Chapter Text
Johnny was leaning against the low wall that surrounded the courtyard, elbows digging into the concrete ledge as he watched as Ali and Daniel sat on the grass, laughing and smiling and generally looking like the poster couple for happy-healthy-perfect. It was March, warm enough that they were all out lingering in the sun during free periods and in-between classes, trying to soak in as much as they could before the next bell. Daniel smiled at Ali adoringly as she explained something out of her notebook, homework strewn about in front of them, not a care in the world.
He felt a body sidle up next to him as his gaze lingered over Daniel’s soft features, the warmth in his eyes, the curve of his smile.
“She’s never gonna get back together with you, y’know.”
Johnny looked over to find Susan suddenly leaning against the wall beside him, brow raised beneath those stupid sunglasses that she’d made Tommy buy for her back when they very briefly dated in eighth grade. “Huh?”
She rolled her eyes and turned so she was facing the same way as Johnny, looking out over the courtyard. “Ali.” She clarified with an attitude. “Don’t waste your time, it’s a lost cause, Lawrence.”
Johnny’s brow furrowed, “I’m not staring at Ali.”
Susan turned on her side so that she was looking up at him instead, pushing the sunglasses up from her eyes and into her dark hair. She let her gaze travel over him before landing back on his face. “So… who are you looking at, then?” It’s the tone of her voice that had Johnny’s jaw clenching, that has that twisty feeling in his gut intensify.
So, he scoffs and shakes his head to cover up the blush threatening to overtake him. Pushes off the wall and walks away before Susan can see whatever was going on underneath, before he got angry and yelled at a girl. He didn’t want to talk about it, especially with someone he didn’t trust. He left before she could say anything else.
Johnny hadn’t forgotten about the moment per se, but over the next week it was easy to push into the back of his mind. A weird moment with Ali’s best friend was whatever, not really on the top of his list of shit to deal with.
Not when his whole life had practically blown up a couple months ago and he was still dealing with the fallout. Fucking LaRusso. The guy had to stir the pot and ruin all of Johnny’s carefully laid plans.
He avoids the guys, or more specifically Bobby, meets with a couple of his teachers to try and get his grades back on track, drinks from Sid’s vast collection of bad wines during the afternoons now that he has nothing to fill them, and then runs six miles on the beach alone at night. He’s not thinking about Susan. He’s not thinking about Ali. He is thinking about LaRusso, but that’s pretty par for the course at this point.
It's why he’s not totally prepared for Susan to bum-rush him on Friday between fifth and sixth period as he’s walking to the bleachers. He has a study hall that he’s definitely not going to the library for, and thankfully none of his friends share this period with him, which makes avoiding them a lot easier.
He feels guilty about it. Because he knows that they mean well. But Johnny can’t stand the hesitancy that’s still lingering. The looks they sometimes shoot at his unblemished throat, still seeing the bruises Sensei had left even though they’ve long since healed. They’re worried about him, he gets that. They shouldn’t be – he’s fine, okay? But he gets it. Doesn’t mean he has to like it, though.
Susan appears beside him suddenly, as she does now apparently. Linking their arms together as she falls into step with him. He stops when he feels her hands on him, looks down at her with confusion. But she pushes them on, barely lets him slow down as they walk to the empty bleachers.
“Um, what the fuck?”
Susan’s got her stupid sunglasses on again. Dark hair flouncing around her shoulders in a similar way to Ali’s, but Johnny found hers a lot less cute. Maybe because he’d been in love with Ali or whatever, it doesn’t matter. She turns her face up to him, raises an arched brow over the glasses hiding her eyes and continues to walk.
“What?” She says with enough attitude to shrink a lesser man. “You always come out here during your study hall. Can’t a girl accompany you without being attacked? Sheesh.”
Johnny’s face slid into a familiar look of annoyance, and he could just tell that Susan was rolling her eyes under those sunglasses even though he couldn’t see it. “Yeah, but we,” Johnny said as he shook his arm free and stepped away from her. “don’t hang out.”
“Whatever.” Susan sighed as she began to climb the bleachers and sit in Johnny’s favorite spot, the bitch.
“What do you want, Susan?” He said through gritted teeth, plopping down beside her.
She was quiet for a moment as she watched him get settled, pulling out his binder and the English essay he had to fix to bump up his grade. She didn’t push up her glasses like she had the other day, just monitored him from behind them. Which was annoying, he didn’t like not being able to see what she was thinking. Johnny shrugged his shoulders sort of aggressively as he sent her another look, hoping to get whatever this was over with sooner rather than later.
Susan sighed out loud, all dramatic and ridiculous, like he remembered her doing back when he’d been forced to spend time with her while he was dating Ali. He never quite felt like they were actually friends – which could be because Susan was always rooting for him and Ali to break up – but it was hard to be around someone as much as they had been and not know the person at least a little bit.
That didn’t mean he was at all prepared for what she was about to say.
“I think we should go to Prom together.”
Johnny blinked, letting her words process before slowly turning his entire body toward her. “What?”
Susan rolled her eyes and turned her face toward him from where it had been angled up at the sun, pushing up her glasses as she did so. “You heard me, Lawrence. Or has that big dumb blonde head of yours been deprived of too much oxygen?”
His jaw clenched at her words, at the carelessness behind them, and so did his fists. He began packing up his stuff when Susan sighed again, more dramatically this time to pull his attention, and started saying okay, okay in that placating way people did when they weren’t really sorry but wanted you to chill the fuck out; shoving at his shoulder to get him to sit back down. He let her, because he wasn’t about to hit a chick, but he turned to face her fully, gaze narrowed.
