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Max dropped her bag on the desk, jumped on her bed and remarked how good it felt to be in her room after school. No, scratch that. Their room. Her and Chloe’s. And the bed was theirs, too.
It was May now. Almost seven months had passed since the Storm.
When the Storm’s fury was finally spent, Max and Chloe went to the Two Whales Diner. Or rather the place it used to stand. Once it became apparent that they wouldn’t find Joyce, Warren or even poor Pompidou in the burnt-out ruin, not alive anyway, they left town, with zero reason to stay. Chloe drove them to Seattle. Not only her truck didn’t break down on the way, it took them there so fast, that they arrived at Max’s parents’ doorstep before the news of Arcadia Bay’s demise. Vanessa thought the girls simply came over for the weekend. Ryan thought Max had had to skip town because of her conflict with Nathan. He was furious. He wanted to call principal Wells and give him a piece of his mind for taking Nathan’s side, even though he was clearly the instigator. He even wanted to go to the police about the anonymous threatening text messages he had received earlier in the week, either from Nathan or someone working for him. Max tried telling him that both Wells and Nathan were dead and the school was no longer there. In the meantime, Vanessa was chatting Chloe up, asking her how her mother was feeling and offering that now, since Max and Chloe were hanging out again, she and Ryan should meet up with Joyce, too. They would make up for lost time. She could introduce them to David.
Only when the evening news, playing on the TV in the living room, loudly announced Arcadia Bay’s doom, Ryan and Vanessa got what the girls had been trying to tell them all along, but couldn’t, partly because grief had made it hard for them to speak, and partly because Ryan and Vanessa couldn’t at first comprehend the magnitude of the bad news they had heard. When Max and Chloe heard the newscaster confirming that indeed, their senses hadn’t deceived them, they huddled together and burst in tears. They were crying over all the people they had lost. Joyce, Kate, Rachel, Warren, Miss Grant, Dana, Juliet, Samuel, Alyssa and David (although the last two would later turn up unharmed). Ryan and Vanessa sat next to them on the couch and hugged them from both sides, not finding any words to say in such a bitter moment.
Chloe, now homeless (and with her stepfather stricken with grief to the point he was not able to care for anyone and needed to hit the road and get as far away from Arcadia Bay or the ocean as possible), stayed with Max at her parent’s house. Max and Chloe having sleepovers was nothing new to Ryan and Vanessa. And even a few weeks later, when they finally got what Max and Chloe had been trying to say to them, that they were no longer merely two friends who happened to be girls, but girlfriends, it didn’t change their mind about letting Chloe stay with Max. One afternoon, after coming home a little early, Max overheard her father telling her mother: “You know what, honey? I’m kind of glad it’s Chloe. No one will ever be good enough for our Max, but Chloe is the closest one to being good enough. Have you seen how she’s looking at our daughter? She would jump after Max into fire. And the fact that she’s a girl is kind of good, too. At least she will not get Max pregnant and run away”.
Max was happy to hear her father’s endorsement. She was also genuinely impressed by his social progressivism with a patriarchal twist.
And it’s not like Max and Chloe were obnoxiously pounding on the headboards every night. They were taking things slow. Most evenings they were both so tired they were in the mood only to go to sleep in each other’s arms. If anything, it was Ryan and Vanessa disturbing the peace. In Max’s absence, they became a little less cautious and one night Max and Chloe heard them having fun. The girls giggled, finding it very romantic that people in their late forties (so positively ancient by their teenage standards) still were attracted to each other.
Max went back to her old school after two weeks, at her parents’ insistence. And they were right. It would serve no purpose to drop out or even to wait until next September to repeat her last year of high school.
She had spent barely over a month at Blackwell. Some of her classmates hadn’t even registered she had been gone, seemingly for good. Kristen and Fernando, Max’s only two schoolmates she would call friends, heard what happened and they were there for her. Chloe liked them both immediately after Max made the introduction. But even though they both genuinely cared about her, Max caught herself avoiding them at times. Through no fault of their own, they reminded Max that she had built, or at least had tried to build a new life after leaving Chloe in the rear window of her parents’ car.
