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So, the Pickaxe has burned to the ground.
Gregg’s text is full of keysmashes and lacking in details, still that much is clear: Bea's hardware shop – her dad's, technically, but if the world was fair, blah blah – exists no more. Mae lets a long sigh scuttle out of her and stares at her phone’s screen until it turns off.
She only said that as a joke, that one time. Bea knows. Of course. She has to.
Nevertheless.
With a grunt, Mae rolls down from her bed and stretches. Something in her back pops. It’s the way she sleeps, probably. Or sits. Or stands. Eh. Nothing hurts so bad, so she’s good.
That’s a good philosophy.
She gingerly sniffs the underarms of her shirt before deciding it’s fine for another day, and looks out of her dorm window. It’s a sunny day at Lennox college. She thinks it's all wrong. She thinks it should be raining.
The urge to run seizes her suddenly. It’s an old friend — she’s always been on the run, since That Day — but there’s something different, this time.
She doesn’t want to run from something.
She wants to run towards.
Bea stands by the rubble of the place she thought she would be chained to her whole life.
She feels nothing.
Where she expects to find all the appropriate reactions — grief, confusion, anger, even relief — there’s only a void. Maybe the person who set fire to the shop committed an act of burglary too and robbed her of her emotions.
That would check out.
From her numb bubble, she overhears her father talking to a couple of firefighters and a police officer. He's the most animated she’s seen him in years. Is this all it takes to have him back? If only she'd known.
There’s no doubt about it being arson, it seems. While they were smothering the flames, they found the remains of a bottle that had no business being there, and the conclusion is obvious.
Good.
This changes nothing.
A small crowd has gathered. They said the smoke could be seen all the way to Bright Harbor. Bea lets her eyes wander from her father to the familiar faces around her, but all she sees are the hungry stares of a cat watching a canary. Bea doesn’t feel like she could fly away.
Then she hears a voice she never thought she’d hear right now.
“Hey, Selmers, how’s it going? Professor, good to see you. Hi, Lori. Have any of you seen Bea?”
Mae yelps when her childhood friend appears from nowhere and seizes her wrist. Well, the finding-Bea part was easy, at least. A grin spreads easily on her lips, because despite the circumstances — despite the fact that they haven’t really been talking to each other since Mae went back to college, and Mae doesn't know why, but if Bea needs space she's going to give her space, because that's what good friends do. Right? Yeah. Anyway, despite that , despite literally everything , she’s still the happiest when she’s with Bea.
That’s why it feels like she's kicked in the shins when Bea snarls: “What are you doing here?”
Happy to see you too, Mae wants to say, but she bites the snark back. Not while Bea is – inexplicably – angry at her. See? She’s improving. The goodest friend. “Gregg told me.” And then, swallowing her hesitations: “Are you all right?”
Instead of answering, Bea runs a hand on her face. For once she doesn’t have a cigarette, real or fake, hanging from the corner of her mouth, but oh boy does she look like she could use one. “Let’s get out of here. Dad?” She goes on even if he doesn't seem to have heard her. “I’ve an errand to run. Call me if you need me. Ugh, I don’t even know if he has my number.” She shakes her head. She doesn’t look at Mae, not even once. “Let’s go.”
Mae has no idea where they’re going or what’s going on, but she manages to rein in her curiosity until they walk past the tunnel entrance. Bea’s silence is barbed wire, it's prickly and it hurts, and Mae has to break it. “What happened?”
Her friend – if she’s still that, if Mae hasn't somehow ruined things again – stops so suddenly that Mae bumps into her and tumbles on the sidewalk, yelping when a sharp pain flares up in her palms.
It’s nothing compared to what she feels when she looks up and sees that Bea’s turned around and her eyes are full of angry tears. “No. You don't get to show up like nothing happened and ask questions.”
Out of breath and out of words, Mae can only stare. Bea’s sharp and dry and sarcastic and cutting, but she’s never been cruel. Don't cry. Don't cry. “What did I do?” she asks eventually. Her throat hurts, like that’s the part of her that’s been scraped on the sidewalk instead of her hands.
