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The call comes in the middle of the night.
And, in all honesty, Allie immediately expects the worst. It’s a childish habit. Like picking at scabs when you know that they'll only scar over. No matter how old she gets, she will always be that wide-eyed kid curled up in a plastic chair in her mom’s hospital room. Half asleep when the machine stops beeping.
She never talks about that night.
Doesn’t talk a whole lot about anything towards the end of it.
When she does, it’s always with a degree of separation. She’ll tell the whole world that her mom made her promise to never give up on love, but she’ll never talk about how it didn’t even sound like her mom when she said it. That, by that point, when they held hands, it felt like holding a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. Fragile, beautiful, and fucking tragic. Instead, she focuses on the way that her dad stayed. Especially during the worst of it. As if, somehow, it means less that she was there too.
Tonight, with the phone pressed between her ear and her shaking hand, she tries not to think about how easily she’d repackage her last memories with her dad. Whether she'll hang on to the anxiety that made home in her body from the second the words multiple sclerosis left the doctor's mouth. He's spent every moment since then trying not to let her see it. He doesn’t want her to watch him die any more than she wants to lose him.
But it’s not her aunt on the other end of the line.
It’s Hannah, her voice trembling as she says Allie’s name.
Later, Allie will try to remember the finer details of this conversation. If she asked any questions before Hannah broke the news. There had been a silence. She’s almost certain. A brief moment before the world changed forever. Had she known before then? Had that gnawing pit in her stomach been there from the moment she heard Hannah choke out her name? She can't know for sure, but she thinks that might have been.
The only thing she will remember is this:
Beau Maxwell is dead.
She won't remember ending the call or scrambling around her room for the jeans and hoodie that she throws on. Won't remember if she locked the door or if it was her who called the Uber that eventually turned up at the dorm. She thinks it must have been someone else because there's no receipt waiting in her inbox when the dust settles.
Maybe it wasn't an Uber. Maybe someone had picked her up. One of the boys, maybe? Or a friend of Beau's from the football team. There must have been at least a dozen people awake that night, scrambling to make sense of it all.
Whoever it is, she doesn't talk to them. Doesn't even say 'thank you' as she rushes out of the car.
Had they said anything to her during that fifteen-minute drive?
She thinks that they must have, because, before that night, Allie had never gone five minutes without saying anything, let alone fifteen. Had they tried to make small talk while she stared ahead? Had they said his name? Shaping his name with the same sad past tense lilt that Hannah had.
On the night her mom died, Allie had climbed up onto the bed and lain down next to her until her dad came to find her. It felt like hours that she’d been there, trying to stay warm enough for the both of them, but it couldn’t have been. Because he would never have left them for more than a second.
She worries, sometimes, that she doesn’t actually remember the night her mom died.
That all the things she believes are just stories that she tells herself to make it a little easier to swallow.
For a while after it happened, Allie had just pretended that her mom was alive. Not to her family, she'd known even then that there were some lines you couldn't cross. But strangers were fair game. The teenager manning the checkout in the little mom-and-pop shop near her aunt's house. The kids on her grandparents' street. The old ladies washing their hands in the bathrooms of every fast food joint her dad had taken her to in those two months he'd been too distraught to cook. All unwitting castmates in the world's saddest improv show.
She worries, quite a lot, that her acting is just an extension of that lie.
That, if she works hard enough, she might be able to make the whole world believe it, too.
At the house, Allie tries her best to make herself useful.
First, she finds Hannah.
She’s standing in the kitchen with Garrett, their eyes rimmed red as she talks in short bursts. Her voice is desperate as she tries to make sense of it all. “He was just here,” she says as if that has ever not been the case.
Allie pulls her best friend into the tightest hug she can manage and whispers soothing 'I know's into her tangled hair. Because she does. Doesn't she? The same way that Garrett does. Except, she's going through the motions, and he's standing there silently.
