Archive of Our Own

In all of the universes, it starts the same, with a tired bus and a quiet town. But here, here Allie and Harry are it. They’re the only ones.

And I'll never go home again (place the call, feel it start)

Allie doesn’t remember falling asleep. She does remember the part just before, the loud bus full of excited kids. She remembers Cassandra pushing her into the seat next to Will, Becca taking a million pictures of everything, and laughing at bad jokes alongside everyone else. 

But the falling part, the eyes closed and the heavy quiet, she doesn’t remember that. 

Everything that's kept her safe is gone.

Because suddenly there she is, wide eyes looking at a dark town after stepping off of a near empty bus. There’s one exception to the quiet, a small looking Harry Bingham who doesn’t seem quite so sure of himself anymore.

“You think everyone’s already home?” she asks softly. She’s not even looking at him, some part of her doesn’t feel as though he deserves her gaze. He’s Cassandra’s rival; that’s all he is. 

“Sure,” Harry says. He doesn’t sound all that certain, though. He sounds like he’s lying, like he’s trying to appease a small child.

The sad thing is, she doesn’t even care. There’s no one there, no one. No texts on her phone, no missed calls, or waiting parents. The bus isn’t even there anymore, the single one (she remembers a whole line of them leaving town) that dropped them off. It’s just them here, her and Harry Bingham. 

“You want a ride home?” he asks. She wants to say no, almost does, only there’s a sort of unsettlingness to the quiet that makes it scary. She’s afraid that if she’s alone in it for too long she’ll disappear too. 

So she nods. “Yeah, that’d be great.”

-

Allie keeps waiting for her phone to buzz, keeps turning on and off her data (she has no service for some strange reason; she can’t get on the internet or refresh instagram) and swiping between her home screens. They don’t talk as he drives. The radio is off. When they’d first turned it on it’d been nothing but static. Allie had jumped straight out of her seat, and Harry had rushed to shut it off. She swears she sees him shaking, but they don’t break the silence to talk about that.

“Turn up here,” she directs. There’s a quiver in her voice, her eyes staring at her lap, at the door lock, and the window button, anywhere but outside at the dark houses. Porch lights are off, gates closed. She feels a little like she’s in a horror movie. “Third house down.” 

When he pulls into her driveway, it takes her a second to muster up the courage to leave the car. There’s this part of her, this huge part of her, that wants to sprint to the front door and up the stairs to her room like she’s a kid using the bathroom at night. Only Harry Bingham is right there in his black Maserati, and even now she’s a bit too attached to her pride.

“Thanks for the ride.” Her voice is still soft, still shaky. She makes eye contact with him this time, though, offering a small smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. 

“No problem, Pressman.” 

His headlights don’t leave her garage door until she’s inside. She doesn’t know why she’s looking for that, but there she is anyway, staring out the front window, watching as his car drives away. Maybe a part of her wishes that she hadn’t gotten out, or that she’d forced him to stay with her. That part of her, if it even exists, is definitely gone as soon as it appears. He’s Harry Bingham , not whoever she’d begun to imagine in her head.

-

In Coraline there’s a scene where she curls up in her parents' bed alone. If Allie were a film student, and her life a film, this is where she’d draw the parallel.

Her house is empty, her calls go straight to voicemail, and, already, the silence is starting to make her go crazy. She can’t even sleep it off, can’t convince herself that this was all some hyper realistic nightmare. It’s all too clear, too devoid of the trademark haze that accompanies her dreams.

She’s riding the line between being asleep and awake. She wishes she could just fall already, fall into that wide awakeness or a deep sleep. Allie thinks about getting up and searching for her mom’s sleeping pills, the ones she moves between the upstairs bathroom cabinet and her bedside drawer, but she’s almost stuck where she is, held down by the blankets and fear of the silence. She’d never been afraid of the dark before, but she guesses that seventeen is as good an age as any to start.

-

The sun comes up at seven. She’s awake when it appears, filling the rooms of her home, her empty home, with a little bit of light. A part of her had thought that with the morning would come people with some sort of explanation as to what the fuck is going on. 

Only here she is, still alone. 

Her phone doesn’t work. She still spends the entire day calling her family, her friends, random people in her contacts who she’d never talked to. It doesn’t work. When her phone dies, she picks up the landline and calls 911 over and over. The TV doesn’t work either, and the internet is down. For a little while, she goes through the settings on her laptop, resetting the different programs as though that’ll fix everything. 

Harry Bingham crosses her mind three times. 

The first is in the morning, when the sun is just beginning to rise. She swears she hears a car engine off in the distance. She pictures a black Maserati. It’s driving down a dead end street. 

And it happens again while she’s calling people. She’s scrolling through her contacts and wonders if his number is hidden somewhere on her phone. It’s not. She has no reason to have his number.

She thinks for a second then about going out to find him, but she can’t seem to imagine leaving her house right now. 

The third time is as the sun sets. Everything’s fuzzy by then. She’s exhausted. When her eyes close, she sees his face. She wonders if it’s just them in this world.

-

On the second day, she goes outside. It’s noon. The sun is bright and hot in the center of the sky. It’s still there. She takes some sort of comfort in that. 

In Cassandra’s Prius, she drives to each of the exits. There’s green all around, bright green and dull green, green in its most natural form. She doesn’t cry in the car, and doesn’t cry right when she gets home, either. Shock is weird like that. 

It’s on her couch, while she’s eating half frozen pizza, that she realizes she’s trapped. She thinks again about Harry Bingham, wonders if he’s found a way out of this mess. On the TV, an old movie is playing. Her parents DVD collection is small; it won’t take her long to go through them all. It’s then that she cries.

On the third day, she starts to talk to herself. She creates a play by play for her life, a narration that allows her to step back a little. If she tries hard enough, she can create a world that she actually wants to be in, can pretend that she knows where she is, that she isn’t trapped somewhere nearly alone. 

Sometimes, she’ll even pretend that she’s talking on the phone with Cassandra, that Cassandra has just gone away for an early summer abroad, and her parents are at work, and everything’s normal.

