Chapter Text
Cherry Valance has got a lot of books on the shelf in her room. Quite a few of them are romance.
Milestone Summer by Nicole Meredith, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Masquerade at the Sea House by Elisabeth Ogilvie.
Her shelf is filled with title after title. Most of them romance.
Her father had curled his lip a bit at them, reading the little summaries and declaring his daughter shouldn’t be reading such filth.
He still gave her the money to buy more, though.
Anyone who came into her room would scoff and shake their head. The typical teenage girl. Caught up in a whirlwind of romance novels.
And they’re half right.
She does read romance novels a little more than she maybe should, but she likes them.
They’re uncomplicated, with characters and a plot and writing that makes her feel what they feel so deeply it hurts.
But she also knows that she doesn’t read them for the “normal” reason. She doesn’t read romance novels because she can’t find it in her own life. She has a man.
Or... well. She at least has a boyfriend.
She can go out with him any time and demand he take her on any of those little dates she read about and he would. As long as he isn’t three sheets to the wind and around his friends.
Because he loves her. She doesn’t need all those little books to tell her what love feels like she knows what it feels like.
And it isn’t from the books. But it also isn’t from Bob.
It’s from a shoebox she keeps under her bed, filled halfway with letters.
Each letter winding, talking about nothing besides love. And each with a kiss mark at the bottom.
It sends a thrill of excitement up her spine, the way she can always crack into the box of letters and read the declarations of love. Knowing she’s sending them right back. Long winding letters that make her hand cramp up by the end of it with her favorite shade of pink lipstick leaving a mark at the bottom.
All folded up nice and pretty and stuck in an envelope she sticks through the slots of Marcia’s locker.
Both of them have boyfriends.
It should feel wrong. It does feel wrong. But it’s also so fun.
It makes her head feel light and her knees get weak in the way alcohol never could.
The way that Marcia could. Her hands and her lips and her hair and her body and the quiet declarations of love after dark, when no one would find them.
They never used their names in the letter. Just a single swooping letter at the bottom of the page next to their kiss print.
Cherry writes a ‘C’ in the same way she’d always been taught to in calligraphy. Never Sherri. Never her name. Always the nickname, which may be more recognizable by this point but she’s always been a romantic and it strikes her as too meaningful to stop.
Marcia signs her letters with a capital ‘A’ marking it hers. It’s her middle name. Amelia.
It’s a secret she keeps close to her heart and it give Cherry a headrush every time she’s reminded she’s one of three people in the world who know it. The other three being Marcia’s immediate family members.
Every month, they slip letters through the slots in each other’s lockers and when school’s out, they exchange them in person, waiting until the other isn’t looking and sliding that pretty envelope into either a purse or the seat of a car.
It’s risky but they both have shoeboxes, filled up with declarations of love and meaningless wishes that they could be together.
Because that’s all they’ll ever be. Letter that fill up a shoebox halfway until they meet, on nights like these.
The sky is dark, a fire sparking lowly somewhere in the middle of the woods just outside of Tulsa.
Marcia waits for the fire to gain a little bit of force, fanning it with one letter before throwing it in. The smell of burning paper fills the air soon enough, always careful never to cause a bonfire.
Always careful to add in one at a time.
Always careful to get rid of the evidence.
The fire climbs until it would be noticeable by one of the big houses in town, and they lean back, waiting for it to die down. Marcia goes right back into Cherry’s arms.
“We should run away together.”
It’s a nice dream.
“We’d have a nice big house. Maybe some kids if we pretend one of our husbands died. A dog.” Marcia talks listlessly about a life that could be, and Cherry can feel her mind grasping at the strands of the dream.
Marcia is so careful to not be too hopeful, not be too eager. And it breaks Cherry’s heart.
Just like it breaks her heart they can’t really ever be lovers. Not out in public. They can go on “double-dates” at the Drive-In that always somehow end with them breaking off from their boyfriends and going to find somewhere else to sit. Closer, easier, better.
The fire crackles and Cherry is pulled out of the fantasy. “That’d be real nice. We could have an apartment in a city like New York where it’s okay to dance together in some places. We could fill it up with records we like and pretend to be away at college if anyone asked.”
Marcia laughs and turns her face to Cherry’s chest, before looking up at her and kissing her.
It's the same sweet-strawberries-on-a-summer-day, fireworks-exploding-behind-her-eyes, love-it-love-it-love-her feeling as always that makes her shiver, kissing back in the lighting of the fire, which had died down to a campfire size.
