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do not go gentle into that good night
***
Max can’t figure out the how, exactly, but she knows the when.
It’s the when of: the after burial and the mourning dresses, Joyce clinging to David like a lifeline and her tears dripping to the ground to evaporate in the Oregon sun. The when of murmurings in the halls, the uncomfortable seminars and one-on-ones with school counseling, the posters in the hallways about gun control and the dangers of drug abuse. Max stands in the very back when Kate holds her little prayer vigils, candle in her hand and gaze burning through everyone else’s backs. She watches with hard eyes and harder anger as Mark Jefferson goes to trial with a sinister smile.
It’s here that Rachel starts coming to her. In foamy dreams of sand between her toes and sea breeze on her cheeks, distant, a little blurry around the edges, invincible and ethereal. It’s always at the beach with the sunlight blessing her hair gold and making Max squint. She smiles, always, and always it’s dazzling.
Max doesn’t know much about Rachel but at the same time she does—in the kind of way people know what historical figures did to be remembered and nothing else. Rachel is a force of nature to her. A whirlwind that tore through Blackwell and left it a mess: the catalyst to the end. The bane of the Vortex Club, Chloe’s curse, the Christ of the lost girls. Max knows Rachel as the girl who smiled and instantly made things better. She knows Rachel as the girl who stuck like sand to your hair that you’ll find bits of in your scalp, days later.
(Max doesn’t know either if seeing a dead girl in her dreams means she’s going insane, but she’d been through worse hasn’t she, and all she’s ever gotten are nosebleeds and searing headaches.)
These days she goes through days at school like clockwork. She puts in the minimum amount of effort to reach mediocre. Spends her weekends in bed or with Kate, sipping tea while fantasizing about running out the nearest door or leaping out an open window. Just sits in the sand while Rachel dips her feet along the waterline, Rachel turning once in a while to smile, once in a while to just stare.
Max can never return either of those. She watches Rachel’s back, the flutters of her clothes, the shudders of her shoulders when a breeze turns too rough. And then she watches something else (or pretends to) when Rachel twists around to look at her. Rachel never seems to mind—she carries on with whatever she’s doing each time. Max should feel weird, just watching in silence, but it’s a dream. Knowing it’s a dream makes a lot of things not weird.
In the in-betweens, in the quiet of classrooms with the scritches of pencils and the good few minutes she hasn’t fallen asleep yet in the evenings, Max thinks of Chloe and Chloe’s October: photographs of her that don’t exist because she was gone before Max could take them. Chloe on the hood of her truck, Chloe in the sun, Chloe with Max and the pink-purple hue of her bedroom, tinted like it’s something unreal and straight out of a fantasy. She thinks of Chloe’s casket sometimes, and the dress Joyce and David dressed her in that she would’ve absolutely hated, were she alive. But she isn’t—and the dress was to match the goddamn casket, besides.
Max could convince herself well enough that she’s doing better with living with what she did, sometimes. That it was thousands of lives to one and she couldn’t bear to be so selfish, or evil.
(Sometimes she closes her eyes to visualize an entire town getting obliterated by a hurricane and feels a little warmer inside.)
Chloe’d be pissed at her for still thinking about it. Chloe’d be pissed at her like she was pissed at a lot of things. Max understands it now, Chloe’s anger so hot that she was like a slice on a wire just waiting to burst and electrify. Chloe carried a suffering nobody could understand even if they tried like Max carries something as heavy as a girl’s corpse on her shoulders. Chloe saw the world as this huge, sinful force that didn’t give her a choice, or a warning, or the proper healing. She never stood a chance. Neither of them did.
The difference between them is, Max is alive and Chloe isn’t.
Chloe wanted so badly to leave Arcadia Bay. Live somewhere in California, maybe SF if not LA. So Max thinks after Blackwell, she’d try her hand at some of the colleges in California. Get a job part-time to help with the finances. Maybe, if she makes it. If she still feels like it in a few months. She’d never go back to Arcadia Bay again or even home because she deserves her own casket, and some dingy apartment in a city with no one she knows seems a good enough substitute. At least until she can get the real thing.
