Chapter Text
It’s important to mention that Marlene doesn’t do mornings.
Her mom might think she does because that woman chooses to live in her own imaginary world, but as everyone in her school knows: she doesn’t do mornings.
During the year, she was always either late, or asleep on her desk. Regardless, students and teachers knew that Marlene McKinnon wouldn’t function properly until the clock marked at least eleven.
So, the alarm that goes off at nine o’clock in the morning is definitely one that she didn’t set for herself. Way to start a random Tuesday in the middle of June; irritated, annoyed, tired, and definitely irritated. Perhaps going to sleep after the sun started rising wasn’t the cleverest of ideas, but the movie she was watching (she wasn’t actually watching it, she was playing a game on her laptop) was definitely worth it (it wasn’t, she couldn’t win the game).
She tries to bat her eyes open but doesn’t manage to go far from simply trying. The only thing she does manage to do is scrunch her eyebrows, beyond nettled by the piercing sound of the alarm that rang throughout her room. Then she attempts to do something else; she calls for the digital assistant on her phone to stop it, like she does every time the horrific verity of reality forces her to wake up early for one reason or another. But this time, the digital assistant doesn’t do anything, and the alarm doesn’t turn off. So, the only thing left for her to do is exasperatedly grunt and throw her pillow towards her dresser, where the alarm sat atop.
And, of course, silently curse her mom. Because who else would have the cruelty to set an alarm for someone else and place it so far away from the bed.
Very ingloriously, Marlene accepts the defeat. Cleary, her mom wants something of her, which is, like, absolutely terrifying because her mom’s requests vary. It can be a simple task such as to get something from a store she’s too busy to go pick up herself, but it can also be something like setting her up with a guy from the country club. Which is probably her biggest, hugest, most massive nightmare.
It would only make sense – from her mom’s point of view, of course. Marlene just finished school, she has an entire summer ahead of her that she’d rather spend with her friends who in no way belong in her family’s social circle. So, it would only make sense if her mom tried to set her up with some mediocre, blonde dude from one of the many she can spot here and there every time her mom drags her to the club.
She turns the alarm clock off and takes it with her as she heads downstairs, eager to set it in front of her mom and chastise her for interrupting her sleep. Honestly, that would only make her mom even more upset with her, and she’d probably get chastised right back, but when did that ever stop her from doing anything?
Never. So, there she goes. She lets her hand slide on the polished oak bannister as she walks down the stairs, and from walking too fast, she can feel the loose elastic of her plaid pyjama pants drop on her lower waist. These dumb pants have started to annoy her, never sitting where she wants them to, and maybe it’s time to get rid of them. But she’s just too emotionally attached; she’s had them for so many years.
Right before she takes a turn to go to the room she will most likely find her mom in, the doorbell rings.
Marlene rolls her eyes because it went off just as she passed by the front door and she can’t just ignore it, so she has to deal with whomever dropped by their house. And that never ends well, especially when she’s freshly woken up and already has a temper.
A significant detail about the McKinnons’ front door that Marlene absolutely hates is that it is lacking a window that would at least prepare her for who she’d find herself face to face with. Numerous times she’s answered the door just to hear one of her mom’s friends comment on how awful she looks and how good she could have looked if she got rid of the blue highlights on her blonde hair, grew it out, and started wearing clothes that girls wear. Because apparently, girls don’t wear jeans and t-shirts in their world.
If she were to hear that one more time, she’d punch a middle-aged lady in the face. And then this lady would have to worry about her own mess of appearance and leave Marlene alone.
She braces herself for the worst, and pulls the bronze door handle.
Surprisingly, and rather thankfully, no judgemental lady is standing on the other side. Who Marlene does find on the other side of the door, however, is a girl. A girl that she’s never seen before, a girl that’s wearing a charming, floral summer dress that contrasts her brown complexion, and has thrown her coily hair in a bun. She is also wearing a smile, Marlene can’t help but notice, one of the brightest ones she has ever seen.
