The evening air was crisp and cold. The sky was a dark blue, sparse in stars. Parking lot lights shone like small blinding suns, casting their light on Frankie and Ezra.

Ezra looked at him expectantly and Frankie knew he’d been impulsive.

Both he and his new friend were unhappy and the only way Frankie knew how to fix it was food. They moved to Easgrey just before Freshman Year and here Frankie was in Senior Year still with practically no idea about places to eat—there weren’t many in the first place from what Finley always said. The only place he could think of going to was Sunny Hill.

Sunny Hill was a mall- shopping centre if you will, and it was not on a hill.

It was the only mall in Easgrey and was supposed to be a park but, supposedly, after whoever owned that piece of land took a fancy to Malls they decided to build a mall instead. The bank was built down the street instead. Anyone over the age of 12 would’ve come here with friends over a million times, and by the time they got tired of the shopping mall they’d have licences to drive out of town and do something else there.

So Frankie obviously hadn’t been there much.

Ezra on the other hand probably had.

“You don’t look too excited,” Frankie said as he observed the look on Ezra’s face.

“I don’t like this place.”

Then why did you drive here? Frankie wondered before smiling stiffly, “Should we go somewhere else then?”

Ezra didn’t say anything when Frankie put it forward so she assumed it’d be fine—it didn’t seem like that now.

The slight displeasure on his face tugged at Frankie’s heart. Frankie suggested, “You can choose what we have, on me.”

“You have money?” Ezra said in genuine surprise.

“Why wouldn’t I…?”

Frankie took a look at how he was dressed, a hoodie and cargo shorts, did he look poor?

Ezra looked him up and down, “You look like a bum.”

“...Why would you say that?” Frankie asked, a little bit offended. He didn’t think he looked like a bum but maybe he did.

“Why do you have holes in all of your clothes?”

Frankie tilted his head. “Is that why you're calling me a bum?”

Ezra nodded.

“I just like it,” he explained, shrugging, and the slightest bit embarrassed. “Wearing my clothes like this is nice.”

The holes in his clothes were nice to fiddle with which is why they kept getting bigger and why he wouldn’t replace them—they were always there and they always would be. They weren’t that big and he’d eventually, and magically, lose those pieces of clothing as soon as the holes became too big. Frankie kept it at a maximum of two as well, he wasn’t just walking around in swiss cheese-looking rags.

Ezra blinked. “You’re weird.”

“” he said, scoffing.

“I wish you were poor. This is worse than that,” Ezra continued.

Frankie looked at him, doubtful that he’d ever seen that expression on Ezra’s face before, then asked, “How could you think I was poor? Foster has money, and I have a Job so I have even more money than him.”

“Foster doesn’t have money, he’s still paying me back from sophomore year in instalments. I’m not in your family’s business and I don’t know what your money goes to.”

Frankie asked, confused, “Paying you back for what?”

Ezra shook his head.

“You can’t tell me?”

“No.”

If he couldn’t tell Frankie about it why bring it up? He was interested now and had no way of satisfying himself. It must have been a big amount for him to still be paying it back at least a couple of months later and at most a year later—Frankie wondered what he could’ve possibly used that for.

A gush of cold breeze made Frankie seize up and then shiver.

“Let’s go inside,” Ezra told him with knitted brows.

Frankie agreed with a hum.

The Neopolitan place didn’t deliver and eating alone was weird—Frankie never got to have it.

“You’re fine with Neopolitan?” Frankie asked. It wasn’t anything that assaulted the tastebuds but not many people seemed to like it. “You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

Frankie looked him over, noticing that he seemed less tense than he had been when he first got into the mall.

Glossy wooden floors and rouge-red walls. The ceiling was painted white, and black chandeliers hung from circular moulding. The place was hideous and Frankie loved it.

Outside of the restaurant, the mall was quite busy, it was Friday so he figured that was why. While inside the restaurant they were one of five customers— empty as it always was.

“Let's go sit,” Frankie said while pulling Ezra along. The entire way to the pizza place Ezra kept getting distracted, lost, or walked entirely too slow. He had to drag him along by the cotton of his shirt.

The booth table Frankie sat them at had a window to the people walking outside the mall, it was the seat he sat at on the rare occasion he’d come to this place.

The first time he came to the Neapolitan place was during Freshman Year. Frankie didn’t know how he was supposed to order, the waitress didn’t seem to see him, and he was too socially awkward to walk up to the till. The waitress came up to him after a while asking when the rest of his family was coming and how many people he was waiting for, she looked confused when he told her that no one else was coming because he sat at a booth that typically held families but he was by himself.

When Frankie sat down, Ezra did as well but the way he sat down was strange.

Frankie hesitated to bring it up but did so anyway, “Did I do something?”

Ezra shook his head slowly.

“So why are you sitting as far away as you can?”

While Frankie was sitting next to the window, Ezra was sitting diagonally from him—opposite him on the outside seat.

“I want to sit here.”

What did I do? Frankie thought.

Soon a waiter came to greet them, he took their orders— Ezra’s having to be practically pried from his mouth— and left. Every attempt Frankie made at striking a conversation was met with one-word answers from Ezra. Frankie wondered if he offended the boy somehow, hadn’t they been talking perfectly fine when they were standing infront of the mall? As soon as they walked into Sunny Hill and got to the restaurant it was like he was talking to a completely different person.

One that disliked Frankie, heavily.

When the Pizza came it was very clear that Ezra did not like pizza.

He pushed the thing around like a picky child does to a new food, and looked at it as if he was served shit on a plate. He looked particularly put off when he took a bite from it- scrunched up his nose and struggled to swallow.

Frankie had already half finished his, planning to take the rest home as leftovers.

“You don’t like it,” Frankie stated.