In the meantime, she slugs through classes, hands in assignments, expends energy never more than necessary. Her teachers give her the eye sometimes, the one that essentially means you can do better than this, Maxine and she supposes she could, but she’s tired and what’s the point. She could’ve said the exact thing when Ms. Grant sat her down after class but she remembered, pretty quickly, what’s the point?
Regardless, October crawls to November in this way, and eventually December. With the snow settling on the windowsills all the sun Max gets is from dreams and Rachel. She goes through the motions. She only sometimes forgets she has friends. She watches Rachel by the water and wonders what it’s like to be a dead girl.
One time, Dana thinks to ask her, staring while Max rinses her face one morning, “how you holding up, Max?”
A toothbrush sticks out of Dana’s mouth. When she pulls it out to ask a follow-up, Max says, “I’m okay.”
“You’ve been holing yourself up in your room a lot lately.” Max lets her hands hover under running water. “Kate told me you have a project for Photography. With that new teacher? Have you done it?”
The last picture Max took was one of a blue butterfly in a bathroom. Her camera’s replaced all her winter clothes in the box of things she doesn’t use under her bed. “Mm. I’m almost done with it.”
“Good. That’s good. Hey, the girls and I are having a thing tonight at my room. Just before we all go for the holiday break—”
“I’m actually feeling a little under the weather, Dana, I should get some more rest. Can you tell Kate to tell the teachers I’m sick for me?”
Dana’s face is scrunched with concern but she says nothing. Max power walks it back to her room and pretends not to hear when Kate calls for her just before she shuts her door. She puts her pillow over her face, keeps her eyes closed and body still until she goes under.
And on that day before the holiday break, with Max skipping school, pondering to leave her window open, the pains of hypothermia, the fall from her sill to the ground, Rachel leaves the waterline and stands in front of her. Max watches her flex her toes on the sand for a while before craning her neck up to look at her.
The sun is behind Rachel’s head. Her face is all dim curves and curtains of hair, smile shadowed like a secret, a detail blurred and lost to underexposure.
The beach is quiet all of a sudden like a video on mute and Max gets this odd flash of memory of sitting restrained between her grandparents in church.
“What do you think?” Rachel asks.
“What?”
She shrugs and looks around. Her face is impassive as she regards their surroundings, hands on her hips, a sheen to her throat and cheeks that looks a bit like the start of a sunburn. Max wonders idly if she’s gotten any tanner sitting here all the time. “Of this place. The beach.”
Max looks around, too. The breeze is gone now, she notices, and the sea is stagnant, a perfect line of stillness against the sand. “It doesn’t snow here,” she says.
“Would you like it to?”
Max looks back up at Rachel. Rachel’s face is unreadable. In slow, slow blinks, the sun dims behind her head (just dims like a lamp with a setting, 3 for high and 2 for just right) and with it the breeze returns to lash her hair fiercely to one shoulder. Winter comes like a watercolor bloom, gold to silver. Snow starts to fall around them and Max braces herself for an unbearable cold that doesn’t really come. Or that she just doesn’t really feel, at least not here.
“I used to like snow. I don’t now, though,” says Rachel pensively. She’s looking Max in the face. Max could flush. Would flush, if this wasn’t a dream.
“Why?”
Rachel’s smile turns tight. She looks around again, watches snowflakes leave damp spots on the sand and settle on her clothes. “Too cold.”
And then she isn’t smiling anymore. She shifts, moves to Max’s side to sit on the sand with her and they watch winter swallow up the beach. They speak no more. Max thinks it’s fine. In about five minutes she’ll wake up on her bed at 3pm with her phone filled with texts from Dana or Alyssa, not any tanner than she was at the start of October. Certainly not any warmer.
Max sees none of Rachel during the break at home. What she sees a lot of is her parents and their coddling, and the stupid glow-in-the-dark stickers she stuck to her ceiling as a kid, just lying in bed and blinking at them all until she falls asleep. Her dreams are more or less nonsense and she forgets them as soon as she wakes up.