On the fourth day, all she eats is a bag of cheeto puffs hidden high in her cabinet. Twice she cries because she can’t help but remember a conversation with Will she’d just had about cheeto puffs versus the original.

On the fifth day, she doesn’t leave her bed. The blinds let light into her room, and she watches the day pass through an open window. She dreams that night of Harry Bingham, of him and his fast car in her driveway. She dreams of eggo waffles drenched in maple syrup and someone besides herself walking through her home. 

In her dream, he even talks. 

“Are you okay?” he asks, and she shrugs. 

“I could ask you the same thing,” she hears herself say. “We’re stuck in whatever this is, Harry. It’s just us, and I don’t know what to do.”

-

So it’s the quiet that drives her to him. It’s her getting sick of the sound of her own voice, of the gentle hum surrounding her, and the crickets that come out at night.

She takes Cassandra’s Prius out of the garage and drives fast down familiar roads that don’t feel familiar anymore. She doesn’t smile once, not when she makes a turn perfectly, or spots a black Masrati in a long driveway. The idea of Harry already being gone, of him disappearing like everyone else, crosses her mind twice. That’d make this place even more like hell, losing the only person left to save her. She hates that that’s how she thinks of him now, as the only person left to save her.

But that doesn’t matter much because he’s there, laying on the couch near the front of his home. His front door is open wide, and she can see him from the front steps. 

Never before has the sight of Harry Bingham brought her comfort. God, she hates this new world. 

And now she’s walking into his house, slowly, like she has all the time in the world. (She does have all the time in the world, nothing left to lose.) He doesn’t snore, at least not right now. His mouth is slightly open, and she feels incredibly creepy, standing there watching him sleep. 

She thinks about leaving, about going home with the comfort that there’s another person just as stuck as she is. But then he’s sitting up and staring right at her. He looks a little like he doesn’t believe she’s there. 

“Allie?” He sounds tired. She’s tired too. 

“Just wanted to make sure that you’re still here.” She feels a little like she’s frozen in place. She wants to leave, to go home (if that’s even her home anymore), and sleep and eat cheeto puffs, but she can’t seem to get away. 

“I’m still here,” he confirms. She smiles a little. He smiles a little back. There are bags under his eyes, deep set ones. His shirt is rumpled and his hair all over the place. 

“I don’t know what to do. This isn’t home.”

He’s not smiling anymore, but standing now, moving towards her. She doesn’t step back, but wonders if he really is real. “Did you go to the exits?”

She nods. 

“We’re stuck here, Allie.”

“I know.”

-

He offers to drive her home as the sun sets. They watch it fall from the sky while dipping their feet in his pool. If she tries hard enough, she can almost pretend that there’s a party going on in the house behind her, that her sister is at home reading a book, and her town isn’t empty. 

“Is it okay if I stay here tonight?” she asks, and he nods like he was going to ask the question himself. 

“You can sleep in a guest room if you want. Or on the couch. Whatever you want.”

“A guest room is fine.” She doesn’t look at him, just down at the water. When she moves her feet, it causes little ripples. She thinks about the time she learned to swim, about Cassandra holding her up until she could float on her own. She wasn’t even five then. Cassandra’s gone now, or maybe Allie’s the one who’s gone, the girl who disappeared. She wonders if, in some other world, there’s a Buzzfeed Unsolved episode about her.

They share a box of Annie’s mac n cheese. It’s white cheddar. Harry almost burns himself pouring the water out of the pot, and she laughs for the first time in forever. He laughs too. The bags under his eyes fading in the light. His shirt flattened out. His hair still all over the place. 

It’s not late when they go to bed. There’s not really much to talk about; they’d never really talked before, save for a few small interactions mostly based around Cassandra. It’s still nice, though, just being near another person. Allie doesn’t feel the need to fill the silence. It’s almost comforting, now, the quiet. 

She sleeps in the guest room. Harry leads her upstairs to where she feels bad for still having her sneakers on; there’s expensive looking rugs lining the halls up there, the type that her mom would always buy only to return later on. She imagines Harry’s mom glaring at her while she walks. That actually makes things feel more normal. 

He grabs her some clothes, a pair of sweats and an old summer camp t-shirt, and tells her to just ask if she needs anything else. 

“Thanks for this Harry. I think I’d go insane if I was alone for any longer.” She means it as a joke, as something said lightly to make fun of their situation.

He doesn’t smile, though. “‘Course, Pressman.” He pauses. “I think I’d go insane, too, if I had to spend anymore time alone. I don’t know what’s going on here.”

It’s only nine o’clock. The sun has just finished setting, and she is simultaneously wide awake and exhausted. “I don’t either. I just know that it’s you and me. That’s it.”

“I’m sorry, Allie.”

“I’m sorry too.”

-

The sun looks the same rising as it did in her own bed, in her parent’s bed, in Cassandra’s bed. It rises like nothing’s wrong, like things aren’t different. 

Everything’s different, though. 

It’s quiet everywhere, but in Harry’s house, the silence is somehow louder. It’s loud at seven in the morning as the sun rises, and even louder when he wakes up, when she hears his footsteps down the hall.  She waits a little while to get up, wonders if it’s necessary, if the blankets wrapped around her need to leave (they’re soft and warm and make her feel at home. They remind her of long New England winters and falling asleep on the couch).

When she does get up, when she travels all the way downstairs to where he is in the kitchen, he smiles at her like he’s surprised she’s even real. She wonders if that’s how she looks too.

-

He makes her Eggo Waffles for breakfast and laughs when she accidently drenches them in maple syrup. They spend the early morning hours watching Spy Kids , one of the three movies that he has in his room. (She makes fun of him for it. Not relentlessly, because she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t a fan of a good bit of nostalgia, but enough that it’s almost annoying.)

At noon, she drives home in Cassandra’s Prius (it’ll never be Allie’s, always Cassandra’s. Nothing’s ever going to really change in this world, nothing that they don’t touch. That’s going to fuck her up), and tries not to focus too much on the quiet. She’ll fall asleep at nine, and think about texting Harry only twice (he gave her his number, and she just can’t help it).

When she wakes up, the sun will look the same rising as it did from Harry’s house. 

