Chapter Text
July 2019
Lyla knows a lot of things about Sean.
Sean is the kind of kid who always tries to make small talk with everyone's mom, even though he's always sucked at small talk. The same kind of kid who managed to convince his baby brother that magnets were a type of animal in middle school. He's the kind of kid who wakes up at 6 AM to go running because he wants to “relax” and who has been known to cry during movies that aren’t even sad. Sean is also the kind of kid who will eat anything lemon-flavored, even though Lyla's pretty sure he actually hates lemon and won't admit it to himself.
The prognosis is, of course, that he's a fucking nerd.
Keeping all that in mind, Lyla sorts her Skittles on the back of an old magazine, studiously avoiding the tabletop. She pushes the yellow pile at Sean with the back of her hand, as usual.
“Thanks, your highness,” he says, popping one into his mouth.
The guys at the metal detector weren’t exactly pleased when Lyla came through loaded down with quarters. But she knows the drill by this point. The first thing you do when visiting your best friend in jail should always be to raid the vending machine with laundry money and the floor change from your car. Makes it feel almost like you’re just hanging out, and it’s a pretty good conversation starter. Sean actually looked kind of excited when he saw the haul artfully arranged for him. It reminds Lyla of the vending machine dinners she sometimes eats at school when she's too busy for the dining hall.
“Can I see the pics of your dorm room now?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” Lyla pulls them up on her phone and hands it over, feeling her forearms peel off the sticky plastic table. Sean drags his fingers around trying to zoom in.
“Dude, your new phone is so stupid. How do I—“
“Let me see it.”
“Oh wait, never mind. I got it,” he says and then immediately scoffs. “Only you would wait until you’ve lived in a place for like eight months to finally finish putting up your posters.”
“What can I say? Mystery is part of my aesthetic. I’m worth waiting for.”
He scrolls through for a minute, kind of vaguely smiling.
“Misty Mice! I’m glad you put that one up. We didn’t get that shit autographed for nothing,” Sean says, being the lovely, observant friend he's always been.
“Obviously. This is why I keep you around, dude.”
“Oh god, what is this picture?” He flips the phone back toward Lyla to reveal the bonus pic of Amanda sleeping on her desk.
“That’s my roommate during finals. Blackmail material for if she ever becomes evil. Check out that massive drool puddle.”
“Gross,” Sean laughs. He returns the phone and grabs a few more Skittles.
“You know,” he says, chewing speculatively. “I think I kind of hate lemon-flavored stuff.” He plunges his other hand into the bag of knock-off cool ranch Doritos.
“Why do you always eat it then?” Lyla asks through a mouthful of cheddar popcorn.
“I don’t know. I don’t eat a lot of candy anymore.”
Neither of them feel the need to mention exactly why that is, but it definitely crosses Lyla’s mind.
“Picky! You have literally been eating all my lemon Skittles since I met you,” she complains. “But I guess you can have a purple one, if you must.”
He scoops up all the purple ones and eats them at once just to spite her.
“No! Sean, you know I love the purple ones. I’m over here trying to be all diplomatic and you had to go and ruin it.”
“I deserve them more than you,” he says. That fact is kind of like sadly indisputable, even though she knows he's joking. She keeps things light because asking him whether he's actually getting enough to eat here would be pretty weird right now.
“Nope, now you owe me big time,” Lyla tells him. "You must forfeit half the fake Doritos.” Affronted, Sean hugs the coveted chips close to his bosom.
Unfortunately, Sean knows Lyla just about as well as she knows him, possibly even better considering how boring her life tends to be. It's fair to assume he still remembers that good gossip will always distract her from candy-related rage.
“Diversion, diversion! Look at this tattoo!” He pulls his sleeve up to reveal a fucking sizable tattoo of a wolf. Lyla’s mouth drops open in shock.
Sean's never sat down with Lyla and actually told her what happened out there. She read about it in the news, of course, and she's seen the evidence in person: the scars on his face, the new way that he carries himself. But all she really has is a collection of snippets she's pieced together into the most important year of her best friend's life. Actually getting to know Sean again distorts the story in her head. He tells her the most basic and simultaneously earth shattering stuff about himself at his own pace. She still gets mad at herself for never anticipating the tiny little details that keep taking her by surprise.
“What the fuck!? Are you kidding me?” she shouts, thoroughly diverted. The little family sitting a few tables over glares at them, so Lyla lowers her volume from actual yell to whisper yell. “How long have you had this?”
"A couple years. I got it on the road.” He snickers at her immediate eye roll.
“Oh, wow, ‘I got it on the road. I’m so deep and edgy,'” Lyla says in her practiced imitation of Sean’s voice. This is the sort of teasing that only recently stopped feeling strained and started feeling funny in a dangerous sort of way. "You think you’re so cool!”
