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"Do you ever wonder what our lives would be like if we hadn't met Elfangor that night?"
The tinny canned laughter of a Friends episode plays on the TV, perched on the desk at the foot of the bed. Cassie isn’t really watching it anymore, and she doubts Marco is either. At this point, she’s just letting the colors and sounds and pretty people on the screen wash over her. The two of them are hanging out in Tobias' and Ax's dorm. It’s a Sunday at almost midnight – or is it after midnight, by now? – so naturally, it was vacant, as neither of its inhabitants enjoyed sleeping indoors. They used their dorm for little more than a place to stash clothes and textbooks between classes. It was also the only one with a TV, so in the months since beginning their first semester of college, it quickly became a frequent hang out spot for the Animorphs.
It’s rarely ever all six of them at the same time anymore though.
Marco hesitates only for as long as it takes for him to exhale smoke. "I probably would’ve still hated you."
Cassie giggles.
Still hated you, he said. She's suspected that for years, but this is the first time it's been voiced aloud. Pre-teen Cassie would've been upset by this, she thinks. She would've spent too much time gnawing her own fingers off to figure out what's wrong with her that they aren't getting along. College Freshman Cassie just shrugs it off.
"Yeah," she agrees. "Probably.” She knows he’s not joking, but Cassie snickers at it all the same. It could be a nervous response, but more probably it's due to the joint the two of them have been passing back and forth, though at this point it’s no more than a roach. She takes a final hit of it when he passes it back to her and carefully ashes it in the tray sitting on the bed between them. (She wonders if Ax has ever licked the ashtray clean and giggles again.)
Cassie isn't quite sure how it happened, but over the course of the last few months, she and Marco became regular smoking partners. A few years ago, she wouldn’t have ever imagined herself regularly getting high with someone on a dinky little twin bed in the dead of the night, not least of all because the D.A.R.E. assemblies worked a little too well on her as a kid.
But more than that, she would never have imagined herself doing such with Marco , of all people. She loves him of course, the same way she loves all of her friends, but she can’t say with confidence all the time that she likes him. She doesn’t know which would be worse – if the feeling were mutual, or if it weren’t. Most of the time, they butt heads. She doubts they ever won’t. It's practically a guarantee that if Cassie voices an opinion on something, Marco will inevitably find a way to suggest the opposite. Or, at the very least, strongly imply the opposite while going along with her idea anyway, just for a chance to tell her he told her so later. It's maddening.
And yet, out of anyone in their little group, Cassie trusts Marco the most to keep her grounded when she needs it. She trusts Rachel too, to an extent. But, well... Rachel likes to be delicate when it comes to Cassie, in particular. Still. As if they didn’t spend nearly three full years ripping out throats together. At least when Marco gets condescending, she knows it's on purpose. He’s never been one for sparing feelings. These days she's pretty sure that the only reason he doesn't beat around the bush with her is because he does actually give a shit about her.
Pretty sure.
"I thought you were nice enough when we were kids," she offers. “Or… no. Nice is definitely not the word. But you were funny. I just didn't really ever have anything to say to you without Jake around."
"Yeah, no shit." Marco snorts. "It's the only thing we’ve ever had in common."
"What is?"
"That we were both in love with Jake." He turns to her and grins like it's just a big joke, but she knows he isn't kidding.
Cassie gives a short, self-deprecating little chuckle, as she glances down to fiddle with the hem of her shirt. Ironically, it was a gift from Jake. An old Nine Inch Nails t-shirt he got from a secondhand store for her birthday one year. It's too big. She still sleeps in it. "Yeah, well. I don't know if I was ever in love with Jake. That sounds so... heavy. I don't know if I've ever felt so strongly about one person."
"What about Andy?" Marco waggles his eyebrows at her.
"That's different."
"How is that different?"
"It just is! I mean, Andy and I only just started dating, like, a month ago. It's way too early to start dropping any L-words."
"I thought she was an L-word."
"The other L-word! Oh, you know what I mean." Cassie nudges him in the shoulder with hers. She knows it didn't hurt, but he still whines about it like a wounded dog. What a drama queen, she thinks as she rolls her eyes.