In Seattle there’s only rain and silence, except for Christmas day when she and her parents go out to eat. The menu is a little more than what they could afford, but they have a daughter who isn’t doing so well and they only smile when Max stuffs her face with a dish she can’t even comprehend the name of. Her dad gives her a planner, of all things, for next year, decorated with doodles of cameras and paintbrushes and polaroid prints. She doesn’t think it’ll ever come out of its plastic wrap.
She goes back to Blackwell, after. Victoria Chase doesn’t, and Max catches Victoria’s door wrenched open and boxes as high as her waist piled by the doorway. On the same day, she submits three assignments, one the Photography thing Dana mentioned, and catches a bus to the Two Whales to get some pancakes. She’s confident about heading there because Joyce doesn’t work there anymore.
(When she passes David Madsen in the halls, he doesn’t even look at her. He and Joyce split up, last she heard. Gossip travels fast in a small town.)
She skips dinner entirely and falls asleep to Kate knocking softly on her door. Later, when Rachel sees her and smiles at her, she gives a little wave before sitting on the sand.
“How were the holidays?”
“Fine.” Max makes room for Rachel, and Rachel plops down next to her. The sunlight lights up her nail polish as she flicks her hair. She smells like how laundry hung out in the summer to dry does—fresh and clean and sweet from fabric softeners. “We went out for Christmas. Watched a movie for New Years.”
“What movie?”
“The Force Awakens.” Rachel’s stringing together seashells on her lap. Max watches her ministrations. “I didn’t see you for the holidays.”
“Would you have liked to?” There’s a smile in Rachel’s voice though her hair is hiding her face. She cracks a shell by accident, throws it away.
“Where were you?”
“Here,” she looks up at Max, “where else?”
“I mean…” and Max stops herself, because this is pretty stupid. It’s all a dream, anyway. She shakes her head. “Nothing.”
“You don’t know, do you?”
Max blinks. Rachel has finished her seashell necklace and she holds it up to the sun by one end, staring at it. “I don’t know what?” Max asks.
“A lot of things,” Rachel says vaguely. She reaches out.
Taking Max’s hand, she turns it over and curls the necklace neatly on Max’s palm before pushing the fingers closed.
She rises, then. Dusting sand from her jeans, she walks back towards the surf and pokes her toes around for more shells. Max watches her for a long moment before looking down at her hand. When she does, the world turns dark, she’s cold even under her blankets, and on her palm there’s nothing.
“What don’t I know?” Max asks. Rachel has turned the beach to winter again and she’s making craters on the sand with the tips of her shoes.
“A lot of things,” Rachel says again, in much the same tone as before. She looks at Max for a second and laughs. “Why are you always sitting there? Come up here for a bit.”
Max, because it’s a dream more than because Rachel says so, obeys. Rachel reaches for her hand with a leading kind of force once she’s close enough, going up the tips of her shoes, gripping Max for balance. She walks en pointe along the sand. Like a dumb teenager, all pointless fun and games, trying to see how long her balance and boredom will last her. “What don’t I know?” Max repeats insistently as she walks as Rachel walks.
“Did you know,” Rachel says offhandedly, walking and tilting and walking again, “I didn’t meet my mother until I was like… eighteen. Just recently, actually.”
Max tightens her grip on Rachel’s hand when Rachel sways. She goes with along this branch of conversation because this is a dream, anyway. Her brain is trying to be funny. “No. How did that feel?”
“Overwhelming. Kind of weird. It was cool, though.” Rachel shrugs. “She was a junkie.”
“Oh.”
“Which is why she didn’t get to keep me.”
Rachel flattens her feet on the sand. Max looks at the trail of craters she’s left behind them, gathering moist from the snow, round dug holes. Their hands are still linked, she belatedly realizes, but Rachel is making no move to separate them.
“It sucked to meet her,” Rachel says at length. She sounds like she’s confessing something. Max tries to read her face but she’s looked away, out at the water. “Because it got me thinking about the kind of life I could’ve had with her. What could’ve been different.
