He waits for her at their favourite ice cream shop, still burning bright with a thousand white fluorescent bulbs, even though it is late and it is empty. He orders two root beer floats for when she arrives.
The waiter is new here, and he nearly puts down the glasses without coasters and Lemony winces and stops him just in time.
She always uses coasters. Has since they were children. He fell in love with her partly because of it—because she used coasters, read long books, because when that pesky waiter at the old shop began dropping thumbtacks in their floats she would always find a way to spit them out before they pricked her tongue.
(He had not been so fortunate.)
She still does those things and many more. She can whistle with crackers in her mouth, and her specialty is Mozart's 14th Symphony but he always prefers it when she does La Grazza Ladra.
Beatrice is anything and everything, and if ever there comes a time where she isn't, the world might cease to spin. She is a master of disguise and a queen of theatre; she composes very good poems and once wrote a screenplay, about a boy and a girl and how they lived their lives without a single sadness or regret.
And then they died, quite abruptly. She showed it to him once and the next day her brother disappeared and she never mentioned it again.
Lemony looks longingly down at his root beer float. The joy he formerly used to get upon drinking them has slowly evaporated throughout the years, and the process was further quickened with the thumbtack incident, but he finds that now all he really wants is soda and ice cream and he decides that it'll be alright if he starts without her.
He pulls out a straw from his pocket and drops it into his glass. It's not really a special kind of straw, just a normal old translucent plastic one, with blue and yellow stripes running down the edges—but it's from a package that he received a very long time ago from his mother, and he hasn't seen her since childhood, so God forbid he use any other sort until these run out.
Lemony glances to his right, where Beatrice's own glass sits, the ice cream already beginning to melt. Her chair remains vacant: she is late. It is not normal for her to be late, and thinking back on the times they've met each other at midnight for root beer floats, he realises that the only times she ever is late occur when she's had to put on an encore at the theatre (for far more sinister purposes than pleasing the audience), or if the stage has caught on fire yet again. Or perhaps she has just forgotten to brush her hair.
He wishes he could lean on something, but there isn't a back to the stool. He slouches instead, curling protectively around his root beer to prevent any small sharp objects from making their way into the glass. He sips slowly, willing the flavor and warmth to last.
He tries to think of nothing; attempting, for once, to let his mind rest—and fails miserably. He thinks of everything instead. Of how his typewriter is running out of ink, and how his article deadline is nearing and how he is running out of time in more ways than one. He has to find something soon or he shall be happily fired from The Daily Punctilio—and this would be gladly accepted, if it were not for the fact that he is currently the sole communications head of national newspapers at the V.F.D.
He thinks of misfortune, and reptiles, and hidden blue boxes, of letters and secrets and all manner of codes. He wonders fleetingly if life could have ever turned out differently; if in another universe he had not been grabbed by the ankles that one fateful night, but it is no use questioning what could have happened, because now there is no turning back. And he has thought about it too much already – it still pains him.
He closes his eyes and pushes his glass away and is halfway through a sigh when she arrives.
His eyes flicker open and he glances back, to where his dear, dear Beatrice is pushing open the door and rushing in, hair in a tangled mess of a bun that is quickly falling apart. The tips of her dark chocolate locks appear to be smoking, and in both hands she carries gift bags of the expensive-looking sort.
He is alert at once, sitting up and nearly knocking down his glass.
She hurries over and takes a seat in the stool next to him, setting down the gift bags and pulling off her gloves, which used to be white—they are now stained with the orange-tinted pink of fruit punch. She lays them to the side of her root beer and gives Lemony a quick peck on the cheek, pulling out another straw from his back pocket. She's always known where he's kept them. "Good evening, love."
"Your hair is on fire," he says in response.
"Is it?" she exclaims, glancing down to where a few strands of singed hair lay over her shoulder. She looks back up at him and smiles, dropping the stolen straw into her root beer. "Ah. Well, it'll go out in a moment. How are you?"
"Fine," he replies, and she knows that he isn't and he knows that she knows. As for her, well—she is not the calm, collected Beatrice who usually walks through that glass-paneled door. She was caught in the middle of something (how very Beatrice of her), and either forgot (which is unlike her) or was unable to reach their meeting on time (also unlike her), and that is why she is late, and as to what she was doing, he is nearly but not quite afraid to ask.
"What happened?" he says, softly, and she looks down and cups her hands around her glass and the sadness she's been hiding glosses over her eyes.
"I was at R's to pick up some things for J, and she and her mother were... at it, again. Another fight. So, er, yes. Things didn't end well."
He tilts his head and motions to her hair, which seems to have stopped smoking.
She shakes her head. "Oh… no. That was on my way here. O was experimenting with the gasoline in your sister's tank again."