“Do you have a concussion?”
Her brow furrowed at the question. “Huh? What – no!”
“Some guy giving you a hard time?”
“No, dad.”
Johnny’s gaze narrowed further. “Then why the fuck are you asking me to go to Prom with you?”
“Because.” Susan shot back, face closed down and voice full of attitude.
“Of course,” Johnny said sarcastically. “’Because’ makes perfect sense. How stupid of me to even ask.”
Susan glared at him, fingers drumming against the metal seats of the bleachers rhythmically in a nervous tic that had Johnny twitching. She sighed, but not dramatically, and Johnny found that he was actually more inclined to listen to her this time.
“Because,” She started again. “Because I need a date. And so you do.” She held his gaze, not letting him break it. “And… because we can’t go with the people that we actually want to be with.”
He felt a queasiness shoot through him, but he didn’t move. If he didn’t acknowledge what she said, what she meant, then it didn’t actually mean anything.
Susan kept starting at him and Johnny was suddenly aware of how specific her gaze was – had been, this entire time. He felt seen in a way that made him feel sick. But it could just as easily be his paranoia. He wouldn’t even say it to himself, there was no way he was saying anything to fucking Susan.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He managed to get out eventually.
Susan just arched a brow, managing to convey condescension and disbelief with one look. Which was honestly kind of impressive, but now wasn’t the time to really think about that.
“Oh, okay.” She shrugged performatively. “So, then you don’t have a crush on Daniel LaRusso?”
Johnny found himself staring down at her and realized that he had stood up. His hands were shaking. He needed to get out of here.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Johnny spit out.
Susan didn’t seem all that bothered by his outburst, which was annoying – or should be annoying, if he could actually feel anything but blind panic right now. She looked up at him from her lounged position on the bleachers, stupid sunglasses pushing back her thick hair and creating a dark halo around her calm face.
“If it makes you feel any better – the person I want to go with is your ex-girlfriend.”
Johnny’s brow furrowed as he took in her words. Annoyingly, it actually did calm him down a little, mostly because he was so shocked to hear her actually admit it. His heart was still beating too fast, and he felt sweat begin to cool down his back, but now he was mostly focused on his brain computing that Susan wanted to date her best friend.
“You… like Ali?”
Susan pulled her gaze away from him then, turning her face toward the empty football field as she shoved her sunglasses back down over her eyes. “Don’t go broadcasting it all over school, but… yes. Okay? So, just, stop freaking out now and sit down.”
Johnny slowly sank back down onto the bench, looking at Susan as she now avoided his gaze. She didn’t look queer. But, then again, neither did he.
“Ali’s not gay.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Susan shot back, pissed, arms tight across her chest. “I had to watch her moon over you for two years.” She gagged a little. “What she’s doing now with Daniel is somehow worse.”
They were quiet for a moment, the undefined chatter from the cafeteria wafting over to them on the breeze.
“I don’t like LaRusso.” Johnny found himself saying.
Susan scoffed. He felt his jaw clench.
“Yes, you do.” She looked at him, but her body language was a little softer than it had been before. “Anyone with eyes and half a brain could see what you’ve been doing all year.”
He felt himself flush at that, the panic rising again. “I don’t –”
“Just shut up, Johnny.” Susan sighed. “Look. Whether you want to admit it yet or not, you’ve got something brewing for Daniel and I’m in love with Ali, and they’re dating each other.” She rubbed her face, dislodging her glasses for a moment before righting them again and looking over at him with resignation lining her face. “I want to go to Prom, and I don’t want to listen to her try and set me up with one of her stupid boy-friends from UCLA.”
“I hate those guys.”
Susan snorted, smile quirking the corners of her lips. “Yeah, we know.” She huffed a laugh and shook her head, smile fading. She looked tired all of a sudden, older. “I don’t want to end my Senior year like this.”
Johnny… didn’t get it. But, then again, he sort of did.
He hadn’t even really thought about Prom. Just assumed that he’d see who was around the day before and pick one of the girls his friends had been urging him towards. He didn’t… want LaRusso – at least, not in any way that he was willing to admit – but he could see the appeal in what Susan was saying.
This year had been a fucking wash. It would be nice to finish it without Bobby looking at him like he was broken and Dutch pressuring him to just fuck it out of his system already, man. Susan would be good for that, would get everyone off his back, show the world how fine and okay Johnny Lawrence definitely was.
So he found himself nodding.
“Okay.”
Susan turned back to him quickly. “Okay?”
Johnny nodded at her, letting out a deep breath. “Yeah, okay, fine. We’ll go to Prom together.” Susan smiled, a real one, and Johnny felt warm in a way he hadn’t since before he and Ali broke up. “But I think we should start dating.”
“Uh, John, I think you missed literally everything I just said –”
He rolled his eyes, “I mean… the fake thing.” He shrugged, uncomfortable. “Everyone’s been on my back since what happed with my Sensei. I think… I think it might stop them from worrying. About me. If I perform like they expect, it’ll get them off my back.”
Susan looked at him, sunglasses in her hands. She ran her pale eyes over his face, seeing something that he couldn’t define and that made him uncomfortable. “Why don’t you want to ‘perform like they expect’?”
He looked down at the binder in front of him, his open backpack, his dirty sneakers. “Because I’m not the same person I was before December.” He found himself saying. He wasn’t quite sure why.
Susan was silent for a moment before she nodded. “Okay. So, you’re my boyfriend now. Try not to be too much of an asshole.”
He snorts. “No promises.”
“Yeah,” She sighed. “Should’ve expected that much.”