“Doesn’t that just suck?” She turns back to Max though only halfway, and in the hesitant curve of her mouth Max reads a bit of anger. A bit of disappointment. “Knowing things could’ve turned out differently?”
Max pauses. She thinks of Chloe, a sadness wrapped in a blanket, fatherless and friendless and angry. Chloe, covered in a sheet, red stains blooming where her stomach is. Max turns away and says, “yeah. Yeah, that sucks big time,” with a quiver to her voice and eyes on the lighthouse in the distance. Rachel raises their joined hands. With a smile, she pulls Max in—and promptly pushes her back with a surprising show of force.
Max jerks awake with a phantom slam. She waits the entire hour for her alarm to ring before getting out of bed.
Her and Warren don’t hang out anymore. October-November was a different period though, a period of Warren trailing after her like a puppy and trying to get her to do things, things like tabletop gaming and anime binging. He’d been enthusiastic about it too, even skipping English class to introduce her to his other nerd friends one time. He’d been a good friend to her, regardless of motive. Regardless of his tiring energy.
It’s just that she never did follow through with her promise of writing up her own character for D&D, and she’d already forgotten that anime title he told her about in the next five minutes.
Now his texting has gone from the full force of a waterfall to the occasional trickle. He posts on Facebook now about Brooke rather than stupid links he unabashedly tags Max in. Their last conversation was about a project he and his friends are doing for Ms. Grant, and Max’s text bubbles are one to every three of his. Mid conversation about lab explosions, Max stopped replying. After that are just the occasional how are you’s and up to hang? and now, the yo Max, saw you at PE, get that dodgeball!
(She thinks to reply for a moment because Victoria’s the Blackwell bitch here, not her. Then she remembers Victoria isn’t here anymore and locks her phone without thinking twice.)
There are more than a handful of texts she hasn’t replied to other than his. There’s one from her mom from about two days ago asking her where she hid her old clothes, for goodwill maybe. She’s probably found it given the absence of a follow-up. Two from Juliet asking if she’d like to write for the school paper because they need members. Some other friends in scattered intervals. None from Kate, if only because Kate actually knocks on her door and brings her treats from tea boxes to biscuits. She inhales a pack of the biscuits for dinner and sits watching snow fall out her window, falling asleep at her desk.
Rachel’s waiting for her when she comes to. Only instead of sunlight and the blue of seawaters, around them are trash, debris, the wreck of what could’ve been a part of a house at Max’s feet. The sea is eerily still and the sky looks like the dull gray of a storm’s aftermath. The clouds are an afterimage of a hulking, spiteful god. Max knows what happened here before she even thinks to ask.
Even Rachel looks like she went through hell. She has a busted lip, a faint bruising on one cheek. There’s a discoloration around her throat with an uncanny resemblance to the indent of fingers and with her sleeves rolled up, Max sees messy track marks. Fresh, young, new.
(Max knows what happened to her before she even thinks to ask.)
“Too cold,” Rachel says. She’s always the first to speak between the two of them. Max is looking at her only because she doesn’t want to see the beach.
“Why’d you turn it into this?”
“Because I felt like finding out,” Rachel says simply. “And I felt like remembering.” Her eye on the side of her face that’s bruised is bloodshot. Her pupils are blown. There’s a stain of something dark under one nostril and a faint twitching on her jaw like she’s trying not to gnash her teeth.
Max frowns. Rachel tilts her head at the sight of it, and Max sees a little spasm around where her neck meets her skull. “I didn’t need to see it,” Max says quietly.
“Didn’t you?” Rachel sounds doubtful. Extremely so, for show. “Need to see how it could’ve gone differently?”
Max says nothing for a while. Rachel takes that as her cue to approach the water, stepping out of her grimy boots to dip her feet in. She washes off the mud. Filth spreads around her like an aura, a sick, twisted halo. She’s looking down, watching her infection of the water, and Max only then notices she’s wearing the clothes she and Chloe found her in.