Despite this girl’s beauty, though, Marlene can tell why she is outside of her house. If the fine silks of her dress aren’t enough of a giveaway, the Jimmy Choo sandals she’s paired it with are more than enough. She is her mom’s guest.
So, her reaction is completely logical. “Who are you?” She asks, expressionless. Her eyes are still tired and droopy, and not even this girl’s radiant smile could get her to liven-up. Not to mention that she doesn’t want to give her any wrong ideas, since her mom invited her. For all Marlene knows, she might be here to recruit her in some ridiculous country club activity.
The girl’s smile doesn’t falter at Marlene’s blankness. “I’m Mary!” She says, extending a hand for Marlene to shake. Marlene looks at it warily, until she decides to shake it with the hand that isn’t holding an alarm clock. She must look so weird like that, walking around the house with the company of a clock. “You’re Marlene, right? Your mom has told me a lot about you.”
And just like that, she drops the hand. And she doesn’t care if she looks weird.
Normally, she would have already shut the door in this girl’s face. But there is something about her, something about how she doesn’t exactly look like the usual copy-paste of her mom’s friends. She’s lacking about thirty years of age, the sourest expression one could muster, and a bunch of wrinkles. So, it gets Marlene wondering; why would she choose to spend her morning with Marlene’s mom of all people.
Now, confused, Marlene’s eyebrows furrow. And because she can’t really bother, she goes on to ask without much filtering, or any at all, “Why are you here?”
A perfect example of the ever so polite girl her mom always describes her as to new people she meets. Can’t have this Mary girl think whatever Marlene’s mom told her is true, right? Also a perfect example of Marlene’s pettiness. She doesn’t care if she looks bad as long as her mom gets mad because of it. It’s as simple as that.
Mary barely gets to say a total of two words before the shrieking voice of Marlene’s mom cuts her sentence short.
“Mary!” Her mom comes to the door, wearing a huge smile and pulls Mary in a hug. “Welcome, dear, I was waiting for you!”
And as her mom invites her in, which Marlene hadn’t really thought of doing, Marlene crosses her arms in front of her chest and leans against a pillar next to the door, getting out of the way so Mary could walk in. Her eyes examine her mom and Mary greeting each other suspiciously. Surely, this has something to do with her; an alarm went off just before a girl around her age who has “heard a lot about her” came to their house. That can’t be a coincidence.
She doesn’t have enough time to figure it out, though, because her mom redirects her attention to her, and of course it’s not for anything positive. “Haven’t I told you not to wander around the house in your sleeping clothes? It’s improper.”
Marlene’s eye twitches. She looks down at her plaid pants and tank top, then looks back at her mom with the blankest stare. “I’m in my house,” she tries to reason. Unsuccessfully so.
“My house. So you need to follow my rules.” Her mom glares. That woman really has no positive bone in her entire body, it is truly the strangest thing. “Go on up and change. Quickly! We need to get going.”
Marlene’s eyebrows shoot up, and from head to toes, her entire body fills with dread. “Go where?”
Her mom smiles at Mary, then turns back to Marlene with a significantly less genuine smile. “Shopping, of course. You need some summer dresses!”
Oh, hell no.
・❥・
When the alarm went off earlier this morning, a couple thousand horrors went through Marlene’s mind. There could be a million reasons for why her mom had set it, but out of all of them, the reality is far more horrid. Because not even in her worst nightmare would she have to try on summer dresses with a random girl and her mom as an audience to criticise absolutely everything about her – and the dresses, but mostly her.
She stands awkwardly on shoes she has promised herself to never wear, regretting not sneaking out of the house while they were waiting for her to get ready.
“It’s rather awkward,” Mary comments, looking her up and down. Marlene has grown immune to it by now, the stares and the comments. They stopped at approximately eight different shops before they chose every single ugly dress from this one. Mary looks at Marlene’s mom. “Don’t you think?”
