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“Hey. Spence.”
Spencer murmurs indiscernibly, shaking her head, burying her face deeper into pillows.
“Spencerrr.” Toby presses his hand to her shoulder, shaking her ever so gently. “Wake up.”
“Why.”
“It’s time to get up.” He leans down and kisses her gently on the back of her head. “C’mon, baby, you’re gonna be late.”
“And what if I don’t care about being late?” she says distinctly into the pillow, and he laughs.
“Spencer Hastings, not are about being late?” he teases. “I think the world might actually stop spinning.”
Spencer yawns enormously, twisting around to face him. She stretches out lazily, a ray of sunlight striking her face, and she squints. “Who allows the sun to be up this early,” she mumbles, thrusting her arms over her face. “And why?”
Toby pulls her arms down. “Surely you would know,” he says. “Isn’t that what they teach in fancy law school?”
“No,” says Spencer. “They teach you stupid crap that no one needs.”
“Is that so?”
“That’s what it feels like at this time of the morning,” she informs him.
“Well, maybe that’s why people don’t tend to make their strongest decisions at this time of the morning,” he says sensibly.
“Yeah,” says Spencer, staring off out the window. “Or maybe it’s why no one should be up this early.”
He chuckles, pulling her blankets off, ignoring her pititful cries of protest. “Don’t do this to me, Cavenaugh,” she pleads. “Just let me sleep. ”
“If I let you sleep,” he says, “you’ll be yelling at me the next time you wake up. So come on. Get up, get dressed, I’m gonna go finish breakfast - I’ll see you in fifteen minutes. Okay?”
She makes a noncommital noise, and he leans over and kisses her. She sighs heavily, and nods reluctantly, and he’s grinning as he leaves the room.
For a second (just a second, she promises) she lies back into bed, letting the exhaustion ripple through her, savoring those last moments of the softness against her back. And for a second (just a second) she savors this life - this precious, fragile life. Toby making eggs in the kitchen. Sunshine streaming through her windows. Graduating law school in two months.
Everything peaceful, and adult, and sane, and real.
(So real.)
But just a second. She gets out of bed, washes up and gets dressed, has breakfast with Toby and kisses him again before he leaves her work and she leaves for school. She has four hours of classes today, then three hours of her internship.
Life is so ordinary.
Life is so real.
(Most days.)
Her phone beeps just she pulls into the parking lot of the university, and her heart sickeningly thrusts itself into her throat. She is thrown forward with the impact of the terror, her head hitting the steering wheel, and she feels the car sliding out from underneath her, no, she feels the world sliding out from underneath her, she can’t breathe, she is sixteen years old, pinned to her boyfriend’s front door, sobbing her heart out and rocking back and forth and her phone beeped, she is sixteen years old, her phone beeps and there is blood dripping over her bag in the middle of her interview with Oxford, her phone beeps and she is sixteen years old and looking over her shoulder, she is seventeen, her phone beeps, and she is in the Dollhouse, that buzzing in her head, her phone beeps and she is never ever ever going to escape this -
When she opens her eyes, the shattered glass of her windshield is ever so gently resting on her schoolbag in the passenger seat. When she opens her eyes, the front of her car is pressed up against the sign marking the lot, and she has slid down in her seat, tears streaming down her face, and there is a scream coming from somewhere within her throat, because it has been ten goddamn years since all this began, and here she is practically on the floor of her damn car crying because she forgot to turn her phone off before she left for school.
“Ma’am?” There is a policeman at her window, peering down at her, his eyes concerned.
Spencer wonders why the hell she stayed in Rosewood. The police sure as hell are exactly as incompetent as when five seventeen year old girls were trapped in a bunker for a month, and no one did anything about it.
The next half hour is a blur. She is talking to policemen, she is talking to an ambulance driver, she is crying because she’s late for class, people are gawking at her everywhere. Her hands are shaking and then she’s put together, she is talking to the people in the cars behind her. She is apologizing, she is nodding, she is thanking people. Police are setting up cones around her car. Police are leaving. People are leaving. The tow truck comes and goes. She deigns to get her own ride home.
They drop her schoolbag by her feet, and she picks it up unsteadily. She closes her eyes to fight the wave of nausea that comes, but she pushes it away, and she stands up. Miraculously, she wasn’t hurt at all. Part of her windshield shattered on impact with the lamppost, but none of it hit her; she slid down in her seat but her belt kept her in check, the airbag didn’t go off, and she explained that it wasn’t a panic attack, she was just startled by something. She had to insist a few times she didn’t need to see a doctor, but eventually, they let it go.
She takes a breath, and then a step, and then another breath, and then another step, and thanks Toby in her head for always adhering to her Hastings rules and ensuring she’s out the door an hour and a half before her first class. All that, and she’s still fifteen minutes early.