“What don’t I know?” Max remembers to ask just to be able to say something. Rachel looks at her over her shoulder. Her cheek’s already healed and her eye is fine. It only takes Max blinking for her to return to normal, clean and bright and pretty, highlighted by sunlight and the sparkling of the sea, ethereal again, as people insist to remember her.
She looks like she’s thinking about answering, for a second. Then her smile turns teasing and she extends her hand toward Max instead, beckoning. “Come here.”
They link hands again. Rachel pulls her close, gentler this time, and continues pulling her as she walks deeper into the surf. Max walks until she couldn’t, until her head has dunked into the sea and the ground falls from under her feet. Rachel is still holding her hand. She’s a cloudy vision of blue in the water but still somehow, her grin is unmistakable. She speaks, all garbled nonsense and a sputter of bubbles. Max tries to ask what? but water fills her mouth as soon as she opens it, shoots down her throat, and she’s blinded by her own bubbles as she struggles to breathe.
Her chest feels like it doesn’t know whether to squeeze itself crushed or expand until it explodes. She can’t swim because her body is limp. Her eyes are closing, closing—
Rachel gives her hand a tug. Max is yanked closer and then she wakes up gasping for air and her hand wringing the edge of her desk, the room dark and her clock reading 10pm. She drags herself to bed and tries to fall back asleep. It’s nearly 1 in the morning when she finally does.
Winter inches to spring. Classes continue in a drone of oscillating fans, the voices of teachers, and muffled yawns behind hands. Max gets herself a can of bug spray from Samuel to set aside for when the season hits peak and things get really bad.
Kate doesn’t stop hoping to get her out for tea. The Vortex Club ceases to exist without Nathan or Victoria to keep its heart beating. Principal Wells is terminated for alcoholism and such is how life goes on in Blackwell.
Max doesn’t know if the adage applies to Rachel. In every dream she’s different, though, changing looks, new clothes, always pretty and never again like the time she showed Max the wreck of Arcadia Bay on the beach. One more time she takes Max back under the water and swims them back up just as Max starts to choke. Her hair’s a different kind of blonde when wet—more bronze than gold, matted to the sides of her face like a hood. Max gasps and she just smiles, going back under again without Max. She doesn’t resurface until Max wakes up. Another time they don’t go deeper than past their knees. Another, they don’t go into the water at all, and they play a long game of Two Truths and A Lie and Rachel wins every single turn.
Victoria hits her up, once. Her profile picture on Max’s notifications would’ve surprised anyone but Max is far past the point of getting shocked by anything. This has been a long time coming, besides—Victoria, the epitome of plastic elitism, the owner of nothing and owing everything to her parents. Marked by the scarlet letter of someone being crushed by their own ambitions and insecurities she disguises with verbal abuse, her pain a weapon. She’ll want to know what Max is up to. She’ll want to boast, condescend, have the last laugh somehow.
(Max hasn’t forgotten how she looked like in the Dark Room. Small and frail and begging for her life, more human and broken than anything Max has ever seen.)
“Still at Blackwell?” She foregoes the hey because she thinks she’s too good for that. Max stares at the text for a hard ten seconds before replying.
“Yeah.” Victoria sees the message. Max types again. “How about you?”
“Greener pastures. Blackwell doesn’t really cut it for me anymore.”
“You’d rather have a murderer for a teacher?”
Victoria’s dots pop up, go out, and then pop out again in a span of only a minute. Her reply is succinct once she’s able to get it out. “Rather not be there anymore ever.”
Max leaves her on seen. She feels bad, kind of, because she feels like she should at least give Victoria a small victory but she killed Kate. Not here but she did, and Max can still picture the sprawl of Kate’s body on the grass some days. Victoria leaves her a parting message five minutes later (fuck you, Max) and she only mutes her phone, rolling over to sleep at 7:30 in the evening.
It’s funny to her that the company she really only enjoys is the company of a dead girl. Understandable though, in a way. Morbid, in many ways. Rachel’s a figment of a long gone reality and something else: some kind of higher power that just likes to fuck with the universe. It’s masochism, probably, willingly taking in the fucking, but she did a whole lot of fucking on her own anyway, timey-wimey fucking and ripping through space and reality fucking. She thinks it’s full circle—it’s fair punishment. She thinks it’s actually a little nice, watching Rachel build up a sand castle and promptly crush it with the heel of her hand.
