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“Ew, I can’t wear this to class. I can smell the chlorine all the way from over here.”
“Scared of getting busted? I guess you could just blow everyone who asked you about it to pieces! Or stay here all morning. Choice is yours.”
“I wish. Not everyone can afford to get expelled from high school.”
“My company not good enough for you, huh? I see how it is.”
“You dork.” Max grinned at Chloe, whose hair shimmered almost purple in the red-blue light filtering through the makeshift flag curtain. It was too bad she’d used up the last piece of film in her camera on her morning selfie; this would have made an incredible shot. Not that she hadn’t managed to stock up on a ton of pictures of Chloe already, though.
“Well, as you wish, SuperMax,” Chloe said. She propped herself up on her elbow and gestured toward the closet doors behind Max. “I’m sure you’re familiar with my closet, since you made yourself nice and comfy there while a certain someone got the shit slapped out of them by their stepdouche –“
“Chloe–“
“You can find yourself something to wear –“
“Amidst all the dirty laundry?”
“Amidst all the dirty laundry! Welcome to the fashion pit.”
Max cracked open the doors and peered inside. Chloe was that much taller than her and a little broader over the shoulder. Definitely cooler than her, too. There was a leather jacket hanging on a peg and another one in a heap on the floor, tangled up with a bunch of ripped-up jeans and tank tops emblazoned with weird shit and band names she’d never heard of. Looking down at her own stinky sugarskull t-shirt, she felt about fifteen again.
“Should be some of Rachel’s clothes still around,” Chloe piped up behind her. Max turned; Chloe was sitting up in bed now, eyeing her. “She was about your size, I think. There. To the left.”
Yeah, on a few hangers in the very corner of the closet were some clothes that looked probably smaller than all the stuff crumpled on the floor, though it was kinda hard to tell. A red and black checked flannel shirt. Max reached out and touched the sleeve. The shirt had been washed paper thin and super soft. A pair of skinny, skinny jeans that were possibly even more ripped than anything she’d ever seen Chloe wear. Wonder of wonders, a plain white t-shirt.
But Max hesitated. She thought of Chloe’s cell phone background, her and Rachel crowding in on the small screen. She thought of all the things she’d noticed in the shed over at Chloe’s supposedly secret lair – the graffiti, the pictures – and she thought of the kind of fucked up flare of jealousy she’d felt, even as she realized it was messed up to be jealous of a girl gone missing. She wanted to be Chloe’s best friend and she wanted it to be her and Chloe forever, but she couldn’t wear the costume of a different best friend or become a weird surrogate. She wasn’t Rachel Amber. She was Max Caulfield.
“I don’t know, I think I’ll risk something of yours,” she said and picked a shirt up off the floor at random, holding it up in front of her to measure the size against her body. The shirt was black and had either Cannibal Songbook or Cannibal Cookbook written across the chest – it was hard to tell since it had a giant, possibly deliberate tear across one side. “Uh, maybe not that.”
Chloe quirked an eyebrow at her but said nothing. After some rummaging, Max settled on a flannel shirt that wasn’t too unlike the one belonging to Rachel that she’d rejected, but a faded teal and black plaid instead of red and black check and probably way bigger. She twisted toward Chloe, wielding it.
“Yeah?”
“Sure.” Chloe looked amused, as well she might, since it would probably look like a pajama shirt on Max. She didn’t even have to put it on and check out the mirror to realize as much.
“Is this Hot Topic?” she asked, shrugging it on, for lack of anything else to say.
“Hot Topic? What did you do, roll back time all the way to 2003?”
“Hey, just because…”
“Just because some of us only wear hipster deer tanks and whatever Warren links us from Threadless dot com, a trusty old plaid shirt must come from Hot Topic?”
From anyone else – Victoria, the consummate dick, immediately came to mind – Chloe’s words might have come across a little hostile. Of course, even though Chloe was more than a little given to sarcastic intonations, Max didn’t even have to see her grin to know she was just joshing her. Strange how you could not so much as speak with someone for years, strange how, despite how much they’d changed, you could still know them like you knew yourself, almost.
With anyone else, maybe Max would’ve rewound time to say something less potentially contentious. With Chloe, she just grinned.
“I wasn’t thinking the plaid shirt so much. It was mostly the whiff of Eau de Emily Strange and the Manic Panic stains on the shoulders.”
“Emily Strange?” Chloe pushed her hair back behind one ear and shook her head in disbelief. “I was kidding before, but you really did somehow rewind time to two thousand-whatever and get stuck there, didn’t you? It’s all, like, Adventure Time and Family Guy now, you know. For realz, Emily Strange?”
“Aha!” Max laughed, delighted. “I knew you were a Hot Topic aficionado! How else would you–” She didn’t duck in time to avoid the pillow hurtling towards her face, but that was an easy fix with her rewind powers. A quick zoom back and the pillow went flying over her head, hitting the open closet and making its many empty hangers jangle and tangle.
“Oh, I see what you did there, cheater! You can’t fool me. Your reflexes were always legendarily bad. Remember dodgeball? Elementary school, the year of Ms. Derrida, gym teacher terrorist and all-around Max hater?”
“Don’t remind me,” Max groaned as Chloe did a semi-graceful vault out of her bed, managing to bend and twist her arms in a way that would surely have left Max with dislocated limb after dislocated limb in a similar situation.
“But it’s not a bad look on you. Even if it’s hella big,” Chloe said. “Maybe I should try out your duds for the day. You be Chloe, I be Max. See how it goes.”
“I mean, it’d be great if you’d submit a photo to the contest for me so I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore,” said Max. “But what would I have to do, like, fight with your stepdad? Smoke drugs?”
