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It’s a hard summer without Sarah.
It’s probably a really hard summer for Sarah too, out there somewhere processing the fact that she’ll never have to breathe again, but it feels like Ethan hasn’t been able to catch his breath either. He wakes up unable to catch it again, Jesse’s unshakeable fangs still latched around his wrist, and Sarah’s still gone. He doesn’t like her like he told Benny he did (just to throw him off, just to tell your best friend that you don’t love him like you know you do), like he told Rory, like Erica thinks he does, like he’s sure everyone with eyes thinks he does, like he projects he does. She’s just the easiest target when you’re a gay boy in a small town. But, she’s still one of his best friends, and it’s still his fault that she’s the last thing that she ever wanted to be. He wakes up from a nightmare and falls right into one too.
“Hey, do you wanna do me a favor?” he asks into his cellphone, no longer sure when he got the phone number of Erica Jones, but so very glad that Sarah probably pressed it in at some point. He needs it now, because his parents are thankfully out for the week, but there’s a zoo animal army that Benny accidentally charmed, and Erica is the first vampire he’s been able to get a hold of. It would be different if it was an army of squirrels again, or something, but there are lions down there, and Ethan isn’t okay. He likes animals, but there are too many teeth and not enough padding. They had loved Benny for a while - like the love potion - but after a few hours, again, like the love potion, it had gone bad. Benny’s across the street with his grandmother and Jane now, and Ethan had lured all of the animals to his own house. Lots of regrets.
“I do not,” she says, “I just painted my nails, and whatever favor you need cannot be more important than Red Hot Rio, dweeb!” Ethan assumes that Erica is about to hang up the phone then, but he squeaks, which is embarrassing, but it stops her, so it’s enough, right? That’s enough.
“Erica, I’m in danger. My house, okay? Please,” he begs, and then he clicks off the phone, because it’s way too quiet outside of it. It sincerely feels like less than a minute before he hears a knock outside of his bedroom window, quick and insistent and loud, and Erica is hovering there with her arms crossed across her chest by the time he gets there. He opens the window.
“I can’t believe you hung up on me! Now let me in,” she says, hands on the windowsill now and her fangs crowding up her mouth just enough to make her speech slur just a little. He steps out of the way of the window.
“Okay, okay. Thank you for coming, Erica. Come in. We don’t have much time, but there are zoo animals downstairs and they hate everyone and Benny is looking for a cure to make everything go back to normal, but we have to keep everything contained but we don’t want to hurt them,” he explains hastily, looking at the vampire with a strained smile. The blonde rolls her eyes.
“You’re so lucky my nail polish dried on the run over here,” she replies, pushing past him and slamming open his bedroom door without a care in the fucking world for the noise it makes against the wall. They’re the only people in the house, so he supposes it doesn’t matter, right? He follows her down the stairs and watches as she corrals lions, tosses monkeys gently onto couches, keeps lizards in draws and drives the birds to roost in cabinets. She’s a better animal tender than Ethan would have ever given her credit for. She glares at him when he tries to come further down the stairs, cutting eyes at him from where she’s picking up a particularly bad tempered lemur off the kitchen counter, placing him gently onto the chair.
“Stay up there, nerd. Only one of us is surviving a lion bite,” Erica cautions him, and so ends their first fight of the summer, because Benny rushes in soon after that. He gives Erica something to dose all of their furry and not furry unfriendlies with, a potion that sends them to sleep so they can put them back in their cages. Benny does the brainwave thing on a few of the zoo employees, and that’s how he gets so good at it, and Erica stays to hang out for a while. Not because she likes them, or anything, but she’s done enough work today, and hunting sounds like a lot of work, and Grandma Weir has a new blood substitute to try anyway. That’s what she says, anyway. They invite Rory over, and he complains about missing the action. The ache of missing Sarah dulls, just a little bit.
These dweebs aren’t Sarah, but they’re what she’s got right now. Erica misses Sarah so much she aches all over, misses Sarah so much it hurts in ways she never thought she could. She misses Sarah and misses Sarah and misses Sarah and goes over to Ethan’s house whenever he asks and sometimes when he doesn’t, because she misses Sarah. Sometimes Benny is already there and sometimes he isn’t, and she learns not to care. Ethan is… neutral ground. Ethan is… her friend. She has friends other than Sarah now. Rory is her friend. Benny is her friend. They have a standing event on Friday night and it isn’t a party anymore, because the four of them hang out on Friday nights to compensate for the fact that Sarah isn’t babysitting for Ross and Samantha right now.
Ross and Samantha told her to call them Ross and Samantha. She told them that Sarah was on an internship. She exchanged their trust for a lie.
It’s a hard summer without Sarah.
