Chapter Text
Small towns had a special kind of charm to them. People waved when you were driving down main street, bank tellers and grocery store cashiers seemed to know everyone by name and family history, secrets were few and far between and usually gossiped about over coffee at the one single café in town or in between farmer’s market stalls on the weekends.
Life moved slower in small towns. There was a kind of leisure and steadiness to the current of everyday interactions there. Julie Molina could appreciate that type of stability, the way nothing ever really changed no matter how fast the world spun on around them.
That wasn’t how she had grown up. LA was too busy for stability, too focused on being on the cusp of the Next Big Thing to really take the time to appreciate the things that already existed. Julie had always thought she was like that, too. Constantly moving and changing and growing into the biggest version of herself that she could be.
But things were different now. The Julie that thrived on all of that busyness had been cared for by a doting mother and father, watered with enough praise and support to grow an entire forest out of her dreams. No one had prepared her for what might happen to all those roots if half of the sun was suddenly gone from her life. Losing her mother was a pain that couldn’t be compared.
Leaving the hustling, bustling streets of LA for the quieter pace of whatever Small Town USA Tía Victoria had decided to settle in had changed her. Her hopes and plans for the future were just slowly starting to come back to life. Her mother’s death had been like a wildfire, grief ripping a blazing path of destruction through the garden that had been carefully cultivated and leaving nothing but ash in its wake. But somehow, slowly, the greenery was returning. Hope springing eternal, even with the weight of lost love bogging her down.
As difficult as it had been to leave LA, Julie had to admit this had been the right move. The town the Molinas had moved to was quiet and calm, the exact kind of port in a storm that they had all needed after losing Rose. Tía had been living there for long enough that she was considered a local now, and her family was welcomed with open arms and sympathetic, all-knowing smiles.
Carlos was flourishing, joining the soccer and baseball teams at the middle school where he was slowly becoming kind of a star player. He had made friends easily, bright and bubbly kid that he was, and it had helped him to have Tia closer to them again. She wasn’t the same as mom, but there were parts of mom that lived on inside of her, and that was almost as good.
Ray wasn’t as obsessively protective anymore. LA had become too bright for him without Rose. Too fast and unpredictable, no longer a place he could trust with his family. But in their new town he wasn’t alone anymore. The world wasn’t as scary when it was smaller, familiar faces sprinkled along every block and store front in town. He was more comfortable now that he knew he could check in with one or two people and immediately have a wealth of information as to where his kids were and what was happening around town. It made him feel more secure, and Julie was pretty grateful for that.
It had affected her too. The slower pace, the helpful hands, the steady thrum of support that seemed to be a living, breathing part of small-town living. Everyone knowing everything might sound like a nightmare, but it offered a sense of day-to-day expectation that was perfect for a family still recovering from being torn apart. Knowing that things wouldn’t change every single morning was a weird sort of blessing. A simple guideline that was helping them patch up the pieces that had been left behind in Rose’s wake.
Julie was letting herself heal here. Letting herself change and grow in different ways than she had planned, but still good ways. Necessary ways. Her best friend Flynn wasn’t as much of a fan. She missed Julie, missed their togetherness at school, their planned future of the two of them against the world. Double Trouble could conquer anything, but only if they were together. And Julie could understand that kind of loneliness. She felt it too when she thumbed through the social media notifications of the friends she had left behind, all happy faces and new adventures.
But Julie couldn’t see that future for herself anymore. She couldn’t meet Flynn in that fantasy world when all of it had been planned with her mother at her side. She didn’t want it without Rose. Flynn tried, but she just didn’t get that. Moving had allowed enough space for Flynn to start to accept that. Enough space for Julie to be able to lick her wounds in private for a bit. They would make their way back together eventually. Soul sisters couldn’t be separated forever, but for now, it was for the best.
Julie tried to tell herself it was also for the best that she hadn’t made friends as easily as Carlos. She didn’t really want or need those kinds of attachments right now. She wouldn’t stay here past high school graduation. She didn’t think she would go back to LA necessarily, but she definitely wouldn’t be staying in this town. This was her stop gap. Her place to heal and grieve and process without having to worry about anyone watching and judging. If no one knew her, no one would be able to have any opinions about the way she lived her life, and Julie had found she kind of liked the freedom that offered her. Kind of liked being able to live in that greyspace where she didn’t have to be anything. She could just... be.
She had carved out a solitary existence for herself here. She went to school, she did her work, she came home. She spent time with her dad and Tía, watched every game Carlos played in. At night she would sneak out of her first story bedroom window and walk to the high school track that was three blocks away. Sometimes she would walk laps on the synthetic rubber, thinking, feeling, moving her body so that she could shut off her mind. Other times, she would lay on her back in the middle of the field, eyes open on the stars above her.
When Julie was little she had been obsessed with the idea of stars and constellations. All those tiny little dots were really massive balls of chemicals and gas, billions of miles away from them. Some of the stars weren’t even alive anymore but time hadn’t moved fast enough to catch up with their death yet. The thought of it made Julie’s head spin, like she couldn’t quite fathom the infiniteness of the universe even though she desperately wanted to.
Rose had gone stargazing with her a lot. When Julie would wake up in the middle of the night, restless and full of energy, her mom would bundle her into an old blanket and they would sit out on the back porch, staring at the sky. Her mom’s finger would trace the constellations, connecting the dots for Julie to see the images they represented. She would name them, in English and in Spanish, tell the stories behind their creation. Julie would be lulled to sleep in her arms, visions of stars dancing behind her eyelids and her mother’s soft voice weaving itself into a kind of lullaby that followed her into her dreams.
