Graffiti Girl // Michael Clifford

|| 40 ||

I will never let you fall. I'll stand up with you forever. I'll be there for you through it all, even if saving you sends me to heaven.

«Your Guardian Angel» The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus

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"Would you stop? You're gonna give yourself brain damage," Luke laughs. He pulls my head up to a halt by my jacket collar.

"What do you think I'm trying to do?" He rolls his eyes and lets my head fall back to the desk.

"Giving your brain a booboo won't actually fix anything."

"I'll have to disagree," I mumble into the blank handout assignment on top of my unopened textbook. When I sit up with a loud sigh, the paper sticks to my forehead and Luke chuckles as he picks it off.

"She's only been sober for a few weeks. It's never been an overnight thing, with her."

"But, if we're looking at it that way, she was only really drinking for a few weeks, too, so..." I drone obnoxiously.

"Yeah, but she's been suffering for years."

I scowl at the way Luke scrunches his mouth, very sympathetic and patronizing.

"You and R need to stop reading your Psych books in your free time."

Luke laughs. "Tell her that. Ever since Mrs. Rylen lectured the chapter on addictions, R hasn't let it out of her sight. I checked her Google history the other day, and half the searches that weren't related to Dave Grohl or gifs of Evan Peters were fancy medical words I'd never heard before."

"Three things." I hold one finger between our faces. "One: Dave Grohl is God and shall not be questioned. Two: Evan Peters can suck my dick and I say that as a complete compliment." I ignore Luke's confused grimace. "Three: you go through your girlfriend's phone, mate?"

Luke's eyebrows are scrunched. "All right--four things." He dramatically flails a patronizing finger in my face before I shove him away. "One: agreed. Two: what are you even? Three: I'm a concerned boyfriend making sure the woman I love isn't spending too much of her life researching a combination of good looking, attractive men who aren't me and some miracle she's after that doesn't exist to fix her best friend. And--four: are we just going to completely skip over the entire point of what I was trying to say in the first place?" He gives me a pointed look as he lets his shoulders shrug and hands fall into his lap.

"One--"

"Stop." He holds his hand flat in front of my face before I can get the next word out. "Let's just skip to the point, yeah?"

I huff in defeat and Luke briefly show a victorious smirk before he lets it fall from his face entirely, and I know he's over playing my games.

"I'm still trying my best."

"I know," Luke says easily, "and it's been working, piece by piece. She hasn't been drunk since she ran off. She's already finished her book for Mr. Berkins' class. She turned in that big missing lab she had for chemistry last week with little help from any of us. Pretty sure that's more homework than she did before."

I scoff a laugh. "Well she did her homework, it was just all from the internet."

"We both do the same exact thing, so can't judge for that one," Luke says as he slaps my arm. "And she still does that, for the record."

"Oh, I know. You're not the only one snooping through Google," I laugh.

"I can't tell if we're creeps or loving boyfriends."