“’Smoke drugs’?” Chloe laughed. “God, you’re such a square. You could probably do with being a bit more like me. Get a little adventurous. Get your thrasher on!”
“Breaking into the school at night and bombing my way into the principal’s office wasn’t thrashery enough for you?”
“Correct! I dare you to…” She paused, then blurted out, “I dare you to kiss me! Right now!”
Max barely had time to react, either to protest or, more likely, to lean forward, before Chloe put her hands up.
“Just kidding!” she said. Max kinda thought her voice sounded nervous, maybe even trembling, and her expression was a little unsure, but then she gave a bark of laughter which seemed to erase every trace of potential anxiety from both voice and face.
“Sure you don’t want me to kiss you?” Max joked awkwardly. “I’m in the Chloe shirt. I’m down.” At least she thought she was joking. It had to be something and wasn’t like she really knew how to flirt, and besides, who flirted with their childhood BFF? Luckily, Chloe seemed to take it as a joke: she laughed again.
“Oh I’m pretty sure you’ve been macking on me for hours and then rewinding it away. I know all about your Jedi mind tricks, Miss Max!” She flopped back down on her bed, dramatically, letting her outstretched limbs bounce once or twice before she sat back up and grinned at Max.
“Now go, go. Go! You’re late for your fancy-schmancy photo class. And me, I’m hella late for this big ol’ fatty right here.” She picked up a half used-up, shriveled little piece of a joint, more roach, really, than joint. See, she wasn’t a total square! She knew about roaches. They were called that, right? Either way, the joint in question was not a ‘fatty’ in any way Max would envision a ‘fatty.’
Still, it was true Max was cutting it close; being late to Mr. Jefferson’s class would not endear her to him. To be fair, probably nothing would after what she’d said in Principal Wells’ office, and it wasn’t like she especially wanted to be liked by him anymore. Antagonizing him further, though? Maybe not the best idea. Chloe was waving around her joint with one hand and scrabbling for a lighter in her nightstand table with the other; Max shot her a smile as she began to make her way out the window onto the garage roof.
--
Finally closing her fist around her Zippo, Chloe settled back down on her bed, content that she didn't have anywhere to be yet not content that Max wasn't there with her. Which was dumb, obviously. She knew how to enjoy her own company. She did! Maybe later, she'd– But a sudden sound, a clattering on the roof, derailed her train of thought. She looked around to locate the source of it.
“Light a scented candle or something!” Max popped her head in through the window again, the curtain mussing up her hair. Chloe was sorta surprised to see her back, but mostly just distracted by the way her hair looked. Like, maybe she should do her own hair like that. It looked good, was all.
“I don’t own any scented candles, Max. Why, are you suggesting the Room of Doom smells bad?”
“No, but it will when you start puffing on that thing!” Max looked legitimately concerned. Chloe didn’t have the heart to tease her about her adorable choice of words when she was just looking out for her.
“It’s okay, Protector Max,” she said. “If you’re thinking about the stepshit, he’s already at Blackwell, staking out the perimeters and whatnot. I’ll be fine. But thank you for your concern.”
“Alright. Well, in that case I need to roll. See ya soon.” Max drew her head back out and disappeared, Chloe vaguely listened to the sound of her steps on the roof panes as she made her way down. She should’ve offered to drive her to school, probably, even though she really wanted the good old wake and bake experience. Yep, she should totally have offered to drive her to school. She’d text her and do just that.
Chloe Price (8:16 AM) dude, you want me to come pick you? i'm sorry, kinda bailed there
Max Caulfield (8:16 AM) It’s cool, I’m at the bus stop and it’ll be here in a couple of minutes. :)
Chloe Price (8:17 AM) NO EMOJI
Chloe Price (8:17 AM) but i am a wang tho
Max Caulfield (8:17 AM) It’s totes cool, Chloe! Get back to your thing I shouldn’t mention over text, according to Ms Chase.
Chloe Price (8:18 AM) real smooth there, james bond! jk have a great day
So, conscience assuaged, Chloe put her phone to the side and went back to The Thing Max shouldn’t mention over text. She flicked open her lighter. It was weird, she thought, as she took the remainder of her joint between her lips and lit up, to be best friends with someone who could do literally anything to you and you’d never know. Like, how did she know she hadn’t said something stupid once and Max had gotten really angry and punched her in the face and then rewound? Well, okay, that sounded severely out of character for Max, but the crux of it was that she’d have no way of knowing. Weirder still to be in – God, she did not want to admit this even to herself, but at least smoking was beginning to make her feel more relaxed about the whole thing – weirder still to be in love with somebody who could rewind time. What if, when she dared Max to kiss her… She allowed herself to think about it. What if Max actually had kissed her, what if Max indeed been macking on her for ages, or even more than that, and Chloe just would never know about it and never get to experience it. It was unfair. Not in a consent way, though probably lots of people would object to a thing like that, but because Chloe wanted to be a part of those moments, too. Max’s superpowers were so damn cool. And yet...
Ugh, it was too much to be pondered this early in the morning. Not to mention, this whole pining thing, falling for Max when they were just thirteen and actually keeping a torch for all these years, it was so epically lame when you thought about it. She didn’t want to think about it. She wanted a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and she wanted it now, so she took the final, pretty gross-tasting drag on her joint and discarded it in a half-full forgotten coffee cup, then began to slouch her way downstairs.
-
“Who’s that?” Max had received about 30 texts in as many seconds, as far as Chloe could tell. The vibrations sounding from her pocket were so loud and so incessant that you would’ve been forgiven for thinking she was hauling a sex toy around. It was very distracting.