“It’s Marlene’s stance that’s awkward. The dress is fabulous,” her mom says. Marlene can only sigh, and ignore the look on Mary’s face when she looks back at her because, in contrast to her mom’s, hers is unreadable. Marlene prefers being able to understand what someone is thinking about when they stare at her for so long.
She smiles at them both. “It’s a no, yes? Yes. I'll go change.” And back to the dressing room she goes. She plans to stay there for at least fifteen minutes.
After shop number four (or five, she can’t remember) she started taking extra time while changing into dresses. She’d use stupid excuses, that the zipper wasn’t working well or that the dress had a weird fit and it took her a while to put on, anything to waste as much time as possible. The later she was, the less dresses she’d have to try on until they had to go home.
And hopefully, then, the time would pass faster.
But it doesn’t. It passes slowly, painfully so.
In the dressing room, she notices there are no more dresses left to try on, and a little bit of hope resurrects. Still, that doesn’t mean there’s no time to waste, so instead of changing into her very comfortable sweatpants and going to find her mom, she changes and settles on the chair in the dressing room.
She pulls out her phone, replies to some of the messages in the band’s group chat, texts her best friend about this hellsent day, watches a couple of muted Tiktoks in case her mom is outside and the sound snitches on her, and after a good ten minutes, she decides it’s time to go back out.
Only she doesn’t find what she expected she would. She expected her mom and Mary would have gotten their things and prepared to leave – probably go to the next shop – but it’s not that. She finds Mary looking at some hung clothes, while her mom is nowhere in sight. It is very curious but Marlene can’t make herself pay it any mind, she’s just glad escaping turned out to be easier than she anticipated.
She walks up to the girl who has been acting like a friend of hers all morning and asks, “Where’s my mom?”
Her voice comes as a surprise to Mary because she seems startled when she turns around to face Marlene, but she still smiles at her. “She had to answer a phone call,” she informs, and fails to notice the visible satisfaction in Marlene’s face. “She told me to find something for you to try on, so, here, I have some—”
“Don’t care, see ya!” Marlene smiles sweetly, feeling the freedom as she heads for the door. Before she leaves, though, she adds, “Or not. I prefer the latter.” Because going through this again would be her definition of hell. And she’s out the door.
What she doesn’t expect to happen, however, is Mary following after her. She’s walking down the sidewalk, observing what other shops there are in this area and trying to spot a bus station when a warm hand grasps her wrist and stops her in her tracks.
Confused, she turns around to face the girl with the perfect makeup, and the perfect attitude. She understands why her mom invited her to come shopping with them. Mary is the perfect example of who Marlene’s mom wants Marlene to be. And that makes her furious. Both at her mom and at Mary.
She raises a judgemental eyebrow at her and nods towards her trapped wrist. Mary retracts her hand immediately. “Can I help you?” Marlene asks.
“Where are you going?”
Marlene looks around, not finding a reason to stay and talk to Mary, but still doing so. “Uh, I don’t know. Anywhere,” she informs. “Probably to the ice cream shop down the street.”
Mary frowns at her. “Your mom is trying to bond with you.”
At that, Marlene can’t help but laugh. Sticking around wasn’t the greatest idea, after all, so she continues to walk. And, for some reason, Mary follows her. Sarcastically, Marlene asks, “Is she?”
“Yes,” Mary states firmly. What would have to be going on in someone’s head to believe that practically forcing someone to go shopping and try on clothes that they really don’t want to wear is a form of bonding?
“See, now, I don’t think she is,” Marlene says. “So you can stop following me now.”
Mary did not, in fact, stop following her. “If you come back now, I’ll tell her we should get going because I have somewhere to be. You can’t just leave.”
“Sure I can.” Marlene smiles. God forbid she gets some ice cream in peace. “Look, princess, you don’t know me,” she reasons as she pushes the door to the ice cream shop open and walks in, having had enough of whatever this pretend-friendship is. “I don’t know why you’re acting like you do, but you don’t. And, frankly, I don’t know you either. So, can you just… I don’t know, leave me alone?”
Mary stares. “Your mom told me to hang out with you because you need some proper friends.”
