of the rebar into the customer's work truck, he was ready to go home. It seemed like he'd been loading rebar all damn week, thanks to the new construction going on in town. It was an easier job when it was just weekend warriors building decks or putting in new molding. Either way, it was 7pm and his shift was done. Jason retreated to the back office to clock out and hang up his apron, an ugly purple thing with JASON scrawled across the chest in sharpie above the logo for Hart's Home and Hardware. That was the color theme for the store, a weird radioactive eggplant purple on all the uniforms, aprons, tags, signs, logos... He'd never paint a house purple because of it, surely. He really didn't mind the job, or working hard, but that purple was just...bad.

"Adios, muchachos," he muttered to the apron, and headed out of the office and shop, looking up at the gray cloudy darkness as he exited. "At least it's not cold..."

He heard an abrupt rush of air as some large object passed through the space directly behind him. "HEY CHICKEN LITTLE!" A voice bellowed at him, the shout piercing into his ears as somebody hit the pavement directly behind him.

Jason leapt forward and looked back, a look of shock on his face. Iikka. Of course.

"Jesus, dude!" he said, recovering from his surprise. "Carl said he'd call the cops next time he caught you climbing his store again."

"The cops can't arrest Jesus." Iikka Guiomar said with a contemptuously smug smirk plastered on his face as he got up from the low crouch he had landed in. "Besides, I didn't climb the store. I climbed the building next to the store and then jumped over here.

"Well, they'll have to let you off on a technicality," Jason said with a grin. "What's up?"

"Sky, space, and stars my friend, and also my own handsome self spying that ride of yours. I have something I need to do at the mall, and I can't climb the streets to get there. I don't suppose I could cajole you into giving me a lift?"

Jason stuck out his right leg to show off the dangling rip of fabric. "I could be convinced to go to the mall. Rebar problems."

"I'll make you a fair offer. I'll be your malefactor, and teach you everything there is to know about stepping all over whatever you please." Iikka said easily. "Assisted, of course, by the Fabulous Thunderbirds and their hit song, 'Stand Back.'" He pulled an iPod from his jacket and brandished it at Jason as though it were a switchblade.

Sometimes Jason greatly questioned whether Iikka lived in the same reality he did.

"Right, well. Ok then." he said, taking his keys from his pocket. He led the other boy towards the weathered looking black Mazda 3 parked in the back of the lot. He'd started working when he was 14 with a hardship permit, and saved up the money to buy a car. He'd only been driving it for about three months, and it was a rather worn car on the outside though there were only about 70,000 miles on it. It had been in a flood once, and that really brought the value down. The paint was peeling from negligence and he had to replace the carpets on the bottom with some cheap mats, but it worked, and had a nav system with an audio input jack. If Iikka wanted music, he could have it. A couple clicks from the locks unlocking as Jason pressed the button on the key fob and they were in.

"And hey, who was that I spied at the counter? Anybody I would be interested in?" Iikka asked conversationally as he got in and fastened his seatbelt before plugging his iPod's jack to the dashboard nav.

"Who, Claire?" Jason asked, trying to imagine Iikka and Claire spending time together. That would be weird. She was too mainstream, maybe. "I dunno, she's a nice girl."

"Meh. Claire is an awful name anyway." Iikka opined.

"It's a nice girl name, you need someone with some crazy bitch name. Like, a Mandy or something." Jason retorted in her defense, "Or an Aimee, like spelled A I M E E rather than just Amy."

"Mandy is also an awful name, would it hurt to ask for somebody with a name that sounds nice to say, with a bit of resonance to it? Did you know our biology teacher named his daughter Achalasia?"

Jason snorted, "Achalasia?? That sounds like she'd be some princess or something. Poor kid."

"Turns out its actually the name of a muscular feedback disorder that occurs in the esophagus."

Jason shook his head, pulling the mazda out of the parking lot and onto Main Street. He turned on the stereo, turning up the volume a little as the brass band came into the speakers. Iikka always found interesting music, and he had better luck finding MP3's than Jason did trying to find vinyl.

"You know the way. Now accelerate to 88 miles per hour." Iikka deadpanned. "And let it be known I have right of first refusal on roadkill."

Jason stopped at a red light. Iikka gave him a look of consternation, not even bothering to admonish Jason verbally, instead just shaking his head in a soft, morbid fashion.

Jason decided to vex his friend further, and used his blinker as he made a slow right turn onto the feeder that would take him onto the highway. Then he pressed down on the gas, lurching the car foward and crossing over onto the ramp. They shot up the ramp, gaining speed, and weaved their way into the highway's far left lane. He twisted the volume up a bit more on the stereo and the engine's four cylinder did its damnedest to keep up with the demand Jason placed on it. He kept a wary eye out on his mirrors for possible cops, but it was clear.

