The cop who drives her home is so colorless, Mac thinks that she would make a good spy: she's some sort of hazy middle age, with features that are average enough that she doesn't stand out as being either particularly unattractive or notably beautiful. The sympathy on her face stands out more because of it.
"Would you like me to come in with you?" she asks again as they pull around the corner to Mac's street. Her voice is level but attentive. "I could speak with your parents. It might be...easier."
They had asked that so many times at the hotel- Is there someone we can call? Would you like your parents to be here?- that she finally told them that she was eighteen and just graduated from high school and didn't need anyone there. Or she had thought that she told them, but by the way Veronica's hand had landed on her shoulder the next minute, she had probably shouted it.
She had tried to get through the questioning like a Just Graduated Legal Adult would. She traced the night back, traced her relationship with Cassidy. Her voice hitched, once, when she found a red flag: Cassidy when they had pranked Dick, shoulders shifting from relaxed to sharp, nasty. She was holding her arms tight against herself as she spoke. Veronica had sent Logan to get her some of his clothes, and although shorts and t-shirts weren't exactly foreign to her, there was something alien about these, the cotton drape of them, the feeling against her forearms.
Her breathing started to get ragged as she talked about them going to the hotel room, and she knew she was rushing through the story.
"That's enough," Logan said, stepping toward them. Another officer had started questioning Veronica across the room. Mac had heard the shadow of her story. She felt sick. Logan touched her arm and she glanced at him, surprised. "Pencils down. You can talk to her more tomorrow," Logan said to the cop, who nods. Mac suspected they were going to let her go soon anyway, but she was grateful.
Logan offered to drive her home once Veronica was finished. But Mac looked at Veronica and her cracking core, the way she was pressing against Logan. She thought of the look on Veronica's face as she rushed into the room, and knew that she would steel herself, that she would knot her heart until Mac was safe in her bed. She looked at it all and took the offer to have the police bring her home.
The officer watches her with gentle eyes, hand on the door handle, so Mac gives her a shuddery smile as she gets out and walks to the door on her own. But when she gets there, she doesn't want to go in. She doesn't want arms and words. She doesn't want the lights and her parents' eyes.
She's had her ground floor bedroom for years, has never considered sneaking out. She thinks there have been times that her parents almost wanted her to use the window to go to a party or a date after curfew, something they could understand.
They hadn't understood Cassidy, his shy pauses, his broad knowledge, but they had liked him. Mac's shoulders twitch and shift as she slides her fingers into the small gap she had left for summer air to come through the window. It's awkward from her angle, standing on tiptoe on the ground, but she gets it open. She had moved her CD tower a few weeks ago, a simple thing, because the curtains kept getting caught on it, pulling runs in the silk, and that had been easier than taking the curtains down. The desk by the window is almost clear when she finally manages to pull herself up and slide on her belly across the surface. There is a book there. She accidentally pushes it off, tensing as it smacks against the floor. The house stays dark.
She manages to roll and drop from the desk to the floor. Even without light, she makes her way across the room. She leaves Logan's clothes on the floor and gets into bed. Her pajamas and blankets smell familiar, but a worn, obvious sort of familiarity, the smell of coming back after a long time. She pulls the blanket around herself and looks wide-eyed into the darkness.
She called his name when she opened the shower curtain. The bathroom was fancy, the shower in a separate room from the rest and she had forgotten to bring a towel through. She had called again, gentle and a little awkward, waiting a moment before poking her head into the outer bathroom area. She didn't see Cassidy, but she didn't see the towels either.
She closed the door and locked it. It was automatic as she stood there dripping, wishing for the clothes that she had taken off for him. She tried to figure things out. Maybe Cassidy had gone for a walk or to get them drinks or something from the party. But that didn't explain the missing towels.
Her brain turned to Dick next. She could picture that: Dick deciding to burst into the room, grabbing Cassidy, taking the towels as the icing on his adolescent cake. But Dick wasn't a long-term thinker. If it was him, he would be giggling behind the bed, a hand over Cassidy's mouth, or would be back in a few minutes to laugh and tell her to chill and appreciate the joke.
She went into the bathroom proper. There were a few washcloths. She patted herself so she wouldn't be dripping everywhere, and tucked her head around the door. If Dick were there, she could get the towels from him. If not, she would put on her clothes and go find him. And later, after this squeezing vulnerability had passed, she and Cassidy would brainstorm some revenge coming soon to a computer near him and she would know everything was okay.
But Dick wasn't waiting with a "gotcha!" and her clothes were gone, Cassidy's clothes were gone. The bed was stripped. Her cell phone wasn't there, and neither was the room phone. Something seemed to go through the air, vicious and clotted and spreading. There was no way Dick thought of this.
She breathed. There was still a handful of washcloths, but not enough to cover herself. She breathed. The shower curtain was the only option. She climbed onto the rim of the bathtub. It was chilly, slick in spotty places. She weighed down one side of the rod until it collapsed away from the wall. The curtain on its rings shimmied off as it slid down. She picked it up. She breathed.
She wanted to stay in the bathroom, locked away until it was all solved. But she forced herself to go back into the bedroom, to look for something, to find her own solution. There was nothing. He had even taken the TV remotes. She tucked the curtain awkwardly around herself as she opened the drawer to the side table. There was a bible inside, and that was all. She laughed for a moment at the idea of stringing the pages into a dress, and then she was on the floor. She forgot to breathe.
She had been lied to for her entire life, but she knew that her parents did it because they loved her. She didn't understand why this had happened. Somehow Cassidy had been lying to her, and in the emptiness of the room she knew that it could not be because he loved her. She still didn't understand why. She clutched at her arms, wrapped them around her knees. She touched her own skin. It was all that is left to hold on to.