Her breath is still banging against her lungs, and she wants desperately to call Toby to pick her up. She wants desperately to go home, and crawl back under the covers that she knew she shouldn’t have left. It is so damned accursed, having to live like this. Having to have one, two, three good weeks in a row, having to have had such a peaceful, gentle, sunshine morning, and then have half a panic attack on the road. Beause of something so stupid as her phone. Her phone.
If she calls Toby, she’ll have lost.
always playing the game -
She sits on a bench outside her classroom, takes a deep, long breath that starts from her toes, and closes her eyes tight. She reaches into her bag, fighting every second the waves of nausea and terror threatening to overcome, and closes her fingers around her cell phone.
I am safe. I am safe. I am nearly twenty six years old. I am graduating law school in two months. I am safe, and I am an adult, and I am years and years past everything. I might not be okay, but I am safe.
She pulls her phone out of her bag and looks at it. It is a hunk of metal, she tells herself. No one is stalking me through it anymore.
She swallows. And it takes her another five minutes, but she texts Aria.
had half a panic attack driving to school. pls give me 5r
It’s a game they play with each other ( always, always, always ) all four of them, but mainly Aria and Spencer. 5r.
Spencer scrabbles to turn the volume off, and does so just in time before Aria’s texts flood in.
Do you need a ride?
No. I’m okay. I’m staying for class. 5r pls
Are you sure you don’t need a ride?
Yes
Okay. 1. Breakfast dates with me as the seventh wheel / 2. Hugging your mom / 3. The concert we’re going to see next week / 4. We survived, and we’re sure as hell not going to lose now / 5. You have class in ten minutes, and you can’t miss it.
Somehow, there is something resembling laughter, something that might be tears, coming from within her. Her fingers shake as she texts back, okay, yeah, those are pretty good ones i guess.
Don’t I know it, especially number 1, eh,
You’re no seventh wheel. You’re the steering wheel.
LOLOL
She takes a deep, long breath, and in the time it takes to exhale, Aria has messaged:
you are strong, and brave, and we have been through so much hell, and you can do this. you can do this, i promise. you did it. are you sure you don’t want me to come pick you up, because i can?
There are tears pushing at her eyes - honestly, when did she become so ridiculously prone to crying, it is ridiculous - but she blinks them back as she types, no, im okay, thankyou tank you thank you aria god aria i had a panic attack while driving what if im a MENACE TO SOCIETY
you’re not. we’re all just an effing mess, but it’s okay. go to class, yeah? i’ll see you tonight, or tomorrow.
She breathes deep. yeah. yeah. yeah.
you are SPENCER HASTINGS. okay?
Okay.
are you hurt, though?
no, im not hurt. they towed the car, but im not hurt. the glass missed me.
jesus, spence, okay. i love you, you can do this okay?
okay.
She is Spencer Hastings. She slides her phone into the bottom of her bag, curses off Cece, Mona, and her stupid sister in her head a few times, takes a deep breath. She squares her shoulders.
And goes into class.
--
She is exhausted beyond all reason by the end of day - the regular exhaustion of law school, along with the overpowering exhaustion of a panic attack. It is not until she walks outside when she realizes she got caught up in the day and forgot to call for a ride again - well, no, she didn’t forget, she just couldn’t bring herself to touch her damn phone.
Stupid. Weak. And now she thinks she might actually have to find a pay phone - do those even exist anymore - because God, she can’t take out her phone again. She just can’t. Stupid, weak, stupid -
A familiar horn honks, and her heart fills all the way up as she sees the truck she bought all those years ago turn into the lot.
exhale, and she adds “Toby picking her up in his truck” to Aria’s 5 reasons to live, to go on, 5 reasons it was worth it, 5 reasons to keep fighting the trauma, the pain, the illness, the paraonia, the exhaustion - just her reasons from this morning. They vary every day, from Spencer to Aria and Aria to Spencer. Well, they don’t necessarily need them every day.
but a lot of days. They have it honed down to a science. 5r, is all either of them need to say. She thinks one of them probably got the idea from one therapist or the other a few years ago, but she doesn’t remember which one of them it was, or which therapist it was, or when it was. All she knows is that it helps.
He pulls up in front of her, window rolled down, his easy beautiful Toby grin on his face, and she exhales, two parts relief, one part uneasy anxious dread that now she's going to have to explain herself, explain everything. And it's Toby, and he'll fix it, but she has the most peculiar feeling like if she speaks, she'll shatter into a million pieces. “How did you know?” She hurries around the front of the truck and gets into the passenger seat as she has a million times in the past decade and slams the door.
“My love,” he responds easily, keeping the truck in park for a minute, looking at her so intensely she has to look away. “Aria called me.”
