#(info relayed from Barb to Robin to Jonathan)

[heavencasteel420]

WIP Whursday

From Tomorrow’s a Long Way Off (in which Jonathan can astral project…allegedly):

“You’re making that up,” Jonathan told Nancy, when she relayed the last rumor to him. She’d brought Mike, Will, Lucas, and Dustin to a matinee of Superman III on Saturday afternoon, at her mom’s insistence, and she’d come to talk to him by the bathrooms while the kids bought snacks from Robin at the concession stand. Mr. Green hadn’t put Jonathan there or in the ticket booth all week for obvious reasons, which was fine by him. “No one would be stupid enough to believe that.”

Nancy grinned.

“Tiffany Gibbs is that stupid,” she told him. His face must have looked blank, because she clarified, “One of the JV cheerleaders. I was at Benny’s with Jason and some of his friends yesterday, and she was running her mouth about it.”

Jonathan felt his own smile falter. He’d forgotten that Nancy and Jason were sort of going together now. It shouldn’t have bothered him so much. Unlike Steve, Jason didn’t have a long string of heartbroken ex-girlfriends or a pair of vicious friends, so Nancy was better off, probably. Jason had tried to be nice to Jonathan in middle school a couple of times, right after the divorce, in a determined, smiley way that suggested it’d been a task assigned to him by a youth pastor. It wasn’t his fault, exactly, that Jonathan couldn’t stomach that kind of niceness, that it never felt nice at all. Steve had been an asshole, but his concern on Saturday and his apology on Sunday had felt genuine.

That didn’t make him a better boyfriend for Nancy, though. Not that it was Jonathan’s business at all. Nancy might be new to that scene—she’d only really been good friends with Barb, with a few other girls as acquaintances, for as long as he could remember—but she wasn’t stupid or helpless. She could certainly handle all that stuff better than Jonathan could. He’d only been to one high school party, where he’d [REDACTED].

“Heather Holloway laughed at her,” Nancy assured him, apparently misinterpreting his silence. “Told her she’d been staying up too long past her bedtime reading Lois Duncan novels. That made her so mad. And of course Jason told everyone what really happened.”

Jonathan tacked on a smile, pushing aside the thought that of course Jason had been the one to set everyone straight, not Nancy. He didn’t know why he was so determined to pick at the guy. He was doing Jonathan a favor, really, and it was natural that he’d be the one to talk if he and Nancy had been hanging out with his friends.