Chapter Text
This was it. This was going to be April's Hot Girl Summer. She'd just finished the last finals of her junior year at Eastlaird, and even if she hadn't gotten all her grades back quite yet, she was pretty confident that she'd passed them all with flying colors. Maybe the summer after her freshman year had been marked by everyone recovering from the consequences of the Krang invasion, and the summer after her sophomore year had involved far too many off-the-grid camping trips due to the EPF getting a little too nosy, but this summer was going to be different. She knew it wasn't going to be normal, no, she'd learned that particular lesson years ago. But this year April was determined to balance all the weirdness with fun, sexy college student summer activities! She was going to have at least one age-appropriate milestone experience this summer. She was!
Except at the moment, she and Donnie were lounging in the bean bags on the Hamatos' living room floor, both staring at their individual phones, which was not terribly "hot girl summer" of either of them.
After her last final, before she could think about it too hard, she'd downloaded Hinge onto her phone, since that seemed to be the current queer dating app of choice. Maybe a girlfriend wasn't required to have a hot girl summer, but well. It'd be nice. She'd gone through all the hoops of setting up her profile, her and Donnie hemming and hawing over her profile and which photos to include, carefully cropping out any traces of green. The problem was that well…everyone on the app was really, really boring.
Sure, it was fun to swipe through everyone, especially when Donnie was right next to her providing commentary. She'd been excited for the first few matches she got too! But all these people that seemed so cool and attractive in their profiles just…weren't able to hook her attention in a conversation. Just because April was a very good conversationalist didn't mean she wanted to do all the heavy lifting! She'd talk with someone for a few days, and eventually the conversation would peter off, and she just couldn't bring herself to go through the effort of starting it up again.
So here she was. Still spending Saturday night switching between absentmindedly swiping through people on Hinge and refreshing her social media.
Donnie had been providing some commentary earlier, but some notification had caught his attention approximately 15 minutes ago, and he was still very intently glaring at his phone screen and furiously typing. She'd connected the dots when she refreshed her Twitter feed and saw several tweets from Donnie, originating with something he'd quote-tweeted from Kendra. So they were doing…whatever thing they had going on. Historically it was always best to not get between the two of them, so April had just closed out of the app and gone back to Hinge.
Lesley, 24, Manhattan, NY
I'm looking for…
someone who'll sit thru an entire harry potter marathon!
That'd be a solid 20 hours she'd never get back. Swipe left.
Briar, 22, Staten Island, NY
Self-explanatory. Swipe left.
Nicole&Matt, 23–
Yikes– swipe left, swipe left, swipe left.
Cassandra, 21, Manhattan, NY
Dating me is like…
do it and find out
April almost swiped left on the blurry photo of Cassandra Jones on instinct, but managed to drag the profile back to center, staring at it.
Objectively, it was perhaps the worst dating profile she'd seen so far. All the answers to the prompts were vague, none of the photos had both clear resolution and good lighting, except for the picture of the moped she'd finished revamping over the winter. One of the photos, featuring a washed-out looking Cassandra posing in front of a neon palm tree sign, had a big green blur that she was pretty sure was Raph's thumb occupying the bottom left corner of the photo. "Donnie," she managed to squeak out, flicking her eyes back and forth between the screen of her phone and her friend. "Donald. Donathan. Donatello."
"Can it wait? Kendra keeps saying the stupidest shit about the Blockchain, and I–"
"Cassandra's on Hinge," April blurted out. Donnie blinked, pausing for a second like he needed to think about it, the bastard, before setting his phone down.
"Which one?"
"How many Cassandras do we know?!" April asked incredulously.
"At least two," he said. He reached his hand over toward her, making a grabby hand. She gingerly handed the phone over so he could look at her abysmal profile. He was way too unperturbed about what was going on. He scrolled through the profile for a few seconds, his eyes scanning the screen. "Huh. This is… yikes. Remind me to make her a selfie stick," he said, before swiping right across the phone screen.
April let out a strangled screech, lunging toward Donnie. Unfortunately, he seemed to have expected retaliation, because he leapt to his feet, holding the phone up above his head. "Donnie!" she growled, ducking under the arm he was trying to fend her off with to climb up his battleshell, only to get pushed off by two metal claws. "What the hell?! Why'd you do that?!"
He gave her a deadpan look. "April. My darling, wonderful best friend. You've been pining over her for what, three years now? You've been gushing about her triceps since before you knew her name. I'm doing you a favor."
"I have not!" she protested.
"Shelldon, pull up the 'April blackmail' folder, sub-folder 'useless lesbian'. Start footage in chronological order."
