ARReSTeD DeVeLOPMeNT - 𝑎𝑛 𝑢𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑐𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑎𝑟𝑦 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑢𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛

03 || att-i-crats

It was the morning after the party, and George-Michael was in the middle of leaving a very important, mature voicemail.

"Hey, Dad. Hope you're doing well. Listen, uh... I'm looking through my old room and can't find my box of diaries and stuff from when I was younger. Just wondering if you put them anywhere. Let me know. Alright, bye."

Actually, they weren't exactly "diaries and stuff". Mostly, they were love letters. Love letters that he'd written years ago. To his cousin.

"Jesus, I hope nobody found them already." he whispered to himself as he re-checked the cupboards, proving that to definitely be the case.

He and Maeby had always been attracted to one another, which really wasn't ideal considering they were both related in some way to Lucille. When George-Michael was younger, he had no idea how to keep this under-the-radar, so he'd written and drawn letters upon letters for Maeby and hidden them all in a box.

Maeby walked into the room, apparently also somewhat nostalgic as she started looking at all the posters they'd hung up on the wall that still hadn't been taken down.

"Hey, Maeby," George-Michael said, shuffling through the closets for the third time already. "Have you been in the attic recently?"

"No," Maeby replied. "And what in the world is Add-A-Kratz?"

She took a poster off the wall, showing it to George-Michael, who shrugged and turned away.

"No idea."

Both of them were lying.

Add-A-Kratz was a sitcom geared towards middle-aged white women, complete with a laugh track, constant relationship drama and overdone makeup. George-Michael, emotionally close to fitting that criteria, was an avid watcher in his teenage years. So avid that the producer, Mo Lee, caught wind and sent him a personally-signed poster.

And Maeby certainly had gone into the attic. She did this to find her birth records so she could try to get an old job back (she was fired a few years back for being underage). But her birth records, just like George-Michael's box of letters, were nowhere to be found.

"I'm trying to find a box of old papers," George-Michael explained. "Drawings and stuff. I don't know exactly what the box looks like but it probably takes up a square foot or so."

"Nah, haven't seen it," Maeby replied. "You know what I have seen, though?"

George-Michael was suddenly extremely nervous. The possibility that she could have found the letters without the box around them was also likely, and the possibility of her finding something even worse of his was even more so. "What?"

"Remember the wall event last week?" Maeby asked, pulling out her phone. "You know how the press showed up and took pictures of everyone?"

George-Michael's breath caught. "Oh God. Did they get us kissing?"

"No," Maeby replied, holding the phone up to his face. "But they did get a normal, average picture of you. I mean, other than the red hair, but still."

When George-Michael failed to comprehend what Maeby was showing him, she sighed and rolled her eyes. "Read the caption."

"Oh," George-Michael said, following her directions. "George-Michael Bluth, youngest son of the Bluth family, sparks media uproar as fans of local television point out how much he looks like a mixture of every character from Ratatouille. Are you serious?"