She would go with Ryan to see hockey matches while Chloe would soak her pillows with tears of impotent rage over William's death.
She would laugh and gossip with Vanessa while Joyce would hide away William’s photographs and tell Chloe she chose to be angry by refusing to move on after his death.
She would hang around with Kristen and Fernando while Chloe would experience utmost disdain from most of her schoolmates, who deemed her to be a freak, a loser from the wrong side of town.
Max would plan her future career while Chloe would desperately hold on to the thought of escaping with Rachel. No matter where they would go and what they would be doing there, the only way forward was to escape, because nothing could be done to fix her life and nothing could be worse than it.
Max would study and develop her passion while Chloe would have to deal with violent criminals like Damon and Frank and to debase herself by pretending to be interested in shitheads like Nathan, just to scrape together a few bucks, by any means necessary, for her new life with Rachel. And she would keep doing so long after Rachel had decided she would never leave town with Chloe.
And finally, interacting with her new-old friends reminded her of leaving Chloe that tape saying she would always love her and on top of that going back in time to tell Chloe that she would never abandon her, only to abandon her.
Lying in her bed, Max made a resolution to keep in touch with Kristen and Fernando, even if it inadvertently brought back her feelings of guilt. If there was one thing she knew for certain it was that leaving friends behind only caused suffering. On both sides. Plus, she and Chloe both needed friends. Chloe had no one other than Max. Max understood her completely. She knew about the darkest moments in her life. She witnessed many of them. But maybe it would be healthy to also interact with others, who were unburdened with such knowledge.
“How about I invite Kristen and Fernando over and the four of us play that board game I gave Chloe for her birthday?”
Max got up from the bed and started looking for the box containing the game. It was 5 p.m. She had about an hour before Chloe would get back from the auto shop.
Soon after moving in with Max, Chloe started an apprenticeship at an auto repair centre. She showed enough skill to start getting paid after two weeks, even though she was still learning. Her boss was impressed with how she had fixed her truck up, turning a pile of junk into a working vehicle. Her salary was more symbolic than substantial, but it was better than nothing. Chloe tried to hand her entire earnings to Ryan and Vanessa, more than once, but they wouldn’t accept. A compromise was reached. Chloe would save up her salary, so that she and Max could rent an apartment after Max graduated, because they were open about wanting to move out after that. And it’s not like Chloe’s upkeep put a strain on the Caulfields’ budget. She ate very little, even though she seriously cut back on her cigarette usage. Just like Steph and Mikey had once said – being skinny was one of her three trademark qualities. Three evenings a week and every other weekend Chloe also attended classes for working people trying to complete their high school education. Max and Chloe were both set to graduate in a couple of months, together.
Max couldn’t find the game anywhere. Maybe Chloe put it in her wardrobe? Max had two wardrobes, but she had no problem putting all her clothes in one and leaving the other to Chloe. She never had too many clothes. Not because her parents never offered to buy her any. On the contrary, especially Vanessa always wanted her girl not to lack anything in that regard. Max simply never felt the need to hoard clothes.
Max went over to Chloe’s wardrobe and opened it. It was almost empty. Just like her wardrobe back in Arcadia Bay it contained exclusively t-shirts, tank tops, jeans pants, hoodies and a couple of pairs of tennis shoes. Ryan and Vanessa bought Chloe a winter jacket and a pair of warm boots, even though she protested (but relented when Ryan told her that he couldn’t let his future daughter-in-law suffer from frostbites), but those two articles of clothing were now hidden in a wardrobe downstairs, waiting for the next winter to come.
Max saw something on the highest shelf, above the hanger rack. She climbed on her toes, like she always did to kiss Chloe (if they were still standing, that is) and reached. To her surprise, it wasn’t a box, but something wrapped up in a piece of cloth. It was surprisingly heavy. She sat on the bed, holding it in both hands. She unwrapped the cloth.
It was Chloe’s revolver.
