Chapter Text
Lexi’s heart bangs like a bell along her stagnating, heavy weighted rib cage that burns wildly as she stomps the clutch and shifts into fifth gear. She could very easily get arrested for this—thrown in a cold cell that smelled of copper and weed and a door slam that rang like gunfire in her head—but she doesn't care. Her engine rumbles in the dead night.
The night is stale and raw; there’s tears on her cheeks that feel like stars burning into her freckles from the summer sun, and she thinks of Fez; constellations painted prettily on his cheeks and a crooked grin that has her smiling absently. She does not wipe her tears, although the uncomfortable stickiness of it has her cringing.
She reaches over onto the passenger seat and sifts through her jacket to find her pack of Camels tucked into the left pocket, sticks it in her mouth with a curse. She fumbles to get her hand back on the gear and the clutch back into her normal rotation, but eventually she figures it out—reaches up to pluck the cigarette from her mouth and stuffs it into the lighter just below the radio. She takes a long, pondering drag.
Lexi doesn’t know where she’s going.
She doesn’t get far. Her converse squeaking against her Impala’s gas pedal, she heaves a heavy sigh when her gas light blinks on. She doesn’t have much, really—and her 64’ Impala was a damn gas sucker of a boat, but she supposes twenty bucks was enough to get her home. Plus, she was craving hot funyuns anyway.
She goes fills her tank up, is on the road five minutes later but it isn’t for long—she gets pulled going ninety in a twenty five and then she’s wiping ash off her knees after being thrown into the sheriff’s office, handcuffed to a petulant looking-too big pink glasses officer, who asks her so many questions Lexi eventually zones out and the officer gives up on the interrogation.
She gets a phone call. It’s granted long enough to dial the one particular number she knows will answer, and will also come pick her up no matter what she says or does—and someone who wasn’t Cassie or her mom or Rue. It wasn’t like Rue would come if she called. She never did.
She is reminded of the slight discoloration on her knees, thinks of Ash in passing—if he was reading that Anne Rice book she gave him last week. She highly doubts it. They just sit in his bag until his friend—the one that’s always over, always gushing about books with Lexi—(Much to Ash’s chagrin, who would much rather have his friend all to himself rather than share with his brother's girlfriend,) Frank, she thinks absently. His name was Frankie.
“Hello?” Drawled, slow. Calculated and on edge. Lexi wants to laugh. She would’ve, if she didn’t reek of ash and burnt rubber and wasn’t handcuffed in a police station at two in the morning. She wipes a hand over her face and she can see her makeup smear in the reflection of the computer screen. She heaves a shaky breath. Lexi is crumbling.
She thinks she looks a lot like Cassie at the moment. Mascara stained cheeks, a shaky disposition—hardly stable at best. She craves for an inkling of understanding, to be known and to be understood—but it does not come, and she burns.
“Hey,” She breathes. There’s a pause, a silence born of confusion and worry. Her hands are shaking. She can see her bright red Impala gleaming in the moonlight in the parking lot out front. She hopes Polly doesn’t get crushed. That would make her awfully sad.
“Howard?” He asks, and the fire pooling scarily close to her throat fizzles, pops, cracks. “Fuck you doin’ calling at two in the morning? Not that I mind, but—“ A door closes on the other end, as if he had moved to a different room. “What’s up? You good?”
Suddenly, Lexi remembers why calling Fez was an extremely bad idea. Ergo: She’s currently in police custody, about to ask him to most likely come bail her out—and he’s a drug dealer trying to lay low after busting Nate Jacobs’ balls. Lexi realizes with a blinding clarity that she’s so fucking stupid it was unreal. Who the fuck did she think she was?
“Fuck,” She says. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I can’t—I should of—“
“Lexi,” The jingling of keys, telltale murmuring of be right back, to Ash or Faye or both. “Where you at, ma? I’ll come get you, aight?” He worries too much, Lexi thinks. She wants to soothe the wrinkle she knows is creasing between his brow.
Lexi laughs, though. And she knows her next words do nothing to calm him down. “I’m literally in police custody.” She says. “Officer Rett is staring me down right now. Scary as fuck.” Lexi thinks she feels bold right about this moment. Do no bad Lexi, good little sister Lexi, in police custody calling her drug dealer boyfriend with the one branch she was given. “ Can you come get me?” She snickers.
She thinks she’s on the edge, all too well knowing the inevitable breakdown is rearing its ugly talons. She fumbles with a gold ring on her pinky, the one Fez gave her for her birthday last year. She spins it between her pointer and thumb—eyes trained on her soot stained knees and the lit cigarette in the officer's mouth.
Fez goes quiet. Then; “Fuck you mean? Lexi, come on man. The fuck you mean by that?” He tries to speak over her hysterical laughs, but it earns him nothing in the end—she gets louder. The cop looks unimpressed, annoyed, and she snatches Lexi’s phone from her hand and brings it to her ear to speak to him.
“You’re a friend of Lexi Howard?”
“Yes ma’am,” He responds immediately. He does not sound nervous—on edge or even startled. Lexi does, though. Lexi feels real fucking nervous.
The officer nods, as if Fez can see her. She plucks the cigarettes from her mouth and offers it over to Lexi—like she wasn’t seventeen, and maybe in some ways she wasn’t—(she makes sure bills are paid, her family is fed, the house is clean and the yard is taken care of, she’s a chainsmoker, a stoner and fucks a drug dealer in her spare time—she holds Cassie’s sanity in the palm of her hand some nights and her mothers life in the other. Lexi thinks she could just not roll her mother to the side, she could just ignore Cassie when she sobs on the bathroom floor. She wonders how different life could be if she just didn’t give a fuck.) So Lexi takes the cig, thanks the officer, who gives her a placid nod and continues on talking.
