suggested audio: new year's day by taylor swift
At 12 AM on New Year's Day, the ball drops in Times Square. In a Manhattan mansion that's filled with more tipsy people than it really should be accommodating, a bottle of champagne falls in unison.
Puck stares in distaste. He's back for "networking", because Manhattan is the haunt of every kind of creature with any affiliation to magical artifacts, and since Jake's already burned through all of his other resources looking for a flaming pearl, Puck got saddled with research. So far, the only thing he's found is an extraordinarily drunk and equally extraordinarily foul-mouthed dwarf with a penchant for making "lucky" quartz necklaces.
"That's amore," someone shouts, and the entire crowd collapses in on itself with laughter. Sequined dresses reflecting chandelier light turn people into stars, and alcohol turns people into fools.
A girl wearing a silver mask framed with tacky pink feathers lopes into the room, holding a dustpan and coarse-bristled brush. She drops down to sweep up the shards before cursing and throwing off the stilettos she has on, one shoe landing in a corner and the other down the hall. There's glitter coating her scalp and sparkling in her blonde hair. She doesn't seem to be drunk, but not entirely sober either. For someone who looks to be about a senior in high school, this is impressive.
"Smart choice," she says, gesturing to Puck's can of Canada Dry. "Drunk people get pretty messy."
"No kidding."
The girl throws down a wad of paper towels, which quickly darken with champagne. A corner of dark green label peeks out from beneath it. Slowly and meticulously, she sweeps the entire affair into the dustpan and empties it into a plastic bag already containing various food scraps. She doesn't look at him the entire time.
"You from around here?" Puck says, lips around the rim of his can.
"You can say that." Mystery Girl seems to dislike this question, as evidenced by the tiny sigh that she thinks Puck can't hear but actually does.
He takes another sip. "Me too."
"Sorry about that."
"It's not so bad."
Mystery Girl takes the full plastic bag, now containing champagne bottle bits, and dumps it in the larger kitchen trash. She throws open the fridge and examines its contents: leftover Chinese, a few bottles of beer, some strawberry Smirnoff ices, a half used bottle of Sriracha. She pops open the beer and takes a drink after hopping on top of the faux granite counter. "Well," she says, "it's not so bad depending on what you've seen, if you ask me. Or what you haven't seen." When she takes another sip, a goose egg emerald emitting pulses of energy on her right index finger indicates that she's probably seen some of the same "stuff" in New York that Puck has.
"So what've you seen?"
"Dark magic," Mystery Girl quips, and Puck can't tell if she's being serious or not.
At that moment, someone bumps into a low table and sends a stack of candles down, along with a flurry of photos. He swears and steps over the mess.
Mystery Girl sighs. "I shouldn't have let her throw a party. Not in this house, anyways."
"Whose is it?"
"Family friend. Rich ones. They're both on the school board and the whole city absolutely adores them."
Puck kneels down to pick up the photographs. Uncharacteristically nice of him, but if he's going to get any information out of this atomic blonde, he had better not get on her bad side. That had a big "or else" hanging over it that he didn't want to acquaint himself with. "And they're part of the black magic stuff you said you saw?"
Mystery Girl snorts. "Not even close. They're so sappy, they'd make cherubs blush. Pretty sure I've seen that happen, too."
"Must be fun to be your boyfriend."
"Must be," she agrees. It was a bit of a sensitive subject, as she picked up another photograph with so much force, it bent sharply at the corner. "He skipped out on town five years ago to go globetrotting. He's probably in Paris or something, not caring about anything, running away from things or people he doesn't want to think about. It's what he does best."
His heartbeat trips.
Mystery Girl reaches around the back of her head to grab the elastic string holding the mask to her face. Her back is still to him, so he doesn't get a glimpse. The mask goes flying neatly into the kitchen trash can.
"If you ask me, that's worse than anything else I've seen around here, and I've seen some weird stuff." She laughs, and that's when he knows. He has no need to continue trying to figure out this girl's identity. And he knows he doesn't need to ask her about anything that he came here to look for, because he's not going to get it.
"Maybe he didn't go for fun. Maybe he went to sort his life out," Puck snaps. "Maybe he thought he was in love, but he wasn't quite sure, so he left to go find a couple of answers. And maybe he misses you, even though you smell like sewage from the Bronx and look even worse." She won't even grace his insult with acknowledgement. "Maybe you're wrong."
"I think," she says carefully, "that you're stupid. And you don't know jack about my life. So don't go telling me I'm wrong when you don't even know who I am. You're a stranger."
She's drunk, Puck has to remind himself.
Alcohol changes people differently according to the drinker. Some people feel less. Some people feel more of whatever they were feeling before. Some people adopt new personalities. Some people amplify their old ones. In her case, she grew more stubborn under the influence, so she'd fall under the fourth category. It hurts to remember that she was smart, cautious, and incredibly slow to forgive too.
He knows her well enough to not try again. It'd be so easy to spin her around by the shoulders and look at her, hoping the sight of him would restore her memory like magic. It'd be so easy to reveal himself to her right then and there and come clean. It'd be so easy to start over, make the clock hands point at 11:59 and kiss her when the fireworks burst on the windows. It'd be so easy to fall in love all over again, in the middle of broken glasses and broken hearts.
"You can learn a lot from people even if you've known them for a few minutes," he says at last.
"And you can still learn nothing about people you've known for ten years." She walks across the empty hallway, away from him, in her bare feet. He wants to follow, but his legs are stiff and immobile. Maybe she was right. Maybe he is best at running away, and he tests this theory.
He calls Jake. After two rings, he answers with, "What's up? Are you done?"
"Yeah."
"Nothing?"
"Nada. Try Prague next, like the old man told us to."
"Two steps ahead of you, buddy. Lemme bring you in." Jake hangs up the phone and Puck braces himself as he violates every law of time and space known to man in order to pop into the hotel room Jake has rented for the next three nights.
"Well," Jake says, tossing Puck a robe to get comfortable in, "that seemed like a useless trip. I would've thought you had found at least one contact with some information."
"Nope," he says. "There was nothing there."
"So you came crawling back to me."
"Yup."
Jake looks at the hard glare in Puck's eyes and holds up his hands in surrender. "No blame. Just wash up and go to sleep. I've gotten a lead, I think."
Puck disregards the first part of his advice and simply hops into the bed adjacent to Jake's. "Hey."
"Hmm?"
"What do you do when someone you used to know becomes a stranger? Do you try to talk to them?"
Jake leaves this question unanswered for a while, opting to fill in 7 across and 19 down in last week's copy of the New York Times crossword. He chuckles at the Peanuts strip on the next page before folding the paper back along its creases and looking at Puck inquisitively.
"Well," he says, "why would you want to talk to a stranger?"
[shows up almost a year later with starbucks] ...hi. i could give you the long version of why everyone has been receiving radio silence on my end, or you could check it out on my profile so i don't bore you any longer. anyways! i hope now that apps are done, i'll have a little more time to do writing i actually enjoy and talk to people whose company i actually enjoy, like yours.
thanks for reading & please drop a review if you liked the story! or if you just want to say hi! or both!