The gun was spotless and oiled. Chloe must’ve picked it apart, cleaned it and put it back together sometime in the last seven months. Perhaps more than once. Max had seen Chloe hold, wave around and even shoot that particular revolver on multiple occasions. On some of them Chloe had been positively giddy, smiling mischievously like a deeply satisfied gun nut. But now, the thought of Chloe sitting alone and staring at the gun in front of her was unbearable to Max. It made her heart stop for a moment and then start pounding furiously.
Why? Why did the only thing Chloe was allowed by cruel fate to save from the utter ruin of her life had to be David’s revolver? Not a photograph of William and Joyce. Not one of the hundreds of colourful pictures and comic panels she had drawn with Max when they were kids. Not one of the photographs Max had used to display in Chloe’s room as if it had been her private gallery. Not her grandmother’s engagement ring Chloe had convinced Joyce not to sell. Not a well-read noir novel. Not even a fresh change of clothes. She lost everything but the clothes on her back, her rusty truck and this. This hunk of metal.
Max opened the cylinder with a metallic click. It was full. And not of spent casings, but of live rounds. Enough to end six worlds. But Max was worried about one of the bullets ending a very particular world. One she had fought so hard to defend. One she had been living in for the past seven months.
Max fought with all her mind to keep the rising tide of dark thoughts contained. She struggled to the point that her forehead became warm. But she couldn’t. The wall she had raised broke. An underground river carrying all her fears and worries was released.
“Just a hunk of metal. But how convenient to own one! You don’t even have to beg your best friend to kill you with a magical photograph. No, you just press it against the temple of your mind, squeeze the trigger and stop existing! When the Storm came, she wanted to kill herself because of you. You had left her completely alone. To rot. To stew in her sorrow. To be abused by others. It’s no wonder she asked you to finish the job you had started five years prior. To finally finish squeezing the trigger you had placed your finger on the day you had said to yourself ‘I will call her tomorrow’. You refused to assist her in suicide, but she kept this, to prop open that door, even though you wanted to believe it was closed shut, forever”.
Chloe found her sitting on the bed, staring at the gun laying in front of her. Going through the door, Chloe was smiling, thinking about hugging and kissing Max. They made a habit of hugging and kissing goodbye each morning and hugging and kissing welcome every afternoon. But when she saw Max staring at the gun, her smile was extinguished.
“Max, be careful, please …”
“I unloaded it, Chloe. We played those console games in your living room, remember? I at least know how to open a revolver’s cylinder”.
Max reached into her pocket and then she opened her hand, showing six rounds of ammunition – dark, rounded bullets nested in golden casings. She turned her hand sideways and the golden rounds landed on the bedding.
Chloe sat next to Max and embraced her with one arm. With the other, she grabbed Max’s hand. Max squeezed Chloe’s hand tightly.
After a moment of prolonged silence, Chloe said: “Isn’t it silly, Max? I imagined I would solve all our problems by waving that revolver around like Dirty Harry, but in the end nothing was solved with it. Our problems required a smarter touch. Your touch”.
“You’re wrong, Chloe. That gun solved our problems. Four of them. Or one problem four times. Is there a difference? At the beach, before we met up with Frank, you told me that you might save me one day. And you did. Ten minutes after saying that”.
“What do you mean, Max?”
There were some things that Max had experienced in October of the previous year that she never told Chloe about. She didn’t want to burden her. And seeing that by Friday Chloe’s burden had become unbearably heavy anyway, she had made the right call. One thing that still haunted Max was seeing Chloe being run over by the train. She would never tell Chloe about it. About her disappearing under the carriage of the train, like in the jaws of a hungry mechanical monster. It didn’t matter that it had been erased. It most certainly hadn’t been erased from Max’s mind.
“Frank, something I said set him off. He grabbed me by the throat. You told him to step the fuck back. He lunged at me with a knife aiming for my neck. You shot him. I rewound. And I tried again. And once again he tried to slash my throat. And once again you saved my life. Only on the fifth try I managed to find the right combination of words that wouldn’t offend the delicate sensibilities of his royal highness, the drug king of Arcadia Bay”.
A smile briefly flashed on Max’s lips.