-

Harry Bingham: you wanna come over?

Allie Pressman: sure 

-

Spending time with Harry Bingham, in his overly large house that she’s too quickly becoming familiar with, makes her not want to go home. He’s real. He lives and breathes and isn’t only in her head.

He takes her on drives around town, to all the places neither of them had ever gone before. They swing, and slide down old metal slides that heat up in the sun. Allie tells him about how Cassandra used to yell at her for climbing up slides. Harry tells her about how he almost broke his nose after Campbell kicked him while swinging. 

She sleeps in his guest bedroom two nights in a row. He finds all nine seasons of The Office in his attic and they stay up all night watching the first twenty episodes. Allie wonders if her home, the house she grew up in with it’s family pictures and familiarity, is really her home anymore.

She misses the days before she woke up in this strange place, misses not feeling lonely, and feels bad for not appreciating all she had before it was gone. She sleeps with the bedroom door open, and dreams of her home, of her family, of the future she had before waking up almost alone on that bus.

-

They go to the grocery store together. He drives them there in his black Maserati. It’s only been a week, but food is already starting to go bad. She worries about what they’re going to do with the spoiled milk, and eggs, and cheese, with the molding fruit and stale bread. She never thought she’d have to worry about that. 

“Maybe jam?” she says. “Do you know how to make jam?”

He throws a bag of chips into their cart. “Do I look like someone who knows how to make jam?”

“You look like someone who’s going to have to learn how to make jam.”

He laughs, light and breathy, at her words. They already have two full carts of food and supplies. It’s a little weird going through an empty grocery store. The doors open just like normal, and the fluorescents placed up high in the ceiling still burn bright. 

“I’ll have to go back home and grab my mom's SUV,” he tells her as they grab a third cart. Allie’s looking to grab all the fresh fruit she can. 

“I’ll go with you, grab the Prius.”

He lets her drive the Maserati on the way back. She smiles wider than she has in days as she drives fast. It’s a weird sort of rush, one she’d never fully understood. It’s the reason why people spend too much money on fast cars.

She feels alive for the first time since this all started. And she likes the grin on his face, the look he has when she revs the engine. That makes her feel alive too.

-

Harry spots the dog while they’re loading the groceries into the cars. 

He taps her on the shoulder. “Allie, please tell me you see it too.”

And she does. It’s a furry little thing, reminiscent of the dogs her grandparents had while she was growing up. When she bends down to call for it, it walks right over to them. 

Allie turns to him, eyes a bit wide, smile growing very fast. “What the fuck? Are we imagining this, Harry? Is this how we start to go insane?” 

He shrugs. The groceries he was holding go in the trunk and he bends down next to her, hand outstretched toward the dog. “Should we pick up some food for it?” Harry asks as the dog sniffs his hand. It allows Harry to pet it, and Allie’s smile stays firmly on her face. 

“Yeah. I’ll go in, grab stuff. A leash too, maybe? And a collar?”

Harry nods. 

The grocery store is creepier without him beside her. A lot of things in the town are. It’s weird being alone in places she’s never been alone in before. Everything feels off. 

But she’s also known this store her entire life. She knows where everything is. She’d  worked here, the summer before her junior year when she’d just turned sixteen. She would shelve things and help bag when it got really busy. Near the end of summer, just when the idea of junior year really started to settle in, she quit. None of that matters now, though, because now it’s just her and Harry. 

Or maybe it does matter because she knows exactly where all the dog supplies are. Maybe that matters in this new world. 

-

“I’ve decided that it’s name is Charlie,” Harry tells Allie just as the double doors close behind her. 

Her eyebrows fly up and there’s this smile on her face that really won’t go away now that she’s not alone. “Charlie?” she repeats and he nods. 

“Charlie.”

“Why?” she asks, and she’s laughing now, shifting the paper bag full of dog supplies closer to her and laughing so hard it might hurt in a second. 

He shrugs, all casual and Harry like. “He looks like a Charlie.”

God, she can’t argue with that. 

Charlie, the dog, the small border collie that reminds her of being little and summer evenings spent playing in her grandparents yard while waiting for dinner, hops in the back of Harry’s mom’s SUV without really being told. She almost doesn’t believe that it’s real. But, there it is, a real living thing, something that reminds her so much of home, sitting in the back of the car right next to bags of groceries she’s not sure will fit in Harry’s pantry.

-

They put the eggs and milk and cheese in the fridge. Allie makes plans to turn everything into powder as soon as she figures out how exactly to do that. She’s not even really sure what that’ll do, but she thinks it’ll make everything last a little longer. 

The produce is scattered around the kitchen. Harry’s responsibility is to make it all into jams. Allie thinks that he’ll probably do a good job of it. He’s so fucking smart.

Charlie is on the couch. Harry had laughed when the dog had first jumped up there. “My mom would’ve thrown a fit,” he’d said and Allie had laughed too. Their parents aren’t there. Their family is gone (or maybe they’re the ones who are gone, maybe they disappeared. Who fucking knows). They’re alone. They can do what they want and that scares the shit out of her.

As the sun sets, she makes a list of things that need to be done the next day. Harry’s got his feet in the pool, but every once in a while he’ll glance inside to where she sits at the kitchen counter as if to make sure she’s still there. She does it too. Sometimes their eyes will meet. 

When it’s fully dark outside, she follows Harry upstairs and says goodnight to him. It’s weird how safe she can feel falling asleep in his house. She feels safer here than at home, her real home with the pictures on the wall and the never ending quiet. Just down the hall is Harry. She doesn’t have that at the Pressman residence. 

At some point during the night, Charlie comes upstairs and sleeps beside her. He’s there when she wakes up. She nearly cries. (When she gets up, Harry will already be downstairs. He’ll be making real waffles, the made from scratch stuff from a recipe in a cookbook that Allie had thought was just for decoration. She’ll nearly cry then too. He’ll make it feel like Sunday morning. He’ll make it feel normal. She’s not sure how he does that so easily.)

-

They take Charlie with them to the library. Harry drives his mom’s SUV again. Allie’s not sure what he thinks, that they’ll be packing along boxes full of library books with them. She reasons that they could now, seeing as they’re it. 