Bea's eyes go wide. “What? Are you for real, Mae?” It takes her another couple of seconds to realise that no, Mae really doesn't know, and the look of disappointment on her face hurts almost as bad as her anger. She opens her mouth and closes it, hands balled into fists, as if she’s considering either leaving Mae on the sidewalk and walking away or stooping down to punch her. “You abandoned me,” she says instead, with a hollow voice. “Again.”
They haven’t really talked to each other since Mae’s goodbye party. That much is true.
Thing is, Mae doesn’t remember the party very well. Or, like, at all. It still takes so little to get her drunk. She’s faced pure evil and survived, but two paper cups of shitty beer is all it takes to knock her down.
To be fair, she’d been dreading Bea’s reaction to the news that she was fucking off to college again. She’d almost prepared a speech, but she’s the queen of winging it. Has a reputation to keep and all that.
Procrastinating until the night before leaving hasn’t been her smartest decision. Apparently.
(The Speech That Never Was would have gone something like, I know you hated me because you thought I was abandoning you, but this time is going to be different. )
When Mae arrived at the Party Barn that night, she knew she needed to talk to Bea.
She got very drunk instead.
(I’m going to kick myself if I ever hurt you again. Just watch me.)
She’s fairly sure they’d talked. One way or another, Bea must have sussed out Mae’s plans, because her first text the next morning — which Mae read with bleary eyes on the bus — was Here’s hoping this time college agrees with you, which was. Encouraging.
tnx, she’d replied.
So. How are we?
Mae didn’t pay much attention to the “we”. sdfjksjdhflkjdhfs i rergert everytnhn gthat happened l ast night
(I’m going to try and be the friend you deserve. A worthy half of the MaeBea duo.)
Bea never answered to that text.
“Wait.” Mae’s missing something. She has to be. She can’t be this stupid and overlook something obvious. “You stopped speaking to me. I… thought you needed space.” Her brain is trying to catch up, but it’s falling woefully short.
She’s still down on the sidewalk, but at least there are no witnesses, since everyone’s still at the ruins of the Pickaxe. She’s propped up on her sore palms, which isn’t exactly comfortable, but she doesn’t feel like getting up (she doesn’t want to take up too much space).
That was the wrong thing to say . Bea scoffs, disgusted, looking away as she wipes at her eyes openly, angrily. “I can't even look at you right now.”
Mae tries to lean so she can be in Bea’s eyesight. “Well, let’s talk! I'm here now!”
Bea’s head whips towards her. “So that’s what it takes for you to show up? Do I need to set fire to the Snack Falcon next time?”
Mae’s eyes must take up even more space than usual in her face. “ No, you should just answer my texts. What are you talking about?”
“ I regret everything. How was I supposed to answer that?”
There’s a painful crack in Bea’s voice, but Mae doesn’t have time to feel heartbroken about it. Finally, she has a lead. “O-kay. Can you be a liiiittle more specific?”
It’s really hard to tell, but Bea’s cheeks look darker. Is she… blushing? “Maybe I don’t have much experience, but.” She stops, crosses her arms, looks everywhere but at Mae before she finishes the sentence. “But, when I kiss someone, I mean it.”
This is… such a random sentence that Mae is caught off guard. “What.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Mae!” Bea shouts, letting her arms down and finally — finally looking at her. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about!”
“I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about!” Mae shouts as well, because she sees no other way to drive home the point that they’ve been having two separate conversations the whole time.
“You seriously don’t remember? The night before you left? At the party?”
“I think I was a bit drunk.” The biggest understatement this side of forever. Then two dots connect in Mae’s mind, and she freezes. “W— Uh… Did something happen at the party?”
Some of the anger slips from Bea’s demeanour. Not all of it, but the white-hot rage slowly turns into the fire on the smallest burner of the stove. “Yeah, Mae, something did happen.”
At some point, Mae will stand up. As soon as her whole world stops trembling. As it is, she’d probably lose her balance and risk being hit by a passing car. Would Bea save her? Right now, it’s unclear. “Cool. Can you… tell me about it?”
“No, I can’t!” Bea’s voice is shrill, now, which means she’s embarrassed. Oh, dear. “You said you regretted everything that happened!”
If she survives, Mae’s going to ask Angus if it’s possible to die of awkwardness. She has to know. “I don’t remember anything that happened! I was drunk, Bea! I was a drunk dumbass!”
At that last sentence, Bea laughs, and Mae almost cries with relief. “Oh, I know! I’ve made peace with the fact that I have feelings for a dumbass.”
