thank you for reading! Some parts of this were interesting to write as I'm Canadian, so we don't have a lot of the same rituals (ie: homecoming, nobody here gives a flying crap about school sports) but I really wanted to make a realistic high school AU. I always say that my grade 11 year was the year of sex, and grade 12 was the year of drugs, and overall my high school experience was pretty similar to Skins. Anger and angst and breaking up and sex and drugs and your friends being fucking assholes but you still love them... all very important to a high school experience. I was feeling really discouraged after posting this and getting no comments for a few days, so you saying this seems believable and messy and complex makes me feel a lot better. If one or two people enjoyed it, then that's good enough for me. :D

(Also, would you be interested in a retelling of senior year through Pete's eyes? Granted a lot of it would be different, but there would be a bit of repeats. It's just, in grade 11 three of my friends had a poly relationship [it lasted for almost three years] in which gf and bf both decided it was okay to have other people as long as they knew about it, and sometimes watched, and I realy want to translate that into a Ashlee/Pete/Patrick, with a lot of Pete/Patrick/Mikey. It was the general backstory which I didn't feel the need to flesh out until I got to the fighting scene between Frank and Pete and then I was like OH CRAP, WANNA WRITE EVERYTHING ABOUT PETE)