She pulls away, reluctantly, and reaches her hand into her own shoebox.
It almost hurts, letting go of those letters that she knows she can’t keep and watching them blacken and burn in the fire.
It’s a nice dream, that they could live life together.
But it’s just that. It’s a dream. A fantasy.
And both of them know it.
Cherry keeps on thinking that.
Until the weeks after Bob and Johnny and Dallas’ deaths. The silence ringing in her head almost makes her sick, and one day, she opens her locker. There is no letter, which had been the one thing keeping her sane in the weeks since she lost her boyfriend.
A single slip of notebook paper flutters to the ground and Cherry picks it up. It’s Marcia’s same short, slanted writing.
‘My house 8:00. We’re running away.’
She can’t help the laughter that bubbles from her lips.
A couple people look at her weirdly out of the corner of their eye and she quickly tucks the slip of paper into her dress pocket, slamming her locker a bit too hard, her cheeks a color that could rival her hair.
It burns a hole in her pocket all day, until eventually it’s 7:43, and it’s drizzling outside.
She climbs out her window and makes the familiar way to Marcia’s house, which isn’t too far.
Marcia lights up when she sees Cherry, and a squirming guilt settles in her chest. “Cherry! You made it! C’mon, I took some money from my dad’s wallet and we can take your car an—”
“I’m not going.” Cherry says, and the words cut through Marcia’s excitement like a hot knife through butter.
“What?”
“I’m not going.” she says, and she can’t tell if Marcia’s eyes are welling with tears or if her mind is playing tricks on her. “I can’t go. There’s too much to lose.”
Marcia sounds so crestfallen when she says, “Then lose it. Let it go.”
Cherry almost lets herself hope, for a moment. But she shakes her head.
“Cherry.” Marcia says, and it sounds like a warning when it passes her lips. “Cherry, I’m going with or without you.”
Cherry can’t help the cold fear that grips her heart at the words. “No. I—Marcia, no. Don’t, I can’t... I won’t make it through this whole thing without you.”
Marcia laughs and it sounds hysterical. “Then come with me!”
Cherry bites her lip. “I can’t!”
“Why not?”
“Because...” Cherry says, and she can’t think of a good enough reason, even though they’re sixteen and two women who can’t even get a credit card let alone buy a place of their own. “Because.”
Marcia is crying.
“Please!”
Cherry takes a step back. “Stay, Marcia.”
Marcia shakes her head, almost violently. “I can’t! I can’t live like this, Cherry!”
Cherry turns on her heel. She can’t take the fear, anymore. It’s making her chest feel like it’s caving in on her.
She hears a voice echo through the streets behind her, a curse and a warning in equal measure. “You can’t run away from your heart, Cherry!”
Cherry can’t stop herself from gasping and crying. Sobbing too hard to keep running, turning into an alleyway and sliding onto the ground, her butt getting wet from the pavement.
And then, the streets are quiet.
Just Cherry and her thoughts, alone in the pouring rain.
It takes a month for the letter to come in the mail.
Her mother hands it to her when she gets home from school and she sees the familiar writing labeling it from an Amelia Meyer.
Neither name was Marcia’s real name, but it makes her dizzy because she knows who it’s from all the same.
It's some address in New York. One she doesn’t recognize because she’s never ventured into the city.
She basically leaps up the stairs to her room, sitting down in front of it so no one will barge in and ripping it open with eager fingers.
It’s a simple letter. It isn’t the long ones with steadily worse handwriting as it goes on.
It’s sentiments.
I miss you.
I wish you came with me.
I wish I stayed.
Everything and nothing all at the same time. At the bottom, that sloping, familiar ‘A’ with a kiss mark at the very bottom.
Marcia.
She chokes on her tears as they rise to her eyes. She’d cried too much in the past month, it wasn’t healthy. But she clutches the letter to her chest, and she sobs.
When the sun is going down and she’s all cried out, she tucks the letter into that same old shoebox under her bed.
There is no fire in secret at the end of that month.
Cherry keeps the letter under her bed, in that same old shoebox that wasn’t decorated any particular way but held such a thick history of love letters she can feel it when she holds the stiff carboard in her hands.
She’ll keep this one letter, as a reminder. She lets herself think she didn’t run away because she’s a realist, she doesn’t let herself get carried away by fantasy.
She steadfastly ignores the knot of fear in her chest. ‘There’s no way it would’ve worked anyway.’ she tells herself, and she almost believes it.
Because running away together is something straight out a romance novel.
And life isn’t a romance novel.