Ryan comes in, probably to steal a CD or one of her graphic novels. He freezes when he spots her in the bed and sneaks back out. Mac can hear his voice in the hall. "Mom, you said Cindy was going out last night. Why is she back? Did she get in trouble?" She squeezes her eyes shut.
Her mom comes closer in bustling voices and footsteps. "Cindy?" she says from the doorway. "We thought you were going to stay at Veronica's until later on. When did you get home? Why didn't you wake us up?" She comes over. She lays a hand on Mac's forehead. "Honey, did you get sick?" There's a my baby's first hangover note underlying her voice, strangely proud. Mac keeps her eyes closed and thinks about her mother's cool palm instead.
"Natalie! Natalie, the news!" Her dad always shouts across the house. It drives her mom crazy when he does that. She is already huffing quietly, going to the door to see what the problem is. But Mac can tell by his tone what is coming. She opens her eyes so she can look at her mom's face. She wants to remember the way her mother looks at her now, her level love before she finds this out.
Her dad comes down the hall. He speaks quietly. Before her mother puts a hand to her mouth, before she whispers, "Oh my God," Mac closes her eyes.
She thinks that she is doing everything right. She goes to therapy and does computer repairs for extra cash. She spends time with her brother. She meets her mother's eyes. And she doesn't tell anyone that she spends the appointments with her shrink mostly in silence or that one day last week she had a laptop open in front of her and couldn't remember what to do.
It's difficult to explain why she feels the way she does. People feel a vague pity- "Oh, that's her, that's the girl"- but there are no marks, no bruises to show anyone. Everyone agrees that Cassidy was terrible, but her part of the story is a footnote. It sounds like a prank, the kind of thing that people would register as a jerk move and look past, especially as they think of plummeting buses and exploding planes. But Mac feels scraped. She feels shadowed by this, by Cassidy, by who he was and what he did.
She goes out with Veronica one day. Veronica smiles, even after everything, and Mac knows it's because her father will be waiting for her at home. Logan comes with them, driving with one elbow out the window. Veronica wears sunglasses and twists back to talk to Mac as they head toward the beach. Logan interjects wryly every so often. Mac says something that makes them both laugh. The sun is brighter on her shoulder.
She sits on the shore with a book while Logan and Veronica are in the water. Once, she looks up and sees a rainbow where the water splashes up as Veronica pushes Logan over with a shouted laugh.
They come tramping up the sand after a while, dripping. Veronica wipes salt water off her upper lip and starts talking ice cream.
"I think they might have those Tofutti rice dreamsicles, if you want," she says to Mac.
"I'm okay," Mac says as Logan picks up a towel and hands Veronica his wallet. Veronica pulls a few dollars out and hands the wallet back with two fingers and a wrinkled nose before taking her own from her bag.
"Chocolate hazelnut for me. And remember that you can only physically ingest so many scoops," Logan calls after her.
He drops beside Mac and starts messing with his phone. She looks back at her book. Through all the confusing stop and go of Logan and Veronica's relationship, she has never sat with him like this.
"Thank you. For the clothes...that night," she says eventually. Her voice is stiff. She doesn't mention that her mother got rid of his shorts and t-shirt.
He shrugs. "My closet isn't missing them." He glances over at her quickly and then turns, sifting fingers through the sand. "How are you?"
"Fine," she say, and the word is easy by now. But the awkward way he asks the question, the reluctance, the lack of tiptoeing pity, makes her answer with more consideration. Still, she shrugs. "Doing the day by day thing."
Logan nods. "I know how that is." Something in him shifts, not just his face or his shoulders. He glances at her and then away. "I keep thinking of this one game, this cop game I was into a few years ago. First person shooter, great graphics, but no scantily clad babes bouncing around, so Dick was out, but Beaver- Cassidy- he would play with me for hours. It would get dark and he would want to play another level. He just kept saying, 'We have to get the hostages safe' or 'We have to keep going, we have to protect them.'" The water seems quieter suddenly. Mac wants Veronica to come back. Logan continues anyway. "I was on that roof with Veronica. I know what he did to you, and to the kids on the bus, and to Veronica and her dad. I know he was a-" He stops, but Mac's mind fills in the word anyway: monster. Logan drags a hand along the back of his neck. "But sometimes when I think of him, I think of that him."
There's a frozen feeling in her limbs, but she manages to nod, because he's the first person who seems to know those lines, their muddied, snaking borders. She knows what it's like to think of those versions of Cassidy and not know how they overlay. She knows what it's like to think of something- an inside joke or the chocolate he liked- and then to have the memory of herself alone in that room slice into her, to have that feeling again, like she is trying to hold herself into her skin. She shifts over slightly so her shoulder brushes against Logan's. In profile, she can see his mouth shift upward.
An ice cream bar drops into Mac's lap. Veronica hands Logan his cone and folds herself into the sand beside Mac.
Mac breathes in. "What's this?" she asks.
"It looked so lonely next to all the real ice cream, I figured it should come to a good home. A treat from Uncle Pennybags." Veronica's ponytail swings as she nods toward Logan. He kicks some sand toward her feet, but with barely any effort. The breeze blows it away from them.
Mac feels the breeze on her arms. There's the gray of the sea in front of her, the brightness of Logan's towel and Veronica's t-shirt in her peripheral vision. "If the top hat fits," Veronica says over the waves, grinning into her ice cream. Logan laughs. Mac listens to them. She opens her ice cream. There is this. She can hold on to this.
Written for the VM fic recs prompt "How would you break into your own home?" Although it became more like "Why would you break into your own home?"