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i.
There are pictures, among those currently lined up on Marcy's kitchen counter, attesting to a time where it was just her and Anne.
They’re all moments that would be lost to memory, had someone - presumably Marcy’s parents - not thought to capture her first day of kindergarten, or her first time at a carnival, or random afternoons at the park, dripping ice cream cones on wooden benches. Anne’s beaming wildly in all of them, the undeniable focus of those camera lenses, while her shier friend hides behind her back or holds on to her shirtsleeve, sporting a more tremulous smile. Marcy looks at them and feels like she's being granted a glimpse into another life.
It’s probably nothing to worry about, really - she remembers reading that childhood memories fade pretty quickly before the six or seven-year mark, and even then, Marcy is no stranger to having large chunks of her life missing from her recollection.
I asked you to clean your room twice, Marcy. Weren’t you listening?
What do you mean, we never said we’d hang out after school? You were there when we decided.
So you blacked out last night, and when you came to, your essay had written itself?
There was always something eerie about it - being on the other side of herself, not knowing who’s really pulling the strings - but it’s gotten worse after Amphibia. She stops that train of thought before the water reaches her throat, and she throws the offending pictures in with the others she’s bringing along.
It makes sense, she thinks, as she leaves her parents' house behind, that she'd remember nothing before meeting Sasha. That her brain would register Anne as an evergreen presence in her life, roots sinking far too deep into her memory, while Sasha would demand special attention as she always did, making the others question everything that came before her.
She hasn’t talked to the real Sasha in years, but she can still hear her voice. What would you be without me? she asks, out of the blue, when Marcy’s washing dishes or putting clothes away or staring into space. Can you ever be something again?
She figures the answer is no, but not because of anything Sasha, specifically, now can't bring to the table. It's not because of Anne's absence, either, though Marcy keeps expecting to find her next door and sprinting out into an unfamiliar street.
It's the both of them, her therapist said, once, scribbling wildly but refusing to meet Marcy's eyes for confirmation. You miss being part of something.
She hadn't understood. No one really had.
What she misses about their little group is greater than the sum of its parts. Marcy loved Anne, and she loved Sasha all the more because Anne loved her; vice versa, she couldn’t have loved Anne as much as she did if she didn’t love Sasha, as well. They were an interconnected web, the three of them, and if any piece were to be removed - if, say, Marcy was forced to move away; if Anne and Sasha decided to stop sweeping their issues under the rug; if one of them came forward with their feelings and asked the others to acknowledge their own - the entire structure would fall apart.
She didn’t think Anne and Sasha were aware of this, and so it was always up to Marcy to sniff out potential threats and deal with them before they pierced the fragile bubble their dynamic existed in - but the world outside still caught up to them. Day turned to Night, and she and Anne and Sasha faced it as one, but all of it was wrong - they were wrong - and they were almost killed for it.
Sasha's steady voice, her hand outstretched towards Marcy’s on the floor: We do love you. We do.
It was enough, of course, for the time, though not for any time after that.
“Time to wake up,” the lady in the seat next to her says, to the little boy nodding off on her shoulder.
Marcy takes the chance to blink, too. The plane has landed, people all around her getting up to retrieve their luggage, and she’s missed the whole flight.
She peers out the window, far into the distance, past the airport and the highway and the fields beyond. She still expects the face of a child to stare back at her, but she’s five years older now and none the wiser.
ii.
Sasha is twelve when the idea of kissing stops being disgusting to her, and thirteen when she decides she really wants to try it in the only way she knows how.
“Scare dare challenge,” she announces to a bewildered Anne and a confused Marcy when she turns off the horror movie they were watching before the end credits can even start to roll in. “I dare you to play chicken with me. Come on.”
She doesn’t think they’ll look too much into it. They usually know better than to question her, and scarier dares have been issued at this point of the night. Getting a little up close and personal with your friends should be greatly preferable to ouija boards and chanting spells at the bathroom mirror.
Anne, though, has shown more and more of a death wish lately that keeps coming up when Sasha least expects it. “Dude, no way.”
“Why not?” she smirks, eager to take up a challenge of her own. “Too scared?”
