Chapter Text
Mae Borowski knocked. She hadn’t even counted to three before the door swung inward and two bright, dark eyes peered around it. Lori was wearing a vermillion sweater with a white carnation crocheted on it. Underneath, Mae could make out the black collar of her friend’s favorite lazy afternoon relaxation t-shirt (it had a crumbling tombstone with a frowny-face on it). Mae was uncertain why, but she loved how funny the shirt was. She wasn’t even sure why it was funny.
“Hey, Mae,” said Lori.
“Heeeeeeey, Lorms!” sang Mae, her hair and scarf buffeted by frigid wind. “Isn’t this amazing?”
Lori glanced dubiously at the bulging December snowbanks that had consumed Possum Springs, along with all of Deep Hollow County and, presumably, large portions of western civilization.
“I mean, it snows every year, so… no?” said Lori.
“Look, I know there’s room for everybody’s opinions in the world—”
“Includin’ fascists?” asked Lori.
“…Okay, well, not everybody but you know what I mean.”
“Uh-huh.”
“—BUT, you need to consider that you may in fact be completely incorrect about snow. Because snow is the greatest thing.”
“Uh, no,” said Lori, matter-of-factly. “That’s, like, objectively not the case.”
“But, snooooow!” said Mae, waving her arms wildly, in a sort of gesture to the entire northern hemisphere. “Snow is a gift! That’s why it comes around Longest Night!”
“I’m not a meteorologist, but I think you might somehow be goin’ into negative percentages of correctness.”
“Snowmans!” said Mae, in what she probably thought was a persuasive squeal. “Snowball fights! Snow forts! Ice skating!”
“Ew,” said Lori.
“But… but hot cocoa! Bonfires! Tree decorating! Pretty rainbow lights hung up in towny centry!”
Lori stared at Mae for a few seconds. “Literally none of those things have anything to do with snow.”
“That is true, but if we didn’t have snow then they wouldn’t be the same.”
Lori shrugged. “Eh, I wouldn’t miss ’em.”
“…I do not even know you anymore.”
“You gonna stand out there forever? Cuz there’s only so much heat I’m lettin’ out before this door gets shut for the rest of tonight.”
Mae’s arms flumped against her sides. “Fine. I’m coming in.”
Lori was already in the kitchen as Mae hung her coat and scarf on one of the little brass hooks in the entrance hall. She sat down to unlace her boots, and a familiar musty smell of peeling wallpaper, old laundry, and ancient shag rug swatted her in the face. She didn’t mind the smell anymore. She associated it too much with Lori’s house, and by extension with Lori. It wasn’t exactly the best house. It was cramped, needed cleaning (and an exterminator), and perhaps several inspections, inside and out. But it was… homey? Was that a good word for it? Now she thought about it, Mae wasn’t actually sure what the strict definition of “homey” even was. It was one of those words that she used because she had heard other people using it and had inferred its meaning through context, but had never thought to consider what that meaning actually was. “Homey” was a word that had a phantom definition, a word that she understood but couldn’t fully articulate. But it was a soft word, a cozy word that made her feel safe and warm. If any place could be described with “homey,” she thought, following her nose into the kitchen, it was definitely Lori’s house.
“Where’s your dad?” asked Mae.
“Visitin’ my gran’ma, down in Delmarva,” said Lori, testing a steaming pan on the stovetop with a wooden spoon. “She usually comes up here with my aunt for Longest Night, but she can’t travel ’round anymore since her stroke.”
“That’s a heckuva drive,” said Mae, hopping up to sit on one of rickety stools at the tiny counter. “Is this your first parent-out-of-state, home-alone experience?”
“Nah. Dad visits lotsa relatives when he isn’t workin’, and I just don’t like gettin’ drove around all the time. So he lets me stay home.”
“That seems really irresponsible,” said Mae, uncharitably.
Lori huffed and glared at Mae. “I got t-two cans’a mace hidden in the house, plus three b-baseball bats in the closet, and dad always leaves a few hundred bucks in an empty bleach bottle under the sink.”
“…Ah,” said Mae, feeling stupid.
“P-plus!” continued Lori, “I got m-my switchblade on m-me wherever I go, so d-don’t think f-for a moment that I can’t—”
Mae put up her paws defensively. “Whoa. Okay, it’s okay. I got it. No more commentary from me.”
Lori sniffed and went back to stirring cocoa powder into the frothing milk, occasionally testing it with a sip from the spoon. Mae sat, leaning on the counter, let the wonderful, warm, sugary scents of the cocoa-to-be wrap around her like a blanket, and listened to the faint howling of winter outside the kitchen window.