“Of course she did.” She
“Babe. You should have called.”
She feels tears pricking at her eyes today, even though his tone isn’t even approaching angry, just concerned, but it’s been such a long day. “Okay, can we just - ” she swallows, hating how broken, how vulnerable, her voice sounds. “Please can we just go home?”
“Spence, I just - ”
“Can we please just talk about it when we get home?” Her voice is ragged, broken, she can feel herself coming undone under his eyes. Toby’s beautiful, clear blue eyes, so pure, not a drop of darkness down to his soul. He can see straight through her and unwind her with one glance. Can he see it, that strand of darkness, of something unseemly and wrong that runs through her? The darkness that is in her lookalike, that is bound to be within her too? The darkness that maybe she was born with, to a woman in an asylum, or maybe she developed over years of being watched and stalked and tortured?
Can he see it? Can he see straight through her? She is nowhere near as good of the person as his eyes plead her to be. She is nowhere near as good of a person at all.
And more than that, she is weak. She is weak and she is broken and she is nothing, and the tears pushing at her eyes track down her cheeks, weak, weak, weak, and she buries her face in her hands, feeling her shoulders shake.
He reaches for her and she shakes her head violently. “ No, ” she manages. “No. No.”
He withdraws, and she hates herself even more, but she looks up, avoiding the glimpse of her reflection in the rearview as hard as she can. “Please,” she says again. Her stupid, broken, tattered voice. Her stupid, broken, tattered life. Having panic attacks on the floor of her car, almost getting herself killed, because her damn phone beeped. “Please can we just go home.”
Wordlessly, he puts the truck into drive and drives, out of the lot, down the street. She swallows, hating herself so damn much but unable to put any of it into words, curling up into a ball in the passenger seat. Remembering driving the same roads in this same trucks as a teenager, waiting for the day all the pain would be over.
it never ended. it never ended. the pain never went away and i lost, we lost, we lost -
Some miles later, he gently tosses her his iPod. “Hey,” he says quietly. “Just go to the spence playlist, yeah? It’ll calm you down.”
His voice is so, so gentle, and he is too, too kind. But she does, her fingers shaking, not saying anything even though she wants to tease him for having an iPod, or thank him, in some way, somehow, for all of it. But she can’t do either, so she swirls the scrolling circle around, presses the button down when it gets to spence.
Gentle, soft music guides them home. Music about loss, and love, and healing, and always having a safe place to land.
They pull into the drive of their little home, the second Toby had built, this time with considerable help from the crew he and Jason handled. (They’d had the first one torn down.)
The last song winds down, a chorus gently waning, i don’t deserve you, i don’t deserve you. Toby parks, then leans his head against the steering wheel.
“I’m sorry,” says Spencer, her voice barely perceptible. She pushes the big button in the middle of the iPod’s scrolling wheel, and it goes dark.
He lifts his head slowly, piercing her once more with those impenetrable eyes. “Spence,” he says, his voice somewhat brittle. “You never have to be sorry. You know that, right?”
It’s the final crack she needs, and she breaks down, the tears she’s been forcing back all day cascading down her cheeks. He reaches across the console and takes her into his arms like he has a hundred thousand before, and she leans back into the refuge of his embrace, closing her eyes, there is a veritable tempest in her mind, her soul, her heart, swirling right down to the soles of her feet and the tips of her fingertips she is irreparably scarred, but he is holding her. He is holding her. He is holding her, and there’s an off chance that someday, she could heal from all of this.
“I’m so sorry,” she sobs. “I’m so sorry.”
“Never.” He kisses her forehead, so gentle. “Never. You never have to be sorry.”
“Everything, everything is ruined. Everything is ruined. I’m ruined. ”
“No. No, you’re not. You’re Spencer. You’re Spencer - you’re my Spencer. And you’re perfect.”
She exhales noisily, shaking her head, shaking all over, she can barely breathe, really, but he’s holding her anyway. “I’m never going to be okay,” she says. “I can barely drive to law school without having a panic attack. I could’ve gotten so badly hurt today. I could’ve died. Why does something like a phone beeping set me off like this - it’s not even the same damn ringtone I used to have - ” and she’s crying again, but somehow, with Toby holding her, she hates herself a tiny bit less.
Maybe five minutes or five hours later, some undetermined time where nothing is real except the burning feeling in her chest and Toby’s arms strong around her, she hiccups once, twice, (so attractive, she thinks, remembering abstractly the time where she didn’t so much as want to sneeze in front of Toby for looking bad for a second, remembering abstractly being sixteen, a tiny, tiny smidge in the most cautiously hopeful part of her whispering maybe it wasn’t all bad, ) and she exhales quietly.