"You got it!" came Shelldon's traitorous, overly-chipper voice, a holo-screen projecting from Donnie's tech gauntlet.
A video of a younger April and Donnie appeared on screen, both of them sprawled on Donnie's bedroom floor while she painted his nails.
"What school do you think that Foot recruit girl goes to?" the sixteen year old April asked.
"Can't say I've thought about it," Donnie responded.
"Really?"
"Kinda more concerned about not losing track of the mystic metal. Haven't bothered to dedicate time to stalking our mortal enemy."
Even through the lower resolution video quality, April's violent blushing was very apparent. "It's not stalking! It's just, uh, knowing your enemy!"
"...Uh huh. And this has nothing to do with her using a throwing knife to knock the mystic metal right out of your hand?"
April let out a high pitched laugh, shaking her head. "Nope! Not at all!"
The video cut out, and there was a beep before the feed switched to only audio. April's voice started up again. "How far do you think she could throw me?"
"You can always ask," Donnie responded, sounding bored. "I bet she'd do it."
"You think?"
Another beep.
There was a photo of a page out of one of her class notebooks, with various combinations of her and Cass' names written out in frilly cursive in the margins.
"Oh my god, turn it off!" April cried, slapping Donnie's arm. Thankfully, Shelldon complied, the holo-screen disappearing. With that gone, she slumped back down face first into her bean bag, letting out a muffled scream into the polystyrene beads.
"There, there," Donnie said, crouching down next to her and patting her on the back. He even had the generosity to use his real hand and not the metal one. How touching.
Okay, so maybe April had had the teensiest crush on Cass, and maybe it had been going on for a very, very long time. There was just a lot to like about her! Even when she'd still been in the Foot Clan, it had been so cool to have another human stand toe-to-toe with them. And then she left the Foot (super cool), and started hanging out with Raph all the time (super cute), and started coaching a pre-teen hockey team (extra super cute). April hadn't stood a chance, and that was before she and Junior got really into fixing up cars.
"What if she's not into girls?" she whined into the bean bag.
There was an extended pause from Donnie. "...She has her profile set up to match with women who like women," he said slowly, in that patronizing tone that strongly implied he thought she said something stupid.
"I dunno, maybe she accidentally set it up wrong!"
"Are we talking about the same Cassandra Jones?" he asked rhetorically. "The one who only likes the Jupiter Jim movies co-starring Crystal Yistal? The one who keeps her keys on a heart-shaped carabiner? The one who almost got arrested shooting off fireworks while drunk during pride month last year?"
"Maybe she's just a really big ally," she responded mournfully.
"She cuts a slit in her eyebrow."
"Actually, that's a scar. It's just really faint," she said, lifting her head up to see his face when she corrected him. The look of exasperation and annoyance that crossed his face was worth the effort.
"You've spent too much time staring at her face," he eventually managed to say, dropping her phone on the bean bag in front of her.
She scrambled to grab it, switching over to the matches tab, unable to help the pang of disappointment when there wasn't anything new. She locked her phone screen, tucking it under her chest and going back to smothering her face in the bean bag. Donnie settled down next to her on the floor, stretching his arm out across her back and leaning on it as he turned his attention back to his own phone.
"She's so cool…" April whined, turning her head to look at him, smushing her cheek into the bean bag and knocking her glasses askew. "What if she doesn't like me like that?"
"Hm. Well, then I won't feel bad about shooting my shot," he answered, a smirk spreading across his face. She flung her arm out, whacking him haphazardly in the shin. "Hey!" He flailed dramatically. "You know my type! I am a man of consistency, and she's super cool and has objectively great legs!"
She hit him again for good measure before slumping back down, making a tactical decision not to bring up how Kendra was a bitch and didn't even have nice legs.
Donnie sighed, and she let him shove her over a little so he could slide into the divot in the bean bag right next to her, his arm still slung across her shoulder blades. "If she doesn't like you like that, then maybe she's just not as cool as we thought. But it'll still be alright. You've been doing great without her and it's not like that's going to change. Romance isn't the end all, be all, and you certainly don't need Cassandra to have your hot girl summer."
"I know," she muttered in response, bonking her forehead against his chin and leaving it resting there. "It'd just be nice, is all."
He hummed in response, and the two of them laid like that on the bean bag for a few beats in silence, listening to the hum of the air conditioning. "Y'know…" he started slowly, not moving. "When we were all little, we used to argue about who was gonna marry you when we grew up."
April couldn't help but let out a loud snort, reflexively curling into herself. Donnie fidgeted next to her, presumably trying to get her hair out of his eyes. "It was an incredibly serious argument," he insisted.