'We should get badges,' she'd said to him once after a long night of drinking. They'd been the last ones awake, sitting on the couch with Hannah dozed curling into his side, and Dean pretending to be awake with his head in Allie's lap. 'Allie and Garrett, members of the world's worst club.' But Garrett didn't talk about his mom, not the way that she talked about hers. The closest she'd ever gotten to having a conversation with him about it was that night and, even then, it had been a raised eyebrow and half-hearted snort.
Not that it mattered any more.
They're all part of something else now.
Once Allie is sure that Hannah won't crumble into pieces the minute she leaves, she starts working through a mental checklist of things she remembers people doing for her. It's too early in the morning to start making casseroles and lasagnas, not that Allie has ever successfully made either, but she can make sure they're hydrated. She pours three glasses of water and puts two in front of Hannah and Garrett.
Then, with the last glass in her hand, she asks the question she'd been avoiding.
"Where is he?"
They share a look. Uncertainty in their eyes. As if they hadn't called her for this exact reason.
That was it, wasn't it?
Sure, Hannah hadn't said it directly, but there was no other reason for Allie to be here.
Dean had to have asked for her.
Garrett swallows, nodding towards the door, and Allie can't help but be annoyed at his inability to keep it together. 'He's your fucking friend too!' The thought sits in her throat like a caged animal. Violent in its frenzy but powerless under the weight of its captor. The worst part of it is that Garrett would react exactly like she'd want him to. Head hung low. Shameful. She knows that just as much as she knows that she'd feel the same way for saying it.
"Just," she says, walking towards the sliding screen door. "Try and get some sleep, OK?"
Dean and Logan are sitting by the fire pit, staring intensely at the last of the smouldering ashes. Empty cans litter the ground around them. Had they been out here when they got the news? Cracking beers and watching the flames flicker against the darkness, completely unaware that Beau was gone?
In the following days, they'd learn that Beau had actually died the night before. There had been a full day between the moment he took his last breath and Coach Jensen's call. Hours upon hours that they'd all just gone about with their days. Smiling, laughing, joking as if he wasn't dead. It won't feel like that in retrospect. Any memory of that last mundane day will be filtered through the lens of his absence. As if he were some third-act twist, hiding in the space between the lines until the moment he could hurt them the most.
Logan sees Allie first, clearing his throat gently to give Dean a warning and then standing shakily. He puts his hand on her shoulder as he walks past. Says something about needing a drink. He must not have called Grace yet because she's nowhere to be seen. Allie can't help but think that giving her the night is the kindest thing she's ever seen Logan do.
Which is quickly followed by the cruellest thing he's ever done.
Leaving her and Dean alone together.
They haven’t been speaking.
Haven’t spoken in at least two weeks. Well, ten days. Not that Allie has been counting. The last time she’d seen him was when she’d slammed the door in his face. They’d been arguing about something. Hunter probably. Or maybe the girl that he’d insisted on sleeping with afterwards to finish up his half of the assignment. The girl he hadn’t actually slept with. The girl who, according to Beau, didn’t even exist.
Dean looks up at her slowly, eyes bloodshot and wet, and his mouth opens slightly as if he wants to speak but can’t quite manage the words. He’s got something in his hands. A sweater that he keeps wringing out, twisting it in on itself until it’s as tight as the lines of his body.
That was it.
The thing they’d been arguing about.
He’d told her to stop worrying about Sean and the whole fucking state of her life, and she’d just. lost. it. Told him that he didn’t understand what it was like for the rest of him. That the fucking life of Dean was shallow and pointless, and to not bother speaking to her until he woke the fuck up and understood what a real problem felt like.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers, bypassing the empty chair and kneeling in front of him. Wood shavings dig into the skin on her knees as she reaches forward and cradles his face in her hands.