"Now that's more like it." Iikka said, nodding in approval. "Stand back, everyone! He takes large steps."

It didn't take long, as Bradbury wasn't so big, for the two boys to arrive at the mall, park, and make their way inside. They had hardly been there ten minutes when they heard a familiar voice call towards their direction.

"Jason! Iikka! Wait up! It's Max! From school! Where we all go together!"

Iikka cringed visibly, and Jason stopped and looked over his shoulder to see Maxine rushing towards them excitably.

"Keep walking, keep walking!" Iikka urged, pushing on Jason's shoulder, but it was too late, and they knew it. She was bubbly and hyper, and apparently had eyes on the back of her head as she spotted Mario Russo and started calling him out to "Join us too". Because apparently this mall outing was suddenly an "us" situation.

"Oh, hey there, Max," Jason said a bit awkwardly like he wanted to be elsewhere. This was quickly becoming an abnormal social gathering. How often did he ever hang out with Russo?? Not since second grade or something, surely. It wasn't that they tried not to hang around; they just lived in different social circles: Mario on the sports circle, and Jason in no real circle of people whatsoever.

"Hey, guys!" Max blurted enthusiastically to everyone and no one all at once. Bradbury was a small town. Even Max knew that. In fact, if you took more than three steps out your front door, and didn't see someone you know, you are probably alright to act surprised, or even concerned, because the Rapture had probably just happened. Still, Max could never get over the thrill of running into friends from school. Grocery shopping, dropping off the twins at daycare, at her gym, wherever. It was exciting! Imagine, just going about your day, doing boring chore stuff, and then -- bam! -- there was someone to talk to! Someone you maybe hadn't seen in a couple hours, and then you had hours' worth of stuff to discuss! Max thrived on small talk. Which wasn't to say she wasn't capable of deeper conversation. For all her erratic tendencies, she was a good friend, with a proverbial heart of gold and loyalty bordering on innate altruism.

But Bradbury didn't offer much of a chance to show that. Bradbury students even less so.

Fortunately, max was far too idealistic to take it personally.

Unfortunately, it also meant she wasn't very good at taking a hint. So, when she herded her 'friends' from school into one tight little group, it was with blissful ignorance that she all but vibrated there between them. She still had her phone in hand, ready and waiting for that emergency call. But she knew her mother would be alright if she was a few minutes late getting home. She was always telling Max to get out of the house, anyway.

Usually after she'd broken something playing with the twins.

"Hi!" she said again, grinning around at somewhat bright and enthusiastic faces...because no one else had said anything yet.

"Are you guys here just hanging out? I'm looking for stuff for my brothers' birthday next week, but I could find anything so I got a pretzel instead. And some ice cream. And cookies. Not for them, for me. But then I was thinking I'd look at some video games, Mom said she was saving up for a Wii, and if we get more than one controller, they can both play, so probably something loud. They like loud."

She trailed off only when she'd run out of breath, and then tried to wait patiently for someone else to pick up the conversation. Then she forgot about waiting patiently, and started talking again.

"Hey, do you guys play video games? What are your favorite ones? My brothers are only turning five, so it hasta be kinda easy, and nothing with, like, blood, Mom would hate that. The violence, not the blood, she doesn't mind blood, she's a nurse." Another beat. "SO, what are you guys all doing here? Did you come here together? Is it a surprise? Or a secret? That's okay, you don't have to tell me, I don't mind."

"Yes." Iikka said in an utterly deadpan voice. He had not even turned to face Maxine, and he wore a begrieved grimace while he resisted the urge to grind his teeth. Still, he managed to grab onto the hyperactive girl's last statement, and determined how he and Jason might be able to get away.

"What we came here to do is a complete secret, we cannot tell anybody for any reason. In fact, we shouldn't even be talking to each other, we shouldn't be in a group, and we shouldn't even look at each other. But you can still help us. For our secret plan, Jason and I need to go to Brookstone and get one of those bullshit wine aerators. You need to go with Mario - he's right over there - and get a Rubicks cube. Go ahead and talk to Mario, he can tell you all about what we're doing."

'By which I mean go crawl into a dirty pit and die slowly you putz.' Iikka thought savagely. He was not in the mood to put up with Maxine at all, especially during HIS free time. He wasn't entirely sure the half-assed scheme would work (very few people were that stupid, and really, a wine aerator?), but if he could just turn Maxine's attention to Mario then hopefully he and Jason could get out of dodge before the fix was in. The tricky part, of course, would be making sure that there wasn't a second chance meeting between all of them later, but Iikka would run from that Harpy when it came for him.

"Really?" said Max, tilting her head to the side, sort of like a confused puppy might do, even though she was a person, and not a baby animal. She was, however, confused. So there was that. She'd been kinda joking about the secret thing. Mostly because there weren't many secrets in Bradbury, but then she could totally understand wanting to keep some things to oneself, so maybe she shouldn't have been so surprised.