Marlene laughs bitterly. “She makes me sound like a charity case.” She pauses to ask for two different flavours and some chocolate syrup from the employee before she looks back at Mary. “I have friends, she just doesn’t want me to hang out with them.”
“Why?” Mary asks.
“Because my friends hang out at pubs, my friends play the drums, my friends are not part of our social class, and my friends are queer.” She flashes a smile. “Plenty of reasons, take your pick.”
“And why doesn’t she want you to hang out with them?”
Shocking, the first debutante that doesn’t find a problem with everything Marlene mentioned. The question earns her the most dumbfounded look. Why wouldn’t her mom want her to hang out with them, she wonders. As if their society isn’t the most classist, misogynistic and homophobic group of people. Marlene pays for her ice cream, and clicks her tongue. “I’ll let you figure that one out yourself.”
And she leaves a confused Mary in the ice cream shop. This time, she doesn’t follow her.
・❥・
James laughs at her face when Marlene tells him what she’s been up to all morning. And rightfully so.
Of all people in the club, James is the only one who gets just how awful their side of society is. Maybe that’s because he’s not part of it – his family is more than qualified, but unlike Marlene’s, they don’t want to participate in it. Now, why James spends every afternoon at the country club is an entirely different conversation.
And he too got laughed in the face when he told Marlene he got a summer job in the place they have been trash talking for years.
“Mary Macdonald,” James repeats for the fifth time. Truthfully, Marlene only knew her by her last name. That’s why when James realised which Mary Marlene was talking about, he shockingly said ‘Mary Macdonald?!’ and Marlene was caught unprepared. Mary is the club’s golden girl, her parents own a big part of it, she always knows what to say and who to talk to, and Marlene had never bothered enough to put a face on the name. She always just heard Macdonald this, and Macdonald that, and she just grew to dislike her.
It sucks that in reality, she isn’t this horrible person she was building in her mind, but she is willing to look past that. Because, admittedly, she might be nice but not nice enough to get Marlene to like her. Plus, Marlene knows for a fact that the group she hangs out with are some of the most horrible people she had the displeasure of meeting.
“Does that mean you’re going to start hanging out with them?” James asks, nodding towards the club’s patio where the deb tea party was being organised by some girls.
Marlene takes a sip of her lemon coke and shakes her head. “I’d rather die.”
James smirks jokingly at her. “Why not, they seem like such nice girls!” He laughs, knowing very well that these are the same girls that will ruin your life if you don’t meet their standards. And, guess what, Marlene doesn’t.
“You go join them, I bet they’d love you,” she says, shrugging nonchalantly as if what she’s saying is nothing but the truth.
James clicks his tongue. “I can’t. Working.”
“Is that what you’re doing?” Marlene raises an eyebrow at him, and he looks away, rolling his eyes.
“Yes, Marlene, I’m a professional,” he lies. Marlene laughs at his ridiculousness.
“Of course,” she mocks, nodding her head in faux agreement. “Definitely not ogling one of the Black Brothers during his tennis lesson.”
“Definitely not.”
Marlene shakes her head, smiling at her friend’s stupidity. Now, if she were to practically fall in love with a girl from the country club, her life would be over. She’d likely end it herself because first of all, no one wants to date someone that has the mindset of most of the people in the club. Second of all, it just wouldn’t work with all the homophobia, obviously. And, last but not least, liking a straight girl never, ever ends well.
Without realising, her eyes trail towards the patio, which is where they catch a glimpse of the girl she met this morning looking radiant in a long pastel dress. In a sudden, Mary turns and directs her gaze exactly where Marlene was seated, making her wonder if she noticed her earlier and turned around for a second glance, and like that, their eyes meet. There’s a pool, and a small hill separating them, but still, they stare at each other.
Mary dares to smile at her, even wave at her from afar. Marlene ignores her.
She turns back to her best friend. “Stop staring at him and get me another lemon coke.” James shoots her a dirty look, so Marlene smiles sweetly and bats her eyelashes. “Pretty please.”