“You know what, Chloe? You hitting a moving target without fail, four times in a row, always stopping him inches away from my throat, that was badass of you”.
“God, Max, I was so stupid to defend him. Even after he had threatened me at the junkyard, I told you he had his problems but he was no creep. But you were right. Your creep-o-meter has always been impeccable. In the end, he really turned out to be just as awful as you feared he might be. But … why did you put yourself in mortal danger time after time? Did I … kill him?”
“No, you shot him in the leg each time. He would survive. I just didn’t want you to live with having hurt someone like that. And I was afraid he would try to take revenge on us later. Plus, I was still naïve to believe that the universe was a fundamentally just place. I believed that if we did everything like we were supposed to, if we solved the mystery of Rachel’s disappearance and Kate’s abduction and we helped everyone and hurt no one on the way, we would prevent the Storm from coming”.
“Max, I don’t want you to carry burdens like that alone. If there were other moments like that, you have to tell me about them. I mean it”.
Max wanted to tell Chloe about her death on the rail tracks, but she decided not to. Maybe in the future, if that memory doesn’t disappear from her mind’s eye on its own. Some day. But not today.
“Max, I’m glad you shared that horrible moment with me. I’m sorry you had to suffer through it. But I have a feeling this was not what you were thinking about when I came in”.
Max lifted her gaze from the gun and looked deep into Chloe’s eyes.
“Chloe, there’s something I should have asked you about months ago. But I didn’t, because I was afraid of the answer I might hear. No more. Be honest with me. Tell me how it is, even if it’s the thing I am most afraid of hearing. During the Storm you asked me to kill you. Have you had thoughts like that since then?”
“Max, I’m so sorry I asked you for that. I regret placing that choice before you every day”.
“There was no choice for me to be made, Chloe. I had told you I was never leaving you again” – Max didn’t even realize she repeated a promise Chloe couldn’t remember, because she had heard it in a different timeline – “We are not talking about my hurt feelings. We are talking about you wanting to die”.
“What, you think I could do that to you? Blow my head off in here, spraying our room with my brains? Max, you know I could never hurt you like that”.
“Chloe, I have no doubt you love me. And I love you. I know you would never choose to hurt me. But come on, you’re the science nerd here. You know it better than I do. Thoughts like that. It’s a disease. Chloe, you were diagnosed with depression. You used to take Fluoxetine. We should’ve gone to a doctor when we moved to Seattle. But no, I chose to stupidly believe that my hugs and kisses would magically heal you. And now I’m afraid I hurt you. I left your needs unattended”.
“Firstly, hugs and kisses, especially from Max Caulfield, can and do cure everything. Secondly, Max, I’m no longer sick. You know how I know that? I knew I was depressed even before I was diagnosed. Depression is not about feeling sad. Sadness is a normal emotion. I still feel sad when I think about my mom and dad. But that’s not depression. For me depression was not being able to get out of bed in the morning. Or even afternoon. It was feeling that everything was pointless and meaningless. And some days, it was the desire for everything to end. And by that I don’t mean I wanted to die and be reunited with my dad in the afterlife. Not only I didn’t imagine an afterlife, I didn’t want it. I wanted for everything to end permanently. Because going on, in this world or the next, was the worst thing I could imagine”.
Tears were flowing down Max’s face, but she kept gazing into Chloe’s eyes and she kept listening.
“Now I know I’m no longer sick. Because every morning, I want to wake up. To see you. To touch you. To hear your voice. To tell you I love you and to hear you say you love me. At work or at school, I keep thinking about the moment I’m going to see, touch and hear you again. The moment I’m going to tell you I love you again and hear you say you love me again. Now, everything has meaning. I’m learning a trade so that I can support us once we strike out on our own. I’m studying so that my smart and well-read girlfriend doesn’t have to be embarrassed by me being a high school dropout. And I never want our life together to end. I want to be with you, in this life and all the next lives. I desire to always be with you. That’s how I know I’m no longer sick. So you may sneer at your hugs and kisses, but they genuinely cured me. And if you really want to reduce everything down to chemistry, then remember – hugging causes the release of endorphins”.