Anyway, Iikka had been the first to speak (aside from herself, of course) and break the totally not at all awkward silence, so she rounded on him like a starving, feral cat might the wounded bird who'd just fallen helplessly from the tree. Except she wasn't going to kill and eat him. And again, she wasn't an animal.

"Well...okay," she added slowly. She couldn't even begin to imagine what sort of secret Jason and Iikka could be sharing that involved a wine aerator -- well, no, that wasn't true. She could easily imagine about a hundred different things, but since most of her wild imaginings involved things like pirates and space giraffes, she tended to keep those to herself. She got overexcited pretty easily, and could be about as naive as they came, but she wasn't stupid. It was highly unlikely that Jason and Max were buying a wine aerator as the final, crucial piece of the super stealth jet powered by pizza grease from Mario's parents' pizza place. She knew that was absurd, she knew it, just like she knew they'd probably had to remove the part they'd built to jettison extra cargo into outer space, in case the plane started going down due to the great pizza grease shortage of 2012.

It never even once occurred to her they might just use a wine aerator for aerating wine, since they were underaged, and they were nice boys, who wouldn't do that, obviously.

She turned to Jason and offered a polite smile. She liked Jason -- well, she liked everyone, but Jason seemed nice than most. Thank Iikka, at least. Not that she would ever say as much -- and sometimes she saw him on her way walking the boys to their preschool. He only waved back sometimes.

"Hi, Jason." She pointed. "I like your pants. I saw that on TV once, it was cool."

And then she turned to Mario, who hadn't said much of anything so far. She hoped he wasn't shy. She knew she could overwhelm shy people. She didn't think he was, he was on the track team and had lots of friends and everything, but you never knew.

"Hey, Mario. Good job at that meet last week, I heard you came in first again. Melissa told me." That wasn't really true. Melissa didn't ever really talk to Max. But she'd overheard her telling one of her other friends about it, and people liked compliments. Also, people liked Melissa.

"So...how 'bout that Rubik's cube?" Only now that she was saying it out loud, she realized how weird it sounded and sort of smiled. Maybe Iikka was making a joke. He made jokes like that kind of a lot. Max didn't really get them, but she laughed anyway, because she didn't want to hurt his feelings.

Mario
Did Iikka think that they were idiots? Why in the world would they need a wine aerator? Underage drinking? Well, that would probably explain why Iikka has had trouble with the law (such as beating that one girl to a pulp). He probably had some alcohol in his system. It was obvious that Iikka was attempting to direct Max’s attention towards Mario rather than himself (and towards Jason) so that they might be able to sneak away. Mario was not going to allow that to happen.

“I have no idea what he is talking about.” Mario finally said, in response to Iikka trying to pawn Max onto him. “Why don’t you tell us about it already? I mean, by how quickly words travel through the grapevine in this small town, we probably will know what it is sooner or later. Might as well spill the beans now.”

And Mario highly doubted that Melissa told Max in person that he had won another track event. While he thought that it was perfectly plausible for her to have heard it from someone, as the town was pretty small, but that Melissa told Max in person, highly unlikely. However, Mario just took the complement.

“Um...Thanks?” Mario said. “Oh, and on the Rubick’s Cube. I have only solved one once, and that was after I found a website on the internet that showed you all the exact moves to solve the puzzle. I probably could learn how to solve it on my own, but it is too much of a hassle.”

Mario hoped that his few comments had distracted them from the most obvious comment that could have been made. Max asked about what Wii games would be good for her brothers and there was one obvious answer. The Super Mario Brothers. Mario cringed a little when he heard that company’s name, let alone their game console. He just hoped that the (in)famous plumber and his brother would not be mentioned in this conversation.

Jason pinched the bridge of his nose rubbing the spot between his eyes. Iikka could try his patience at times. He decided it was up to him to clear things up, as it would be far too entertaining to Iikka to just keep running them all in circles. The mall would close before he could buy some pants at this rate. It might be better at this point to just buy pants later and get people calmed down.

"Oh, actually they ripped at work. That's why we're here, I need to pick up a few work pants." he explained.

"Max, have they ever played any Kirby games? They might really like it, and the main character looks like a pink marshmallow." Jason suggested, trying to get things back on track. He didn't have a Wii, but he used to play Kirby Dream Land on his old SNES. "They made a sequel to the original to called Return to Dream Land they might like." He'd seen the ads in the window for Game Stop on the way in.