It was comforting, now, to do the same thing. Lie beneath the stars, trace the patterns of constellations with her own fingers, whisper the names and stories to herself. It was a part of her mother living on within her, a part that wasn’t as painful as the others that she still kept locked away in a box at the back of her heart. She never fell asleep. It was usually too cold and damp for that, but the repetition of the old tradition would settle her enough to make the three block walk back to the house they lived in so she could climb inside and finally go to sleep.
She liked to think that those nights were the time when this small town seemed to understand her best. Like they had come to a kind of arrangement together. Julie was never loud enough to disturb anyone else, never destructive or dangerous. She was perfectly respectable, just trying to find her own little corner of solitude and silence. The town offered her a quiet sanctuary in those late hours, a place where she could actually feel like she was at peace. She never saw anyone else, never had any trouble with leaving her bedroom window open and unlocked while she was gone. The town offered her those hours unaffected, exactly what she needed.
And then, something changed. Someone else started appearing at the track in the middle of the night. Not when Julie was there, but in the time right before she arrived. She could tell. She knew the way the town breathed at night, knew the sounds and sights of 2 am better than she knew them during the daytime. Something was different at the track now when she would arrive. Someone else was going there, carving their own personal time out in the middle of the night, and Julie felt a little miffed about it. That was supposed to be her thing. Her time. Her place. She didn’t want to have to worry about getting caught or running into someone. In LA that would have meant trouble, maybe even danger. Here, it meant the gossip mill churning until it reached her father and Tía and then she would be screwed.
She tried to change it up. Different times of the night, sometimes earlier when she was still risking getting caught by her dad or another night owl in the neighborhood, sometimes later, the darkest hours of night that came right before the dawning of a new day. The town worked with her, it seemed. She managed to continue her trips to the track without getting caught or running into the other mystery visitor. But the fact that she could tell they were still out there somewhere, every night, made her skin itch. She couldn’t achieve the same level of peace anymore. And that was when Julie started to get angry.
She hadn’t asked for much in this world. She hadn’t kicked up a fuss when they moved, hadn’t resisted the therapy appointments her dad had forced her into attending, she didn’t even let herself break down in front of her family. She made sure she did her homework, got good grades, and stayed out of trouble. The one thing, the one thing, that she asked for in return was a quiet couple of hours in the middle of the night where she could fall to pieces by herself, underneath the blanket of stars that had always reassured her the most. And she wasn’t able to have that anymore. It felt like a cruel twist of fate that the town had given her a safe haven only to yank it out from under her the second she had started to settle into it.
She planned a bit of a stakeout then. She told her dad she had to stay late at the library on Friday night to study. He didn’t think twice about checking when the library closed – not now that they were small town dwellers instead of city slickers – and Tía was miraculously out of town for work until the following morning. Julie planned to set herself up underneath the bleachers on the side of the track by 7 pm. She would bring snacks and water so she would be fully set to stand guard for the night, watching for whoever had been sneaking in. She would even bring a book just in case she needed a distraction or a reason to blame for camping out.
She could wait it out until at least 10:30, maybe even 11:00, before she would have to report back home. Then, she would need about 30-45 minutes before she would be able to sneak out and go back to her hiding spot. It wasn’t a foolproof plan, but it was her best shot. If the universe was on her side, whoever it was wouldn’t show up in the small gap of time where she wouldn’t be lying in wait to catch them.
She wasn’t actually sure what she would do when she figured out who it was. She didn’t really have any more claim to the track than anyone else here; small towns left their high school recreation areas open to the public when school wasn’t in session because there wasn’t enough room for more than one track in the town. Julie had no real way of knowing if it was another student or an adult, but she had a feeling. A vibe that seemed to hang in the air after the mystery person’s disappearance. Julie had picked up on it over the weeks and she secretly thought it felt kind of familiar. Almost like whoever else was going out there in the middle of the night had reasons similar to her own for doing so. She tried not to linger on that thought because it was easier to ride the wave of righteous anger than it was to empathize and think about someone else needing an escape just as desperately as she did.
It was already chilly when she finally made her way over to the track. Julie spread a blanket out underneath the bleachers, backpack settled securely next to her side, so she had all of her things close by for easy access if she got caught and had to make a quick escape. She tried not to dwell on how ridiculous the whole thing was. It was the first thing she had felt passionate about in a long time, so she was going to indulge herself just this little bit.
Slowly, the rest of the town went to sleep around her. Cars slowed and then stopped altogether on the side streets. Front porch lights winked on, and interior lights were dimmed once curtains were drawn only to fade to black as the house occupants settled in for the night. Julie hadn’t ever really watched the town bed down like this before. There was a kind of sleepy magic to it that made her own body start to feel weighed down, eyelids drooping as the words on the page in her book blurred in front of her. She shook herself a few times, curled her arms even tighter around her knees, and fought back a yawn. She hadn’t ever fallen asleep out here before. She wasn’t about to fall asleep now, not on this most important night during a crucial mission to discover the identity of her midnight mystery person.
Crickets began to chirp lowly, the only sound in the still air. Julie listened to the song they played out around her, something about it soothing and a bit mesmerizing the longer she listened. Like a lullaby designed specifically for her. And then, before she could stop herself, her eyes were closing, and her brain was shutting down, and the rest of the world faded as she lost her grip on consciousness.