She probably clings to Ethan a little hard. He’s obnoxious, don’t get it twisted. He’ll fall asleep mid-sentence if he’s spreading himself too thin, or conversely speak too fast for her to understand if he’s had too much caffeine. He plays so many video games that she can’t keep up with all of his interests, and she was a nerd long before she was ever a sexy vampiress of the night. She sits cross legged on his bed and devours his entire bookshelf while waiting for the next awful thing to happen, Benny, Rory and Ethan playing video games on Ethan’s television not five feet in front of her and she wonders where Sarah is. She sticks a bookmark in Ethan’s book (because she might be a vampire, but she isn’t an animal), and she wonders where her best friend (she wants so badly to be more than friends, but that isn’t the point, that isn’t the point, that isn’t the point) is. She doesn’t know how long she’s staring at the wall when the video game pauses and Ethan is standing beside her.
“Er, you okay?” Ethan asks, his voice gentle, and he calls her Er like Sarah does, and she wants to cry in front of these fucking dweebs and she never cried in front of anyone when she was a fucking nerd, let alone now. But she can’t do it. Not with this boy who gets to pretend to love her best friend in public (because they’ve talked about it, and she knows, and it’s clever, and horrible, and she knows, and she’s not angry, but it was close), and not with these two boys who know her, not in this place that has become safe. She wraps her arms around Ethan’s shoulders.
“I miss her, E,” she says, and the tears well up in her eyes horribly and Ethan wraps his arms awkwardly around her waist and climbs into bed with her. It’s so terribly platonic that it startles a giggle out of her, because she thinks she might be a lesbian and Ethan Morgan might probably be gay and neither of them have said the words aloud yet but it couldn’t be more obvious than laying in bed with the person of the opposite sex that you’re closest to and it looking like this. She sniffles and pulls him closer and misses Sarah deep in her stomach and knows that Ethan feels it too because he wraps his arms even tighter around her stomach, right where she feels it, like he knows.
“I miss her too. I miss her too. She’ll come back,” Ethan replies, his hand tentatively stroking over her hair. Erica swallows. She can feel Rory and Benny awkwardly standing in their video game corner. She’s gotta get up if she’s gonna save any face at all. She pulls one of her hands from around Ethan and pushes lightly at his chest, making sure to make it a human amount of strength so that she doesn’t rocket launch him across the room or something, but enough that he definitely feels it. He nods, and gets up slowly. He’ll cover for her. He’ll cover for her. Yeah, okay.
“Nothing to see here. Back to your nerdom. Sincerely, don’t look at me,” Erica says, picking her book back up as she wipes at her undereyes to make sure that her mascara hasn’t run. They all stay for a couple more hours, but Ethan has an appointment tomorrow - he’s supposed to be getting on T soon and none of them want to mess that up - so not even the boys can spend the night, let alone Erica. She thinks maybe Ross and Samantha would let her spend the night if she asked (especially since she can’t really check her makeup in the mirror anymore), but she’s never asked. She doesn’t think she ever will. She doesn’t even know how to ask Ethan about that kind of thing, let alone his parents.
Benny finds her when she’s about to leave, making it subtle enough that he almost startles her; she thanks the Moon for vampiric powers. If she had been genuinely startled by Benny Weir, she might have had to write it on her tombstone because she doesn’t think she’d ever allow herself to live it down. Benny finds her and he looks… worried. Almost like he’s scared to talk to her, but he needs to anyway.
“I could… I could do a tracking spell for you? You saw what I did with the zoo employees. I’m getting better. If you wanna know where she is, I could find her. Even if you don’t go after her, it might help you feel better,” Benny says, his voice so earnest that it makes Erica’s chest hurt, and she wants to hug him almost. God, these dweebs are getting to her. Benny is Sarah’s friend too, but not like… not like she and Ethan are. Benny is doing this for her. Benny is being Erica’s friend. God she wants to hug him. So she does. She throws her arms around Benny and hugs him quick and tight and realises very quickly that he’s actually taller than her - a rare commodity in the nerd squad - and she pulls back quickly, which was the plan anyway.
“I - thanks, Benny. But if she wanted me to know where she was, she would call. It’s nice of you to offer though. I… I appreciate it a lot,” she admits, clearing her throat. She walks away before he can say anything else, walking out of the side gate because she knows Benny will use the front, because she knows Benny lives in the other direction, because she knows these boys. God. Rory is standing on the sidewalk waiting for her, hands in his pockets, looking sheepish. She knows that he just heard everything, given the vampiric abilities that they share. Maybe they do have more in common than she would have once wanted to admit.
“I figured I would fly you home? They say you’re not supposed to drive when you’re too emotional. I thought the same thing might apply to flying,” Rory says, rushed and rehearsed and so, so Rory. It actually makes Erica smile.
It’s a hard summer without Sarah. But it’s not as hard as it could be.
“Sure thing, Sparky. Let’s fly home.”