"Uh, yeah," Iikka said grumpily, stretching his arms nervously and shooting a glare at Mario over Maxine's shoulder. "And I'm actually here to pick up mealworms. So there, see? We all have different places to be. Don't complain that I was trying to make your doubtlessly insipid lives a bit more stimulating. I made up an entire scavenging outing when I saw you two just so we could spend the rest of the day together, but oh look - you're a huge sopping wet blanket that's been soaked in baby drool. I guess you must have a lot to do, by yourself and with this person." He gestured at Maxine with his index finger, but with his palm up and with a faint look of contempt, his eyes narrowed and flashing briefly.

The look quickly faded and Iikka shot smirk at Mario. "So yeah, Mattie," he said, oblivious to having forgotten Maxine's actual name, "how about you go get that game - or something similar - with Mario here, and then introduce him to your brothers? Jason and I, we'll be going now, see you on Monday and all that jazz. Bye, and don't wait up." He then nudged Jason a little in the back and actually began to pointedly walk away.

The tension rolled in thick and heavy as a summer storm. Even Max could feel it, though her intuition had always been more tenacious than her blissful ignorance. It made her good at people, it made her love people. It also made her impulsive and spontaneous, and probably a little too sensitive to those few threats she did perceive.

There were rumors older than her brothers that Iikka had sort of a violent streak. She'd never given much credence to them. She made it a point to avoid gossip, especially the kind that could hurt someone's feelings. That, and she was never really included in most gossip. But she knew it could hurt, and if she were the type to be easily put down by people, instead of just fascinated by them, she might have even been resentful. Instead, she did her best to duck either side of a potentially vicious cycle and ignore rumors, whether they were about Iikka, her, or someone else entirely.

Still. Iikka hadn't seemed so joke-y in his otherwise pedantic taunting of Mario. Making up a scavenger hunt when you knew there was nothing to be scavenging seemed sort of cruel, and Mario's avoidance of the situation didn't come across as wet blanket-y so much as pragmatic in a way Max could never be. There wasn't really any need to call names, except that maybe Iikka had been caught in his joke/lie and was being sort of mean about it now.

She glanced sidelong at Mario, then back to Iikka, the faintest beginnings of a frown flitting across her face. She didn't take offense to much -- your could hit her with an SUV and she'd laugh it off as long as everyone walked away in one piece -- but she really didn't like bullies.

But Iikka was already walking away, and she was more or less content to let him go, though she was faintly curious what would make a person want to lie about a scavenger hunt in the first place. She wondered if maybe he was lonely, and made a mental note for herself to find him at lunch one day. She had a few comic books she thought he might like.

For now, though, she smiled brightly at Jason before he could leave. "I think I'll try that, thanks. They really liked Kirby in all those Super Smash Something games. Um...also, good luck with you pants."

[[Dedonus/DotCom Collab]]

There was an awkward silence of which Max was blissfully unaware as she stood on her toes to peer around Mario's shoulder. Someone had hired something that was probably supposed to be a clown to stand in front of the OK! Toy Store and hand out balloon animals for kids. Ironically enough, Max had never feared clowns (she didn't really understand why people thought they were so scary...they were grown-ups in face paint and technicolor wigs. It inspired more hilarity than fear, but to each his own...), but she was terrified of balloons. More specifically popping balloons. But they were pretty, and the twins loved them. She stood there, just staring for a moment, until she looked up and realized Jason and Iikka must have ditched, for pants or a wine aerator or something. She'd forgotten now.

She looked over at Mario, still standing there, shell shocked or bored or both.

"Don't you have to go, too?"

"Well, I could..." Mario began to answer Max. Mario thought this could be the perfect opportunity to get away from Max because usually when you get her attention, she sticks to you like Gorilla Glue. However, if he were to leave Max there, he could not meet up with his track friends because they would probably want to wander around the mall for a little bit. Mario would feel bad if he told Max he had to leave and then later have her see him with his friends still at the mall. He felt that was dishonesty and he would never do such a thing, or he would like to think that he would not. On the other hand, if he would leave and actually go home, what would entertain him on a Friday night while he was at home?

Then another thought popped up in Mario's head. If Mario would leave Max her, she would probably have to walk all the way home in the dark. While crime was not as much of a problem in Bradbury, there was always that one off-chance that some wacko might do something stupid. Mario's conscious just could not live with that. Maybe Mario could stick around for a little while and walk her home so that she did not have to head homeward alone. Or they could go to his parent's house and see if they would give her a lift home. Or something along those lines. Mario would think of something sooner or later.

"...but I don't really have anything important to do tonight."

Max stared at Mario for a moment, head tilted to the side, her eyes studying his face. She'd been called naive and gullible and idealistic (and lots of other, less nice things) for as long as she could remember, but no one could say she was stupid. She hadn't missed the long (well, "long" for Max was more than a single heartbeat, but that was neither here nor there) silence before Mario answered, in that way that usually meant people were thinking, and even more usually meant people were thinking about something they didn't want to tell her.

Which meant it could be a surprise!

...it just normally wasn't.