“You can’t threaten me with the book when I haven’t agreed to the dare yet.”
“No book necessary. We'll know. Won't we, Marcy?"
Marcy cowers, eyes flitting between her and Anne. That's always the issue with letting Anne speak her mind - dissent in a group of three spreads fast, and it spreads even faster when their third is so easily swayed. Marcy has always been one to go with the flow, and Sasha can't fault her for being confused if she's being pulled in two different directions.
“I mean - I guess.”
Sasha's heart lets up. She didn't even notice it beating faster, which is weird. Usually there’s nothing, either inside or outside her body, that escapes Sasha's control - Anne and Marcy are proof of that.
What was she suddenly so afraid of? That they’d join ranks and rise up against her ‘cause they didn’t want to do a stupid dare? That this would be what pushed things too far for them, that they’d hate being close to her that much - that they wouldn’t want her?
She stops right there; of course her girls would want her. That’s not what any of this is about. What matters is that whatever the outcome, she’ll get to keep the upper hand. If Anne and Marcy back down from the challenge, their names will end up in the book again, while Sasha’s pride will stay intact. If they don’t, she’ll get exactly what she wants - seeing what the big deal about kissing is, so she can finally put the fantasies in her head to sleep.
She's not worried about what they mean - intrusive thoughts are a thing, and just like she doesn't actually want to jump from the highest floor of her house to get out of a boring family dinner, she also doesn't want to kiss her best friends. The thoughts are distracting, is all, and they insist on coming back no matter how hard she tries to tune them out.
She’s not used to this. She hates it. She watches Anne roll her eyes at Marcy, breathe an exasperated “Fine,” through her nostrils, and lay a warm hand directly on Sasha’s cheek to pull her closer, and she’s too taken aback to protest that this is not how chicken works.
She takes a glance at Marcy, wondering if she’s gonna speak up - which she isn’t, obviously, too busy looking like she’s gonna have a heart attack of her own. But she catches a curious gleam in her eye, some shy fascination that’s there and gone, and for some reason, it makes her pulse speed up again.
She has to be experiencing some form of emotional whiplash, because Anne getting closer means she has to switch her focus again, and what she feels for her is so much different than what she feels for Marcy. Marcy is quiet tides and safety nets and the dull pleasure of a nicely thought-out plan followed through to the very end; Anne is every hitch in that plan that makes the end result feel worthwhile, the self-satisfied thrill of a victory well fought for. Sasha lives to quell sparks of defiance into slow simmers, just as she lives for Marcy’s quick yields, and those two things are inextricably tied together, so dependent on each other they might as well be two manifestations of the same core want. There’s nothing she could ever need in that messed-up, contradictory head of hers that her girls couldn’t give her, and nothing anyone else could offer that could compare.
She knows of the tunnel vision that comes with having a crush, but she also knows that’s usually a one-person-only kind of deal, and if everyone's already unlucky enough to be cut in half then what does it mean, for her, that she’s only a third? Does that make her lesser than most, weaker?
She’s gonna ignore it. She’s gonna figure out the answer even if it kills her. She’s gonna kiss Anne and run away when it only makes things worse.
Unfortunately, Anne runs first, before their lips have even touched. Sasha feels the air move in front of her and opens her eyes to find Anne scrambling backward, hand sliding off Sasha’s face, looking like some terrible chasm has opened up between them that she doesn’t want to reach across.
Sasha looks at her one second too long, leading Anne to avert her gaze and curl up in a ball. Nobody dares to breathe; Sasha wishes the dark pit, if it is indeed there, would swallow her whole.
Anne and Marcy agree to write down their names without question; Marcy decides she doesn’t even want a try.
Years later, Sasha takes out the book from where she’s stacked it somewhere in her college dorm, opens it up on her lap, and she traces those lines again.
Not for the first time, she wishes for her armor back, but it sank to the bottom of a swamp a long time ago.
iii.
Anne sees them across the café on campus and she almost runs.