Max gets this feeling that had she and Rachel ever met, had things gone differently for them all and the world was a little kinder, they’d have met in the fall. With the sky just the right cross of sunny-cloudy and the world around them a warm hue of brown, Rachel would’ve told her hi and Max would’ve probably forgotten the leaves falling around them and saw only Rachel. That’s just the kind of person Rachel is. Some of the stories you hear in Blackwell are true.
“Why do you stay?”
Max loops the seashell bracelet Rachel made her around her wrist. “What?”
“Why do you stay in Blackwell? Arcadia Bay? This place is cursed. It’s a shithole,” Rachel says blankly. Her hip is touching Max’s hip, her eyes on something distant and only she can see. “Nobody who stays here ever becomes happy. Or even makes it to 30 without getting seriously messed up in the head somehow.
“This place sucks you in,” she says further when Max says nothing. Max can’t knot the bracelet properly. She’s concentrating. “And then it sucks you up, sucks you dry. I always hated it here.”
“You think I don’t?”
“Then why—”
“I hate it everywhere,” Max says quietly. She finishes the knot, holds her wrist up to her face to inspect the stricture of the bracelet. Rachel watches her in her peripheral. “I hate it in Seattle. I’d hate it in California. I don’t think I could ever believe I belong anywhere again.”
Quiet, then. Max hugs her knees to her chest and rests her chin between the scoop of them, squinting as the sun above the water darkens, just a little, just faintly enough to make her wonder. Like a lightbulb losing some steam.
“You still don’t know, do you?” Rachel muses at length. Max could frown—would’ve, but now she’s looking directly at Rachel and Rachel looks like this thoughtful, holy keeper of secrets, of sins: a fragment of God, still here when she’s supposed to be dead. Made herself a sunny home in Max’s head.
She kisses Rachel. Or maybe Rachel kisses her. They kiss, is what’s important. In Max’s mouth the question of what don’t I know gets trapped and pushed down her throat by an exploring tongue. She grabs the back of Rachel’s neck and pulls her flush. Rachel makes a sound like a tiny rumble of laughter and eases their faces to fit better, mouths crushing together softer, teeth clicking less. Something stings on Max’s tongue, acidic and sterile. She swallows the taste down.
Her mouth feels uncomfortably dry when she wakes up. She has to wobble in the darkness to the ground floor pantry for a bottle of water, but even hydrated it takes her an hour to fall back asleep.
“How did it feel?” Max asks. In Arcadia Bay, the birds have made a grand return and Max hears them always every morning. They chirp outside her window and make little scratching sounds on the sill but her curtain’s always drawn so she isn’t that sure, really. Samuel’s bug spray also emerges from her drawer and, picking at a bug bite, she makes a note to get more.
In Rachel’s beach, it’s so sunny and clear it could only be summer. An always summer bordering on cooking and sometimes burning. Rachel’s wearing sunglasses that she tips down to look at Max better. “How did what feel?”
Max raises her sleeves and stretches her arms out to the heat. “Dying.”
The surf bubbles in the distance, glistening like the spots of sweat on her dad’s neck: wet diamonds. Rachel looks like she knows exactly what Max had been talking about and is pleased to hear it say out loud anyway.
“Dying felt like nothing,” she says. People talk about the weather the way she talks about her death. Easily, only a little flippantly: “it was just numbness and slipping away. It was the suffering before that that’s really something to talk about.”
“How did you?” Max asks after a pointless pause. There isn’t a pleasant way to ask what she’s asking. “Die. Or, suffer, I mean.”
“They put too much in. Put me to sleep permanently.”
“Did you suffer long?”
Here Rachel pauses like she’s thinking about it. Like she rewinds the whole thing in her head to count minutes, or hours, or days that were only seconds to someone that could’ve been watching. “I don’t know. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. My body felt like—like someone kept trying to squeeze and pull it apart. I felt like I was drowning for hours.