"Oh," she said, then let the single syllable hang in the air between them in an effort to give Mario a chance to talk. Then, bored, she piped up again. "Well, I think I'm gonna go by that GameStop downstairs to see if I can find a discount copy of that Kirby game. You wanna come? OH! Or we could go to the donut place over there," she pointed to neon sprinkles painted on the wall a few storefronts down from where they were. "It's almost closing time, and sometimes they give the leftovers away!"

While Mario did not have anything against donuts, he did not have the appetite for them because he had eaten several slices of pizza back at his father's pizzeria, Nova Roma. However, Mario did not want to explicitly state that he was full because he had a little too much pizza since he thought that would be almost too stereotypical for someone of Mario's background. The best way to approach this situation was to give some information, but not all of it.

"Well, I just ate not so long ago, but I'll come with you if you really want to get a bite. Just as long as you don't get hyperactive from having too much sugar in your system." Mario said the last part with a laugh.

Suddenly Mario's cell phone rung. When he checked to see who had either called or texted him, Mario discovered it was his younger brother, George. Unlike Mario, George was more into video games and more indoor related activities. Apparently, Mario's brother wanted Mario to go and get him some Xbox points for some reason or another, if Mario was still at the mall. Mario rolled his eyes. Why could George got the points himself earlier in the day? George promised to pay the money back to Mario. While George was usually good on this promise, Mario would prefer getting the money up front so he would not have to worry about not being paid back.

"Well, looks like my brother wants me to pick something up for him for his Xbox. Looks like we're going be heading in the same direction."

With anyone else, the trip through the mall, back down to the first floor, past the Donut Queen, and through the GameStop (half a dozen donuts heavier), would have taken the better part of an hour. But Mario was stuck with Max, and Max was stuck with an idea, and way too much sugar. That, and the mall was closing.

They'd just stepped out of the GameStop, purchases in hand, when the warning chime for the mall closing went off over their heads. Most of the other stores were already closed. The kid who'd helped Max find Jason's Kirby game was locking up the store behind them. Max had nearly had a heart attack when Mario's phone had rung. The ringtone was nothing like hers, but she'd long since trained herself to expect bad news when someone called after dark. The thought had her itching to get home, and as Max turned to Mario, there might have been almost a hint of nerves visible in her expression.

More excitement, though.

"Hey, so I live over in the apartments on the other side of town. Um...I know this short cut out past the main road." Then she realized how weird that sounded, and tried to fix it.

"It's through that abandoned construction site, y'know? I bet we could find, like...giant metal piping there."

Or not.

"Really, dude..." Jason muttered as they walked away from the group. He hoped Max wouldn't take it too personally.

He was a bit embarrassed about Iikka's weird outburst. As much as the big guy liked to rip on people like Max, he definitely had his own social 'quirks' that made people awkward about him. He put it out of his mind, honing in on the local Dickies store. Not being one for shopping for shopping's sake, he made for the sale racks first, poking around for his hard to find size of 29/34. Not finding any on sale, he found the cheaper jeans and picked out two pairs since it wouldn't hurt to add to his closet a little. They were allowed to wear jeans at the hardware store but they had to be in good condition. The leg rip definitely decommissioned his current pair to fix-it-for-school pants.

He went to the register to ring up his purchase, and looked around the store to see where Iikka went when he realized he wasn't with him. It was likely he was destroying something or making a clerk cry.

Then, Iikka came abruptly back into view, coming through the store entrance and carrying a white plastic bag with him, its contents apparently small and loose.

"Hey Jason, sorry I vanished on you, I checked the time and saw the Mall is really close to closing, so I made a dash to the PetCo to get these bidental sacrifices." He took a transparent bag of mealworms out from the opaque plastic demonstratively, while the cashier eyed him nervously.

"So yeah, we have to put eggs in our shoes and beat them. It's already dark and everything outside, so you probably need to have already been home. I don't know how strict your parents are about that sort of thing, but you still probably shouldn't keep them waiting. I also need to still get home though, so I had this idea - there's this dirt road between first and second street that's adjacent to that big construction site. I think construction vehicles used it back when the place was still actually being built. We can tear straight on past the place, you can drop me off at the corner, and you can get home within five minutes."

Technically, Iikka's house was in the upperclass suburbs which were directly South along first street, which would have meant only a fifteen minute walk along the road for Iikka normally - except Jason also knew full well that Iikka probably hadn't spent more than six hours at his parents' home in the past week. Of course, he had several bags of mealworms to carry with him, so presumably he actually intended to retreat home for once instead of conveniently forgetting to mention he was instead crashing at the apartments, more than an hour's walk in the opposite direction.