“How’s high school going?” asked Mae.
“Crummy,” said Lori, stirring more cocoa powder into the milk.
“Sounds about right.”
“Yep.” She sipped from the spoon again, and nodded satisfactorily. “It’s done.”
“Crummy eventful? Or crummy uneventful?”
“Crummy uneventful. Which is prob’ly not so bad.”
“Yeah, you can definitely do worse than crummy uneventful,” said Mae wryly, hopping down from the stool and reaching up into a cupboard for some mugs.
“I have this special power,” said Lori, turning the stove off. “I, like, draw in my sketchbook, or read some class stuff, and just sit in a corner in the hall, or in the cafeteria, and make myself as small and, like, within myself as I can, and…” She tapped the top of her head with the spoon, as though wielding a magic wand. “I turn invisible. And nobody bothers me.”
“Whoa. Dude.” Mae set the mugs on the counter, feeling (she admitted to herself guiltily) a small twinge of jealousy at her friend’s superpowers. “That would’ve been effing amazing while I was in high school. Can you teach me?”
Lori shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t think it really works when everybody and their mothers already know who you are.”
“Ah…” said Mae, deflating a little. “That… makes sense.”
“Uh, uh, so… How’s your job going?” said Lori hurriedly.
“It’s…” Mae screwed up her face as she thought of things to say about her job that didn’t sound like complaints. She didn’t really like complaining to Lori, especially since she was actually pretty happy just to have a job at all. “Not terrible. It wasn’t quite what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“Way more smashing shit with hammers and mallets, like in old cartoons, but like without the stupid physics.”
“Is there not any smashin’ involved?”
“Way less than you’d think. Mainly, we get jobs to go to some giant old building in a city somewhere, walk up and down it while the engineers take notes, and then they tell us what to hit and where to put the dynamite and then we all go stand behind the blast shield down the street, and they get somebody to shout ‘CLEAR!’ and push the switch down, and then the whole thing—” Mae held her arms out as wide as she could “—goes ‘whumpf’ and falls into itself.”
“I mean, that last bit sounds pretty cool,” said Lori, pouring hot cocoa into the mugs, spilling little puddles on the counter.
“It kinda is,” said Mae, taking a mug and blowing on it to cool it. “It’s also kinda sad.”
“Sad?”
“It’s like… Each building has been cleared out and stripped pretty good by the time we get to it, and as you’re smashing in walls and working your way through what up until recently was recognizable as a building, it just sort of feels like you’re walking through a giant skeleton, of something huge and old and so filled with memories, but all the memories got torn out and thrown in a dumpster. Now it's just… empty. It’s one of the emptiest places you could ever be. And, like, once it literally is just a giant building skeleton, we stick it full of dynamite and make it disappear, like it was never there to begin with. And then some contractor comes along and fences the place off and puts up big signs with some kind of apartment complex on it. It’s, like, almost always apartment complexes.”
Lori took a sip of hot cocoa and thought about empty building skeletons, picked clean by workmen and waiting to die.
“That sounds really cool, though,” she said. “Like, just wanderin’ through the corpse of a buildin’ before they blow it up, and you know that so many people have been in that buildin’, and in justa few minutes it’s gonna be just… dust.”
“I mean… Yeah, it’s kinda cool,” admitted Mae. “But it’s sad too.”
“It can be both,” said Lori.
“Yeah.”
“Wanna go grab some blankets while I make popcorn?”
“Hell yeah.”
“Okay, okay, okay. Meet’cha downstairs.”
“This movie is pure garbage,” said Mae, stuffing popcorn into her mouth.
“Yeah, I know,” wheezed Lori, struggling not to choke on a flood of giggles. “Isn’t it great?”
“The best,” grinned Mae.
The basement was, perhaps, slightly tidier than the upstairs was, if for no other reason than it had very little in the way of expectations to live up to. Lori’s father never used it, so she’d converted it into her own little lair, centered around a beige, moth-eaten davenport. Most of the walls didn’t have sheetrock. The floor was barren concrete except for a puke-colored rug that covered about a third of it. The furnace rattled, and there was a serious cobweb issue in the rafters. Roach motels were crammed into every corner. Kitty-corner to the davenport, a rickety plywood bookshelf (which looked very homemade) was packed with hundreds of DVDs and VHS tapes. Most of them were horror movies. Many of them were garbage. Ichor Saint 3: Absolution was no exception.
“I think my favorite part is still that bit where the teppanyaki chef smashes the cultist’s head into her griddle and then uses his corpse to body slam another cultist.”
“Oh, and then, like, uses her impossibly sharp knives to cut his head off in one swing?”