“Actually, I know I am."
“Yeah, okay, whatever. Now let me see!” She bends down to examine the tattoo more closely and resists the urge to grab his wrist. That sort of thing gets you yelled at in jail. Who knew?
The tattoo is messy and weirdly jagged. It's ugly in a carelessly cool sort of way. The sort of way that screams, I burned this stupid picture onto my skin without really even thinking about the repercussions, at top volume. Lyla casually touches the tiny lyrics tattooed behind her ear. She remembers picking them out painstakingly during the months leading up to her eighteenth birthday.
“Two things,” she says, concluding the investigation. "One, as you know, I am outraged that you didn’t show this to me sooner. Two, you didn’t draw this, did you? Because it looks kind of fucking weird.”
“No, it was this girl I met in Oregon. She did it, like, stick and poke."
That sounds . . . intimate. Lyla ragefully shoves a handful of Funyuns into her mouth instead of responding.
“I mean, she kind of sucks at drawing,” Sean continues. “But I think her style is actually pretty cool. She was really into tattoos being this meaningful thing.”
Lyla can hear the reverence in his tone. It sends a pang of weird jealousy through her, which she knows to be stupid and useless but also familiar. This girl is yet another person who knows Sean in a way Lyla never will. She was there when Lyla wasn’t, and she probably never reminded him of home or his dad or school. She was just somebody he met. The girl is clearly gone now. But still.
It aches a little.
“Well, as much as it would make for the world’s greatest stick-and-poke pun, I’m just gonna avoid asking whether you guys fucked because I think you definitely did.” Lyla says flippantly. She looks up to read Sean’s expression, and it actually seems pretty affirmative. She hates it when her teases are confirmed as unfortunate truths. She raises her eyebrows at him and moves on. “Anyway, do you have any other tattoos or, like, manful scars you’re hiding from the world? I think I deserve to know.”
“‘Manful’? What kind of word is that?”
“I don’t know. I learned it in my lit class or whatever. Just answer the question!"
“Uh, aside from the eye thing, I don’t think so.”
Lyla inwardly cringes for reminding him about the eye thing.
“As we have already established, the eye thing is incredibly bad ass, and I will not hear any other interpretations,” she says, ready to drop the topic. Sean nods affirmatively.
Lyla is actually kind of annoyed that he waited this long to show her the tattoo or tell her that he apparently scored with some badass hottie. But he doesn't need to know that. Lyla knows that knowing Sean means knowing that he doesn’t tell anyone his secrets until he's completely sure he's ready.
Skittles crisis averted, Sean changes the subject. “So what should I do for my one-year adult jail-a-versary? My friend keeps bugging me.”
“Do you mean your nineteenth birthday?” Lyla snorts. “Wait, you have a friend? A friend who isn’t me? I’m so proud of my little Sean.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sean says. “You know I have always had friends besides you, Lyla.”
“True, but I taught you everything you know about being cool so I take credit for all of them.”
“Whatever.”
“What are your birthday options?”
He takes a minute to think. “Obviously nothing that'll actually be fun. We have a few decent looking old movies. It could involve, like, kickball or running I guess. There’s a track and stuff. Also, sometimes we get cake.”
“Dude, you have to live it up to the max. You should have a kickball race to the cake with, like, I don’t know, old movies playing in the background. It will be wild.”
Sean laughs. “Sounds stupid.”
They shoot the shit for a while longer and demolish the snacks until the officer on duty announces that visiting hours end in five. Lyla instantly craves a cigarette as she thinks about the long drive back to school.
She'd always hoped her and Sean would somehow end up at the same college. She was already feeling sappy about graduation by like sophomore year of high school, which was pretty premature, probably unnecessary, and definitely emo. But Lyla has premature and unnecessary feelings about most things, so emo is kind of par for the course in her experience.
She just hated thinking they might grow apart. So instead, she imagined some sort of movie scenario where they'd both apply to the same place as a joke, and then they'd both get in, and then they'd both realize it was the perfect school. Maybe he’d major in art, and she'd major in . . . something, and they would still do everything together, even then.
Back when Sean first got to the juvie place where they put him before he turned 18, she wrote him an angsty letter about not wanting to start college when he couldn't. She said she might skip it. She knew right when he received that letter because the first call she ever got from a prison started out with, “Lyla, you are being so fucking ridiculous.”
Sean told her to go to college because he couldn't. Said he probably wouldn't be going when he gets out of here anyway. So Lyla went.
Now, she's done with freshman year, major undeclared, 3.46 GPA earned, summer job at the dining hall secured, and not a single bust for the ounce of weed hiding out in her desk drawer. She kind of hates living in the dorms with a bunch of aspiring sorority girls, but she has to admit that college is a lot less lonely than the end of high school was.
