Welcome to Trainwrecks: Season 2 (2005-2006)! If you haven’t read Season 1, please start there! Trainwrecks is a free-to-read fiction serial that follows a group of six Seattle-adjacent friends from the year 2004 to the year 2015. Join Luna Cruz, Sebastian Velasquez, Dimitri and Victoria Hale, Duke Kingston, and Jasmine Nolan as they stumble their way from adolescence to adulthood, falling in love, making mistakes, overcoming their pasts, and staying together through it all.
For series introduction, character profiles, relationship charts, and general orientation, check out the Table of Contents!
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Duke had one class with Luna that semester and it was Algebra. He considered himself fortunate for two reasons: Luna was good at math (unlike him), and Patrick Ashley was in that class, too. Which meant Duke had a front row seat to the spectacle that was Luna’s attempts to flirt with a guy.
In their almost three years of friendship, Duke had become suspicious that his exuberant best friend was a genius and had simply never been tested. She excelled in school, picked up new subjects in a matter of weeks, could figure out puzzles in record time, had a million hobbies, and was a treasure trove of random knowledge. It would have been easy to write this off as the result of her friendship with Dimitri, but Sebastian had not been similarly affected.
If there was one thing Luna could not do, however, it was flirting, and this soon became an endless source of amusement for Duke.
She and Patrick sat next to each other thanks to every teachers’ insistence on putting people in alphabetical order. Duke was two rows behind them, close enough to hear what was being said, but far enough to keep Patrick from catching on to the fact that he was eavesdropping on their conversations.
“So,” Luna said in a bright, chipper voice, “what kind of video games do you like?”
“Video games?”
Duke hid a smile behind his hand. Bold of her to assume every guy played video games.
Patrick Ashley tapped his pencil against his textbook. “Umm… Pacman, I guess? That was always my favorite when Dad took me and my brother to the arcade. Do you play a lot of video games?”
“Tons,” Luna said. “My dad works in tech so he’s always, like, super excited about new gadgets. He got me started on the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis, and then when Pokemon came out I just had to have a Gameboy…”
Duke watched and waited for the moment Luna realized she was rambling and clammed up from embarrassment. Should be right about…
“But I’m totally rambling,” she concluded, and turned back to her own math textbook.
“No! No, I think it’s interesting,” Patrick Ashley said, and Duke nodded his approval of the save. “I’m not much of a gamer, but I like hearing people talk about their passions. How many Pokemon are there now? I haven’t watched the cartoon since middle school.”
“386,” Luna said, then added, “I think.” Duke shook his head. Of course she knew exactly how many Pokemon there were. “Did you have a favorite?”
“Abra was pretty cool. How about you?”
“Skitty and Wailord…”
And this was how they carried on most days. At first, Duke worried that it wasn’t going to work out. The more conversations he listened in on, the more apparent it became that Luna and Patrick had about as much in common as a woodpecker and a wombat. She was a video game and anime loving nerd who spent her free time either online or gaming, and he was a literature geek who read books with language denser than a pitbull’s body. But Luna knew how to keep a conversation going and Patrick seemed to like talking about himself. Plus, they had infatuation on their side. If Duke and Victoria could figure romance out when they’d started off despising each other, then Luna and Patrick had very little standing in the way of their relationship.
“Just invite him over!” Victoria said to her after school as they waited for their parents to pick them up. It was October cold, and Duke stood shivering in his school uniform, the blazer not doing nearly enough work to warm him. “It’ll be a casual group setting—no pressure!”
“In what universe is your brother capable of being casual?” he asked, to which she scowled at him. He kissed the tip of her nose.
Luna scuffed the pavement with the heel of her shoe. She’d been doing that a lot more lately, the self-conscious middle school version of herself emerging from wherever she’d hidden her. It worried Duke. He preferred his best friend sunnyside up. “I’m with Duke on this one. I love you guys, but you have no idea how to act normal.”
“She says that like she’s normal,” Victoria muttered.
“Look, the whole point of dating is the person’s supposed to like you for who you are, and your weird friends by proxy,” Duke said.
“That’s funny considering how much you hate Dimitri.”
“I don’t hate him. I just dislike him to the highest extent that anyone can dislike a person.” He swept a hand down the front of his blazer as if the very mention of Dimitri had made his clothes dirty. “And if Patrick’s worth keeping around, he’ll dislike him too.”
“There’s Mom.” Luna stepped away from them, headed for the white SUV that had rounded the corner. “See you guys tomorrow!”
“Invite him over!” Victoria called after her.
“No!”
They waved goodbye to her and Mrs. Cruz as she drove past. Victoria let out a hmph and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Honestly. If he doesn’t ask her out soon, I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.” Then she turned to Duke, her frown instantly putting him on guard. “Also, would you please stop being so antagonistic towards my brother?”
“He started it,” Duke muttered, though it wasn’t technically true. The first time he’d met Dimitri, he’d been picking on Luna, playing keep away with something he’d gotten her as a gift. Duke had been in school just long enough to notice Luna was being chronically bullied, so he’d reacted to Dimitri the way he would any other bully: with hostility. And even though he’d quickly learned that good-natured teasing was a part of Dimitri and Luna’s friendship, Dimitri had continued to treat Duke as if he was the scum of the earth.
Victoria rolled her eyes. “Regardless of who started it, I would appreciate it if you were the bigger man.”
“He’s older than me!”
“Thank you for the reminder. My brother’s age had completely slipped my mind.”
“Alright, let’s pretend that I’m going to be nothing but nice to him from now on,” Duke said. “Do you really think he’d respond to that with human decency? No. He’s going to keep pissing me off until I snap and then he’s going to lord it over me.”
Victoria’s mouth screwed up but she didn’t contradict him. She no longer had the excuse of saying she didn’t know her brother well; she’d had a whole year to get used to his antics. She sighed and wrapped her arms around him, which had a pacifying effect on Duke that wasn’t altogether unpleasant. “I know I’m asking for a lot, but please try?”
He let out a noncommittal grunt and returned the embrace, remembering that if Victoria got into Juilliard in a few months, their days together would be limited. And if that happened—which was likely, considering how talented she was—then he’d bend over backwards to make her happy in the time they had left.
“Hey Douche King, quit touching my sister!”
They looked up and found Dimitri parked on the curb in his black Firebird, scowling at them. Duke immediately forgot the preceding conversation and flipped him off. “I’m dating her, asshole!”
Victoria whacked him on the shoulder, but she still gave him a quick kiss before scurrying for her brother’s car. “Text me!” she said.
Duke watched her go and tried to shake the depressing thought that one day, he’d be watching her go for the last time. Somewhere outside SeaTac airport, under the departures sign, rain falling around them. Letting go of those piano-playing hands so she could use them to make her dreams come true.
But it wasn’t like they couldn’t stay in touch. They had cell phones. Instant messaging. Sure, there’d be three time zones between them, but they could still manage scraps of conversation before she had to go to bed. And he could visit her! There was no way in the world his mom would turn down a trip to New York City, and his dad could check up on the Ray’s in Manhattan, and Duke could walk around with his dad’s camera taking a thousand pictures of the city, and the park, and Victoria posing in front of Juilliard with that awkward smile she always had in photos.
They could make a long-distance relationship work.
But damn if the thought of her leaving didn’t break his heart.
Author’s Note: Anyone who’s been in the Pokemon fandom as long as I have may remember the hullabaloo that resulted from discovering Skitty and Wailord were in the same breeding group.
By the way, Dimitri and Duke’s first meeting will be the Week 12 bonus story this season. :D