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Max stepped off the bus, rubbing her arms through her hoodie. The weather had apparently finally decided to remember it was October, not June, and the daytime temperatures had dropped from the 80s last week to 50s today. It was supposed to rain for most of the rest of the week too, and already a few fat drops were splatting onto the sidewalk. Honestly, the rain was almost familiar, now; five years in Seattle had made it seem like the norm, and sunshine very much not. There’d only been maybe three real rainstorms since she’d returned to Arcadia Bay back at the end of August. She wasn’t exactly looking forward to more, but she did at least know how to deal with them.
Glancing both ways, Max hurried across the street from the bus stop to her destination: the Two Whales diner. God, it had been so long, and yet somehow, it seemed so incredibly familiar. The faded blue paint, those ridiculous, neon-lined cartoon whales on the roof, the tiniest amount of dinginess that made the diner feel cozy and not chain-restaurant sterile. As she pushed the door open, the rain started in earnest, leaving her feeling grateful she’d made it in time. She definitely should have worn something more substantial than just the hoodie; if it was still going like this when she left, she was going to get drenched.
The interior of the place was, if anything, even more familiar than the outside, enough to give her a sense of déjà vu. She knew it had been half a decade since she’d last walked through these doors, but it could just as easily have been last week. A range of people occupied the stools along the counter, from truckers to fishermen to cops to Mr. Arngrew, Blackwell’s office administrator. It was a Saturday, so Max was in no danger of getting in trouble for being here at 10:30 in the morning, but she still felt a reflexive flicker of guilt when Mr. Arngrew glanced her way.
A lot of the booths were occupied as well, and for a moment Max hesitated to claim one of the remaining two empty ones. She was eating alone, maybe she didn’t need a whole table to herself? But there weren’t any open stools without at least one person next to them, and Max didn’t feel up to dealing with someone that close to her personal space today. She was nervous enough as it was. She picked one of the booths, the next to last on the right, and dropped her camera bag on the table before wandering over to the jukebox. It was a classic design, right out of a 1950s fever dream, the kind of thing she imagined was key to a good sock hop. After looking over her musical options, she snorted with amusement and pushed a button. After a few seconds, some tinny-sounding guitars started up, and Cher, sounding like the vocal track had been mixed inside a steel garbage can, began belting out, “They say we’re young, but we don’t know…”
Chuckling to herself, Max returned to her booth and slid into the seat. She noticed some algebraic graffiti carved into the corner of the table and shook her head with a smile. Warren? Or Brooke? It had to be one of those two. Maybe it was both, the two of them giggling while they took turns etching the wood with that little screwdriver Brooke had on her keychain. Well, maybe not giggling. Brooke wasn’t much of a giggler. But still, it probably would have been cute.
Max sighed. She’d really thought she’d gotten Warren aimed in the proper direction, at the girl who really wanted to be with him (and who, if she was being honest, he would be incredibly lucky to get, because Brooke was definitely a catch), but all that “Hero of Blackwell” stuff had thrown a wrench into those plans. All she could do was hope it wasn’t permanent. She liked Warren a lot, but just… not how he wanted. She’d finally gritted her teeth and been just about as blunt as she could make herself, telling him directly that he should take Brooke to Dana’s Halloween thing on Thursday. She thought he’d gotten the message. She wanted to believe he had, anyway.
The rain was pounding the windows now and rattling the roof, and she could just barely see the grey waters of the bay frothing into whitecaps as the storm blew through. Maybe she could… just hang out at the Whales all day? Listen to music, read WoW guides on her phone, take a few pictures? It sounded a lot better than drowning on the way back to the bus stop.
Footsteps clicked across the linoleum behind her, and Max turned to find the person she’d been hoping to see: Joyce Price, smiling down at her with a pot of coffee in her hand.
“As I live and breathe,” she said in that lovely Southern drawl, “if it isn’t the one and only Max Caulfield. It’s lovely to see you! How are you, Max?”
“It’s so good to see you, Joyce,” Max smiled back shyly. “You look just the same as I remember you.”
Joyce raised an eyebrow. “Like I’m still a waitress at the Two Whales after all these years?”
“No,” Max protested quickly, “like, you’re still so pretty.”
Joyce winked. “Nice save, kid. You’re still a smart one.” She offered the pot. “Coffee?”
“Yes please,” said Max, and Joyce poured.
“Been wonderin’ how long it would take you to come see me, young lady,” she chided in a friendly tone. “Been hearin’ your name on the TV and seein’ it in the paper for weeks now. I would’ve expected you to drop by a little sooner.”