"Oh, I'm sure," she snickered, unable to do anything but find humor in the mental image of a bunch of pre-teen turtles getting into a slap fight about who was going to marry the only girl they knew. "Who won?"
He let out an over-exaggerated sigh, like the answer pained him to say, even though she could hear the grin in his voice. "Leo, obviously. It may or may not have been involved in the inciting incident for the first Lair Games."
"Hm. I'm sure he and I could work something out when we're both late-20s spinsters," she said.
"That's the spirit. Pizza supreme knows Leo won't ever be able to find someone to deal with his dumb ass."
This was it. This was going to be the summer that Cassandra Jones accomplished an age-appropriate milestone at the correct time. Okay, well, maybe she was a little late for her first girlfriend, but plenty of normal people were late bloomers too! It was fine! She was fine!
It hadn't even really been a priority until Raph started talking non-stop about this salamander yokai he met, and then April had started talking about having a quote-hot-girl-summer-unquote and going on dates, and Casey had suddenly become keenly aware that she was falling behind her peers. Leo had said something off-hand about April downloading some dating app, so she'd downloaded it herself, slapped together a profile, and immediately proceeded to realize she did not care in the slightest about any of these strangers. She wasn't quite ready to give up the cause of reaching an age-appropriate milestone, but she was coming to terms with the fact that dating apps…probably were not her thing.
Even if she did manage to connect with someone, how was she supposed to explain that she lived with a guy who had the exact same name as her and also regularly had at least one mutant turtle sleeping on their couch? Not even to go into the whole "hi, I was raised in a cult and will absolutely say weird things sometimes" thing. Or literally anything else about her life.
"Maybe the Hidden City has dating apps on their orb-thingys," Raph suggested, swinging his feet off the roof of the Hell's Kitchen row house affectionately dubbed Casa del Casey. Getting him in through the front door was starting to be…cumbersome, but Donnie was working on installing a larger trap door that led into their basement unit from the sewers below. "I can ask Mona, she might have some recommendations for you. Maybe she even has some single friends or something! A blind date could be fun."
She was pretty sure that yokai would also think it was weird that she was raised in a cult. Plus, a blind date sounded terrible, like "rather walk on hot coals" sort of terrible, but Raph was trying his best. "Yeah, sure, go for it," she told him. She deserved a fucking Oscar for keeping the grimace off her face.
"Plus, there's tons of like, human-adjacent people in Witch Town if that's what you're worried about. They probably would be totally cool with your whole situation! Oh! Maybe we could go on a double date!" Raph continued, an absolutely hopelessly gushy grin on his face.
"Yeah, whatever you want, big guy," she responded, unable to help but huff a laugh. Even if this was turning out to be some sort of hellish slog, well, at least Raph was having fun.
He pulled out his phone, presumably to text Mona judging by his continued gooey expression, and Cassandra pulled out her phone as well, more out of habit than anything. At the very top of her notifications was one from Hinge: Somebody liked you! Don't keep them waiting. 🔥She tapped into it and proceeded to nearly fall off the roof.
April liked your photo!
Raph looked up at her as she flailed around to regain her balance, red energy flickering around his arms in case he needed to catch her. "You good?" he asked quizzically.
"April liked my photo," she said.
"...Which one?"
"Me and Casey's CHF50," she answered, before realizing that that didn't explain anything. "On Hinge."
"Huh. Hu-u-uh," he responded, looking thoughtful. "Did you match with her?"
"Should I?" she asked, her voice coming out more uncertain than she'd intended. "I mean. Is it weird if I match with her?"
He shrugged. "You're askin' the wrong turtle. But she sent you the like first, so I'm pretty sure you're good."
Casey stared back at her phone screen and the picture of April throwing up a peace sign a wink on her screen. Match with April?
Raph had a point. April had deliberately put the ball in Casey's court for some reason, so well…if she hit it back to her, that'd just be playing along, right? And playing along wasn't weird. Maybe this wouldn't even be anything. Maybe it would just be a "haha, so funny to see you here" sort of interaction.
"If you're still thinking about it, just match with her already," Raph said. "S'not that deep."
Okay. Raph was right. It wasn't that deep. Casey swiped right.
You matched with April! Send the first message?
…
"What if I ruin our friendship and things are weird forever?" she asked aloud.
"...How about we go sweep up some mutant silverfish to drop in Big Mama's dumpsters? Instead of cat– calastra– thinking up bad stuff?"
"I'm pretty sure I can multitask," she said, getting to her feet anyway. "Lemme grab the electro-nets, though. I saw a bunch running around 58th and 9th the other day."