“Holy shit, the edit where it just cuts to an incredibly fake head rolling off a dummy? It’s so perfect.”
“Don’t forget the five-foot blood geyser.”
“How could anybody forget the five-foot blood geyser? I am forever donating valuable brain real estate to the five-foot blood geyser.”
“Oh! Okay, okay, sorry, but shut up, this scene is amazing.”
The two of them watched, snickering uncontrollably as the douchiest of college fratboys was chomped mid-platitude by something resembling an orange rubber beach ball on legs. It burped, coughed up a (clearly plastic) femur and a novelty sports cap, and wobbled precariously into the night. Mae and Lori could barely breathe for laughing.
“Hahaha! Oh my god his little trundle is too good!” Mae was nearly rolling on the floor. “That poor stuntman! He can barely lift whatever the hell that costume is!”
Lori’s giggling, a series of squeaky, hiccoughy intakes, barely registered over the volume of the TV. “Look… L-look, you can see the e-edge of the set right there… They t-totally forgot to cr… crop it out.”
“Or they just didn’t care,” said Mae, wiping tears out of her eyes.
“Th-they prob’ly only did, like, o-one shoot, to save money.”
“Serious dedication to garbage.”
“V-very serious.”
“We salute you, fellow garbage people, for making your garbage into art,” said Mae.
“What does a garbage salute look like?” asked Lori.
“I think you have to be inside a trash can to do it.”
“Like, you literally have to be Oscar the Grouch?”
“You just jump out of it and screech ‘EAT MY GARBAGE!’ but in a respectful kinda way.”
“It’s customary to p-perform the garbage salute,” said Lori, trying to sound sage-like in spite of her giggles, “with t-two fish skeletons and a banana p-peel on one’s head.”
“That’s how they know you’re serious about it,” said Mae.
In the film, a man walking past a dumpster on the street got pulled inside it and eaten. Stupid amounts of red-dyed corn syrup spewed vertically out of the dumpster and splattered the lens.
“OOOOOOOOOHHHHHH!” shrieked Mae and Lori.
“The dumpster geyser!”
“I-it just keeps g-getting better!”
“I made my life choices too soon, this is clearly the best scene in the entire movie.”
“We haven’t even g-gotten to the c-caution cone scene!”
“What?”
“Just watch! Just watch!”
And so it continued, well into the night. Time is easily lost when you have bad movies and good friends.
“What are you gonna do after high school?” asked Mae.
“Dunno,” said Lori.
Mae looked up from her side of the davenport. They’d lit some candles to save battery life on their flashlights, and Lori’s face was lathered in shadow, but Mae could still make out two bright eyes staring at the tiny flames.
“What do you mean, you ‘dunno’?”
“Means what it means,” mumbled Lori.
“I thought you already had a plan. Didn’t you apply to that big arts college out in Cali?”
“…Yeah.” Lori wasn’t meeting Mae’s eyes.
“Did you not get in?”
“No, I got my acceptance letter a few weeks ago.”
“Then what’s up?”
The furnace rattled and tinged away in its corner, as though something small and angry and scared was stuck in it and wanted out. Lori stared at the candles, taking deliberate breaths. Mae waited. It was sometimes how conversations went with Lori. Hell, it was frequently how conversations went with Mae, so she got it. She knew that sometimes what you wanted to say all came rushing up at once and crowded and pushed to get out first, but you couldn’t decide what you wanted to say because you wanted to say all of it, and you had no idea how you could say any of it, let alone all of it, so you just sat, mortified, trying to think of anything to say at all. Those times you were able to say anything, it felt so weak and pathetic that you wished that you just hadn’t said anything at all. Sometimes you wished you could sink into the ground and stop existing forever. Mae knew how it went.
Just as she was about to tell Lori to forget it, a tiny, cracked whisper floated over to her.
“What?” asked Mae, leaning up to hear.
“I don’t wanna go to college.”
In some ways—fuck it, quite a lot of ways—Mae had kind of suspected that she might hear Lori say something like this. She had been suspecting it for a fairly long time. Actually hearing it come out of Lori’s mouth still hit her like a baseball bat.
“…Why?” asked Mae.
“I just… I’m not college material,” said Lori.
“Who the fuck told you that?” snapped Mae. She regretted saying it almost immediately, but she still meant it. She wasn’t sure (she knew very well, corrected a voice in her head that sounded a lot like her therapist) from where the sudden anger was boiling up. It was like this sometimes. Just hearing Lori say the words made her want to smash something.
“N-nobody,” said Lori, sinking slightly lower into the davenport. “I just d-don’t think I’m c-cut out to go to college. I’m j-just Possum Springs g-ghetto trash.”