Max winced. “I’m sorry, Joyce,” she said, meaning it, “but everything’s just been so crazy. I was still trying to find my feet at Blackwell when I suddenly became some kind of celebrity. Everyone’s been calling me a hero when I didn’t really do anything special, and I went from being a nobody that no one cared about to being the most well-known person on campus. Except for Mr. Walker, anyway. It’s… it’s just been a lot.”
Joyce set the coffee pot down so she could put her hands on her hips. “Now you listen here,” she told Max sharply. “You saved a girl’s life. You are a hero, and frankly, it doesn’t surprise me one bit. You’ve always been special, Max. I've known it since you were barely knee-high. Don’t you let me catch you saying such nonsense about yourself again, you understand me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Max, blushing. Two weeks of this and she still had no idea how to handle it.
Joyce picked the coffee pot back up. “So are you having a good time at Blackwell?”
Max nodded excitedly. “Yes. They have a wonderful photography program, and I was lucky enough to get in on a scholarship! It’s really cool. Mr. Walker is an excellent teacher and I’ve been learning so much.”
Joyce beamed. “Why, Max! I’m so proud of you. You always had that shutterbug eye. I remember how much fun you and William used to have with his old instant camera.” Her eyes got a little distant and Max felt a pang as well. She’d loved William so much. He’d been a second father to her in so many ways, and losing him had broken her heart.
Although there had been so much heartbreak right then that sorting out what had caused which parts was almost impossible. It was still enough to make her feel a tremor in her stomach and a stinging in her eyes simply thinking about it. Rather than let herself get drawn down into those memories, or worse do the same thing to Joyce, Max instead reached into her camera bag and pulled out her own instant camera.
“That’s still how I prefer to take my photos,” she said, showing it to Joyce. “William’s influence really got to me, I guess.”
Joyce’s smile faded, but became even more fond. She touched Max’s shoulder and said, “I’m so glad to see that, Max. I know he would have been too.”
Max blushed, then put the camera away. Joyce cleared her throat. “So, then, tell me, Max. What can I get for you today?”
“The last good Belgian waffle I had was five years ago at one of these tables. I don’t want to wait another minute for my next one.”
Joyce laughed. “Comin’ right up,” she said, and headed toward the kitchen to call back the order.
Max smiled as she watched the older woman go, but it faded quickly. Seeing Joyce again was wonderful, but it wasn’t really why she’d come, and she still hadn’t managed to actually bring that up yet.
Oh, Chloe… Are you ever going to forgive me? Are you even going to want to talk to me? Why did I wait so long?
She got out her phone and opened up the contacts list. Chloe was right there, but Max had no idea if the number was still good at all. She’d texted, what, twice? Both times in just those first couple of months after the move to Seattle. Chloe, of course, had replied at once each time, but Max…
Everything had gone wrong in Seattle. No Chloe, no William, none of the people or places she’d known from the Bay; she’d had nothing she could hold onto. Anything she tried just seemed to make things hurt more. Texting Chloe only made her realize she might never see Chloe again. Trying to offer her condolences about William only made her realize she’d never get to see William again. Her new school had been almost literally ten times as big as the one she’d left behind, she’d known absolutely no one, and it wasn’t like Max had ever been really great at making friends to begin with. In the five years she’d lived in Seattle she’d managed to acquire precisely two (2) friends and zero (0) romantic partners.
It had been really, really lonely. Keeping herself going from one day to the next had taken almost all her energy for most of the first couple of years she’d been there.
“Lonely” didn’t quite describe Blackwell so far, but things had been so insane for the last several weeks that it didn’t exactly feel like a sanctuary either. Sanctuary was what she had come here for, hopefully. Sanctuary in the form of her best friend.
She thought of Kate, but pushed away the guilt. This was about reconnecting with a friend, nothing more. She was allowed to think about something else, some one else, besides Kate, at least for a day. She deserved something to be simple. Chloe would be simple.
Well, once she got done being furious with Max, anyway.
God, Max hoped this would be simple.
Joyce came back a few minutes later with Max’s waffles. As she set them down, she looked at Max with a surprisingly hesitant expression. “Max…” she said slowly, “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Chloe, have you?”
Max looked down, the shame of her long silence flooding over her again. “No… We haven’t talked in years. I’m so, so sorry, Joyce. I can only imagine what she thinks of me these days.”
Joyce’s little gasp of surprise made Max look up again. “Oh, Max,” said Joyce. “You mean, you don’t know about Chloe at all?”
“What? No, Joyce, I… I don’t know anything. What’s happened?” asked Max, suddenly worried.