“She just needs someone to drive her car back for the night. You could pick her up in the morning,” Then—very unprofessionally Lexi may add—the officer sighs loudly. “She has a big ass car. Takes up four spots parked sideways, and we can’t fit through parked normally. Take it outta the lot and we won’t have it crushed. Call it a favor.”
“I can do that.” She hears Fez. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“Uh-huh,” The officer says boredly. “We left the keys in the ignition.”
Lexi recoils. “You did what?” She snaps. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” Lexi didn’t mean to. Seriously—she is on the brink and had just found out some asshole officers left Polly running for hours, and now she has to worry about overheating and a dead battery and all this other shit that has her chest heaving.
She doesn’t remember much after that. Just remembers the hard concrete floor under her kneecaps and the throbbing of her wrists being tugged harshly towards the cells. Lexi thinks it was worth it.
She begs the officer not to call her mom—losing a great deal of dignity and pride in the midst of the pleading—but she agrees anyway, since the ladies Lexi almost flat stanley-ied didn’t want to press charges and she would be going home in the morning anyway. She’s dismissed with a warning and a scratch on her pristine record, but relatively unscathed. She gets her phone back charged, calls Fez—( I was coming to get you anyway, shawty. i ain’t gonna lie to you, you’re freaking me the fuck out— and Lexi knows. Because she is not her. ) And she sits on the curb with a plastic smile and a too big heart for her shrinking chest cavity.
Lexi can feel herself unraveling, can feel the ball of haphazardly spun yarn spilling out of her rapidly. Distantly, she thinks she has to pull it together—Cassie is already spiraling, she cannot be another burden on her mother’s shoulders. Lexi is not allowed to fall into this pit. She is not the type of person this is prone to happening to—Lexi is calm and she is collected, she is connected to her emotions in a way that is not healthy but works all the same. Lexi cannot wear her heart on her sleeve. She does all the same, though, and she feels it slipping further to the floor every time Rue blows her off or Cassie spits fury, every time her mother can’t recognize her and every time she’s forgotten at a party and is forced to walk home alone as teenage girl at three in the morning.
The only reason she had been looking for a night in the sheriff's office was because Cassie had come home particularly nasty, and her mother was nursing her fourth bottle of wine, so they were in their usual fighting fits—and Lexi couldn’t bring it down. She couldn’t help.
So she didn’t. She went out with her heirloom car and she drove until she was arrested.
Lexi doesn’t feel like herself. She feels as if she is floating up outside her body, watching herself make decisions and actions that she would’ve never made herself.
Lexi gets arrested. Lexi just doesn’t fucking care anymore.
She plucks a cigarette out of her hello kitty tin with her teeth and uses her rhinestone decorated lighter to indulge her. (Curtesy of Faye, who got too bored one night and busted out her ‘ fucking fancy kit,’ as she called it, and spent the next three hours carefully glueing precisely placed rhinestones in the shape of Lexi’s name and scattered hearts around the white expanse of her lighter.)
Fez pulls around with Polly, running fine—sounds great, so she reflexively grins. She hops over the Impala door—cigarette clenched expertly between her incisors—and lands on her tan seats with a giggle. She’s in an oddly good mood considering the night she had.
Fez says nothing. He pulls out of the lot with a look of pure anxiety; and even if it isn’t much, just a normal stoic face creased slightly, Lexi knows.
“It’s fine,” She mutters, blowing rings of smoke with a grin.
Fez clutches the wheel tighter. “It ain’t fine, Lex. You know it ain’t fine.”
And when they get to his house, he’s pressing dinosaur band aids to her bloody knees—Ash and Faye hover at the door jam, staring her down as if she was some wild animal. Ash looks more uncomfortable than anything, asks her where she was the night before and why Fez came home with her car but not her, and she gives him her most convincing im fine face—tells him straight up she was arrested. Ash laughs. He says, Thats whats up, Lexi. Good shit. The look Fez gives him is murderous.
Faye wipes her dirty makeup off once Fez retreats to make breakfast. She murmurs little things to herself absently as she works.
“Why did you get arrested?” She asks. Her words are slow, but her gaze is meaningful.
Lexi shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t feel like myself. I don’t think I am myself right now.”
Faye nods. “You—“ She pauses thoughtfully. “Sometimes, when I was younger, my mom would, like, have these things where she would tell me and my brother that she didn’t think she was like, her. So she did all this crazy shit in those episodes and then when she would come out of them she wouldn’t like, remember it. I think I do it too, sometimes. Maybe it’s genetic. Does your mom do it?”
Lexi takes in the words, mulls them over for a few seconds. “I don’t think so. Maybe my dad did that stuff.”
Faye makes a hmf noise, pats her cheeks lightly when she’s done. “Don’t stress, Lex. You’ll feel better.” And she’s gone.
Lexi eats her breakfast in silence. No one says a word.
There’s a fire burning in her throat. It is suffocating her. She does not feel like herself. She feels like the ash off a butt of a cigarette and she feels like the burnt rubber of her Impala tires.
Lexi’s chest caves, and she sleeps for two days before Fez decides that it was enough and drags her into the living room.
She is still so tired.