Fuck, that scares her. 

He doesn’t drive as fast when he takes the SUV. It’s almost like he feels the need to be safer. The first time they used it, to move groceries from the store to his house, he had to take a car seat out. Allie thinks it was for his sister. She doesn’t ask about it. 

Cassandra used to volunteer at the library when they were little. Allie remembers spending entire summer days pressed up against Cassandra’s side in an armchair in the corner of the kids section reading Harry Potter.

They don’t go to the kids section.

She picks out books on preserving food. Harry sits behind the desk and plays solitaire on an old computer. At some point she forces them to switch places. She beats Harry’s high score while he reads up on how to can fruit.

With the sun still high in the sky, they leave the library, arms full of books. It takes them two trips to get all of the books into the car, and Charlie follows behind them dutifully each time they go back and forth each time. They drive home with the windows all rolled down. Her hair flies everywhere, but the air feels so good. It’s nearly summer, bright but still only barely warm. She sticks her head out the window and Harry stares at her, laughing loudly in the absence of the radio.

They’re only a step away from something that feels at least sort of right.

-

Too quickly they start treating this world they’re in like something normal. Too quickly they seem to accept that it’s only them, that they’re trapped and alone. 

It’s like, she’s been absolute shit with change her entire life and then suddenly she’s thrown into some empty version of her town with only Harry fucking Bingham and suddenly she’s okay with it.

Maybe it’s just shock. Maybe she’s not out of it yet. Maybe there’s something in the water, or this is all just some dream. There’s got to be some reason why she feels so undeniably calm standing beside him in his kitchen. 

“Does this count as a simmer?” he asks, using a wooden spoon to gesture at some bubbling red liquid. He’s making jam and has an apron on that he’d told her was just decoration before. The before actually scared her. It’s this idea of there being a distinct before and after, one so distinct that it’s practically defined in the moment.

“I think?” God, they really are hopeless. 

“Is it supposed to be bubbling this much?”

She snorts. “I really don’t know, Harry.”

And he grins at her. It’s so carefree, like he’s almost forgotten where they are. Or like he’s come to terms with the situation. “I feel like you got the easy job, Pressman. Everything is just dehydrating.”

Allie shrugs. They have every single food dehydrator they could find running which has got to be some sort of fire hazard. She really misses Google. “I don’t know, I think pouring that milk onto that tray and then putting it into the dehydrator was pretty difficult.”

He laughs and she smiles. The sun’s large in the sky and they’ve been up for hours. It’s better, sleeping here, at his house in that guest room, but sometimes it’s still too much. She still finds herself waking up too early and falling asleep too late. And she still hears rustling coming from somewhere down the hall, from Harry’s room where the light’ll switch on at random hours of the night. 

She still sleeps with her door open.

-

It’s after the sun has set, after the jam has been made and put away and given them both a feeling of immense satisfaction and pride that they can finish a task like that, while they sit on opposite ends of the couch and watch the final season of the of The Office, that she finally asks, “How do you make this seem so easy?”

And it might be a stupid question. It almost feels like a stupid question, but, god, she just wants to know how the fuck being with him in the aftermath of her entire world being flipped upside down and turned inside out still offers some semblance of normalcy. She can’t figure it out. 

“I don’t know,” he says, slowly, like he’s only just now thinking about it too. Or maybe it’s slow because he just doesn’t know what to say, how to explain it. “But it didn’t feel easy until you showed up, Pressman.”

He’s staring at her from his end of the couch. She doesn’t know what’s happening on the TV, can’t focus on it, but can somehow focus on him. 

She breathes. Tonight feels like a night for big questions, so here she goes again. “Do you think we’ll ever go home?”

“I hope so.” Harry opens his mouth like he’s going to continue, but then closes it again. His lips purse. “I miss it,” he finally says.

“What do you think you miss the most?” 

“Being able to leave,” he says, and she laughs.

She’s still smiling when she says, softer than him, but still loud to hear, “I miss the internet. Not the most, but, like, a lot.”

They don’t mention their families because that seems a little too heavy still, but she thinks he knows how she misses Cassandra. She knows that he misses his little sister, caught him staring at the pink of her room earlier. 

On the TV, the episode is ending, the theme music playing over credits. It’s a little pathetic, but she had that theme downloaded on Spotify, way back when the world was still normal. Her Spotify doesn’t work anymore. Or her Netflix, or Youtube.

“It’s a bit fucked up how much I like pretending everything’s normal, isn’t it?” Harry says while the credits roll. Neither move to start the next episode.

“At least it’s still easy for you,” she says softly. “To pretend, I mean.”

Harry turns off the television. The screen fades to black, and they both go to bed.

-

As the sun rises and the air grows warmer, they eat jam on toast. Harry pulls a book on breadmaking out from some stack in the study and they read the introduction pressed too close together on bar stools at the kitchen island. She adds baking bread to their to do list.

(Allie makes to do lists because that’s what Cassandra would’ve done if she was there. She wonders if she’ll ever stop missing Cassandra.)

-

She needs to go back to her old house, just one more time, just to grab some things and maybe say goodbye. 

It’s just that, she can’t really seem to muster up the courage to do that. And then Harry asks if she wants him to come with her, and she doesn’t want to say yes because going home shouldn’t be difficult but she can’t quite describe the feeling she gets when she’s alone now. 

It’s almost like being lost, right when the adrenaline's just kicked in even though it’s just about useless. It’s like the world is closing in on her. It’s like she’s waking up on that bus over and over and over again. She can’t say that, though, no, can’t tell him that she just about has a panic attack every time she’s left alone for too long. 

“I don’t mind coming with you,” he tells her softly. They’re on the couch again, closer now than before. There’s a Harry Potter movie on. She’s not sure which one. She has tea, earl grey, and he has coffee. That’s the first thing he does in the morning, makes those drinks. He’s almost always the first one up.