Max sniffed loudly and with her voice cracking said: “Chloe, I am so, so sorry you felt like that. You felt like that because of me. Because I abandoned you when you needed me most!”
Holding Max’s hands, Chloe said: “Max, please, listen to me. The five years before your return I’d spent firmly stuck in the past. But then you came. You pulled me into the present and you showed me there was a future. For me. For us. The past ultimately doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who we were or what we did or didn’t do in the past. It matters who we are and what we do now. And the most important thing is who we want to be and what we want to do in the future. Max, you came back when I needed you most. You fulfilled your promise to always have my back and to always love me. You not only saved my life, you gave me a good reason to live. And with your every action and your every word you continue to prove you want to be with me and to love me. Now and in the future. That’s what matters. Nothing else”.
Chloe paused for a moment. She gently touched Max’s cheek. Max leaned into her hand.
“Max, I should be the one feeling like I got way better than I deserved, not you. You paid such a terrible price for me. In the Dark Room. Why do you love me so much? What have I done to deserve it?”
“Chloe, I could go on and on about all the things I love about you. Your strength, your beauty, your courage, your smarts, how faithful you are to those you love. But ultimately, love is not a transaction. There’s no buying it. There are no scales that need to be balanced. Nothing of what I did seven months ago I did because I expected something in return. And I didn’t do any of it because I felt guilty or because I owed you, either. Although I felt terribly guilty seeing how awful your life had turned out in my absence and I owed you big time for that. No, the reason I fought to keep you safe was because I couldn’t stand to see you in pain and because the world would be a far, far worse place without you. When I was in the Dark Room, my memories of you kept illuminating it. When I dove into the past within the past, there was only one thought in my mind – I had to save you. No one would ever hurt you again, not if I had anything to say about it. Chloe, I don’t think loving someone is a choice. You just feel it. At some point I discovered I loved you. And I’m thankful for that discovery every single day”.
Chloe wanted to explain that Max was her personal saviour in an effort to cheer Max up: “You mentioned the console in my living room. Do you remember that video game my dad bought for us? The one he told us to keep in secret from my mom, or she’d freak out over how violent it was? Where the main character’s name ironically was Max and even more ironically he had the power to slow down time?”
“I remember, Chloe. Your dad would even sometimes play it with us. The main character was a detective in New York City”.
“Yes! And he was in love with a mysterious hitwoman, Mona. Who was a beautiful, slender brunette. Not unlike a certain someone I sometimes hang out with today. I crushed on Mona hard. Turns out I’ve always known my type”.
“Chloe, I also remember that the woman Max the detective loved was killed when someone that Max the detective considered to be a friend shot her in the head. And no, those parallels between our lives and a stupid, violent video game are not ironic to me. Eery, if anything. Unless you’re trying to say that something malicious planned our suffering for its own amusement. But I am really not in the mood to consider the possibility of the universe hating us with a passion, even though it would explain a lot”.
“No, Max! I’m trying to get at something else. We were very disappointed when we finished the game and Max couldn’t save Mona. But then we read in one of those colourful magazines for gamers that she could be saved if we beat the game on the highest difficulty. That was before one could simply google tips like that. And we spent a week trying to beat the game on the highest difficulty before we did it. You remember how satisfied we were when finally Max kissed Mona and she woke up, even though she had been shot in the head? And she said something that was both funny and touching: ‘God, I turned out to be such a damsel in distress’. Max, I am your damsel in distress”.