“Oh.” Max glanced at her phone, too quickly, surely, to actually be able to read anything. “It’s just Warren.”
“Oh, it’s Warren. In an emergency of some kind, I’m guessing?”
“It’s—”
“Seems like he’s damn frantic to get in touch with you.” Chloe didn’t mean to sound so sour – well, maybe she did, just a bit – but she was driving, for fuck’s sake. She considered herself a pretty good driver on the whole, but if Warren of all people managed to distract her into wrecking the Twinpeaksmobile, there’d be fucking hell to pay. In her peripheral view, she saw Max pocket her phone again. What, she wasn’t even gonna text him back?
“It’s this drive-in thing,” Max said. “He’s really been wanting to go since he finally got a car, but…”
“But what? You playing hard to get?” Chloe rolled her eyes; she couldn’t help it. “And I hate to break it to you, sista, but if he’s inviting you to a drive-in he’s expecting a handy, at least.”
“It’s not like that with Warren,” Max said, her voice so quiet Chloe couldn’t tell whether she was disappointed by that fact or just annoyed with Chloe. “Anyway, if you’d let me finish even one sentence – I’m not sure I want to go. Not because of Warren, because of all of… just all of this.” She waved her hand around, indicating Chloe? No, probably indicating the whole biz with the time-traveling and poor Kate Marsh and getting Mr. Jefferson suspended and the visions and shit. Yeah, for sure. Well, fair enough.
“Okay, okay, I apologize already.” She felt tetchy. She didn’t really want to admit to herself that she was jealous – but, yeah, she was totally jealous. “Anyway, we’re here. Yay.” Max didn’t say anything while Chloe drove into the parking lot of the Two Whales diner, but their eyes met in the back view mirror as Chloe was trying to maneuver the truck into a spot between two badly parked cars. Acting purely on instinct, Chloe immediately looked away, but when she glanced back through the corner of her eye, Max’s gaze didn’t seem to waver. She didn’t know what to do about that or how to feel about it, so she just jumped out of the car, expecting Max to follow suit.
Everything would be less weird over a double stack of pancakes and some bacon on the side. Scratch that – a double serving of bacon and some pancakes on the side.
--
Chloe might be acting strange, but the rush of half-painful/half-amazing nostalgia Max felt upon entering Two Whales didn’t seem to lessen no matter how many times they went there.
Her own old house, the one she used to live in with her parents, had apparently been razed along with a bunch of other houses in service of something Prescott-certified and almost definitely horrible called the Pan Project. Blackwell Academy had been intimidating from the first, never mind how unpleasant her life had been there since Kate had – since she had accused Mr. Jefferson that horrible, horrible day. And now that she knew the school was pretty much in Nathan Prescott’s pocket? Ugh. She didn’t even really have any friends there except Warren and maybe Alyssa, and Alyssa only even liked her at all because she could roll back time and warn her about the objects that always seemed to be flying at her face. And yeah, Chloe may still be living in her childhood home, but it was basically incontrovertible fact that the house had ceased to be much of a home after William passed away, not even taking into account that lunatic Madsen moving in.
Two Whales, though. Two Whales felt like home. She’d probably been here a hundred times since she moved back to Arcadia Bay and reconnected with Chloe, but she still couldn’t stop herself from looking around and taking stock of the place. She smiled at Joyce, currently in the process of making what could only be a damn fine cup of coffee, though she guessed it must be rush hour since her hair was beginning to escape from the bright blue hairclip she always wore. She made a face at the sun-faded gumballs in the machine – it was like she could see them getting staler by the second. She stole covert glances at the diner’s clientele, which had definitely changed yet not changed since they were kids – like, they weren’t the same individuals, but they were definitely the same archetypes. Not everything had to change all the time. In Arcadia Bay, Two Whales was home.
“You finished with your reconnaissance?”
Max looked up. Chloe was grinning at her, seemed like things were back to normal, then. She’d turned the sound on her cell off, just in case.
“Reconnaissance? Didn’t know you knew such fancy words,” Max teased, tentatively smiling back. “You finally gonna take those SATs?”
“Smartass.” Chloe stretched back in her seat, folding her hands behind her head. “You pick up a thing or two even from militaristic freaks and assorted other stepdouches, you know. Probs pronounced it wrong, though.”
“I wouldn’t know, I took Spanish.”
“Yeah, I dropped out of Spanish.”
“As far as I remember, you pretty much dropped out of everything, Chloe,” came a voice, somewhat stern, from behind them: Joyce was making her way over with a couple of menus in a hand and her notepad in the other. She still looked a little frazzled, but despite that and despite her admonishing words, she smiled at them both. “But you’re looking well today. Both of you. I think Max is good for you, Chloe.”
“We’re just good for each other,” Max said, suddenly feeling a flash of something like shyness, maybe, shooting like a chill down her spine, prickling in her cheeks. Chloe looked a little off again – annoyed? flustered? Max still couldn’t read her one hundred percent of the time – so Max opened the menu and stared down at it even though she knew what she wanted already.
“A short stack and all the bacon you got,” Chloe said. She seemed happier at the thought of food; her grin was borderline cheesy, so big it looked almost forced. “Thanks, Mom.”
“Could I have just two waffles with maple syrup, please? And some coffee.”
“You got it.” Joyce didn’t bother to write anything down, clearly needing her notepad no more than Chloe and Max needed their menus.