“I pissed myself,” is how she finishes it. “It was humiliating.”
Max takes that in. It makes much more sense, then, when Rachel pulls her under the water again and holds her in place while she convulses with lack of air, the shape of Rachel like the blur of some horrible, ancient deep-sea creature wading in for the kill. She sees the human in Rachel and it’s an angry, vengeful girl who wants people to feel as she felt. An awful girl who had to have it all: saw all that she could have like she was standing at the top of the Burj Khalifa, cities and skylines and billboards with fog lights, and someone pushed her, wrote her off, watched her fall 160 storeys down.
When Rachel swims them back up and their heads leave the water, she strokes Max’s hair back and kisses her with so much force their teeth click. Max can remember the taste of sea salt on Rachel’s mouth in the morning, needled deep into her tongue like an ache. She can remember all their kisses like she’s the bearer of a lost girl’s pain.
(And she is.)
Max sleeps more than she wakes. Functions more than she lives. She hands in her projects and tries to smile at people and makes an effort to look like she’s enjoying Kate’s teas. She gives in to Juliet’s pandering and writes a short piece about grieving for the Totem, and it has to be edited and proofread a couple of times before it gets the green light, but Max sees it with her name somewhere in the middle on the next issue and it’s fine.
She takes out her camera from the box under her bed to shoot some still lives for Photography for a project, and then it’s forgotten again once that’s handed in. The new Photography teacher assembles a portfolio for her, for the universities, he says, because he knows Max won’t and he really believes Max is worth way more than she’s showing. Because she doesn’t want to end up telling him she didn’t try, she puts together an email and uploads it as an attachment. For the universities. She manages to send it to two before getting tired and going to bed.
Rachel still hasn’t told her what she doesn’t know. Max doesn’t mind. She’s okay with sitting on the sand and sometimes almost-drowning, and heading towards graduation with all the grace and willingness of a limping old man. She’ll climb the stage with her parents and tell them goodbye the same day to get settled in California, to earlier find a job before the semester starts. She’ll think to enroll for a few days and probably forget completely, and then spend the next few months or years in retail or some other underpaying job.
Then, she’ll think that she’s doing good with living with what she did, that she’s fine, and she’ll come up with fairly believable words for it for when someone asks while watching her nail polish dry.
That’s the plan she forms in her head when she falls asleep on her mattress. Mattress because all the dreaming and kicking had pushed the sheets right off and it never occurred to her to fix them.
She’s brought somewhere else tonight. Grass instead of sand and something tall and cursed a little to her right: solid and cold and concrete. Rachel is leaning on the lighthouse and is looking at the sky all funny, like she kind of wants to laugh but also like she’s mad.
“You’re graduating,” she says. Max feels her presence, moving to join her on the bench. Rachel’s made a sunset on the sky. “It’s kind of unfair.”
“A lot of things are.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry you died.”
Max is suddenly wiping tears from her eyes, suddenly so tired, suddenly so sick. Rachel only looks at her, eyes like hazel lanterns, searching and searching Max’s face for something Max hasn’t found. “I know you are,” she says after a long pause. She looks away. “I’m sorry Chloe died.”
“I am, too.” There’s no wind around them. No sounds. The sky is a picturesque still of sunset before them, not really moving forward like it’s frozen in time. Like Rachel. Like Max.
Rachel doesn’t even bother to wipe away Max’s tears when she kisses her. They’ll keep falling anyway. Her mouth stings to kiss. She grips the bone of Max’s hip and eases her back, back, until Max’s head is hanging off the edge of the bench and her neck is exposed enough for her to plant wet kiss on.
“I never had to have you,” she says, only a little angry. She strokes Max’s hair and chin and presses her thumb down on the hollow of Max’s collarbone, like she’s checking if it’s real. If Max is solid—pliant. “I’m not supposed to. You’re not supposed to know.”
This happens like how their kisses happen: because Max lets them. Rachel kisses her one more time and the dry, burning flavor on Max’s tongue comes back tenfold, strong and pure and nauseating. Rachel is gripping the back of her head, not letting her pull away. Her breaths on Max’s upper lip are ragged. Cold.