“He’s,” is all Dean manages before a violent shudder passes through him. He’s crying now. Brutal, shaking sobs wrack through his body as he collapses forward into her arms. She’s seen him upset before, but never like this. Not even in their most bitter fights. It pulls the breath from her lungs.
He presses his face into the soft fabric of the hoodie she’s wearing, fingers balling the fabric at her sides. He collapses into himself, smaller than she’s ever seen him, as she curls her fingers across the back of his head and holds him there. He lets her, unmoving even as the sobs turn into deep, panicked breaths.
He’s drowning on dry land.
And, fuck, she’s only twenty. She doesn’t know how to fix this any more than she knew how to make the machines start beeping again all those years ago. She wishes that she did. That, somehow, watching one person die made it so that you never felt it again. But she doesn’t
She’s just a kid.
They both are.
“I’m here,” she whispers in his ear. Cycling through every unhelpful thing that was ever said to her until she’s left with only that. “I’m right here, baby, as long as you need me to be.”
And maybe Sean had been right. Maybe Allie doesn’t know how to do anything without centring herself. But at least she’s here.
They sit like that for hours, him falling apart and her trying her best to hold it together. It’s not perfect, but nothing about this was ever going to be.
Days later, they’re lying in his room when he clears his throat and speaks for the first time in hours.
“Can,” he starts, voice hoarse. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” she smiles kindly.
She’d do anything he asked her to.
“Was it like this with your mom?”
It’s funny, really, how the first thing she feels when she hears the question is anger. Like he’s doing it just to hurt her. But the pure desperation in his voice as he asks immediately overrules it. He’s searching for something. Hope, she thinks, that if she had survived it, then maybe he will too.
“Not really,” is all she can give him.
She wishes it were more.
Her mom’s death had been gruelling. A slow, incoming tide that took her piece by piece until they were all drowning with her. They’d given her six months, and that’s what she had. Allie had hoped, despite the diagnosis, but even the best pretenders couldn’t ignore what’s right in front of them.
Allie still hasn’t accepted that Beau is gone.
She knows that it’s true. Feels the beginnings of it in the weight that settles over her body. But all she can hear is Hannah’s words playing over and over in her head. He was just here. Young. Healthy. Smiling as he tells her that he’ll see her next week.
Dean’s lips tremble as he asks, “Worse?”
She shakes her head, a wet little noise escaping her despite her best efforts. “Just different, I guess.”
No one had known Allie’s mom like she had, and she’d spent her entire life carrying that. No one understands unless they’ve been through it too. Even her dad, who loved her mom more than anything, doesn't understand the exact shape of the emptiness that she left behind. They were staring at the same Rorschach test and coming away with different answers.
And maybe that’s good, in a way, because she can’t imagine anyone ever loved Beau the way that Dean did, either.
“But it does get smaller,” she says.
No, that isn't true.
The pain stays the same size; you just survive long enough to curl yourself around it.
Dean drags the back of his hand across his face. He hasn't left his bed for three days now. Still wearing the same clothes she'd found him in. Stubble spread across the bottom half of his face like the shadow that had settled over the house. Beau's sweater sits on his bedside table, folded nearly amongst the chaos.
“I can’t remember what it felt like before,” he says.
Four days and he’s not managed to say the words died once.
“You will,” Allie says, putting her hand on top of his. “It’ll come back.”
“But he won’t.”
Suddenly, Allie is thirteen again, standing in the McDonald's bathroom as she tells a stranger about the vacation her mom is going to take her on when she gets back from her work trip. Her mom's jumper two sizes too big. It smells more like sweat than it does her now. But Allie can pretend that it doesn't. She can rewrite reality as many times as she needs to if it means that her mom isn't quite gone.
“No, baby, he won’t.” She says, scared that if he starts believing otherwise, she might never get him back. Dean isn't like her. He can't live in the space in between. “But I’ll be here. We all will.”
It’s not enough right now, she knows that more than anything, but it will be at some point.
She just needs to hold on long enough for him to get there.