Lemony looks down at his lap and then glances back up at her and smiles weakly, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. The sorrow and desperation in his eyes is apparent. Olaf is getting more dangerous to be around these days.
There are many questions he wants to ask, but instead he goes with the one that will give him the least complicated answer. "You took Kit's car?"
"I had to," she sighs. "Mine is even older than your typewriter, Lemony. I think it's finally done in for."
He turns and leans in closer, touching his nose to hers, willing the pain and the fear and the tension to wash away. "But I bought you that car."
She laughs in spite of everything holding her down and pinning her heart, letting go of her root bear and wrapping her arms around his waist. "Yes, because even you didn't want it." She kisses him once and then pulls back, crosses her legs and takes another shot of root beer. "Anyway, we've both gotten pay raises this month and if you chip in I should be able to get a new one in a few weeks. And if I'm not able to pay for it, well, we have our ways." The sparkle in her eyes cannot be missed, and Lemony is glad to see the return of her usual self.
"The pay raise, though," he says, because this has been bothering him for a while, "Have you any idea why they gave me one in the first place? I assumed you had something to do with it but you haven't said a thing."
"I thought it was because of that article you wrote last month," she says, taking a silver spoon from beside her glass and snitching a bit of his ice cream (much to his annoyance, though he says nothing).
"What, the one on that circus sideshow? I've written far better than that and they know it."
"I found it rather compelling."
"You would, wouldn't you?"
Her eyebrows twitch upwards. "And just what do you mean by that?"
He shrugs, and spins his stool back forward to face the counter. "They're weird. Like you. Odd ones out."
"That's like all of us. You, me, Hector, Jo." She's forgetting initials in the heat of the moment. "We're all the strange ones."
"But you're alright with it."
"And you aren't?"
He pauses and catches her eye for a second before focusing his attention on his root beer float.
"Who's to say what's normal, anyway?" she murmurs.
He tries to stop himself but the words tumble out. "I can't say what is, but I know that we aren't."
She is silent then, for a moment.
"No. I suppose not."
"Don't you ever wonder?" he says quietly; he might as well after that comment. "What would have happened, if we'd never been taken? If our families had been like every other one on the block?"
"Why, we wouldn't have met," she says, in surprise forgetting half their conversation, for it is a funny thing to inquire. In all the time they've known each other he has never asked such a question, and he has asked many an odd one throughout the years. It has always been a simple fact that their lives will never be simple. They are the ones who have to fight to keep the balance in the world. There will be others, surely; the fate of the world does not rest in their hands as some members think, but they play a larger part in it than even she and him can imagine.
"I… I know, I mean, probably not," he says, uncertain, stumbling, "But what if? What if we grew up at a normal school, a public school, and ate… peanut butter and jelly? Every day, for lunch? What if we went on to university, and studied something normal and boring but far less dangerous than what we do now, like—like economic sciences, and… what if we liked it? What if we were happy that way?"
She wants to open her mouth and reaffirm her previous statement, but even to her that sounds almost… lovely, no matter how unexciting or petty an idea it may seem.
"Do you think we would have met, still? Gone out for root beer?"
"Oh, but that's the best part," he says, spinning his stool round once, twice, excited now. He grasps her shoulders the second time around. "Of course we would have. It's like in books, you know, when people are apart and they find their way back to each other no matter how impossible the odds—"
She laughs, though her heart aches for it to be true. "Those are fairytales, Lemony."
"So what?" he exclaims, and she laughs again and reprimands him for being so loud. He goes on, his voice a stage whisper now. "We would've found our way to each other, you and I, and our parents—we'd be with our parents, Bea, we wouldn't have to be orphans because in this world no one is lonely!—would disapprove, and so we'd go out every Tuesday midnight just like we do now and have the most massive, beautiful root beer floats in the world… and the delight and happiness would never fade, not ever, and there would be no idiot waiters dropping tacks in my soda, and all the treacherous people in the world would be locked up and no one would die over poison candles or silk gloves or secrets of any sort, and… oh, Bea, imagine it, will you, give a man his hope for once!"
His eyes sparkle like the stars she used to watch from the peak of the Mortaim Mountains. She grins even though it's a ridiculous notion, because she has not seen him so happy since they were twelve years old and she bought him a set of Louise Fitzhughs, and all she wants to do is press her lips against his stupid, gleeful blathering mouth and so she does, stopping him midsentence.
He pauses for only a second after the interruption to return it, grasping her shoulders and kissing her hard.
Then he pulls back and continues his tangled soliloquy, not because he believes it will happen, but because life is worthless without dreams, and dreams are best when shared over root beer on Tuesdays.