Mae stared at Lori for a few seconds. “…What,” she said.
“It’s n-no big deal!” squealed Lori, a tiny, cracked snigger creeping into in her voice that broke Mae’s heart. “I-it’s better th-this way, y’know? I-I just… *sniff* California’s s-so far away, a-a-and I’d j-just be m-miserable a-a-a-and… And… ha ha… *sniff* I-I’d probably s-suck at college. Ha ha… I-I’d t-totally… totally skip classes a-and n-not do my homework a-a-and… *sniff* I’m n-not the kinda f-face you’d ev-ver s-see on a d-director’s b-bio-g-graphy p-page. Y’know? ‘L-Lori Meyers!’ S-sounds l-like the n-name of a serial k-killer…”
In the candlelight, Mae could see thin tears making trails down Lori’s cheeks. She felt like she was drifting in a vacuum with nothing to grab on to. The world had suddenly become much colder, and Mae was screaming at herself in her head to say… something. Anything. Lori’s sniffs began to turn into sobs, but she suddenly kept talking, maybe (Mae wondered if she was projecting) trying to stop the crying.
“I-i-it’s not l-like I’d m-make any f-friends. Tiny g-ghetto t-trash from some t-town millions of m-miles away that y-you’ve never *huff* h-heard of. L-looks like a squishy p-pear w-with too m-much acne a-and never t-talks to a-anybody. N-name like a-a s-serial killer. Ha ha! J-just th-think of all the f-friends I’ll m-make!”
“Lori?”
“I-I mean, w-what’s the point of it all? *huff* *huff* I-It’s s-so much m-money. M-my d-dad’s gonna g-go b-bankrupt a-a-a-and f-for what? Like, s-so I c-can go t-try to s-screw a-a-around w-with a camera? *sniff* W-what the f-fuck g-g-good’ll th-that… *huff* *huff* do? M-making m-movies w-won’t pay r-rent. *sniff* ”
“Lori,” said Mae, throwing her blanket off and crawling over to her friend.
“Sh-should p-probably just p-put in a-a-an applic… a-application at the S-Snack F-Falcon. *huff* *koff* They’re a-always h-hiring. *huff* A-at l-least dad w-would s-stop telling m-me t-to get a r-real job—”
“LORI.” Mae put her paws on Lori’s shoulders and squeezed gently. “Lori, where’s your inhaler?”
Lori choked and sobbed and fumbled for her messenger bag on the floor next to the couch. Mae picked it up for her and held it open. Lori grabbed the inhaler, bit down on the mouthpiece and depressed the release, gasping through sobs and sniffles. Mae might’ve found the little squeak of her hiccoughs funny if the entire situation wasn’t so fucked up.
Fishing in the bag, Mae pulled out a black and white polka-dotted handkerchief and, after a brief hesitation, dabbed awkwardly at Lori’s cheeks. Lori shoved her away, or at least tried to. It felt like a bumblebee sneeze.
“Sorry,” said Mae, backing off. “Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean to… I was just… I’m sorry.”
“N-n-not your f-fault,” mumbled Lori, hugging her knees to her chest.
“Did you, uh… Did you still want the…” Mae trailed off.
Lori glanced over and snatched the handkerchief.
“Ah… Okay.”
The furnace clattered and clanked away, like a distant, out-of-touch relative who had no reading on the situation and just kept rambling on about hideously awkward things at the dinner table while everybody becomes more and more uncomfortable but nobody wants to be the one who tells them to shut up. Mae sat stiffly, her paws in her lap. She felt useless. It was a familiar and unwelcome heaviness in her head and her belly. She needed to say something. Lori was right next to her and crying and hurting and she had to say something.
Mae took a deep breath. Fuck it, she took three. Her therapist had told her that “centering” herself (whatever the ass that was supposed to mean) was a reliable way to calm down and avoid impulsive statements, and that a good way to “center” herself was to take deep breaths. It didn’t always work, but it did sometimes, and right now she would take anything she could get.
Focus. You need clarity. Lori needs help and you need clarity. Don’t fuck this up. Don’t make it worse. Focus.
Mae cleared her throat. “So… uh…”
Lori’s sniffling quieted. Slightly. Not much, but Mae could tell she was listening. Mae cleared her throat again.
“I…” she tried.
“Um…” she continued.
Good job so far, champ, she thought to herself. Really laying down some big truths there.
Mae sighed. What could she say? What could she, of all people, tell Lori to make this big stupid mess seem not so big and stupid? What could she say that wouldn’t make her sound like the world’s biggest hypocrite?
You have to say something. Lori needs your help.
