category: BtVS
timeframe: pre-series
characters: Willow, Xander, Jesse
warnings: none
rating: teen
summary: before Buffy, before high school, there was middle school. On a hellmouth

"'Is something wrong?' she said
Of course there is
'You're still alive,' she said
Oh, do I deserve to be?"
— "Alive" by Pearl Jam

"This is bad." Xander leaned forward across the kitchen table. "This is very, very bad. This is badness that can't be described, except to say . . . ." He blinked, searching for words. "Bad."

"Or, you know," Willow grinned, tucking her hair behind one ear. "Terrible. Or-or horrible."

"No good." Jesse nodded, affecting a serious expression.

Xander glared at his two friends as he closed the cover of his history textbook, then turned his glare to the color reproduction of a painting of . . . soldiers, fighting in . . . some battle of some war that he was probably expected to learn all about. "That's not funny."

"You used to love that book." Willow tilted her head, allowing the strand of red hair she had previously tucked to escape and drape itself across her own textbook, neatly wrapped up tight in a clear plastic cover.

"‘I went to sleep with gum in my mouth, and woke up with gum in my hair,'" Jesse quoted, putting one last piece of tape on the corner of his Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure covered math textbook.

"That was different." Xander sighed, and resumed his struggle to pull the folded edge of his brown- paper bag over the front cover of his text book. The bag ripped. He glowered at it. "That was back when books were little things, with pictures, and were read to me before I went to bed, and no one asked what the gum was supposed to represent, or what the possible future implications of ‘Alexander's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day' would be on his fragile psyche." Not, of course, that his parents had ever read him bedtime stories. Jesse's mom had, when he slept over.

Willow frowned. "They didn't?" She slid seven bright, shiny, freshly sharpened pencils into her purple pencil case, leaving plenty of room for the matching pencil sharpener, tape dispenser, and mini-stapler.

Jesse stared at her. "No."

Willow blinked. Then glowered. "Stupid psychiatrists." She added three pens in black, blue, and red ink to her pencil case and closed the cover of her binder, then brightened. "But, ooo, that just means I'll have a head start on all the comprehension and analysis questions Mrs. Bubinek asks us about ‘Where the Red Fern Grows'!"

"Didn't you read that in fourth grade?"

"Yes, but now I get to read it for class!"

Jesse turned a baffled gaze from Willow to Xander. "Is she always this scary?"

Xander shrugged. "You get used to it." He stared at the cover of Willow's binder. It was purple, like her pencil case, and lacked any doodles or decorations, except for the ‘Willow's binder, sixth grade' label that Mr. Rosenberg had written on it with a thick, black, permanent marker. He noted the pale blue jansport backpack that rested on the table beside it, just as new and untouched as the binder and the plastic covers on all of her books. The backpack was a deluxe model, with two large pockets and one small one, perfect for carrying all the notebooks, textbooks, binders, pens, pencils and paper that Willow would ever need at Sunnydale Middle School.

Jesse had a Batman binder, that came with a special bat-schedule on the inside cover, which he had filled in with new names for all his classes, like "advanced bat weaponry" for tech ed, and "Joker's death trap" for reading. His backpack was black, and had two pockets, and the tag was still attached to the zipper. He'd talked his mom into buying him a pack of mechanical pencils and erasable ink pens. He had Spiderman dividers and a fresh ream of loose-leaf paper, which he'd already offered to share with Xander.

Willow had offered half her pack of little, white, reenforcement stickers.

Xander glowered down at his two-year old Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles trapper-keeper. Duct tape lined all the corners of it, and he'd already had to use most of his reenforcements to keep his battered, ink covered dividers from falling off the metal rings. He had two pens that he'd "borrowed" from Mr. Rosenberg's desk, and one sad, stubby, chewed-on pencil with no eraser to speak of. His backpack was the same red one he'd had since third grade. The big pocket was too small to even hold his history textbook, and the little pocket's zipper was broken, so it hung open, inviting anyone who wanted to to stick something diabolical in it when Xander wasn't looking. Like the pair of Superman underroos that Larry had stuffed in there that morning in home-room.

"Is it too late to fail fifth grade and stay in elementary school?"

Willow gave him one of her patented "poor Xander" looks that really irritated him. "You'll be fine. Middle school will be great. You'll see."

Jesse nodded. Easy for them to say. They didn't have Mr. Carter for gym. The man who'd screamed "Hey duuuuuudes!" at the orientation meeting last spring, as though he was even a little bit cool.

"Willow, how long have you known me?"

She brightened. "Um, six years, eleven months, 23 days, fourteen hours and . . . ." She glanced at the silver princess watch her uncle had given her for her birthday. "34 minutes." She grinned happily, then seemed to shrink under Jesse's disbelieving gaze. "Approximately."

"Right." Xander nodded. "ForEVER. And have you ever known me to get excited about school?"

"You were pretty happy in first grade when we made stone soup--"

"No. Never. I HATE school, Willow. And it hates me. And now it's not even just SCHOOL. It's MIDDLE school, and we have to switch classes, and take home ec, and have lockers, and be on time, and there's NO RECESS. It's going to be bad. Very, very bad."

Jesse shuddered. "No recess. That's just cruel."

Willow huffed. "Fine. Be a Mr. Pessimistpants. See if I care."

"Fine." Xander nodded, secure in the knowledge that he'd won. He wasn't sure what he'd won, but he'd won, dang it.

"Fine." Willow began systematically putting all of her books and supplies back into her backpack.

Jesse started packing his things up as well, whistling softly too himself. Willow blushed, which only egged him on. "K-I-S-S-I-N-G,"

Xander let his head thump down on his binder. He stared at Shredder's clawed gauntlet. "Shut up, Jesse."

Xander stared into Jesse's locker, his heart seizing up somewhere in the bottom of his throat. He let his eyes run over the spines of the textbooks, then glanced over at the pictures and stickers that covered the inside of the door. His hand ran over the faces of Alicia Silverstone and Gwen Stefani, then paused next to a photo of him, Jesse, and Willow at the mall just before Christmas.

They were going to go camping with Jesse's dad over spring break. Just the guys, out in the woods, doing manly things, like chopping wood and lighting fires and sleeping in tents.

It was the morning after the worst night of Xander's life. The last night of Jesse's. Or his unlife. Or something. Jesse should be standing here, grabbing his books for his next class and comparing and contrasting Cordelia's and Buffy's outfits. Not being swept up into a trashcan at the Bronze.

Xander stared for a moment longer. Then, as the warning bell rang, he curled his fingers into claws and tore Alicia, Gwen, and his own smiling face from the metal and crumpled them into a tiny ball. He closed the locker door and started towards his science class, pitching the ball of people into the trash can without looking back.