“Chloe, it’s not as clear-cut as you think it is. We are both heroes. And we are both damsels in distress. I am sorry for not explaining this to you before. This is going to sound dramatic, but this conversation has already exceeded the usual measure of drama by several magnitudes, so here it goes. Chloe, I not only want you. I need you as well. You understand me? You saved me, too. I can only imagine how you felt during those five years I decided to ignore you …”
“Max, please, stop. You never decided to leave me or to ignore me. We were kids. You had no idea how to comfort a friend with a dead dad …”
“Yes, Chloe, I know you forgave me pretty much the moment you picked me up from Blackwell parking lot. I didn’t even apologize to you, not really. And your response was ‘welcome home Max’. Every morning when I wake up and see you laying next to me, or already up and dressing for work, I am grateful for that second chance. But I was talking about something else. Chloe, I can’t even begin to imagine how you felt when you asked me to turn the photograph I had given you, the symbol of our reunion, into a weapon that would kill you and separate us forever. I’m not trying to say I ever had it equally as bad as you. But when we bumped into each other, things hadn’t been all great in Maxland either. I was … adrift. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. ‘Becoming a famous photographer’ is not exactly a concrete goal. And I was so afraid. Of being judged. Of being mocked. Of not being good enough. Of being rejected. I couldn’t stand the thought of putting a part of myself out there, for others to see. But when I found you, really found you, found you in my heart, my fear was gone. I knew what I was supposed to do. What my place was. What my purpose was. I am supposed to be with you. My place is at your side. My purpose is to love you. Do you remember the things you told me in the swimming pool at Blackwell and the next morning in your room? That I was the smartest, most talented person you had ever met? That everyone gets rejected before they get accepted? That I needed to start moving forward in time? That I made you feel like you had a reason to stay? Those were all the things I needed to hear”.
“You just needed some pep talk. I was happy to oblige”.
“No, it went far beyond that. There’s a part of me that I hate. A part of me that made me second-guess everything. That made me doubt everything. And it tried to make me doubt our love. It tried to convince me that you don’t love me and I shouldn’t love you either. I hate that part of me more than I hate Mark Jefferson. Because Jefferson is a sadistic pervert, so he did what sadistic perverts do. But she is a part of me. I met her and she was wearing my face. While you were dragging my unconscious butt to the lighthouse, I had a heart to heart with her. I told her to get lost. But to know there’s a part of me that is so dark, that feeds on fear and doubt, it’s hard to describe how awful it feels. You are the only reason I can move forward in time even though there’s something like that inside of me”.
“Max, everyone has mean, cowardly, ugly thoughts. I have thoughts like that, too. I used to have them every day. Now, thanks to you, I have them far less frequently. But they still come. Your thoughts don’t define you. What you do about them does. And with your countless acts of love, as big as pulling me from before an incoming train and as small as putting a fresh cold compress on my forehead when I had fever, you have proven to love me, and to trust me. It pains me to know that you felt like that. But I’m glad you shared it with me. Now, when you have bad thoughts, you can always talk with me about it”.
With a mischievous smile, Chloe added: “And if that evil clone of yours ever shows up, I’m going to kick her butt. It’s not going to be easy if she’s wearing your beautiful face, but I’ll chase her away”.
“You have already done it once, Chloe. My nightmare, it ended when I started to remember all the moments we had shared. Just as you did with my body, you pulled my mind to safety as well”.
“I am at your service, always”.
“God, Chloe, I am such a mess”.
“No, Max, you’re just a kind, sensitive person who went through a lot”.
Chloe paused for a moment. Her face betrayed she was thinking intensively.
“Max, do you sometimes feel … angry? I used to feel angry all the time. Angry that even though I tried my hardest to be a good daughter, a good friend and a good student, my life collapsed anyway. Angry that I fucked up my scholarship at Blackwell, which was the last thing my dad would’ve wanted. Angry that I always seemed to chase away the few people still in my orbit. Is that how you feel, sometimes?”
“Yes. I feel like that. Angry with myself for all the wrong choices I made. Angry with the people who hurt you and me”.
“Max, do you trust me?”
“Of course I do!”
“Then come with me, I know what would make you feel better!”
They left the Caulfield residence. Ryan and Vanessa, seeing them walk out, said: “Have fun you two! Don’t be too late!”, thinking the girls were simply leaving for a Friday date.
Chloe drove Max to the auto garage she worked at. Nobody was there and all the lights were out.
“Are you going to show me some expensive car that a rich client left for repairs? In the hopes that on the backseat of such a car it would be easier to steal a kiss from me?”