Fingers flew over the controls, alternating between the joystick and action buttons. On the screen before him, his character moved in response to his commands, left, right, jumping up and boosting himself in midair to make it across the expanse, strafing side to side as an opponent on-screen moved in and out of his line of sight. It was exhilarating to have this kind of control, that wherever the freshman boy pointed his fingers, his armored avatar obeyed. With the voices emanating from his headset, and adding only a few elements from his imagination, it was easy to pretend that he was the character on the screen, climbing into the mechanical robot in this battle of the ages.

"Theo, get your ass over to the other side of the map," demanded one of the voices through the headset, this one belonging to one of the boy's teammates, a former classmate of his named Jeremy. From the sound of his voice, it seemed like Jeremy was in serious trouble, but then again Jeremy was always the alarmist.

"I can't," explained Theo, gritting his teeth as he unloaded his barrage of firepower against the opponent dancing around his robot. The enemy was going to die, of that he was sure, it was only a matter of time and firepow—yes, a kill! "There's too many douchebags ganging up on my robot!"

As if to emphasize his point, the mechanized robot onscreen crumpled over in death, exploding in a violent fury which engulfed half the map, signalling yet another failure. Seething, Theo roared a loud expletive, expressing his anger in a voice that the entire house was sure to hear. He didn't think much of it, and launched into another fury of combat as his character respawned, robot-less this time.

Someone knocked on his door, but Theo was too focused on the game to notice. Suddenly, a small, thin woman was standing by his side, her hand on his shoulder. The boy looked up, peering below bushy eyebrows to make out the image of his mother. She hadn't changed from her business attire except to remove the jacket and loosen the collar of her blouse, but her thick, brown locks were let down from their business-style bun, cascading down her shoulders, interrupted only by the occasional fold or crease mark. Her brown eyes peered through thin-rimmed glasses, a clue that he had interrupted her after-work reading time. Theo knew what she was going to say before it came, so he was hardly surprised when the words came in her sweet, encouraging tone. "Theo," she started, the warmth in her voice doing an awful job of hiding the concern he knew lurked beneath, "I think you've had enough time shooting and blowing things up, tonight. Why don't you go do something else?"

"Sure mom, in a minute," he mentioned, his eyes returning to the screen where his focus lay.

His mother had several patented moves for dealing with her only son. Even if she led a busy life doing whatever it was that she did, Theo barely paid attention to his parents' jobs, Marina Navarro had never shirked from her duties as a mother. This move was easily her favorite, effective both against her son's video games and her husband's computer. She slipped between Theo and the screen, placing her hands on her hips to widen her stance. Her son leaned around her, playing her game for a moment as he tried to continue playing his, but she matched him move for move.

"It's Friday night, sweetheart," his mother spoke in a firm tone which left no room for negotiation. "You're a teenager, you should be out of the house."

In his ear, Jeremy was screaming for help again. Theo felt a twinge of guilt as he pulled off the headset to better hear his mother; the next time he spoke to his friend he was sure to get an earful for abandoning him.

"Fine," he decided in an exasperated tone. Hitting the button on his controller, the game shut down, immediately disconnecting him from the battle and contact with his former schoolmates. He made a mental note to apologize when he signed on again tomorrow.

A grin stretched across his mother's face, the only clue of satisfaction he would see all night. "I'll have Gregor drive you somewhere, Theo. I'm sure your friends are all hanging out at the mall."

In actuality, Theo's friends were in New York, staring at their video game screens and wondering why he had suddenly dropped out of their match. Since moving from the Big Apple to Bradbury in upstate New York, Theo hadn't done much to connect with anyone at his new school. Everyone at Bradbury High had gone to Bradbury’s middle and elementary schools together. There wasn't much room for the Latino transfer boy from New York, whose family immediately began flaunting their wealth in town, first by buying the biggest house in Grand Oaks, and then by having a chauffeur drive their son to school, eschewing the bus that even the upper-class freshmen weren't too snobbish to ride.

The Latino boy sulked the entire ride to the mall, or at least what the town of Bradbury considered a mall. It barely had two anchor stores, and the dozen or so shops that made up the rest of the pickings displayed such high prices and poor variety. If Theo had really wanted to do some shopping, he would have planned for the two-hour trip to Plattsburg. For most of Bradbury, the mall was the local teenager haunt, so it was a wonder how the stores there had enough business to survive.

Theo asked Gregor to drop him off at the door, instead of letting his father's chauffeur, or whatever he was, park the grey sedan with him inside. The big man just grunted in reply, he knew how to find his charge easily enough, and it wasn't as if the mall was even big enough to get lost in. The freshman boy knew he would only escape from the man's watchful eye for a few minutes before he was located, but it was enough to make him satisfied.

