Work Text:
(i)
the first time you see her after arriving back in town, you don’t recognize her. how a person could jump from innocent whites and browns and pastels into angry reds and blacks and electric blues is beyond you, but chloe has always been about achieving the impossible. she is just another stranger in the halls of blackwell, and your eyes slide off of her the way they slide off everyone—unattached and evasive. you are a bird in flight under the roof of this school, where the elite parade around like richly feathered birds. you feel like a duckling amongst eagles.
chloe is, of course, a peacock. as out of place as you are, but colors and confidence mix into a heady brew of ownership, you can’t think of how anyone could possibly challenge her.
she is standing at her locker when you see her first, and you let your gaze slide off her like water through fingers. kate is speaking to you, but you don’t hear her because chloe shuts her locker and turns and sees you. she sees you and recognizes you on the first glance, and you see familiarity and anger flash into the look she gives you before indifference settles over her, a thundercloud that turns her into an unreadable torrent of combat boots and missing persons posters.
she stomps past, and one poster sits on her locker like it’s a monument. rachel amber. you ask kate who she is, and kate just gives you this—look.
(ii)
“who’s rachel amber?” are the first words you think of to say to her, after all these years. maybe a little anticlimactic for the gods or powers that be that could possibly be invested in the unspooling of the two of you.
you’re standing in the parking lot, next to a dreadful looking pick up—chloe’s, you figure—and she turns and gives you the familiar anger glance she did in the hall a week and a half ago. for what it’s worth, she doesn’t stomp off. “missing girl,” is the answer she gives you.
you roll back on your heels, and look out across the parking lot, students peel out of the parking lot in flocks, leaving dust billowing in their wake the way birds leave feathers. the wind carries both away, and chloe says nothing more. not that you’re expecting her to. her tone is curt with you, and even after the transformation she has undergone, her angry voice hasn’t changed.
“okay,” you begin, and you could follow this up with anything, really. an apology, maybe. an explanation, maybe. an excuse, most likely, knowing you. you pick this: “who is she to you?”
“why do you care?” the retort is like a whip, and you feel the lash against your cheek, a welt that’s inflicted on your blood, unseen but clotting.
“i’m—just curious,” you splutter, because her words have left you teetering on your heels. you shove your hands into the pockets of your sweater, and chloe is looking at you like she’s about to perform surgery—cut you open to see what’s inside. totally clinical and unfeeling. you feel like a frog on the dissection table.
she scoffs at that, dumping loose posters into the backseat of her crappy ride. she is all plumage now, shoulders raised and back drawn to her full height. “you don’t get to pick and choose when you care about my life, max.”
you open your mouth to apologize, to explain, to excuse, but chloe goes on. “but, hey! i can humor you. i loved her, and now she’s gone. noticing a pattern in my life?” you are not given a chance to speak, before she is in her truck and falling out of the nest like all the rest. she doesn’t leave dust feathers but oil, resin, eggshells.
(iii)
you find where her and rachel used to hang out one afternoon after class. just by chance, really. not very smart on your part, because it’s in the middle of nowhere and you have no car. but you have found yourself wandering further and further out of the pond lately.
chloe was here
rachel was here
written on the nondescript grey concrete brick of a pathetic little shack that the two of them had turned into a haven in the junk. the words, for some reason that is beyond your comprehension, make you furious. you spend five minutes blacking them out with the sharpie in your bag.
max was here. it’s not enough.
(iv)
you decide that chloe is either very brave or very stupid when you catch her breaking into the pool. you, being brave or stupid, follow. when you catch her standing near the edge of the deep end, you are torn between the ugly desires of drowning her and wanting her to drown you.
you don’t announce yourself, but she speaks to you anyway. “my dad died, max.” stating the obvious, but there’s the whip again. you think of rachel’s disappearance and feel like an ugly pendulum in her life. your entrance and exits announce tragedies.
“he fucking died,” she says, and you realize that birds are creatures of the sky, but ducks waste away in ponds and peacocks are tethered to the ground.
“sorry,” you say, finally settling on apology. you feel like coughing up algae.