It’s here that the world shudders. Or maybe that’s just Max shaking. Rachel’s hands are everywhere: pulling off her shirt, pushing up her bra, tweaking just a little too hard at what’s underneath. When Rachel starts unbuttoning her jeans, Max only helps out to slip them off, lifting her hips and tugging with Rachel’s hands. She swallows formalin and something nasty, lumpy, sticky when Rachel kisses her again and she wants to retch but Rachel slaps a hand to her mouth, shushing and soothing her. Fingers find her pelvis and then slide between her legs, make her back arch, her joints ache from her awkward position on the bench—fingers slide in.
Rachel’s cold. Too cold. There’s a bit of blue under her fingernails and her eyes are milky when she looks at Max, and when Max breathes she can smell an undertone of rot, something growing moldy under the sun. Rachel’s fingers are stiff too, and they don’t curve right, and Max is afraid that if she moves her hips too hard they might break. She whimpers just the same, closes her eyes, covers her face, but Rachel pries her hands away to give another kiss.
The bruising on her neck and cheek are worse and her shoulder looks painfully displaced. There’s filth on her feather earring and smeared all over her chin, dust and blood and a little of something else that looks sticky. Her fingers, pounding inside Max, stroking, moving, links them both like graves do for the living and the dead. Max grasps Rachel’s bicep, unable to help herself from digging her nails in and whining.
All at once, an overwhelming grief bears down on Max. Because she understands that this is all that will ever be of Rachel, all that’s left of her, and that somewhere in the real world the flesh is starting to turn to powder around Chloe’s bones. Because a part of her died in October and what’s left is the power in her right hand and her pulse. She comes anyway, and Rachel noses at her neck and breathes against her collarbones while she rides the orgasm with twitching hips and hands desperately gripped onto the icy stiffness of Rachel’s arms. Her mouth is open. The wood hurts her back and her ass. In the silence the sound she makes is loud and throaty and horrid.
She’s warm again, Rachel, when Max finds her breaths and can see beyond white spots and leftover tears in her vision. Soft again. Beautiful again. “Never had to have you,” Rachel repeats fondly. “Never had a chance.” She’s whispering. Max feels a lazy breeze roll by them and nude, she shivers.
“Ask me what you don’t know,” Rachel murmurs by her ear. Max pushes her by the shoulder so they could sit up. Her back hurts from the bench and their movements and she’s still naked and a little cold, but she doesn’t care. She looks Rachel in the eye.
“What don’t I know?”
Rachel tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. Her feather earring shudders. Swings, when she leans forward and gives Max a chaste peck on the lips. She tells Max her sin.
Max looks eye to eye with the storm. Days ago she sat on her mattress with the wrinkled photograph of a blue butterfly in her hand—days ago it was her blood on the tiles of the girl’s bathroom from a heavy nosebleed and the paper cut she got from a torn up polaroid. Now Chloe is behind her, and they’re soaked, and there’s a hurricane in Oregon on October, rioting and heading for Arcadia Bay.
Chloe is yelling. Max knows her spiel by heart now and doesn’t listen. Her choices unfold, the tornado looms, and Max tells them fuck you, tells it eat shit.
Rachel Amber walked into the Dark Room knowing full well what would happen if she just didn’t: if she just went on with her life, let some other girl walk in instead and gone to California like she wanted, lived lives in magazine covers and TV adverts instead of missing person posters. Like she was supposed to. If she just let herself live with her choices like she was expected to.
(Mark Jefferson didn’t know she’s cursed.
The catalyst to the end.
The Christ of the lost girls.)
Now Max walks toward the hurricane, knowing full well that Rachel and her do meet in the fall. They’ll meet in a lost place as lost girls and life for everyone will go on. She’ll be the girl of Octobers, ripped apart, pieces of her lost in a thousand realities. She’ll come to Rachel. And she knows the when and the how.
She leaps toward the tornado. It sucks her in.
***
rage, rage against the dying of the light