Ezra looked at him blankly, he couldn’t even bring himself to lie.

Frankie shook his head, ”Why did you come here if you didn’t like it?”

Ezra pursed his lips, pushed the Pizza away, then spoke, ”You wanted to eat it.”

“Somewhere we were both fine with,” Frankie started, ”I’m supposed to be cheering you up, not force-feeding you,”

He shrugged, “It’s fine.”

“It’s not.”

Frankie didn’t think anything would get through to the boy, everything he was saying fell on selectively deaf ears.

Frankie asked, “Tell me what you actually like eating,”

Ezra stayed silent.

“Come on, let’s go somewhere you like instead.”

“It’s late.”

“It’s only 7,” Frankie said, “Unless you’re feeling tired?”

“No,” Ezra said. “You go for a nap in like an hour don’t you?”

“How’d you know that?” Frankie asked him. He didn’t remember telling Ezra his sleeping schedule and he only napped on the days he didn’t have a cafe shift after school, so how could Ezra have known?

“I come to your house all the time and you're always asleep at around 8.”

“You never see me anyways though…how would you know I was sleeping?” Frankie said as he packed the rest of his pizza into a takeaway container. He quickly realised that it was probably Foster who told him that Frankie was asleep at this time of day, “Next time, then?”

His features loosened.

“Next time?” Ezra asked

“I mean, there doesn’t have to be one,” Frankie said before quickly correcting his assumption. “If you-”

“No, there is going to be one,” Ezra said abruptly.

Frankie nodded slowly.

“It wasn’t supposed to come out like that…I meant I wanna eat with you again,” Ezra said with a softened tone.

Frankie gave him a small smile but inside he was giddy, he could barely contain himself. ‘Want’ and ‘him’ in the same sentence was so strange that Ezra’s words did laps around his head.

Frankie turned his eyes to Ezra’s barely finished Pizza as a distraction, he asked, “Are you gonna finish that?”

Ezra pushed the pizza infront of him.

When they got back to the car park, “I can walk,” Frankie said.

Ezra looked at him with knitted brows, “No. I’ll drive you,”

It’d only be about 15 minutes if Ezra were to drive straight from Sunny Hill to his house, but that would turn to 45 minutes if he were to drop off Frankie as well.

“No, I’m walking,” Frankie said, “You can go home and get to bed, it’ll take way too long if you drop me off,”

“You shouldn’t walk home alone,”

Frankie almost wanted to laugh, he sounded too much like Foster. But then he paused, Ew he sounds like Foster, Frankie thought.

“You shouldn’t drive while half asleep,”

“I’m not sleepy,” Ezra said.

“Beg to differ.”

He could barely keep his eyes open.

“It’s not that late, it’s barely eight,”

“Do you even go out at this time of night?”

“Yes. I went home from the bakery all the time when you weren’t working there—literally just last week.”

“That’s a ten-minute walk. This is a forty-minute walk.”

“It can’t be that hard,” Frankie said

Frankie would figure it out somehow.

“Foster told me to drive you home,” Ezra said.

Frankie figured that’s why he was pushing.

“You don’t have to do everything he says,” he replied.

It felt like Ezra was the one who owed debts, not Foster.

Ezra narrowed his eyes and Frankie narrowed his back.

“Okay,” Ezra said, “But call me If you get lost,”

They’d exchanged numbers at the end of one of

“Lost?” Frankie said between laughs, “What makes you think I’m gonna get lost?”

“You have a bad sense of direction.”

“And you don’t?”

Ezra shook his head.

“The entire time we were in that mall I had to drag you by your shirt to get you to go anywhere.”

“That was because I don’t like crowds.”

“That still doesn’t mean,”- Frankie gaped open- “Is that what you sat across from me?”

Ezra blinked.

“You didn’t want to sit next to the window with all the people going by, so you sat on the outside of the booth. You’re scared of crowds.”

“I’m too old to be ‘scared’ of crowds. I just don’t like them.” Ezra said furrowing his brows.

“You’re not,” He replied, frowning.

Ezra was barely 18, he heard Foster talking about going to his birthday party last month. Frankie still felt like a child at 17 and he doubted turning 18 in a couple of months would change that- the childishness wouldn’t just jump out of his body the moment he turned 18, nor would fear. Besides, you could never be too old to be scared of something.

Cedric was still afraid of spiders at 33, he always got Foster to kill them.

“I am.”

Frankie rolled his eyes, no arguing with him. “Fine. You ‘don’t like’ them.”

Ezra was sitting on the hood of his car while Frankie was right infront of him. They were the same height now and Frankie could see Ezra’s face—as perfect as it always was. He got off the hood and stood up, turning away from Frankie and taking something from the back of his car.

He put the thing up to Frankie.

“Another one?” Frankie asked as he looked at it. It was a jacket, lined with something fluffy—warm-looking and expensive-looking.

Ezra nodded.

“You don’t wear this Jacket either?” Frankei asked playfully.

A smile pulled at the corner of Ezra’s lips. “I don’t.”

“I’m not cold, Ezra. I don’t need it,” Frankie said.

The wind that blew by him didn’t help at all, he felt goosebumps appear on his arms.

“You look cold.”

“It was one breeze,” Frankie said, sneezing right after he did so.

Ezra held the coat right infront of his face and Frankie reluctantly took it. It wasn’t as big as he thought it was going to be, not that it looked big, he expected it to be big enough to fit Ezra but it obviously wasn’t if it fit Frankie pretty well.

Other than that, Frankie felt lik he was in a heated room the moment he put the Jacket on. It was probably wool or some other natural material—money really could buy happiness.

“You can keep it.”

Frankie looked at him, unable to hide his smile. “Thank you.”