“Hey!” Chloe said after Joyce had walked off, before silence could begin to fill the space between them and before that silence could get awkward. “We should do this!” She thrust a hand into her pocket and withdrew a crumpled paper, made a very cursory attempt at smoothing it out and handed it over to Max.
“Happy Halloween Bazaar,” Max read. “You wanna go to that?”
“It’s the 25th one, dude!” Chloe looked downright jubilant. “Don’t you remember we used to go as kids? Like every year. What, you’re too good for pumpkin carving now?”
Of course Max wasn’t too good for pumpkin carving, or silly costume parades, or anything else Halloween entailed. She would kind of have supposed that Chloe was now officially too punk rock to have any truck with the Annual Happy Halloween Bazaar, but hey! She wasn’t complaining.
“Of course not. We used to kill at that pumpkin carving contest.” Max grinned at the memory. “Remember the time—”
“When our old gym teacher was a judge? And we carved that brutal caricature of her and she totally knew and wanted to give us detention for fucking years, but,” Chloe raised both arms in a victory gesture, “couldn’t, because hey! Mayor Cochran thought she was being petty!”
“Yeah, I mean, it was after school hours. And I don’t think he saw the resemblance.”
“It looked just like her, though.”
“It really did. Down to the beady eyes and penis-shaped nose.”
“Another victory for Max and Chloe!” Chloe reached out her hand for a high five, or something like that, and Max slapped her palm just lightly with her own. Before she left, they’d never been very tactile friends, like, they never used to touch very much. Too young to see hugs as anything but tools wielded by parents to keep you still when you didn’t want to keep still, probably – pirates didn’t hug people, c’mon. They’d had a secret handshake, but that was about it.
Now, though, they hugged pretty often and walked arm in arm sometimes, or hand in hand if they felt like it, and there were high fives and fist bumps and it was just all kind of nice.
“Lost in thought?” Max started at Chloe’s voice.
“Oh… sorry.”
“Just thinking about all that pumpkin ass we’re gonna be kicking, right?”
“Totally!” Max was glad for the excuse. How weird would it sound to say she was sitting around thinking about them touching each other? She gazed down at the poster. “We’ll need costumes, too, though. And–” She’d just noticed the date of the bazaar. October 27. She’d assumed it was going to be on Halloween proper, but Halloween wasn’t a Saturday this year, she guessed.
“What? The food trucks?” Chloe’s excitement visibly dimmed as she saw what Max was looking at. As if on cue, Max’s phone, stupidly placed on the table between them, lit up with another text message. She should have put in in flight mode or something, not just turned off the sound.
“Right. Your little drive-in date.”
The text wasn’t even from Warren, it said right on the screen that it was from Max’s mom, but Chloe still gestured at the phone in a way Max could only characterize as contemptuous.
“Maybe you should get back to loverboy, already.” She stood, shuffling out of the booth much more gracefully than Max would ever have been able to manage.
“Dude, I’m not – hey! Sit down!” Chloe glared at Max and Max tried to glare right back.
“I’m not going. Okay?” Max said. She switched her phone off as obviously and ostentatiously as she could and tossed it in her satchel. “I’m not going to the drive-in, I mean. We’re going to the bazaar.
“It’s the twenty-fifth one ever! Like, it’s an anniversary!” she cajoled when Chloe still looked hesitant. “It’ll be amazeballs and you know it. We can’t not go.”
“We’ll need to think of a good costume,” Chloe said as she relented, sliding back into her seat. Max hadn’t realized quite how tensed up her body was until she physically felt herself relax. Like she’d been part of an actual stand-off or something.
“Well, I think not going as Captain Chloe and First Mate Max would be betraying our childhood selves. Thoughts?”
“Right as always!” They high-fived again.
“I missed you so much,” Max said. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t been in touch for all those years. What the hell had she been thinking?
“Well. It’s Chloe and Max forever now. Mega super time travel girl and her trusty sidekick!”
“Oh, shut up, nobody would ever look at us and say you’re my sidekick. You’re not anyone’s sidekick. You’re blatantly the main character in, like, a JRPG with your spiky blue hair.”
“Fine then. Partners in crime!”
Joyce had reached their table with a large tray and began allocating them each their food. She’d even remembered to bring Max the coffee milk she’d forgotten to ask for.
“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that,” she said in a faux-stern voice.
“Hear what?” asked Chloe, all innocence and big green eyes.
“About you two being partners in crime.”
“I thought you didn’t hear that,” Chloe and Max said at the same time, looked at each other, and burst out laughing.
“You two.” Joyce shook her head and walked away, but Max definitely spotted the beginnings of a smile before she’d turned away completely.
--
They’d had a really excellent Sunday brunch together, but after Chloe had dropped Max off at the school, she’d begun to grow resentful of Chloe’s weird jealousy or whatever it was over Warren. She stewed about it as she was crossing the main campus, heading for her dorms. Because the thing was, she told herself, Warren was actually just a friend. And yeah, maybe she was naive at times, but she was pretty sure she was right in thinking that was all he wanted to be, even. She entered her building and stalked up stair after stair, annoyance building with each step.
Chloe, on the other hand! Chloe clearly liked Rachel Amber better than she’d ever like Max, and yet Max would never complain about that. And they hadn’t just been friends, either, no way! Naivety or not, she’d eventually realized that the magazines in the shed weren’t exactly fashion magazines. She was honestly really super glad that Chloe was into ladies, because all the dudes in this place, at least at Blackwell, seemed to be at best idiots, at worst homicidal maniacs of all stripes. It was so great that Chloe was into girls and girlfriends and stuff so she wouldn’t have to deal with disgusting boys like that. But seriously? Did she have to talk about Rachel like that? Max didn’t need to hear how sexy and sassy and cool Rachel was, not least because she herself was awkward and clumsy and nowhere near sexy or sassy. Just a square, apparently. (She slammed the door to her dorm behind her, then had to rewind when it knocked a bunch of shit off her rickety shelves, throwing her diary open and sending a glass of water flying all over it.)