Joyce reached out and took Max’s hand. “Did you come here today hoping to see her again, Maxine?” she asked gently.
Max let her name pass without comment. Joyce had always used it to indicate a serious topic, and even if it drove her up the wall - had, in fact, driven her up the wall even when she was thirteen - now didn’t seem like the right time to address it. “Joyce, is Chloe okay?”
Joyce’s face fell, and she sat down across from Max at the table. “I wish I knew, Max. I really wish I knew.” She sighed, looking out at the rain. “She’s gone, Max. California, I think, but I don’t know. She left the day after her eighteenth birthday with a friend of hers, Rachel Amber, and we haven’t heard from her since.”
Max’s brain stopped.
Chloe was gone? That… Max couldn’t process it. Chloe was in Arcadia Bay. That was just how things were. Chloe was in Arcadia Bay, and Max had gone to Seattle. That had been Max’s reality since the day she’d left, and she had been as certain of it as she had been of gravity. Although, come to that, she did suddenly feel unmoored, as though even the ground underneath her was unstable and she might suddenly float or fall away with no warning.
“...Why?” asked Max finally, partly because she needed to know but mostly because it was the only thing she could make her mouth say.
“I don’t really know that either,” Joyce said, her eyes getting misty. “She wasn’t happy at home, not since William died, and she’d been expelled from Blackwell for almost two years by then. We enrolled her in Neah-Kah-Nie, but she never went to class there either. She’d just become so… wild. Drugs, bad boys, tattoos, piercings, blue hair, she went through it all. And then she was just… gone.”
Chloe… with tattoos and piercings and blue hair? Her beautiful strawberry-blonde hair? Max tried to imagine it and failed completely. And she’d been doing drugs? Max didn’t even really like beer, but Kristen and Fernando back in Seattle had gotten drunk more than once around her and it wasn’t that big a deal. (She was happy to play designated driver and get blackmail Polaroids for future use.) But drugs? Did Joyce mean, like, marijuana or did she mean something like heroin?
What had happened while she’d been gone? What had happened to her friend?
(Although, come to that, how likely was it that Chloe would have expected Max to have held a gun on someone in a Blackwell bathroom? Max had recently had lots of education about how quickly someone's life could change and how far those changes might go, no matter how bizarre they might seem from the outside. Life had a way of making people strangers, even to themselves sometimes.)
Something else filtered through Max’s shock, though, and it kind of popped out before she could think about it. “Who’s ‘we?’”
Joyce grimaced a little. “Ah, yeah, I should have realized you wouldn’t have heard about that either. I remarried, Max. Two years ago next month. I’m Mrs. David Madsen now.”
The idea of someone replacing William in Joyce’s heart was almost as difficult to picture as Chloe with blue hair and tattoos, but intellectually Max could accept that it was the sort of thing that happened. Widows remarry, that’s not all that strange. It’s not as though Max believed William would have wanted Joyce to stay alone and grieving for her whole life.
But then the last part of Joyce’s statement hit her. “David Madsen, the security guard at Blackwell?” Max gasped.
Joyce nodded. “He’s been head of security since just about the time we got engaged,” she said. “The promotion was what prompted him to propose.”
Max opened her mouth to tell Joyce exactly what she thought of David Madsen, but at the last second, changed her mind. Instead she asked, “Does he treat you well?”
Joyce seemed surprised by the question. “Why, yes, Max,” she said, sounding a touch offended. “David makes me very happy, and he’s been a good provider. I’m proud of him.”
Are you proud of how he contributed to what happened to Kate? Max thought angrily. Somehow she doubted that Madsen had told Joyce about how he’d been stalking and harassing the girl in the days leading up to that night on the roof, how he’d tried to accuse her of being complicit in her own victimization.
Madsen was a bully, paranoid and fascist, who seemed to view the kids he was supposed to be protecting as the enemy. Max knew he’d served in the military at some point, but he was supposed to be dealing with students now, not insurgents. God, she could all too easily imagine how he would treat a stepdaughter with tattoos and piercings, let alone drug use. How Joyce could have replaced William Price, one of the kindest and wisest people Max had ever met, with someone like David Madsen was something Max doubted she would ever understand.
She found herself suddenly eyeing Joyce with unfamiliar and unwanted suspicion. According to the timeline she’d given Max, Joyce had married Madsen in November and Chloe had disappeared the following March, doing so thoroughly enough to cut off all contact with her own mother. Do you really not know why Chloe left, Joyce? Or are you just covering for your husband?