Mae swallowed.
Fuck it. If you don’t say something now, you never will, Just go. Just go.
“You know… I dropped out of college.”
“I know,” sniffed Lori.
“Right. So I’m, like, the least-qualified person to be giving you advice on this.”
“Yeah.”
“Like, I don’t think there’s anything I can say that will make you feel better about any of this.”
“That’s g-good to know,” said Lori.
Fuck, thought Mae. She gritted her teeth.
“And, like, I’m not good at helping people make good choices. I’m barely twenty-three and I don’t know a goddamn thing, and the world is big and crazy and filled with things I will never understand. I think going to college might be one of those things? College just didn’t work for me and… and I think… I think I maybe understand why, but it took years to actually make that progress. But I learned, and now I can actually say that without like a million horrible doubts picking me apart and pointing and demanding to know if I did the right thing for the right reasons. And learning wasn’t easy. Learning is never easy. That’s maybe the point? I dunno. Like I say, I dropped out. Never went back.”
Lori had stopped crying. Mae was staring at the candles and half-wondering if the words coming out of her were for Lori or for her. She couldn’t tell if that was selfish or not, but at this point it felt like the words were just using her as a conduit to come into existence. They poured out of her without any real bidding or control on her part. It was almost spooky.
“And, like, it doesn’t have to be that way for everybody. We all have our strengths and whatever. Sometimes we aren’t sure what that is, and we get stuck, and we think there’s all of these people we need to please for some reason; get good grades, kiss your boss’s ass, make your parents proud, fucking… I dunno. It’s bullshit. But it’s there. Everybody wants to make somebody happy. But we also all wanna be happy, and maybe that means going to college and getting into debt. Maybe that means getting a shitty-ass job at a supermarket to make your parents happy. Maybe that means getting by however you can and making the most out of whatever’s left. It sucks. It really, truly, monumentally sucks sometimes and I wish there was something that I could do about it. If I could remake the world… I mean, let’s be honest it would still probably suck, because about the only thing I’m good at is breaking shit.”
Lori snorted through a stuffy nose, and tried to turn it into a sneeze. Relief rose warmly into Mae’s throat, snuffing out the prickle of brief, instinctual irritation.
She’d made Lori laugh. Somehow, she wasn’t fucking this up. Or maybe she was? Was laughter a good thing? It was probably better than all the shit that had been spilling out of Lori before. If it had been Mae in Lori’s place, a chuckle would’ve definitely been a good sign. Was that presumptuous of her?
Shit, you’re losing track. Bring it back to her. Make your point. FOCUS.
“A-and… uh…” Mae cleared her throat. “And, like, I get it. I get that you feel like you can never be the magical, mythical thing that everybody wants you to be. You can never be what anybody else wants you to be. But, like… You can be what you want to be.” Inadvertently, Mae chuckled. “Holy crap. That sounds so easy when I say it like that, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Lori.
Mae sighed. “It’s really not easy. I mean, I wish I could tell you that the secret to happiness is super-easy and foolproof and will make everybody you love happy too. But I’m not gonna bullshit you. Because…” Mae swallowed. She could feel her cheeks burning like soft embers. “…Because I think you’re super great and really smart and you would probably see right through any bullshit I tried to tell you to just make you feel better.”
Mae could feel Lori’s eyes on her. She wasn’t sure if this was an improvement or not. Just sitting here, in the half-dark on a squishy old davenport, struggling to wrap words around the feelings in her chest and pull them out of her mouth like a glass oven, trying to tell her friend that there was no possible way that she could be more of a fuck-up than Margaret Borowski. What else was there to say?
“I think…” Mae stammered and started over. “It’s not my place to tell you what you should and shouldn’t do. But, I mean, if I were you… I’d go.” Mae punched the air, as if throwing an imaginary football. “Get the fuck out of Possum Springs, go to college, do something with your life. You’re barely 18. You’re not a lost cause. Hell, Lori, between the two of us, you’ll never be more lost cause than I am. You still have a chance to do awesome things. And, I just… I really think it would be a shame if you missed it.”
Mae took a breath, slow, ragged at the edges. She might’ve kept talking from that point, even though she’d pretty much run out of things to say. She might’ve, except two tiny arms wrapped around her and a tiny body hugged her with all of its strength. The shock of the impulsive gesture wore off after a few seconds, and Mae smiled, albeit sadly.
As Lori’s head fell against Mae’s chest, her back shuddering with quiet sobs, Mae put her arms around the tiny girl and just held her.
There was nothing more to say. Nothing that could be said, really.
Nice. I didn’t totally fuck it up, thought Mae.
Except, apparently, that.