She's pretty sure Marcy was the first to notice them both, since she's already looking when Anne looks up from her phone. There's this girl she met through a college group chat, and she's supposed to meet her here, but she just texted Anne she'd be late, so here Anne is now, barely one step in, staring at her ex best friend staring at her in turn. Said ex best friend’s hair is even shorter than Anne remembers, and there are more empty coffee cups on her table than any one person could reasonably consume in a day.
Anne doesn't even need to look behind her, given the way Marcy's eyes keep flickering to a point past Anne's shoulder and the world’s sense of humor - but when she does, she’s met with Sasha's gaze over the counter, the other girl having just appeared through the staff entrance and tugging nervously at her apron. The visual is so absurd it takes Anne right out of the moment.
“What are you doing here?” she blurts out. She almost wants to accuse them of following her, ambushing her, of - frog forbid - catfishing her, but she can see her own surprise mirrored in their faces, the absolute loss they’re all at about what to do next, and she can’t help but think that Sasha’s plans used to be much more substantial than this.
“Uh - working?” Sasha replies, though she sounds unsure of the answer herself. The girl next to her, wearing the same apron, makes a snide comment that Not right now you’re not. Sasha makes a frustrated noise and turns to her, breaking out the same voice she always used on Anne to get her to comply. “Cover me for a bit?”
“Your shift was supposed to start half an hour ago.”
“Then five more minutes won’t make a difference.” But the girl doesn’t look half convinced, so Sasha hangs her head and sighs. “Look, I’ll do you one more. Cover my shift today, and I’ll work double time tomorrow to make up for it.”
Her co-worker grumbles, but eventually agrees, and Sasha jumps over the counter.
Anne doesn’t understand anything. She hasn’t talked to either of them since they all left Amphibia, and she wasn’t even the one to make that choice. Marcy was made to move away the second she got back and promptly dropped off the face of the Earth, while Sasha’s parents pulled her out of school and only had the courtesy to reply to one of Anne’s many attempts to reconnect to tell her to leave their daughter alone, under threat of legal action. They were either under the impression that Anne was to blame for the whole Amphibia situation, or trying to distance themselves from it as effectively as possible.
Anne kept being worried about them, even as her own life went on just fine. Having been away to a fantasy world for six months might’ve drawn more attention to her than she would’ve liked, but not all of it was bad. She felt like she was in Wartwood again, a strange, lonely creature trying to prove she was more than a freakshow - but just like in Wartwood, being stripped of all expectations came with a certain amount of freedom, and with people sticking around for nothing more or less than what she really was.
She was especially surprised at being finally asked out, often and by many. Back in the day, her friends were usually the ones garnering romantic interest, and Anne was the one left to clean up their mess when Sasha got bored, or Marcy forgot she was dating anyone at all for two weeks straight; now people she'd known even back then were coming forward, claiming they'd wanted to ask her out for years.
You were always off-limits, one of them said when she inquired. It was an unspoken rule, but no one wanted to get on Sasha’s bad side.
She remembers being confused, because no one had been scared off dating Marcy, and that had to make her different, special, in Sasha’s eyes - but it stood to reason that Marcy wouldn’t need serious warding off, as her relationships were usually short-lived and fell apart on their own.
I guess she wanted you all to herself, they continued, and the tangled mess of emotions that single line evoked in her was far too large to pick at - so she did the sensible thing and banished it entirely.
But right now, Anne realizes she was a fool. Thoughts of Sasha and Marcy have never simply stopped - they've been queued up for this exact moment, and now that her memory has been jostled, they won't stop coming, fragments of sentences and questions and considerations rising up in her throat and barely stopping before they leave her mouth.
Why did you sabotage me at every turn why could you not stand me being happy why didn’t you do anything if you wanted me that much and you why did you let her -
“I have a date,” she feels the need to announce, as if daring them to say anything about it.
“You do?” Marcy whispers conspiratorially - the first words she’s spoken to her in five years. “Are they here? Point them out to me.”
“Not yet, and absolutely not.”
“We’ll stay close by,” Sasha assures, and Anne’s about to remind her of what happened on her thirteenth birthday, how Sasha lied then and she could just as well be lying now, but that’s before Sasha begs “please,” like she’ll never get another chance to talk to them like this again.
That has to be why, despite everything, Anne follows her out.