He set off on a mad rush to his favorite location, the only store he cared to patronize at the mall, GameStop. The example consoles were worn and unkempt, some with controllers that had been broken for months, but they were one of the town's few places of free entertainment. GameStop's main attraction, however, was their wall of new release games. Theo breezed past the wall of Playstation games, his face souring in disgust, and quickly reached the white and light green pastels of XBox game boxes. The first column held the upcoming games, or at least those that weren't prized enough to be showcased right next to the registers, and Theo examined the empty boxes for any further clues as to the future game's promise.

When he grew tired of the XBox wall, the brown-eyed freshman boy turned to the Wii games. A couple of schoolmates were standing at the wall, eyeing games like Super Mario Party or Kirby's Dream Collection. He figured they were classmates, anyway, he attended Bradbury High like all the rest of the town's adolescents. Theo stood silent behind them, watching, wondering if he knew the girl's name. Her frizzy hair and freckled face seemed familiar, as more than just a passing acquaintance, but he couldn't recall. He hadn't paid much attention to the people at his school since he moved here. They were already fine without him, and he was fine with doing his own thing, why ruin what worked?

Shooed out with the rest of the mall-goers at closing, Theo was surprised not to see the big ogre that was Gregor waiting for him. It was just at that moment that he felt a vibration in his pocket. Pulling out his phone, the youth pulled up the message it had just received from his mother, and read it quickly. It said, Your father needed Gregor for something important. WALK STRAIGHT HOME RIGHT NOW. I'll see you when you get there. XXXOOO. The freshman boy rolled his eyes in characteristic teenage apathy, after his mother had made such a big deal about getting him out of the house, what could be so important that he had to hurry right back home? He decided to ignore the message, the mall might be closing, but that didn't mean the night was over.

Theo stood close enough to the somewhat-familiar girl and her companion to overhear what they were saying. He gleaned from their conversation that the girl lived at the apartments, but the older boy must live closer to the middle-class residential neighborhood at the center of town. Otherwise, the construction site would be no shortcut at all. He had passed the site plenty of times by car, and on the few occasions that his parents and Gregor had both been busy, giving Theo ample time to explore the town. The old construction site, evidently the original location for the mall before it had been moved, was fenced off to prevent just this sort of thing.

But, Theo had a thing for eavesdropping, and when he did he heard many such useful things. It was amazing how much someone would say when they thought no one was listening, perceiving silence for ignorance. He knew that the high school boiler room was a safer place to smoke weed or cigarettes than the bathrooms, he knew that the school nurse had a thing for the biology teacher, and he also knew...

"That's all fenced in, you know," the Latino boy blurted out suddenly, announcing both his presence and the fact that he'd been eavesdropping. His olive-skinned cheeks were burning at the embarrassment, though he knew they were only turning a darker shade of brown instead of red. With the dice rolled, Theo figured he might as well see where they landed. "But I heard there's a section that you can climb through without messing with the barbed wire."

Theo glanced from the girl to the boy, wondering if anyone would answer the spoiled kid from the wealthy neighborhood.

Mario
"It's through that abandoned construction site, y'know? I bet we could find, like...giant metal piping there."

“Giant...Metal...Piping” Mario thought, unsure whether Max intended to use such vocabulary to convince him to come with her to some abandoned construction site where they probably should not be in the first place. If Maxine would have added ‘Green’ to what she had said, Mario probably could not take such a blatant reference to that infamous plumber, who, well, made his life difficult. Mario took a couple deep breaths before he answered Max so that he could get the Mario out of his system.

“So, where exactly is this so-called “short-cut”? Where my cousins live, there is a road called “Short Cut Road. Only probably was that it was scary as heck to drive on and it most definitely did not make the trip any shorter.”

"That's all fenced in, you know," an unfamiliar voice said. "But I heard there's a section that you can climb through without messing with the barbed wire."

When Mario turned to see who had spoken those words, he saw a Latino kid walking towards both himself and Max. Mario had seen the kid before, but he could not place his thumb on his name because he seemed like he was a least a grade or two below Mario. It was right on the tip of his tongue, yet Mario still could not remember it.

“Did anyone ever tell you that eavesdropping is never polite? And what are you talking about jumping over fences, um, um...” Mario said to Theo, still blanking on his name. Mario quickly leaned his head over to Max’s ear and whispered, “What’s his name again?”

Max had been ten and in fifth grade when she missed a solid three months of school and was subsequently held back for a year. She'd always been one of the oldest in her class, and despite her tendency to doodle, whisper, and daydream in class instead of paying attention, she was a decent enough student, she'd more or less caught up by the time she reached high school, so not too many people knew it. Because Max loved people and loved talking, but there were some things she simply refused to talk about, and fifth grade -- the year she and her pregnant mother had left her lawyer father in the city and moved to Bradbury -- was one of them.

But it wasn't unusual for Max to befriend kids in the grade behind her, since about half her classes were with them, anyway. In this case, the new batch of freshmen. And several of them were new.