Sometimes she still gets so fucking mad about what happened to Sean that she can't even function. It scares her. But also, is it wrong to be a little relieved that she actually knows where Sean is again, even if the place he's in sucks really hard?
Before, she'd imagined she would at least get to visit him at some faraway, fancy art school before he disowned her utterly. Maybe like NYU or something. Instead, she ended up visiting him in jail. The good news is that he still hasn't disowned her yet.
When Lyla gets up to hug Sean goodbye, she tries to make it count. She might not be able to visit again until after classes start.
“Hey, uh, could you hold up a minute?” He asks when she bends down to brush cheese dust off her pants.
“What’s up?"
“I was wondering if . . ."
His eye casts downward, and his forehead creases. He looks like a kid with that reluctant expression plastered on his face, but he also looks old as fuck in the monochrome khaki. The eye patch doesn't exactly help either. Mostly, he looks like he regrets pre-empting whatever he was about to say.
Lyla feels an expectant smile light up her face as she watches Sean realize that she won't be letting this go.
He tries to evade anyway, “Actually, never mind. It’s really—"
“Come on Sean, I’m here for you. We’re pals! You gotta stop thinking you’re an inconvenience, man.” She flips into hard-ass reassurance mode like an experienced gymnast.
"I just know this is going to be really fucking inconvenient.” He groans, running a hand over his shaved head.
This sort of thing happens at least once per visit. The first time, it was because he wanted her to give Ellery his new mailing address. The fifth time, it was because he wanted a Mountain Dew from the vending machine. Maybe this time he wants to borrow a pen.
“I will go to the moon and back for you, my friend,” She recites, bravado turned up to a million. “But, like, seriously, I don’t care. I don’t have anything but work going on for the next month. The summer life is pretty chill. Just tell me!”
Lyla assumes he probably wants to complain about asking for a while longer, but they're in a prison visiting room with negative one minutes left in their time together, and the guards are kind of starting to breathe down his neck. He hurries it up.
“Okay, would you be willing to, um, go down to Beaver Creek and visit Daniel for me this summer?”
He says it so fast that it's practically incomprehensible, but there it is. Lyla is actually pretty taken aback by that request. She'd been extra careful not to mention Daniel or anything that might even vaguely allude to him. It was kind of hard considering how little she actually knows about the time they spent running. It worked today though, and Sean also hadn’t brought him up.
Their friendship is full of hesitations now, and Daniel's definitely the biggest one.
The judge gave Daniel over to Sean’s mom’s parents nearly two years ago. Lyla had literally never heard of them before this whole thing started. Apparently their house was the place Sean called her from a couple months after he left. The cops wouldn’t let her hear the end of that one. Sean was lucky she’d started answering any random number that called her phone, just in case it was him. Even the ones that were obviously, like, telemarketers and scams and shit.
Sean talks to his brother on the phone once a week, and Daniel is allowed to come up to Washington and visit a few times a year with their grandma. They'd only let him come twice so far, and from what Lyla can tell, those visits were some of the worst experiences of Sean’s life, at least in the post-runaway nightmare era anyway.
Even after he gets out of jail, Sean won't be able to leave Washington for a few years without permission from a probation officer, and he sure as hell won't be getting custody of his brother. He got off without the fucking bullshit murder charge and the equally bullshit kidnapping one, but he's still dealing with a long list of other charges for resisting the police and, as strange as it seems to Lyla, assault and battery. As far as she can guess, he did what he had to do.
Sean keeps talking, suddenly bleeding information about Daniel. “You could go just for like a day, maybe one night. It’s only a few hours away from your school, and you said you needed to get more practice with highway driving. It’s just that—apparently he isn’t doing as well at the new school. I don’t know if he likes it there anymore. He said he does on the phone, but I’m not sure whether to believe him. I guess his friend moved away. He has to go to summer school to catch up with the other kids, and he’s been having anger issues for a while, and his therapist is trying to prescribe something, and. . ."
Lyla raises her eyebrows. Sometimes it's stone cold shocking how much Sean has changed.
"I just need someone to go look in on him for me and make sure everything’s okay and that, like, the grandparents are still treating him right. Plus, he kept telling me he missed you, um, back when we were. . . traveling. But yeah, so probably—well, it might be nice?”
Lyla doesn’t hesitate to say yes when he finally shuts up. The last time she saw Daniel was at Sean's trial from about 20 feet away, crying and exhausted-looking in a little button-up and tie. He must be almost 12 by now.
Sean hugs her goodbye again, squeezing tight. “You make me feel so normal in the best fucking way. Seriously. Thanks for doing this,” he says. He sounds choked up, which Lyla hates.
She drives back with the grandparent’s address scribbled on her hand and a bunch of new phone numbers stored in her contacts. Sean had all of them memorized.