And, yeah, it was petty and horrible to be jealous of Rachel. But that didn’t make it feel any less unfair, both that she kind of couldn’t be and that she definitely couldn’t express it. And why, she asked herself, trying to calm down a little, was she so jealous of Rachel, anyway? Yeah, Chloe had totally crushed on Rachel, but Max had been her best friend since they were in kindergarten. That counted for something, right? Like, it counted for a lot. She fed Kate’s bunny rabbit a lettuce leaf.
“Om nom nom,” she told it, not to talk to the rabbit but just to hear the sound of her own voice. Maybe it would make her think a little clearer.
It wasn’t like she wanted Chloe to crush on her, anyway. Was it?
“Oh my God,” she said out loud, just staring at the chewing rabbit. “I’m totally into Chloe. I’m for realz in love with Chloe.”
--
Chloe Price (2.44 PM) just had the best idea
Chloe Price (2.44 PM) you in?
Max Caulfield (2.47 PM) ???
Max Caulfield (2.47 PM) Fine, I’m in. When? Where?
Chloe Price (2.47 PM) blackwell
Chloe Price (2.48 PM) be there.
Max Caulfield (2.51 PM) When? I’ll meet you on the quad after class, but don’t let yourself into my room again. Do you know how much Madsen bitched at me over the last lock you busted?
Max Caulfield (2.55 PM) Chlo? (-_-;)
Chloe Price (2.56 PM) chlo? what am I a goldfish? see you at half past
Chloe Price (2.56 PM) ps NO EMOJI
Chloe didn’t like lying to Max, but technically she had already picked the lock on Max’s door by the time she received the message telling her not to. Technically, this was fine, kosher; she’d withheld the truth, maybe, but she had not lied. Satisfied with having wrestled any ethical concerns back in the corner of her mind where they belonged – because since when did she start caring about ethics, really? – Chloe scanned the hallway before cracking Max’s door open and slipping inside.
Last time she’d been here, Max had been busy with some class or project or other and utterly unwilling to come unlock her door for Chloe, even though Chloe had been completely out of clothes that hadn’t begun to smell hella funky and skunky for, well, reasons. Max still had her checked shirt and jeans, and knowing Max like Chloe did, she’d definitely washed them by now. Like Chloe could’ve passed that up. She needed fresh clothes; she needed them quickly; she had her finest collection of variously curved and pointed bobby pins gathered in her grungy back pocket. In short, she’d made quick work of room 219’s flimsy door.
Chloe hadn’t had time to stay longer than to pick up her clothes, which had indeed been freshly laundered and meticulously folded, sitting right out on Max’s desk. They hadn’t smelled of Max anymore, which was—well, obviously, the scent of detergent was better. She hadn’t snooped around or touched anything else or sniffed anything else or anything weird like that, she’d just grabbed her clothes and boom! out of there, but Max had still been grudgy for a full week. Yelled at by the stepführer, as it turned out, as if Max would have anything to gain by picking a lock she already had the keys for. Apparently being banished to a hotel room by Joyce had done little to improve the gloriously sunny mood he was oh so well known for.
That was a while back, though. And they were chill again, they were talking, they were hanging. Things weren’t weird, right? Things were pretty chill. And about to get chiller, too, ‘cause the little Altoids tin in Chloe’s pocket was newly replenished with joints! Well, a joint. Half a joint, if you were being really pedantic. There was a smoke alarm to contend with, of course, but if the alarm on Max’s ceiling was anything like the flimsy little plastic discs Chloe had had to disable during her time at Blackwell – she dragged a chair over and climbed up on it – then she had nothing to worry about. Indeed: Chloe barely had to poke it with a finger and all of a sudden it was hanging there, twirling around like a little baby mobile on a thin red cable. Chloe removed the two batteries, et voila! as they probably said in the dumb pretentious movies stupid Warren was always trying to get Max to watch. Satisfied that she wouldn’t be busted, Chloe jumped down from the chair again and left it, sweeping across the room to open the windows as wide as they’d go.
Well. It was possible she could get busted, she supposed, even with all the preparations she was so painstakingly going through. Vaping seemed like a weird bougie and/or hipster thing to do and kind of a pain in the ass, she wasn’t even sure how you did it, those lamesauce e-cigs maybe? but she had to give it up to vapers for apparently coming up with an idea to make sure their shit didn’t stink ‘cause this stuff was smelly as fuck. Oh well. She’d just have to count on the fact that all the other Blackwell students were also goody-two-shoes who would never be caught in their dorms during class hours, no sir. And keep the windows nice and open. And maybe light some scented candles or shit. Max probably had a whole collection of Yankee Candles in various scents of Rain. April Showers. Rain Clouds. Rain in the Woods. Snowy Rain? Purple Rain?
She flopped, more than laid, down on Max’s bed. This was what it was like being Max Caulfield. She glanced about the room, taken with, just, she didn’t know, taken with the Maxness of it all. There was the guitar with the butterfly stickers – Chloe remembered when they were kids, she’d just had this hideous bright pink plastic monstrosity that produced, like, two twangy notes at most, but she’d loved it so much. The real guitar, she’d gotten for her 13th birthday, just before the Caulfields moved away. Chloe had given her the packet of stickers. There were posters, of course, but only for things Chloe either didn’t know about or didn’t care about. She was more interested in the Polaroid pictures lining the wall by the bed; she propped herself up on an elbow and studied the pictures, taking an occasional drag on her joint.