God, it just doesn’t make sense how she can’t get herself to just go home. It doesn’t make sense, her associating the places with how all of this started, how much she can’t stand how empty the home feels in her head. “I should be able to--”

“I don’t mind coming with you,” he repeats. He’s staring at her, and, when she catches his gaze, offers her the faintest of smiles. “Really, I don’t.” She wonders if he likes to be alone much either.

“I guess you could look through our DVD collection,” she says, and he nods. 

He doesn’t leave her side the entire time. She treats it like having a guest over, lets herself be reminded of the first time Will came over, two weeks into freshman year, how she showed him around and they did homework at the kitchen table. She shows Harry around, walks him through rooms while she grabs things to take back to his place, smiles when he laughs at a baby picture of her eating sand at the beach.

Later, after they’ve returned from her house with boxes of her things and a number of old films, when it’s dark out but warm enough to keep the windows in the guest room open for the fresh air, he tells her that he wouldn’t have been able to do this alone. 

And they’re in his room because Spy Kids Three was only downloaded onto this one device and-- god, she doesn’t even understand the explanation, but she’s there anyway, laying beside him under a plaid comforter. He has a window open too. Sometimes the curtains will shift. They’re in his room and she falls asleep, and he doesn’t wake her up once the movie’s finished. 

In the morning, she’ll wake up with one of his arms wrapped around her. She won’t move. He’ll still get up first and they won’t talk about the change.

-

(She falls asleep beside again two days later when a thunderstorm knocks out the power. It’s raining hard, everything so loud that it almost feels like the house is shaking. They meet in the upstairs hallway with phone flashlights.

And, god, she was never afraid of storms before but here she is, seventeen years old scared of thunder.

And he’s right there, and he’d just tried a light switch and it hadn’t worked and then he goes, “You want to sleep in her tonight, just in case?”

She doesn’t ask what the just in case means, doesn’t really care. This time, she falls asleep with Harry’s arm wrapped around her and wakes up with it still there.)

-

Sometimes he pisses her off. 

He never puts away the dishes, wears that fucking robe for way too long in the mornings, and leaves books everywhere. He doesn’t apologize, ever; he just moves on like it’s nothing. 

And sometimes, sometimes she just wants to be alone. But also not alone. Sometimes she just wants to be with someone else, anyone else.

But then he does the laundry, he vacuums the upstairs carpet, and picks books out for her at the library, and suddenly she’s wondering if it’d really be better with someone else.

She can’t come up with the answer, and that scares the shit out of her.

-

Allie finds sticky notes in an office drawer and makes a calendar to put on the fridge. 

Harry plants strawberries in the back garden because he was sick of the frozen ones and makes more jam. 

They continue pretending that all of this is easy.

(It’s not easy. Sometime in between, Harry spends an entire day in bed. He doesn’t get up in the morning and it’s Allie who makes the coffee and tea, who puts on music and walks Charlie. Sometime in between, they find a prescription bottle of xanax in a bathroom cabinet and move it to Harry’s bedside for easier access. Sometime in between, Allie spots a copy of Gone with the Wind on a bookshelf and cries so hard that it hurts.

But it’s Allie who lays in bed beside him, lets him pull her close and keep the blinds drawn. And it’s Harry who hands her a box of tissues, who doesn’t ask what’s wrong once because, god, he already knows.)

-

“Do you miss Cassandra?”

“What?” They’re side by side on the bed. It’s bright out, maybe, she doesn’t know; they’ve closed all the blinds in the room and don’t want to go downstairs. 

“I just miss my sister and you and Cassandra were close, right?”

She stares at him, watches his chest rise and fall with every breath. It’s warm, laying next to him. “Yeah, I miss her.” And Allie swallows, tries to figure out how much she can say before she’s oversharing. She figures it doesn’t matter. What else do they have to do besides overshare?

“It’s weird now, her not being here. I spent my entire life following her around and then the second I need her, like really need her, she’s just gone.”

“I’d choose being stuck here with you over Cassandra any day,” Harry tells her softly. He nudges her side with his elbow under the covers. 

For a second, a split second, she thinks that maybe she’d choose him too.

-

The forest still scares her. 

She loved to hike when she was younger, would drive with her dad to trails, would walk under waterfalls at state parks. But Cassandra hated it, didn’t like to get her clothes dirty, didn’t like having a sunburn at the end of the day, so Allie didn’t end up hiking as much as she might’ve wanted to. 

God, the forest scares her. 

It’s just there, suddenly, out of place unlike everything else in this new world. (She calls this place a “new world” so much that Harry jokes they should call the town New Ham. She loves that.) And they’re trapped, trapped by green, by the tallest trees she’s ever seen.

“What if there’s something out there?” she asks Harry. They’re driving, driving down by the edge of town. They’re driving down the road that used to lead to Greenwich. She’d spend summers there with her grandparents, spent summers driving up and down this road. 

“What?”

And the sun’s in their eyes, filling the car with a yellow tinge that feels natural and warm. Just ahead is where the road cuts out. They’re surrounded by green. “Do you think something’s out there?” 

“Besides trees?”

“Like other people,” she clarifies. The car’s slowing down. They have to turn around soon. She doesn’t think Greenwich exists in this world.

“What, am I not enough for you, Pressman?” Harry jokes, but it’s tight, like he’s thinking, or maybe trying really hard not to think; she can’t tell. 

“You know what I mean.” 

She watches him, likes to do that sometimes while he drives. It’s just strange how much things have changed, that’s all. And it’s weird, being a girl in Harry Bingham’s car. It’s not something she ever thought would happen, and especially not like this.

After a moment, Harry says, softer this time, “I think there’s got to be something out there.”

Allie’s not sure if that’s the answer she wanted. But, fuck, she’s not exactly sure what answer she did want. It doesn’t matter. He changes the subject, lets it die out through a long silence, and they don’t talk about it at home. 

-

Harry finds hiking boots and two big backpacks at some shop in town. They keep Charlie at home because they’re afraid of ticks, which, Allie will admit, is an oddly specific thing to be worried about, all things considered.

And they approach the forest, with compasses that neither really know how to use, hand guns from a safe in the study, and a packed lunch of chips and sandwiches. 

