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Even while your widening smile was shaking in the smoke, your head was full of hope - BFL
(one.)
After her dad dies, Chloe is told to remember the good times. She does, dutifully. She remembers cartoon marathons in her parents bed. She remembers the way the hair on his arms felt against her skin. She remembers how he kissed her on the bridge of her nose six times before she went to sleep. It does nothing except make her even more raw. She can't be touched – certainly can't be loved. Can't stand her mother's arms around her, can't stand the way the bed sheets rub against her skin. She is so sad. She bleeds all over herself for months afterwards and waits for someone to help her pick up the pieces.
More specifically, she waits for Max to pick up the pieces. She tries to, kind of. With the nervous hands of a thirteen year-old who doesn't know what bereavement really means. C'mon, Captain Chloe. Let's escape. Max feels like home before it was broken. They make blanket forts in Chloe's bedroom and braid each other's hair with sweaty hands that catch and tug. They hold clammy hands and fall asleep under the projected stars on the sheets as if they're much younger. Max sleeps right through the night but Chloe has to get up quietly and go steal one of her mother's cigarettes. They taste awful and make her dizzy but somehow the lingering taste of the death in her mouth makes her feel closer to him and she can finally sleep. She thinks that maybe as long as she has Max next to her and a cigarette in her hand, she is home and she will be okay.
(two.)
But Max leaves for Seattle two weeks after the funeral and it's only then that Chloe really understands and stops being so sad. She gets angry instead because it's safer. She finds a dead blue butterfly on her pillow and holds it between her bitten fingernails and rips the wings from it. She refuses to move on, refuses to let go, refuses to even try. She starts going up to the lighthouse at night and sharing beers with the older boys from Blackwell. Covers up the memory of childhood summers with the memory of getting high for the first time. They give her alcohol and a little pot and call her Hurricane Chloe. She loses her virginity underneath the stars and all she can think of is Max, a hundred miles away and asleep in a bedroom that Chloe has never been in.
On her fifteenth birthday she cuts her hair ( and the soft skin on the inside of her thigh). Her mom goes fucking crazy. She tells her it's like having a stranger underneath her roof and Chloe agrees. She wants to be a stranger; someone new, someone tough and hard, someone who never gets left behind. She will never be left behind again. To prove it to herself, she stops hugging her mom in the morning and talking to the fair-weather-friends she knows at school, even if that means she's lonely as fuck and resigned to hang with the biggest burnouts in town. Her grades start to drop and "My dad died" is no longer much of an excuse for anything. But she will never be left behind again. She wears her loneliness like armour, holds herself together when she sits alone at lunch and declares it proudly to the night that doesn't want her.
(three.)
Rachel enters her life like a breeze in the summer. You too, huh? They're both sixteen and Rachel swats away a blue butterfly that lands on the desk between them. She teaches Chloe how to breathe easily again, with her shiny hair and Bambi eyes. She feels like rain in the desert and looks like Max when she sleeps and her eyes sparkle like they're full of somethingThey strut down corridors at Blackwell in all their mis-matched glory, lapping up the attention and judgement and turning it into something beautiful and exciting. Loneliness is a thing of the fucking past because she has a best friend again, a best friend that has such a pretty smile it hurts to look at, a best friend who smells like jasmine and tastes like peppermint. When she comes it isn't Max's name on her lips anymore and she stops feeling like such a broken girl. No, she won't ever be left behind again.
They color coordinate the pills they take at parties – blue for Chloe, yellow for Rachel - hearts as big as their pupils. They make out when they're drunk in their little junkyard hideout, cherry lipgloss on nicotine, Rachel's hands in Chloe's hair. A couple of months after her seventeeth birthday she finally gets kicked out of Blackwell. They continue to plan their romantic escape together and paste pictures of L.A palm trees and San Fransisco skylines onto the walls. They're together forever, even though Chloe has started to spend a hell of a lot of her time waiting around for Rachel in her dorm room.
(four.)
Late April, Rachel doesn't pick up her phone. Chloe doesn't mind. Nothing to worry about anymore. She can feel it this time - she won't ever be left behind again.