It was weird. Max came off like a girl who didn’t know she was pretty, like Ellen Page mashed up with some non-twin, one-book character in a Sweet Valley High novel. Chloe didn’t pretend to be too good for Francine Pascal because she was not a pretentious ass unlike some she could mention, she was a boss bitch and probably had hella cash. Francine Pascal would not have any truck with people like Frank. Yeah, she was great. But she’d started out thinking about something else. She gave her head a shake to get out of her weird reverie. Anyway, yeah, Max had that rom-com slash teen girl movie thing where she was super beautiful but didn’t know it. Like take off your glasses, let down your hair, kinda thing, except Max had a bob and no glasses, but the point, Chloe thought, stood.
And still, even though Max seemed kind of timid and insecure in regards to her looks sometimes, still she’d made it her mission to document herself with selfie after selfie after selfie. Chloe kind of found it inspiring. If she’d have thought she was anything but smoking, she would not have been taking pictures of herself and she definitely wouldn’t have been sticking them up on walls for herself and everyone else to see all the time. Of course, the best thing about the selfie wall to Chloe was that it was just a barrage of Maxes. Maxes with eyes closed, eyes open, looking at her, looking away. Made-up Max, bare-faced Max, Max almost always in a tee and a hoodie. Max with earbuds in, Max in the mirror taking a picture of herself taking a picture of the words ‘Fire, walk with me.’ So many Maxes all at once. It was almost overwhelming.
Then she noticed the drawing that was pinned up just beneath the wall of selfies, half hidden behind a truly twee owl-print cushion. Her first thought was that Max had joinx’d it from her room, which truth be told she would have been okay with, both because it would have been hilariously out of character for Max and because it would have been genuinely touching that Max would’ve wanted their one of their old pulpy comic book sides so bad. Her second thought was that this must be a new creation, because even though it was about as skillfully drawn as the ones she kept from when they were kids – which was to say, not so much with the skillz – the Chloe in the picture had choppy blue hair instead of long, blond locks, and certainly twelve-year-old Chloe would not have drawn herself with a stud in her nose and rings in her eyebrows. The title was altered, too – the page was no longer plastered with “She’s a Killer!”; she was a so-called ladykiller instead. It was still attributed to Warner Sis, though, which had been their obvious answer to the ubiquity of Warner Bros, and they were pirates, so that was on point, and dammit, Max, why did she have to be so fucking cute? Chloe almost punched the lame cushion right in the pillowy owl face, glaring at the sketchy cartoon version of Max who seemed to be smirking up at her through her eye patch. She refused to look at this any longer; she replaced the cushion and flopped down on her back again and stared up at the ceiling.
--
Chemistry class was terrible even at the best of times, but this was way worse than usual. When Ms. Grant slapped the graded pop quiz onto Max’s desk, it was facing down, but the paper was flimsy and sheer enough that Max could see the big, red D+ right through it. Even if she hadn’t been able to see it, the kinda reproachful look Ms. Grant gave her probably would have given the jig up. Great. At least class was nearly over; she wouldn’t have to suffer a whole lecture about the correct answers, thus finding out exactly how wildly wrong she’d been.
Some people seemed to be happy, at least. Not her lab partner Juliet, since she and Max were on about the same level of clueless, but glancing around the room, she saw a couple of legit grins and even a fist, courtesy of Warren, thrust into the air in victory or elation or whatever, but almost definitely nothing negative. Warren was pretty good at chemistry, after all, and (she thought a little guiltily) probably did even better now that he wasn’t constantly helping her out with concepts and experiments to the point where he wasn’t putting much time into his own homework.
They still said hi in the hallways and exchanged the occasional text and stuff, but Warren had pretty much ghosted on her after she’d had to explain, finally, that she really liked him but wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, just a friend. Which was fundamentally true yet so completely misleading that it almost felt absurd saying it. Juliet, who’d never met a piece of gossip she hadn’t immediately believed and wanted to repeat in at least as long as Max had known her, had told Max that Zach had told her that Warren had told Justin that Max had friend zoned him, and that it sucked. That chain of people seemed so long and so unreliable and so generally untrustworthy that she wasn’t going to condemn him for that (except, “the friend zone”? Really? Yuck) but it was a fact that they weren’t spending much time together anymore. It was kind of sad, she guessed. She had liked him. She did like him! Just, when it came down to it, he wasn’t the one she wanted to bang. And hang out with. Forever.
“You know how I like to roll out that old teacher stand-by, ‘There are no dumb questions,’” said Ms. Grant, back up at her desk now and interrupting Max’s thoughts just as she was beginning to drift off into a day dream or internal monolog or something like that. Ms. Grant paced, paused, let her ironically searchlight-like sweep eyes out over the class before beginning to speak again. Max avoided her gaze.
“I do stand by that. However! There are dumb answers. Maybe a few of you should start asking your questions before coming to a test and writing down answers like this so we won’t have to have this talk again.” A bunch of students tittered, probably because they hadn’t done badly in the first place. Ugh. Suck-ups. Max was well aware she’d have to study more and study better and that this would cut into time she didn’t have – well, time she’d rather spend doing something else, at least. Theoretically, she could just turn back the clock over and over and study indefinitely, she supposed, but a) that would be so boring she might die and b) if she didn’t, the headaches and nose-bleeds probably would kill her, anyway. Lately, she’d been trying to save her powers for mostly just emergencies and especially embarrassing fuck-ups. If that made her boring – if that made her receive shameful grades in chemistry class – then so be it.
