Chapter Text
Sometimes, on sleepy spring afternoons, when the days were just starting to last a little longer and the nights were growing less frigid, Mae and Gregg would sit out in the (now abandoned) Food Donkey parking lot and watch the birds sunbath on the dilapidated roof. The warblers would tiptoe around, careful of loose shingles, and huddle their fat bodies low down until their feet disappeared under their feathers. Sometimes Gregg would throw pebbles up at them; they’d hit the gutters and rattle around with the dead leaves and stagnant rainwater.
It is one such day, and Mae has her combat boots all tangled up in a rotting plastic bag; it crinkles as she kicks her feet, stomps along the lines of a faded disabled parking space. Gregg bounces some bits of broken up asphalt in his hand and narrows his eyes, focusing hard on the single window of the rundown supermarket still intact.
“You get it, don’t you?” Mae asks; she watches the piece of concrete cut through the shimmering heat of the evening, hears the glass crumple and scatter along the horizon – Gregg lets out a whoop of pride. “You – you feel it also.”
“I mean, I guess,” Gregg’s ear twitches. Mae can’t see his face, which she guesses is intentional. He can’t see hers either, and that’s more than fine. “Not quite like that, but maybe a little bit – a little bit like it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yep,” the p pops, and the second stone goes soaring. It hits the wall of the Food Donkey with a solid ker-dunk; a warbler startles from its dozing position and flies away.
There’s silence now, and neither wants to be the first to break it. Mae thinks back on all the things that had happened to bring them here – it had only been a few weeks ago they’d taken down Casey Hartley’s missing person posters. Sometimes, before the shapes and the hole in the center of the universe, he’d join them here in their lazy ceremonies. It doesn’t feel different now, without him, but it should. It should, and the ache rings through Mae’s head like the sparkling, crushing sound of glass beneath Gregg’s sneakers now.
“What are you doing?”
Gregg’s ear twitches again, but this time he shoots her a toothy smile over his shoulder – the eye contact grounds her and she tugs the plastic bag from her feet as he explains, “I’m looking for that real big chunk I threw earlier, it was a goodie!” He turns back to shuffle his bare hands through the shards. He’s a pro at this, at the dangerous things like this, because he doesn’t even yelp when the sharp edges get caught in his skin. “Wanna scare those birds off for good. Stupid birds.”
“Heh, why, dude,” Mae scoffs – it’s not really a question – and makes her way over to the window where Gregg is knelt down. “What did these birds do to you?”
“I’unno,” he barks, and she can hear the anger and the laughter and the little bit of mania in it, “Exist, is what.”
“Damn birds,” Mae agrees without even thinking about it, “How dare they.”
Gregg stands suddenly, bounces the recovered piece of asphalt in his hand, and then hurls it through the thoroughly broken window. Mae hears but doesn’t see it clatter around the empty aisles inside. “It’s – it’s like it’s all very fast,” he says, apropos of absolutely nothing.
“Huh?”
“For me,” he clarifies, tilting his head to stare into the darkness of the Food Donkey, “it’s not shapes, or colors, or buzzing and voices, it’s just… fast. I’m going too fast.”
Oh, right, she remembers, confusion dissipating, I asked him a question. Not even, like, a minute ago.
“It’s like. When you drink too much caffeine, or don’t sleep, or take a buncha drugs – or, or all three?” He crouches back down to rummage through the glass again. Mae bends down to join him; the sunlight is opalescent, boils the ground so it burns Mae’s palms. “All three at once. And I just get jittery, and I gotta do something to make the jitters stop. I gotta do something as fast as I feel.”
The sky burns bright orange, and the sunset reflects golden on the shiny black surface of Gregg’s leather jacket. Mae watches him – how his fingers fiddle lightning quick along the ground, how his eyes are wide and bright and mostly sclera at this point – and understands what he means. It’s not the same, but it is, in another way. The buzzing and the jitters, the shapes and the speed.
Bea had said he was bipolar, and maybe she’d just been trying to be mean, but…
“Is it ever like that for you?”
“Um,” blood rushes to Mae’s face, bashful at being caught reminiscing. Gregg has plopped down onto his backside, legs sprawled at awkward angles. He has a big shard of glass clutched in his left hand, but he’s looking at her, and her face, and her eyes, and – “Sometimes. I think mostly it’s noise. It’s loud and it makes all my senses hurt, y’know? Sometimes it makes me sick to my stomach, but like, angry-sick. And I’m just gonna angry-vomit all over everything, or something, but it’s with my hands not my… stomach acid.”
“Makes sense,” Gregg says, and Mae knows it does not, but neither do their brains, so it’s most likely alright if Gregg lies to her right now. “Sometimes it’s like that for me, too, I think.”
“You think?”
“It’s hard to put words to these feelings!” Gregg announces, far too loud for the small distance between them. He throws his arms out, wide like his legs, the way Mae does sometimes when she really wants to make a point, “So all I can do is think! I don’t know!”
It’s a victorious ‘I don’t know’ – not clueless or bitter or defeated, but joyous. There’s something wonderful about not understanding something so fundamental about yourself. Mae grins and she feels it in her eyes and chest and hands, burning up on the parking lot.
“I don’t know!” she choruses back, and Gregg laughs louder still till it rattles in her ears. He stands, examines the glass closely, and says - apropos of absolutely nothing, warm like sleepy springtime sundown – “Do you think this would make a good knife? Knife substitute?”
“Hell yeah, dude,” Mae agrees, not bothering to stand, “You could stab someone with that. Could kill ‘em.”
“Sweeeeet. Wanna try it?”
“Killing someone?”
“No! Not now, at least. We should knife fight with ‘em.”
“Broken glass fight,” Mae considers it very carefully, already searching the ground for a suitable weapon, “I like the way you think.”
They do end up giving it a shot – Mae loses, ends up slicing her hand on her own piece of glass, and Gregg steals some bandages from the pharmacy aisle of the Food Donkey – and stay there till the first stars start peeking out from behind the light pollution. The ground is cool beneath their backs as they lay there and point out where they think constellations may start or stop. Angus calls, eventually (always the worrywart) and Mae decides to walk Gregg back to the apartment complex when it’s finally time to get going. The birds had long since disappeared, replaced by fireflies and small-footed bats circling high, high up in the plum-bruised sky.
As they wander out of the empty parking lots, wobbling over the heat-cracked pavement, they agree to do this again some time. Sometime soon.