The forest is dark. At some points, you can’t see the sky while looking up. But they walk through it, east, towards the coast. She just wants to know if the ocean is still there.

But, also, it’s almost like she thinks that if they walk far enough, walk for days and days until it feels like a whole new world, they’ll find an empty town just like theirs filled with people just like them. It’s only a dream, though, something to think about to pass the time.

They don’t walk for days and days. They walk for maybe two hours, just until they stumble upon a clearing, a space big enough to use as an excuse to lay out a blanket and stop to eat. God, they’re having a picnic. How is she just now realizing this?

It’s not until after they’re done eating, when Allie’s staring at the sky, back against the blanket, Harry beside her, that she realises this would’ve been a dream just a few months ago. It feels like the best day of summer, the bright blue and the warmth. It’s not too hot, not yet, but she doesn’t have a jacket on over her t-shirt. 

And Harry’s whole arm is pressed against hers. It’s warm too, warmer than the air. She doesn’t want to move. 

“I don’t think I want to walk the two hours back,” he tells her, all light and loud. Sometimes she forgets that they can be as loud as they want out here, that they can be as loud as they want back at the house. Sometimes she forgets that it’s just them.

“How far do you think we walked?”

Harry pretends to count on his fingers and she laughs, a little because it’s funny, and a little because she thinks he wants her to. Is it pathetic that she’d laugh over and over and over again at whatever joke he made just so she could see that smile he gets, the one that’s almost entirely in his eyes, that’s bright, so so bright? 

“Six miles.”

“Fuck. We should’ve driven.” And he laughs when she says that, even though it’s not all that funny either, and she smiles then too. 

“Next time, Pressman.”

-

The days get longer.

Nothing really changes. It’s still just them. She wonders if this will ever end, or if this is how things will be forever. She hates thinking of things in terms of forever, but right now, when it’s just the two of them and has only been the two of them for months now, she can’t help it.

The days get longer, and the normalities of life before fade to memory.

-

“Did you ever go to Minas pond?” Allie asks. The sun’s just rising, and the sky is the clearest blue. She’s sipping tea, mint because she wanted something a little different. She regrets that now-- it tastes like toothpaste-- but doesn’t want to annoy Harry into making her a new one.

“No. Did you?” He’s spooning sugar into his coffee, stirring it until it’s dissolved. 

“Yeah. I used to take a boat out there with Will. It was fun.” She sets the tea down, wants to forget about it, tries not to think about how much it hurts sometimes to mention other people. God, Will doesn’t even feel real anymore. 

“We can go out there,” Harry offers. “Make a day out of it.”

So, on the first real day of summer, when the temperature has risen to an uncomfortable level, they go back out into the wilderness, equipped with bug spray and beach towels and a picnic lunch.

And the water feels nice, cold and fresh. They can’t swim in the pool anymore; they need to clean it, but it’s nice to be in the pond. Everything feels blue. Everything feels just like how it used to feel before with one, just one, exception.

“Is this everything you remember it being?” Harry asks, swimming up to her with long strokes.

She grins. “Yeah, everything and more.”

They end up sunburnt, bright pink for days after. Neither care. Allie doesn’t remember her trips with Will ever feeling quite this bright.

-

It’s dark outside. The stars seem brighter here than they were back home. Sometimes they’ll sit and pick apart the sky. She can’t remember the different constellations, so they’ll make new ones up. It’s dark outside, and they’re sitting by the pool, staring at the sky, when he presses his lips to hers. 

“What was that for?” she asks, but she’s smiling, so wide and so bright. 

“I don’t know,” he says. “I just didn’t know you before, Allie, like at all.”

“I don’t think I really knew you either.”

He pauses, stares at her. He’s always staring at her. “I really like you, Pressman.” Fuck. She pulls him upstairs, wonders if they’re drunk enough to maybe just forget about all of this later before realising, halfway through slipping off her top, that they’re not drunk at all.

And later, later while she lays beside him in bed, she admits softly, “I don’t want this to just be because there’s no one else.” She’s leaning into him, blinking at the ceiling. They put up glow in the dark star stickers a few days ago, standing on his bed and pressing them into the ceiling. The stickers remind her of being little, of that obsession she had with stars when she was still in elementary school. He’s playing with her hair, and she wonders if he’s looking at the stars too.. 

“I think I would’ve always chosen you, Allie,” he says slowly. 

“Even if this never happened?” The stars aren’t glowing, not really. In the dark, she can only barely make out their shapes.

“Yeah,” he says easily, casually, like it’s absolutely nothing. “I would’ve gotten you to go to one of my parties, and we would’ve been beside the pool with some of my dad’s expensive scotch, and you would’ve started to talk, and the second I got to know you, it would’ve been over for everyone else.” 

She sighs, tears her focus from the ceiling and faces him. “God, Harry, you’re too good at this.”

He grins at her. “Too good at what?”

Allie rolls her eyes, shifts closer to him still, and whispers, “You know what,” before kissing him again and again and again.

-

They spend summer outside, at the pond with Charlie both of them covered in bug spray, eating the strawberries Harry planted forever ago, and the wild blueberries and blackberries found in patches around the edges of the town. The blackberries dye their fingers and lips a deep purple, but neither can find it in them to care.

It’ll be a hundred degrees out, the digital thermometer in the kitchen window reading triple digits in bright red, and Harry’ll turn the AC up as high as it’ll go, until it’s cold enough that Allie needs a sweater and socks to walk around comfortable. 

It’s always one of his sweaters. 

They avoid town, any leftover food from before rotting now. She thinks that they have enough powdered egg and milk, enough cured meat and dried fruit, to last them a lifetime. And there’s canned everything too. Neither worry about food.

Really, they don’t worry much about anything.

“I got into Harvard,” he tells her while they sit inside on the couch, side by side. It’s bright outside but they’ve drawn all of the blinds. “God, back in the real world I would’ve been packing for Cambridge.”

“Do you think all of that’s just gone, our entire lives leading up to waking up on the bus?” she asks. If that world is still out there, if people are still going on in their absence, then Cassandra’s probably already off at Yale for the summer classes she’d wanted to take. 

“I don’t know.”