Then again, it wasn't unusual for Max to befriend anyone. What was more unusual was for those people to stay friends with her. Truth be told, she'd been a little surprised Mario had opted to the GameStop with her, though she'd assumed his brother had something to do with that.

Still, she was glad to see yet another familiar face when she turned. Her own expression brightened instantly, even before she could recall his name. And she did.

It just took a few seconds.

"Oh! Hi!" she exclaimed brightly, before immediately shrinking the distance between them to something any other person might have considered uncomfortable, but Max just considered hands-on mnemonics for name remembering. Not that peering at him up close really helped anything, but it was a useful stall, and Max hated to think she might hurt his poor feelings. He was taller than she was -- not a difficult task in the slightest -- but also younger, which immediately put Max in the mind of a puppy.

Max loved puppies.

Finally, she straightened and turned to beam at Mario.

"He's Theo," she announced victoriously. "We had a math class together earlier this year until I hadda drop it." She scowled. "Now I go to this tutoring center on Saturday mornings. Which is lame, because that's cartoon time with the boys, and now I don't even get home in time to see Sonic." She pouted for a moment, then immediately got over it.

"Anyway, what about fences? Oh...there are fences? Oh, yeah, I guess there are...I forgot about that." Max looked crestfallen for a moment, then brightened again and grinned at Theo. "Hey, does that mean you wanna walk home with us?"

Jason shrugged. His mother didn't really have a stance on his curfew as long as he stayed out of trouble. Once the diner closed, she usually hit the sparse bar scene in town until 2am or later. She had some bad habits that kept her from winning arguments over how Jason spent his time as long as he wasn't breaking any laws. It hadn't been too bad when he was a kid, but when he started working the two of them had more money for food, and that was when his mother started drinking her disposable income with more abandon. He kept a savings account to save his money, but he gave her a portion of each paycheck to help feed them. His goal was to live without food stamps and TANF checks one day.

"My mom cares about curfews about as much as you do," he said honestly, his eyes wandering over to rear end of a girl that was arranging shirts on a display. He couldn't help it, he was a young man after all. "I don't mind walking around a bit before we go."

Iikka laughed. "Yeah, guilty as charged on the curfew thing. But everything is still closed or closing soon. We can't go to the shop, or to a theater, the library, and while we could go to the police station and loudly talk about what an awesome show Hannibal is just to piss everyone off, I get the feeling they'd take exception to that."

Especially so when one of the delinquents aggravating them was Iikka Guiomar, master of inferential professional-specific insults. He had been voted 'Most likely class student to be seen in the news' for three years running, the cited reason being his tendency to go out of his way to deliberately offend civil servants with casually supplied slights and doubts as to their competence. Most of the police force tolerated this, but there were a few of them who would probably have blown a fuse on a bad day, and Iikka's case history certainly wouldn't have done him any favors then.

His observation skills weren't bad either, since he spotted Jason staring off into space and tracked where his gaze was aimed. "Pfft. My friend, you are window shopping in the wrong store. The goods you seek, they are located in the lingerie store thither. Go yonder, and save the damsels clad in shimmering samite from the draconic creatures I shall unleash there. They love that shit." He held up the bag of mealworms dramatically while rolling his eyes. "Really, if you're looking for someone to waste time with other than me, you should probably turn in early tonight and then hit a few parties in the Suberbs tomorrow. Or even try going to a Sharing meeting. Hell, if you played up your disheveled rocker look, I know a few girls at one of those who'd try to tie you to them just to annoy their dads."

He knew from firsthand experience, since most of them had asked him out a few times in the past, much to his dismay. Iikka Guiomar was not a person who devoted much time or energy to romantic prospects, and if he did not laugh in the face of anybody who ever said they cared for him it was a remarkable show of restraint on his part. He was notorious for hitting on girls in the theater department, but he had never seriously pursued a relationship with anybody.

"Which was gonna be my point anyway. It's late, everything's shutting down, and your eye candy probably won't take it well if you try and drive it home. Get an early night and enjoy the weekend, I say. We can visit a few hobby shops, play some video games, whatever. World is our Oyster and all that. But it's not going to happen now."

Jason cringed at the idea of going to a Sharing meeting to meet chicks. He wasn't that desperate. He would never be THAT desperate. Also, he wasn't about to go hit on the shop girl, so much as he just couldn't help but notice her. He wondered what on earth Iikka really thought he would do anyway. And it was highly unlikely he'd ever be invited to a party, even in the suburbs. People didn't really gravitate towards him. It was just as unlikely as the lingerie girls chatting him up.

He shook his head and motioned for Iikka to follow him back out towards the mall exit.

"Sharing, no. Hell no. Anyone ever tell you you talk too much? FYI, you talk too much. Want me to drop you off at the construction site again so you can go practice your ninja shit?"