Maybe she was the one being paranoid now, but Max had seen what Madsen had done to Kate. There was no way her loyalties wouldn’t lie with Chloe if she and Madsen hadn’t gotten along, no matter what changes Chloe might have experienced. And if he were the reason why Chloe had left before Max had a chance to return, well… She certainly hadn’t needed more cause to dislike the man, but she definitely had some now.
Still, Max hadn’t come here to get into a fight with Joyce. If her suspicions about Madsen and Chloe were correct, then at least Chloe was away from him. So Max stuffed her opinion of Madsen into a drawer in her mind and said, “I’m glad you’re happy, then,” which was true enough as far as it went. She didn’t want to stay on the topic either, though, so she went on, “You said she left with someone called Rachel?”
“Yeah,” Joyce said with more relief at the shift in the conversation’s direction than Max would have expected. It didn’t do anything to ease Max’s suspicions about what Joyce truly believed about why Chloe had vanished. “She was a lovely and charmin’ girl, but she was a hellraiser just like Chloe was by then. Those two seemed to be joined at the head sometimes, but I’m not sure that was always a good thing. They sure got into plenty of trouble together, anyways.
“Accordin’ to her parents, Rachel hasn’t contacted them since she left either. I’m not sure how hard they tried to find her, though. Rachel never said, but I always got the impression things with her and her father weren’t… always good.”
The self-recrimination hit Max in the gut again. “Sounds like she found someone to replace me,” she said, poking awkwardly at her slowly-cooling waffles.
“Now Max,” Joyce said soothingly, “no one could have ever replaced you in Chloe’s heart. Rachel may have been Chloe’s friend too, but I promise you, she never forgot about you. She mentioned you practically every day, it seemed. I’m sure she would have been thrilled to see you again if she were still here.”
Max didn’t say anything to that, and after a moment, Joyce patted her on the hand and stood. “Now you finish those before they get cold,” she said, “and don’t you worry about the bill. This is my treat.”
Max tried to protest, or to at least offer a tip, but Joyce wouldn’t hear of it, so Max reluctantly agreed, watching Joyce walk away with an increasingly heavy heart. She stared at her plate for a moment, then pulled out her phone and opened her texts again. This time, she started typing.
[[Chloe? It’s Max]]
Max 10/27 10:57 am
She got a reply almost at once.
[[Sorry, no]]
Chloe 10/27 10:57 am
[[had this number for a year]]
Chloe 10/27 10:57 am
[[lots of people looking for that girl tho]]
Chloe 10/27 10:58 am
[[wish I could help]]
Chloe 10/27 10:58 am
Max sent an apology for disturbing them, whoever they were, then slowly and painfully went through the process of deleting the contact. It was a tiny reflection of what driving away from William’s funeral had felt like, a piece of her soul tearing apart.
She was a First Mate without her Captain. She had never imagined it would be so devastating.
Max ate the waffles mechanically, though she had no appetite and everything tasted like sand. She made herself get through them, as much as she could force down her throat, solely for Joyce’s sake, since she knew the cost of the meal would be coming out of Joyce’s pocket. She’d finished no more than half before she knew that one more bite would result in everything coming right back up, so she pushed the plate aside and just stared out the window at the rain, listening to the occasional rumbles of thunder.
And to think, she’d believed she’d made it to the diner just in time.
She was eighteen months too late. Her whole reason for coming to Blackwell, gone. Pointless. How angry must Chloe have been to not tell Max she was leaving? To change her phone number without letting Max know? She must have believed Max had completely forgotten and abandoned her. She’d been half right, Max knew. She’d never forgotten Chloe, but there was no way to pretend she hadn’t abandoned her friend. Her supposed best friend.
She couldn’t be angry at Chloe for leaving without telling her. But that didn’t do a thing to change how much it hurt.
Against her will, she found herself disappearing into a reverie of her favorite memories of Chloe, from their pirate fort hidden deep in the Arcadia forest to the “wine-tasting session” and the accompanying carpet stain that hours of scrubbing couldn’t remove to mornings spent making pancakes with Chloe and William after a sleepover. Then, though, she remembered hiding a tape recorder where Chloe would find it, cowardly confessing about the upcoming move to Seattle into a terrible built-in mic rather than just at least having the courage to look Chloe in the face while she said the words.
Fuck, no wonder Chloe thought Max didn’t care. She couldn’t have done a better job convincing Chloe of that if she’d tried.