She was an art student, anyway, she grumbled to herself as she swept her pencil case off the desk and into her satchel. She crumpled the test into it, too, with a little more vehemence than was perhaps necessary. Why would they expect her to be a chemistry ace? This was, like, college level stuff, probably. It wasn’t like she even needed dark room chemicals for her photography work, never mind stoichiometry! Surely she’d–
“Ow!”
She’d walked straight into Juliet.
“Oh! Juliet! I’m sorry.”
“Head in the clouds?” Juliet smiled at her, despite the fact that she’d just been barged into and looked mildly disheveled for it. Or maybe she’d been looking disheveled all along, who knew.
“Sort of.”
“Penny for your thoughts.”
“Oh, they’re not worth a penny.” Max liked Juliet okay, both as a lab partner and as a sort-of friend, but she knew perfectly well not to tell her anything she didn’t want the entire school to know by morning.
“You’re sure? Okay then!” At least Juliet was generally cheerful. “Are you headed to the dorms?”
Max looked at her phone. She’d had no new messages from Chloe, but somehow she suspected they wouldn’t be meeting at the quad.
“You know, I think I am.” She pulled the strap of her satchel across her body.
“Let’s go!”
Not a walk suited for quiet reflection, then, but at least Juliet’s gossip, if not always strictly true, could be pretty entertaining. It didn’t take long for her to start in, either.
“Did you know,” she said in hushed whispers, since there were still plenty of people in the corridors, “that Warren and Brooke broke curfew, like, majorly last week?”
“Did they?” Max wasn’t terribly interested. Her favorite flavor of gossip was Victoria Chase fucking something up real bad, but apparently that wasn’t on the menu today.
“Uh-huh! Yeah, they went to some movie thing at the science center. But then they stayed out practically forever. You know where they were found?”
“I don’t.”
“Parked. In his car. Together. Majorly getting it on. You know where his car was parked?” Juliet clearly struggled to wait long enough for Max to answer or guess, after a second she just burbled on. “Just outside Principal Wells’ office! He was the one who discovered them when he came out for the morning paper!”
“That sounds really, really unlikely. Wouldn’t they be expelled or something? I thought they viewed infractions like that pretty seriously.”
“With those GPAs?” Juliet laughed her nasally laugh. “You’re so naive, Max. It’s cute. So how do you feel about this?”
“About what?”
“I mean, weren’t you going with Warren for a while there?”
“Going with…? No, we were friends. We are friends.”
“But he really liked you, though. Like, major crush.” Max could feel Juliet scrutinize her face, probably looking for even the smallest tic or blink that she could warp into tomorrow’s headline news: Max crushed that Warren found new love! Max regrets foolishly rejecting boy genius! It was so dumb that Max couldn’t help but laugh.
“Anyone else on the horizon, then?” Juliet asked breezily. Too breezily. Max knew her game.
“With my chemistry grades?” she said. “They’re already catastrophic. If I had even less time to study ‘cause I just wanted to get with my partner, I’d probably get kicked out of here, you know.”
“Ugh, I know, right? I just got a C. A C-, even. My parents are gonna be all over that. Not in a good way.” Juliet sighed. “Speaking of which, though, you know how you said I could borrow those notes you took last week when I was out with the sprain? Do you think I could come and pick them up later today?”
“Sure. I’m not sure they’ll be much help, though. Like, what even is stoichiometry? Why all the moles?”
“I hate moles,” Juliet said glumly. At that, they stopped talking, keeping on course toward the Prescott Dormitory in silence.
--
Chloe hadn’t noticed while fucking up the smoke detector, but there were a bunch of glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling in the kinda depressing green-yellow color of glow-in-the-dark plastic in the daylight. Not only that, but they seemed to be arranged in something like constellations. Patterns of some kind, at least.
“There’s the Casiopedia, Chloe,” she said, pitching her voice just slightly lower and raspy, like Max’s. Hunching her shoulders a little to get into character and grinning at her own joke, she stretched out an arm, pointing at the ceiling. “It’s… the goddess of cameras. Look, that star is her… hair. And that star is her camera.” Okay, her Max impression could use some work, maybe.
“I don’t see the point of fake stars,” she said, Chloe again with her shoulders relaxed and her voice back to normal, “when you could just go outside and look at real stars whenever. Maybe not in Seattle with all the light pollution and shit. But in Sasquatchville, here? Stupid fucking Seattle. Why…?” But she knew why, of course: because Mrs. Caulfield got a new, better job; because Mr. Caulfield had relatives in Washington. “Although I’d trade the stars for city life,” she had to concede, thinking about it. “Not Seattle. We’ll go to L.A.”
“Wanna go to the drive-in, Maaaaaaax?” she whined, because now that she was complaining about shit, she might as well make fun of stupid Warren, as well. A two-for-one kinda deal. She screwed up her face in the dumbest expression she could muster and drew out every vowel as long as she could. She knew she should cut him some slack, both for taking a beating from Nathan Prescott for Max and for finally taking no for an answer when Max had told him really firmly that she didn’t want to go to the movies with him. Still, she’d never claimed she didn’t hold grudges. Forever.
“Come on Maaaaaaax,” she therefore continued. “Let’s go to the drive-in and I’ll tell you about cool movies and bombs. I’ll stop sending you a gajillion texts every second if you go to the drive-in with me. Maaaax! My penis needs attention!” What a gigantic asshole. Maybe the worst thing about it was that in any other context, Chloe would kill to know a person who could build a bomb out of fucking office supplies or gardening materials or whatever. Whatever. Max could teach her.