She’s not looking at Mae as she tells her that, as she tells her that she, Beatrice Santello, de facto ex owner of Possum Springs’ only hardware shop, moderator of the local young socialists Chattrbox group, smoker, goth, sensible driver, secretly romantic, had feelings for her.
Has. Present tense.
Holy shit.
And Mae is still sitting on the sidewalk.
Honestly, Bea should have predicted it. Not the irritating part where she can’t stay mad at Mae for shit. That part is a given.
No, she should have foreseen that, just after she confessed she has feelings for Mae — because of fucking course she has, she wouldn’t be so upset if she didn’t care — the dumbass she’s in love with will try to stand up too fast and fall down again.
Before she has time to think, Bea’s holding her, if not upright, at least steadily. And there’s probably a metaphor there, in Mae unconsciously grasping at Bea’s dress sleeves, in Bea reaching out and holding on to something that’s hurt her in the past and will probably hurt her again in the future (but not on purpose, not ever on purpose, and she will do her best to remember it when she feels like giving up, she promises), in them both, just about to lose balance but never quite reaching the tipping point.
But she has thrown her stupid heart over an invisible fence, and she feels so much lighter.
Slowly, with much blinking, Mae seems to focus on Bea’s face. Her pupils are wide and, while she’s too much of a disheveled disaster to be described as pretty, Bea struggles to find a better adjective. Cripes, she’s got it bad.
This is the time for some sappy declaration, for the final close up before the word Fin appears on screen.
Bea looks deep into Mae’s eyes. “The fuck is wrong with you?”
“Missed breakfast today,” Mae explains.
Of course. “You know better.”
Mae shrugs and they both wobble for a moment. “Better than missing the bus.”
“You’re dead weight, Mae.”
“That’s a bit cold.”
“No, I mean literally. My arms are starting to hurt. Can you stand?”
Carefully, they establish that Mae can, and they stand awkwardly next to each other for a moment, waiting to see who’ll take the first step.
Then Mae hits Bea’s arm with a punch that’s a little too forceful. “Hey, you saved me. You literally rescued me a moment ago. You almost bridal-carried me.”
Rubbing her arm, Bea rolls her eyes. “I changed my mind. I take everything back.”
“No, you don’t. You liiike me.”
“Not anymore.” Bea closes her eyes for a second, wishes for a cigarette.
(She’ll never remember, perhaps mercifully, that the day before she put a cigarette down on a shelf in the store, just for a moment, to fix a loosened lightbulb, and then forgot about it.
She’ll never link the broken bottle the police found among the rubbles to the stash she keeps there for a nightcap after the annual harfest play.
She’ll never put two and two together, not consciously, at least, because the cigarette that burned the Pickaxe to the ground is the last she’ll ever smoke.
She’ll never think too much about the fire because she feels a bit guilty about how happy she is that it happened.
Because she had the guts to confront her father about it, telling him that she would use the insurance money to build a paper-maché castle, to send him to therapy, to fund a scholarship of one dollar a year for a lucky local teen, but that she would categorically not be reopening the shop. (He will grumble and agree to the therapy thing and never once point out that the insurance money was technically his, as much as the Pickaxe had been his. Technically.) Because eventually it brought her father back. Because it had given her a nice little stash to fall back on during her first year of college, when she finally felt ready. Because it brought Mae back.)
“Oh, no.” Mae whines. “Bea! I forgot our first kiss. Was it good?”
Fine. This is going to take a while to get used to. “I’m not taking questions right now. I hate to be the grownup in this conversation, but we need to talk. If.” She hesitates. She’s always hated this part, the part where she blushes and stammers. So transparent. It’s a bad look on her, really. “If you want. To do this, I mean. If you, yeah, if you wanna do this.”
“You’re so embarrassed.” Mae’s eyes narrow with delighted mischief.
Bea starts walking down the street, blushing even more furiously. “Come on. I’ll buy you breakfast.”
The city is still empty, except for the occasional rustling of little creatures among the leaves, and Bea doesn’t look back. She knows that Mae will not say no to free breakfast, that she’ll scramble to catch up, and if her heartbeat is quickened by the hope of small, soft fingers interlacing with hers, well. That’s nobody’s business but hers.