Out in the pouring rain, Max saw the garish yellow of the Blackwell bus approaching the bus stop, and she jumped out of the booth and dashed for the door, not even slowing enough to say goodbye to Joyce. She’d come back another day and apologize for that. Instead she hurried out into the deluge, everything getting soaked through immediately, and only barely dodged a wave of water thrown up by a car passing by as she approached the stop. Alyssa Anderson, just about to board the bus, wasn’t so lucky, and Max managed a moment of sympathy as she watched the other girl climb up the bus steps, wiping dirty rainwater from her face.
The trip from the bus stop at Blackwell back to the dorms wasn’t any better, and Max stripped out of everything as soon as she closed her door behind her, changing into a set of PJs and another hoodie to help herself warm up.
She would probably need to leave her room at some point later, for dinner or something, but right then, she wanted nothing to do with the outside whatsoever. She climbed into her bed, pulled the cover over her head, and closed her eyes.
The nap took forever to arrive, and when it did, it was restless and filled with unpleasant, barely-remembered dreams. She struggled back to consciousness sometime in the middle of the afternoon, feeling not a whit better than when she’d laid down. Max glared around her room, then surrendered to the inevitable and sat back up. After a moment’s thought, she moved from the bed over to her desk, opened her laptop, and started typing.
Chloe had never been much for social media, so Max wasn’t surprised to see that her Facebook account had apparently been deactivated outright. A search for “Rachel Amber Arcadia Bay OR,” however, turned up quite a number of hits. Some were from the Blackwell Totem’s online edition, mostly about starring roles in student theater productions, but what really drew Max’s attention was her Facebook and Instagram accounts. Neither looked to be active now, but up until March 12, 2012, she’d posted multiple times a day. Max began to click through the photos.
Holy shit. Rachel was gorgeous.
She was clearly a natural model; even the candids from her friends’ phones looked ridiculously good. She had no single, consistent style, but whether preppy fashionable or edgy punk, it all looked amazing on her. Max looked down at her hoodie, rumpled t-shirt, and rubber-duckie-patterned pajama pants, and suddenly wished she could somehow turn invisible, despite being entirely alone in her room.
She kept clicking, trying to ignore the increasing sense of inadequacy, and on perhaps the sixth photo, Max finally found Chloe. It took her several seconds to be sure of who she was looking at, but it was definitely Chloe. She had the blue hair Joyce mentioned and most of a full tattoo sleeve on her right arm, although there was no sign of any piercings. The picture was of some kind of party, and it looked like Rachel and Chloe were dancing together, both in full punk regalia and apparently having the time of their lives.
Max felt another crack run through her soul.
More clicks, more pictures of Chloe and Rachel. They were at a concert, they were in a booth at the Two Whales, they were up at the lighthouse, they were sitting in the bed of an old and very battered pickup, they were flipping off the camera with their tongues out, they were...
They were kissing.
The photo was dated Valentine’s Day, 2012, and it was a selfie with a background so blurred that Max couldn’t make any sense of it. Chloe was wearing what looked like a navy suit, including a very loose necktie, while Rachel was wearing an off-the-shoulder black dress and a (presumably fake) diamond earring in lieu of her usual blue feather one. They both looked unreasonably sexy. The kiss was… very intense.
Max slammed the laptop closed. She looked wildly around the room, then went and picked up her shower kit and went to wash off. When she returned, she spent almost half an hour deciding what to wear, eventually settling on her nicest and tightest jeans and the only buttoned blouse she owned. After a moment looking at herself in the mirror, she reached up and undid the top button. She brushed out her hair, spent a few minutes trying to figure out if she could do anything with it (she couldn’t), then put the very little experience she had with cosmetics to use. She’d always hated looking girly, feeling far more comfortable in her relatively shapeless hoodie and makeup-free face, but for this, girly was the goal.
When she was done, she looked herself over in the mirror again. She was no Rachel, was never going to be Rachel, but she looked about as good as she could hope for. Taking a breath, Max pulled her door open, crossed the hall, and knocked on Kate’s door.
Kate’s expression when she laid eyes on Max made the preparation entirely worthwhile.
“Max?” she started to ask, but Max stepped forward, put her arms around Kate’s waist, and pulled her into the deepest, hungriest kiss they’d ever shared. Kate made a surprised noise, but it quickly transformed into a gasp of pleasure as Max steered them both into the room and closed the door behind her.
After several moments of increasing urgency, Kate finally pulled away enough to ask, extremely short of breath, “Not that I’m complaining, but what’s the occasion?”
Max looked at her, at beautiful, kind, caring, talented, brilliant, and most of all present Kate, and smiled, brushing some hair out of Kate’s face. “You are,” she said, and they toppled together onto Kate’s bed.