Allie pauses, wraps the fuzzy blanket around her just a little bit tighter. Harry’s got his feet resting atop the coffee table, casual, like it’s something he did before all of this. “I’d be working on college essays right now, or at my grandparents house in Nantucket. It would’ve been my last real summer before college.”

“Well I’m happy that we got to spend your last real summer together, Pressman,” he says, and she smiles, beams at him, almost forgets that they didn’t really have a choice.

(And they spend summer in bed, too, or pressed up against counter tops, or laying on the couch, her fingers in his hair and his lips on hers, on her neck, sucking on that one spot above her collarbone until it leaves a mark.

And back home, maybe this wouldn’t have worked, maybe they would’ve hid everything, and it all would’ve been too much to handle. Maybe she would’ve covered the purple with concealer and lied to her sister. Here, though, it doesn’t seem to matter much, if he leaves a mark. There’s no one else around to see it. It doesn’t really feel like a secret.)

-

The days begin to get shorter, the trees change color, and Allie starts to really believe that this is all her life is ever going to be.

They cross off days as they pass on an old calendar that they hang on the fridge alongside sticky notes full of to-do lists. They farm, spend days cleaning up the old community garden and picking the tomatoes that survived through a summer full of Harry and Allie’s mess of survival instincts. They kill an entire crop of lettuce even though it’s supposed to be one of the easier crops, but grow a couple of carrots that actually taste okay.

There’s a notebook on the table in the study with detailed plans for next year. It feels weird, making plans for another year just like this one.

“You really think we’ll make it?” Harry asks her. They’re walking back from the garden, and it’s starting to rain, just a sprinkle. The air still feels like summer, though, even if the sky reminds her of deep fall. “You think we won’t go crazy here?”

She shrugs, bumping her shoulder into his. They’re facing the sunset, walking towards it, bathed in the orange and pink. “I mean, we haven’t lost it yet. Maybe we’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, maybe we’ll be fine,” he repeats, and he grabs her hand, squeezes it. She doesn’t know who it’s for, her or himself.

-

For Thanksgiving, they grab a frozen turkey from the grocery store.

“And we’ll have to make cranberry sauce, and fresh rolls since the ones at the store have gone moldy,” she says. And they’re pushing a shopping cart, tossing things in as they walk.

“Apple pie?”

“No,” she whines. “Pumpkin, obviously.”

“Pumpkin pie is disgusting, Pressman,” Harry says, and she makes a face back at him. He grins at her.

“I don’t know why anyone would want apple pie without vanilla ice cream,” she argues. They’re so close now that she has to tilt her head back to stare up at him, but that doesn’t really matter. 

“I don't know why anyone would want to eat pumpkin pie at all.”

“Maybe because it’s delicious,” Allie offers, and he shakes his head. 

“I bet you’re going to tell me that you like marshmallows on your sweet potatoes.”

She gasps, loudly and dramatically, watching for his smile.

“God, Pressman,” he says, pushing the cart forward, throwing a can of pumpkin puree into the cart. “You’re lucky you’re cute.”

“Ditto, Bingham.”

Once upon a time, Thanksgiving felt safe, untouchable. She’d go to her grandparents house, wherever they were. Usually it was Nantucket, but one year they were in Florida and it was so bright and warm. No matter what, her mom would always bring a box of recipe cards with her, and Cassandra would talk about how everything’s online now, mom, and there’d be a football game playing somewhere in the background, or maybe a dog show, or a parade. 

Here, Harry makes her sweet potato casserole with marshmallows on top. She’s afraid to tell him exactly how much that means to her, doesn’t, not until later, when she’s laying beside him, when it’s dark and she can only barely make out the edges of his features.

And she’s a little wine drunk still, or maybe just regular drunk from that bottle of whiskey he’d pulled out. Her skin is bare and he’s pulled her close and she thinks that maybe he’s already asleep when she whispers, “I think I love you.” 

And she’s not sure if she’s actually said it, or if this is all in her head, she’s not sure until he whispers back, soft and only barely there, “I love you too, Allie.”

-

It snows on Christmas, big flakes that fall from the sky and stick to the front walk, to the pool cover, that blanket everything in white. They don’t really celebrate Christmas, don’t put together a fake tree or wrap presents in red and green paper. No, they spend the day in bed, wrapped up in his blankets. They sleep through it.

(But at some point, later, they go out in the snow. They build a snowman out in the front yard, fight over what to make the nose. Harry grabs a scarf for the snowman and takes pictures of Allie standing next to it on an old camera she’d thought was just for decoration. Later, he’ll dangle mistletoe over her head, and she’ll laugh as she kisses him. That’ll feel more like Christmas than the real day.)

-

“I wish we could watch the ball drop.”

“God, I wonder if New York even exists anymore.”

“Do you think we could walk all the way there?”

His face scrunches up. “No.”

“I miss being able to feel like there was a whole world outside of this town,” Allie says wistfully. Her head’s resting on his shoulder. The electric fireplace is turned on, and it’s snowing outside, just barely though. She doesn’t even think it’s sticking.

That doesn’t matter. 

It’s New Year’s Eve, and they’ve been stuck here for months now, months and months and months.

“There’s stuff out there,” Harry says, and he’s trying to sound reassuring, she can tell. It’s the same voice he uses when she can’t stop crying, when she feels like the world is closing in on her, when she feels like she can’t breathe. It’s the voice he uses on those days when she doesn’t want to get out of bed, the voice that says, soft enough that it feels like a secret, it’s okay to hate this place.

“There’s the pond,” he continues. “And that apple orchard, that field where we thought we saw a turkey.”

“You know what I mean,” she says. “It’s not the same. There’s no New York City anymore.”

It’s quiet. She can hear the snow falling outside, can hear the fire. Harry tops off her champagne glass and she turns to him. 

“What’s your new year’s resolution this year, Bingham?”

He laughs, and they both ignore how heavy it felt just moments before. They seem to do that a lot, change the subject when it all feels like too much. “Haven’t come up with one yet.”

“Mine is to drink more water,” she tells him. And he laughs again, the corners of his eyes crinkling, and, fuck, he did nothing to deserve to be that good looking.