For once, Sasha doesn’t lie. The three of them walk in circles, round and round the building like crazy spinning tops, and talk about the last few years like they’ve only been apart for a really eventful week. When they do stop to take a break, it’s on a bench in the town square directly in view of the café, in the shadow of a large tree, and they get tangled up in each other like kids playing Twister at a slumber party - Marcy’s head on Sasha’s shoulder, Sasha’s fingers in Anne’s hair, Anne lying in Marcy’s lap. It’s good, and it’s quiet, and it’s what Anne has been missing this whole time. She has to keep her eyes closed against the sun, but the warmth and the chatter are more than enough to keep her senses busy. She feels sleep dragging her down bit by bit. She never wants to leave.
“Tired?” Sasha whispers, and though Anne can’t see her, she’s pretty sure she’s got the kind of secret smile that’s reserved for when no one’s looking. Anne can only hum, Sasha’s fingers still drawing tight circles on the sides of her head.
Someone - she can’t tell which one of them - leans over her and drops a kiss on her forehead. Though it’s clearly meant to be soothing, it gives her enough of a thrill to pull her back from the brink and make her voice work again.
“I didn’t expect to find you here,” Anne drawls, as if that’s a perfectly good explanation for the bone-deep weariness that’s seeped into her. Maybe it is. She wasn’t this exhausted when she left campus. “And you have a job?”
Sasha’s laughter is bright, and just as disbelieving as Anne sounds. “I know, right? I decided I didn’t need my parents’ money. I wanted to make it on my own.”
“I thought I’d never see you two again,” Marcy confesses, so softly that Anne has to strain to hear her. The words are met with complete silence, perhaps the shared realization of a common fear. “And even then, I thought - I thought you’d want nothing to do with me anymore.”
“You disappeared,” Anne reminds her, not without a note of accusation. She turns her head into one of Sasha’s hands. “Both of you. I tried to reach out to you.”
“I didn’t want things to go like that,” Sasha says, sounding almost in pain, “but maybe it’s good that they did.”
“It’s fine,” Anne shrugs. “I’ve been okay. I just missed you, and - and Amphibia. Getting used to real life again was hard.”
Marcy lets out a chortled, ironic little laugh. “I know what you mean.”
“I think it would’ve been harder, if we’d had each other.” Sasha clears her throat several times, and it’s getting harder to read her without looking straight at her. “I couldn’t have lived with the constant reminder. The feeling of loss would never have gone away.”
“Maybe,” Anne admits. The feeling of loss never did go away for her, but she carried it around like phantom pain in a hastily replaced limb. The new one worked just fine, and it wasn’t even too hard to get used to - but being with them again now is like nerves growing back, new skin covering the appendage and taking it in as part of her body again.
“We couldn’t forgive each other back then,” Marcy says. “Do you think - we can now?”
And Anne wishes she could keep her eyes closed, maybe pretend to be asleep and forgo the question - but no, this is a conversation they need to have, and it requires her to get off Marcy’s lap and look them both in the eyes. “I don’t know,” she mutters. “I don’t want to just forget everything that happened. But - I think we can try.”
“‘Cause, look, if we make it to next year I’d - I’d like to move off campus and find a nice apartment we can share. One with a large bedroom, or - or three singles. Whatever works best for you.”
“Gee, Marce, don’t scare her off now. We’re supposed to get her safely back to her date, remember?”
Right, her date. Who totally should’ve shown up by now. They are in full view of the café, so they can’t have missed each other. She looks down at her phone and squints at a text notification.
Hey! I’m gonna have to take a raincheck - just got called in for work. Maybe another time?
“No, it’s fine.” She pocketed the phone after typing out a quick reply. “How do we feel about blue walls?”
“You know, guys -”
“Marcy, it’s 3 AM.”
“I never told you this, but when we were thirteen, I - I kinda had a crush on you.”
“Ha. That’s embarrassing.”
“I know, right? I mean, the three of us together? So dumb.”
“Is that even, like, allowed?”
“Eh. It’s not like we ever played by the rules.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Yeah, anything you want to share with the class, Sash?”
“Girls.”
“Yes.”
“Go the frog to sleep.”