He wipes her cheek. “Listen,” he says quietly. “You are the strongest person I know. Did you know that?”
She’s shaking like a leaf, but it’s okay, she supposes. “No,” she murmurs. “I’m not. I’m a goddamn mess.”
“And yet, you’re graduating law school in two months,” he says, his voice low and practically in her ear. “You’re graduating law school. You run five miles a day. You go to therapy. You take your medicine, even with all the fear it gives you. You live even when it’s the scariest damn thing you’ve ever done. You got into a panic attack and a car accident on the way to class, and you still went. To every. Single. Class.”
She wipes her own eyes, with the back of her hand. And again, something like a laugh - maybe - rises in her chest, or her throat, or maybe slips through her veins. “I think that’s more stupidity than strength.”
He pulls her up so she’s facing him, and kisses her properly. “You are the strongest person I know,” he says again, simply. “okay? And I promise, you’re going to be okay.”
She sighs. “It just pisses me off,” she says, pulling away from him slightly, leaning her head against the window, “that I can get so far, make so much progress, and then be pulled back the next day and feel like I’m nothing, because my phone beeped and it reminded me of being sixteen. It’s just pathetic.”
“It’s not pathetic,” he says firmly. “Spence. For years, I couldn’t see a certain color of lipstick without the world ending. Does that make me weak?”
Her heart yields. Her boy. “No. Of course not - ”
“No, it doesn’t. Because it wasn’t the lipstick that I was afraid of, was it.” His voice is succinct, but she can feel the pain, brittle and bursting, behind it. “It was everything behind that lipstick. Right? It was everything that lipstick represented. You went through a literal decade of being abused by something that always started with your phone beeping. So the fact that you even have a phone is truly something. I could, for instance, never carry around that kind of lipstick with me.”
The solemness with which he said the last bit, his eyes twinkling, makes her laugh, or maybe cry a little bit more, and then lean back into his arms.
“I have my internship in half an hour,” she says.
“You know you can - ” she’s shaking her head. “Okay, fine. But please, first, come inside. And eat something. And tonight, after your internship, should we go to the doctor?”
“No,” she says. “No. I’m okay. I’m not hurt. I promise.” His eyes are worried, worried, worried, beautiful, so she sighs and relents. “Okay, fine. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.” He kisses her forehead once more and she pulls away from him, pushing open the door. She sighs, jumping out of the truck, her feet solid on the ground, and leans against the truck for a second, taking in the house he’s built her.
For a while, they thought about moving out of Rosewood, once and for all.
“ Well, last time I tried that, it didn’t end well, ” she’d said.
“ Me neither. And it’d be easier, logistically, work wise and school wise… ” he’d mused. “ But. I don’t know. What do you want?”
And she had thought of Emily and Alison, bringing up their girls, girls who would go to Rosewood High. She had thought of Aria, who already had to start over her whole life, and who it would be impossible to do without her friends. She had thought of Hanna and Caleb, raising and she thought about Toby. She thought about her mother, her real mother, and she thought about Toby.
Ultimately, there had been a lot of reasons for staying in Rosewood. Maybe it wasn’t forever, but it was right now.
Maybe the pain was only right now. Maybe the pain wasn’t forever.
(maybe the only way to win the game was to keep playing, damnedly, until the miserable end - )
--
Later that night, after Toby’s fallen asleep, she lies awake, staring at the ceiling, and then slips out of bed, in her pajamas, and goes into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Like every single one of her therapists and doctors have recommended that she cut down on caffeine, but it’s physically impossible. Regardless, she has switched from coffee to tea, at least in the middle of the night when she can’t sleep.
She nestles down on the sofa with her favorite pink cup, and takes a deep, long breath. Her phone is resting on the side table, and she watches it for a while. She thinks for a while, tries to put it at a distance but still think about it, tries to put it in a screen, as if she’s watching it happen to someone else.
It takes more strength than anything she’s ever done - but that’s the thing about surviving; every single day takes more strength than anything she’s ever done - but she reaches for her phone. Her heart is beating almost out of her chest but she picks up her phone.
She dials Aria, who picks up on the first ring.
“Spencer.”
“Hey, Aria.” Her voice is thick with maybe exhaustion or maybe fear or maybe, in a strange, ripped sense, pride. “I just - I just wanted to thank you for calling Toby earlier.”
“Oh, God, Spence, obviously. Anyway, how are you feeling now? And hey, how was classes today anyway?”
She can see her reclining across her sofa, settling in for a long conversation.
Every instinct of Spencer’s is telling her to fling her phone across the room and crawl back into bed, but she grips it tightly, stretches out across her own sofa, and it’s the new hardest thing she’s ever done, but she, too, settles in for a long conversation.