"Hey, hey, there's nothing wrong with a little lezzing out. If I were a girl I'd be all over your earthy tree-hugging farm girl chic thing too."
“I thought you said you would’ve hated me?” Cassie smiles. Then, she narrows her eyes at the TV in mild confusion, momentarily distracted by the sight of one of the Friends excusing himself onto the balcony to eat his horrible dessert that his other Friend made. Chandler, maybe. Her knowledge of Friends starts and ends with the dolphins at the Gardens who share their namesake. She’d change the channel, but the remote fell to the floor about an hour ago. She’d have to climb over Marco to get it, and that sounds like entirely too much work right now.
Marco shrugs a shoulder up and down. “Can’t it be both? Don’t tell me you’ve never gotten a hate-boner. Or whatever the girl version of a hate-boner is, like... a wet hate-throb.”
Cassie screws up her face in disgust. “Eww. Please never say that again.”
Marco laughs at the same time the live studio audience on TV does.
***
Cassie draws her knees up to her chest and leans her head on Marco’s shoulder. It’s dark now, Marco having finally scrounged around for the remote after the third or fourth episode of Friends in a row to shut it off. The plots all seemed to blur together for Cassie. The orange light of a nearby street lamp outside of the dorm casts strange, warm shadows across the room. Ax’s twin bed really isn’t big enough for the two of them to be sitting together like this, but when you’ve seen someone’s guts spilled in the dirt more times than you can count, it's hard to mind closeness.
"With Jake, I just... I don't know. Maybe at one point I loved him. But being in love… I mean, we were just teenagers. What did we know about being in love?”
“You’re still on that?” Marco asks. Though she can’t see it at this angle, she just knows he’s raising an eyebrow at her.
“Mm. Yeah. After a while it started to feel like... like, like I was only with him because I had to be, not because I wanted to be. Like I was the only thing keeping him sane."
Marco laughs in a way that sounds a lot like a scoff. "You were the only thing keeping him sane."
"But that sucks!” Cassie groans. “I never asked to be responsible for keeping him sane. And I know it's selfish of me to think this way, considering what was at stake, but that kind of pressure is just unfair. I just wanted... I guess I don't know what I wanted. But not that."
"Yeah."
"Yeah." Cassie repeats lamely.
"Yeah." He snorts. "You know, when my mom died, he just totally lost his shit. My dad, I mean. His will to keep living and everything. I was very, very aware that I was the only thing keeping him sane. Keeping him alive, even. And like... sometimes I resented him for it. Not, like, I'd ever abandon him or anything, but I hated having to even be in that position. And it sucked . I was twelve."
“I’m sorry.” Cassie frowns.
“Me too. But it is what it is. You just have to try to move past it and try not to strangle the bastard in his sleep. It’s not like we can change the past.”
She doesn’t say anything. She knows she should say something reassuring, or uplifting, this is supposed to be her job. Instead, all she can come up with is to mumble, “Well… we could. ”
“No, stop it. Stop right there. We can’t change the past. And if I ever find out you did, I'm smothering a pillow into your face until you stop breathing." He pauses. "And anyway, we don’t even know where the Time Matrix is anymore.”
Cassie tries desperately to remember the last time they saw the Time Matrix, but she's got nothing. Now that's an unnerving thought. She clears her throat and tries to change the subject to put it out of her head.
"You know, Jake proposed to me."
Marco's eyebrows practically shoot up off of his forehead. “He what? ”
"Not recently!" Cassie quickly adds after realizing how that sounded. "This was, like, two years ago? Before everything ended. I said no, obviously. I told him to ask again after we were done with the fight."
“Did he?”
Cassie shakes her head softly. “We haven’t talked about it at all since then. We don’t really… talk a lot. Anymore.”
“Neither do we.” Marco sighs and leans his head against Cassie’s. “Hey, wouldn't you know it? We finally found the second thing we have in common.”
Cassie laughs at that and closes her eyes. She tries again to think of something reassuring to say and again nothing comes. She can live with that though. Sometimes the smart thing to do is to be okay with not having all the answers.
In the dark, she finds Marco’s hand and links her pinkie with his.