Chloe knew some of the other mechanics tried things like that with their dates. If a particularly trendy car found itself in the garage, it could become a spot where more than one couple kissed.
“You know my tricks too well, Max”.
But instead of taking Max into the auto shop, Chloe took her around the side of the building, to a grassy backyard next to it, surrounded by trees on three sides. It was secluded and not covered by the garage’s security cameras. Stacks of garbage covered it. Cardboard boxes, polystyrene packaging, wooden pallets, rusting car parts. Chloe told her to wait. She soon came back, carrying two sledgehammers, two pairs of thick gloves and two pairs of plastic goggles.
“Max, do you know what a demolition room is? It’s place where you can unload all your anger. Well, this here is not a room, more of a demolition backyard. I had something similar set up in the junkyard, back in Arcadia Bay. Unfortunately, there are no old TVs here, which are the most satisfying thing to break. But there’s lots of other stuff to smash. Want to give it a try?”
Chloe thought that Max would require some convincing or even a demonstration before she would dare to begin demolishing. But Max snatched the gloves and goggles from Chloe’s hands and quickly put them on. Placing the goggles on her face, Max was reminded of the time they had murdered Chloe’s dolls by blowing them up. Chloe stacked up cardboard boxes and polystyrene pieces. Max began to demolish. Swinging the hammer, she flattened cardboard and splintered polystyrene. Max imagined the boxes she squashed were heads. Each time she squashed one, she insulted its owner in her thoughts.
“Eat shit and die!” - she thought when she squashed Mister Jefferson’s head.
“Fuck off with your teary voicemail! Nobody forced you to hurt Rachel and to attempt to do the same to my Chloe!” - she thought when she squashed Nathan.
“How about a sledgehammer up the ass?” - she thought when she squashed Frank.
“How does it feel? Like the good shit you knew Nathan hooked Kate up with?” - she thought when she squashed Victoria.
“I’m sorry! But you just keep pushing me!” - she thought when she squashed David.
Chloe stood there, leaning on her sledgehammer, in awe of Max’s fury.
When Max was done decimating the cardboard and polystyrene army, Chloe brought a box full of empty beer bottles. None of those bottles had been emptied by her. The other mechanics knew she was still a year shy of legal drinking age, so they never offered her a drink. But even if they did, she wouldn’t. She never liked the taste of beer. She had begun to drink in a vain attempt to drown her loneliness. Now, her loneliness had already been drowned, in Max’s affections. But the other mechanics provided a steady supply of empty bottles.
Chloe lined twenty bottles up. This time, they smashed together. Once they were done, they were both panting, with their brows and hair covered in sweat.
Max dropped her hammer, took off her gloves and goggles and jumped at Chloe, kissing her passionately. Chloe removed her safety gear, too and kissed her back. Each run her hands through the other’s hair. They collapsed into a pile of cardboard, which cushioned their fall and turned out to be surprisingly comfortable.
Max was very bold in her kisses and caresses. Chloe stopped her: “Hold on, Max. You want our … first time to happen here? On a pile of garbage?”
“No, I want it to happen in a place where my wise and empathetic girlfriend cured my anger. Besides, aren’t you supposed to be Chloe the Elf Barbarian? Isn’t making love with your sisters in arms on piles of fallen enemies what you barbarians do?”
“Woah, Maximus! Making love on piles of fallen enemies? Was that a flashback of the time you were a gladiator in ancient Rome?”
Max laughed out loud.
“What’s so funny Max?”
“Maximus! You haven’t used that one in a while! Hearing that, I imagined you as the emperor’s sister …”
“Hey! I could totally be Roman royalty!”
“Of course! With your naturally commanding presence, you could be a Roman empress, like Irene of Athens. You even have a Greek name, too. I laughed, because if you are the emperor’s sister, then I’m Russell Crowe!”
They both laughed, pearly. So pure and uplifting was this moment of joy that it not only counter-balanced, but outweighed the tears, fear and anger preceding it.
And then it happened. Exactly in the place Max wanted it to happen.
The next morning they went to the pier and tossed the hunk of metal into the ocean.