Then, at the sound of a key going into the jammed lock, she jumped out of bed, mashing the remnants of her joint out into her Altoids tin, readying herself to charm Max into being happy she was there and forgiving her for the lock thing immediately.
--
“But why is the door – ugh. Of course.” Max hadn’t expected Chloe to stay out of her room, but at least after the last time she had sworn up and down that she’d just get ahold of Madsen’s master key in case of any future ‘emergencies.’ She had not expected this jammed door. Juliet, who had come with Max to her room to get the chemistry notes, looked at her curiously as she pulled the key out of the lock with some difficulty and began bashing the door with her shoulder instead. Finally it flew open. Hard. A pretty repugnant smell of weed began rolling out through the open doorway, making Juliet nearly seal-clap with glee, but Max really didn’t care, because she watched as the door smacked into a chair that was standing in the middle of the room for some reason. She watched as the chair crashed into her already-rickety bookshelf. She watched as a bunch of books flew out of the bookshelf and onto the floor, but none of the three girls was looking at any of the dumb novels or stupid textbooks, because her goddamn diary also fell out of the shelf and down and laid there, open, to the most embarrassing, incriminating spread of pages of all the pages in that stupid fucking thing. Juliet was looking at it, reading it thirstily.
Chloe was looking at it.
Max felt completely frozen in time. Like she couldn’t rewind. Like she couldn’t fix this.
--
There was a picture of her, was the first thing she noticed, a little dog-eared from – what? Use? There were hearts drawn on her picture, on the little white Polaroid strip thing. And then the words, those were the second thing she noticed. Big, tall letters proclaiming that Max loved her… too?
Chloe stopped looking at the diary. She looked up at Max instead, she was probably staring, she couldn’t help it. Max was raising her hand.
“Don’t,” Chloe said weakly. Max had told her before that she just needed to stretch out her hand to rewind time. But the thought of Max erasing this knowledge out of her mind before she could even process it or reciprocate was too much to handle.
Max stretched out her hand further, but then she turned and used it to kind of shove that Juliet chick out of the room. She slammed the door behind her, too. Then she turned again, towards Chloe.
“I dare you to kiss me,” she said and even though her hands shook pretty bad, her voice didn’t shake. Chloe’s voice totally would if she tried to speak. “And if you don’t want to, that’s okay, and I won’t… rewind. Pirate promise.” Chloe only just let her finish that sentence before sliding a hand around the back of her neck and kissing her. She still had no idea if they’d ever done this before, but it felt like they had; it felt like their lips were meant for each other, like these kisses were encoded in their DNA somehow, Max’s soft lips moving against hers and opening slightly, Chloe gently biting her lower lip, Max shyly sliding her tongue into Chloe’s mouth.
“I love you, too, you dumbfuck,” Chloe said between kisses. “How have you not noticed?”
“Not-so-SuperMax?”
Chloe barely even dignified that with a snort. Instead, she pushed Max down on her dorm bed, sending the twee cushion flying as she leapt over and straddled her. She leaned down really close, strands of blue hair stroking against Max’s cheek.
“And so the shark finally got with the otter,” she said, leering.
“Ugh, sharks again?” Max shook her head, giggling.
“No, no, you’re meant to say ‘What a stupid otter,’” Chloe said.
“You know, I love you, and I love quoting bad YA with you. But I draw the line at Twilight.”
“Fine! But the shark wins!” She leaned in even closer and grazed her teeth against Max’s neck.
“Ow,” Max half-said, half-moaned. Chloe drew back a little.
“Too much?”
“Dude, no, do it again.”
So Chloe did, digging her teeth in just a little deeper this time.
“Max,” she whispered into her ear. “How much of this, I mean, how far do you want to go?”
Max just twisted her head and looked at Chloe in, pretty much, disbelief.
“Chloe. I want you to just take my shirt off. And my bra. And I want you to do your teeth thing on my – okay, you know what, I just want you to shut up and show me how you want me to do things and I’ll show you what I think I like. Is that okay?”
Chloe laughed. “Aye-aye, Captain.”
--
Hours later, when they finally made it out of the bed and then onto the desk and then off the desk and then out of the dorm room itself, Max happened to steal a glance on the whiteboard hanging beside the door. Gone was the William Blake quote she’d written on the board a couple of days ago and there were only the faintest of blue imprints left of the little cartoon dude that had been sitting in the lower-right corner since the beginning of term.
Instead, the word ‘dykes’ seemed to slither across the board in ugly fancy curlicue letters that suggested, most likely, Victoria’s hand. ‘LESBO’ was written below in all caps, spikier letters and angrier, Max didn’t really want to think about who could have written it.
She looked at Chloe.
Chloe looked at Max.
Chloe snatched hold of the marker that was attached to the bottom of the board, tugging hard enough that the string tore clean off in the middle.
“Fuck yeah,” she scrawled in front of “dykes” and added an exclamation point after. “Max + Chloe,” she scribbled across the word ‘LESBO’ and drew a scraggly heart around it. She looked at Max like, Your move.
Max grabbed the marker, her own heart feeling like it was swelling, bursting, well-nigh exploding. In absence of anything better (and after all, Chloe had left her little important to add) she drew a large smiley face. And another. “:D” and “:D” and “:DDD” horizontally and vertically and horizontally across the board, and then she flung the marker, still uncapped, at Victoria’s door where it left a sadly unnoticeable mark, and grabbed Chloe’s hand, and together they strode away, Chloe reaching up her other hand over her shoulder to flip the bird at, well, everything else.