“That’s a good one, Pressman. Might have to steal it from you.”

“Feel free.”

Harry sets an alarm for midnight on his phone. He kisses her just as it goes off, pulling her close and whispering happy new year, Pressman.  

She smiles. It doesn’t quite reach her eyes, but maybe that doesn’t matter, maybe she’s just tired. “Happy new year.”

God, she misses home.

(But she knows she wouldn’t go back unless she could take him with her. She knows that it’s the same for him.)

-

On his birthday, he pulls out an old scotch, one with an expensive looking label, and they take turns passing it back and forth like cheap vodka. “Do you think it would’ve been like this with someone else?” she asks. He stares at her. He’s drunk and she thinks that maybe she’s drunk too, bases the idea on the fuzziness around the edges of everything.

“I don’t know,” he breathes out and that is not the answer she wanted. No, not at all. She thinks it’s the right answer, though, that it’s probably her answer too. “But I’m glad it was you.”

“Me too.”

-

They’re a year in, exactly a year in, the day the buses return. And it’s dark outside, late at night, late enough that the moon is the only real source of light outside, when she spots the buses driving by the front of the house, watches as the street lamps light up in their wake.

“Harry did you--?” she asks because, fuck, maybe she’s imagining things.

“Yeah. Do you think we should--?”

“Yeah.”

And they take the Maserati, drive it fast down the road, fast enough that they can spot the buses just parking, can spot the people unloading. And there’s Cassandra, right in the middle of the crowd, and Will and Becca and Campbell and Helena. It’s overwhelming, the number of people, she can only barely remember being surrounded like that. It feels a little like a past life.

“Fuck,” Harry whispers beside her. They’re at a stop, and Harry’s shifting into park, staring at the crowd and then her and then back at the people. Cassandra’s so close, close enough that Allie can see her looking around, looking for her, Allie realizes. Cassandra’s looking for her.

Allie’s out of the car before she can think things through. She’s out of the car and running, running towards the group, running towards Cassandra. She thinks maybe Harry is following her, wonders if his footfalls are real or imagined. She wonders if any of this is real. 

“Cassandra,” she calls out. She feels a bit like she can’t breathe. “Oh my god, Cassandra.”

Her sister stares at her, squints and smiles and only looks a little confused. “You okay, Allie?” she asks, like everything else is somehow normal. And Harry’s beside Allie now, standing just barely in front of her, like he’s trying to protect her or something. 

Allie moves closer to Harry, just one step closer. She stares at Cassandra. “Yeah.”

“How’d you get off the bus so early? You weren’t there when I woke up. Thought you might have disappeared or something,” Cassandra says, light and casual. She glances at Harry. “Did you get off the bus early too.”

Harry blinks at her. “Something like that.”

And Allie can’t believe any of this, wonders what the fuck is going on. There’s just so much to take in, so many people. It’s loud, for the first time in forever. God, it’s so loud. 

“Cass,” she says slowly, trying very hard to take at least some of this in. “Did you just wake up, on the bus? Were you going to the mountains for some camping trip?”

Cassandra laughs, like Allie’s telling a joke, making up some funny situation. “Yeah, but then there was a rockslide so they sent us home. I was just about to call mom to see if she could pick us up.”

Harry stiffens beside her, moves closer. She feels like she can’t breathe again, like her chest is tightening up. 

“I don’t think mom is here. Or dad. Or anyone,” Allie says, and Cassandra laughs again. Someone nearby shouts something about no one picking up. Allie already knows this part of the story. 

“You sure you’re okay, Allie?”

“Cass, Harry and I have been here for, for a year, and this is it, this is all there is. There’s no one home waiting for us and no way out and--” And, god, she sounds frantic, she sounds crazy. She almost doesn’t believe her own words.

“Allie,” Cassandra repeats, sharper than before. She sounds worried now, worried for the first time. People are starting to leave. Allie thinks she spots Will somewhere off in the distance. He’s standing beside Kelly. It’s been a year for her, for Harry. It hasn’t for anyone else. “Are you okay?”

“It’s true, Cassandra,” Harry says, and Cassandra turns to him, her eyes flitting between Allie and Harry like she’s only a step away from figuring everything out. “Go to the grocery store, or anyone’s house, and you’ll be able to tell. Try to leave town.” 

The crowd’s nearly gone. Cassandra stares at them. “I don’t believe you,” she finally says.

And Allie’s desperate now, wants to prove that this moment isn’t just some fever dream, that the last year of her life wasn’t just some fever dream. “Let’s just go home, Cass. We drove here; we can drive home.” She can’t remember the last time she thought of the Pressman residence as home. She doesn’t know how to explain that to Cassandra, though, doesn’t know how to explain any of this to her sister. 

Harry drives fast and Allie sits shotgun. He’s grabbed her hand, won’t stop rubbing circles into her wrist. She can’t stop turning her head to the backseat to stare at her sister. Their phones won’t stop vibrating, people texting and calling. They ignore it. 

And they find the house covered in a thin layer of dust. There’s no food in the fridge, no, Harry and Allie cleaned it out months ago, and half of Allie’s things are gone. 

Cassandra turns to them. “What the fuck is going on?”

“We don’t know.”

-

At some point, Kelly will come by Harry’s house and spot Allie on the couch wrapped in a blanket, and will ask what are we, Harry, and Harry will say, with this level of certainty Allie’s almost not used to, I don’t think we’re anything anymore. At some point, Will will tell Allie you’re different, and it’ll take all Allie has not to yell about a year spent nearly alone. 

The night the buses return, Harry and Allie will spend hours explaining things. They’ll go to that party, and drink cheap beer, and hyperventilate into paper bags. Even with everyone else suddenly there, this new world won’t feel any more normal than before.

And it won't be until later, until after things are just barely explained, that Allie will look around and realize that she hasn't seen Sam or Grizz. She'll wonder if they ever got off the bus, and later, later while she's laying beside Harry, while it's late and she can't sleep, she'll wonder where exactly they could be.

She'll wonder if the end could really be that similar to the start.

But I live in a hologram with you