"Bea!'
Mae was running through the city when she finally found her. She had been looking for her ever since she ran from the party they were at. Mae wasn't quite sure what she did wrong, but she must've done something, seeing as Jackie seemed to blame her anyway.
After that, Mae had gone running through the city looking for her. It wasn't like Bea to run off like that, and they were both in an unfamiliar setting late at night. It was dangerous to be out and about at this time.
It had taken her awhile, but she had finally found Bea. She was sitting on a bench next to the cities river, eerily calm. Her face was obstructed by her position and the copious amount of fog in the area.
"There you are!" Mae exclaimed, "Are you alright?"
There was a long pause as Mae waited for Bea to answer. When it was clear she wouldn't, Mae decided the best thing to do would be to continue talking.
"Why did you run?" she asked.
It was an honest question. She had no idea what she had done wrong. She wanted to know what she had done. Maybe once she found out she could make sure to not do it again.
Or who knows, maybe it wasn't her fault at all. Wouldn't that be a relief? In the end, she just really wanted to know what got Bea to run away.
"That's like, extremely dangerous!" she continued, "You're alone in some college town, and you don't even know w-"
"This was my party," Bea interrupted, silencing Mae.
"These are my parties," she explained, "I come to these so I can feel normal, for like, 2 hours a month."
Mae didn't really know what to say to that. This was what Bea considered normal? It certainly didn't look normal, nor feel normal to Mae.
Not knowing what else to say, Mae decided on just restating the obvious.
"You could have been mugged or something," she said half-heartedly, trying desperately to make some sense out of the situation.
"All over some idiot guy? College is stupid anyway!"
That got Bea's attention.
Furious, she got up from the bench and whirled around to glare at Mae.
"Oh my god you complete asshole!" she yelled, "You will never understand this! Ever."
"You know what I do when I go to sleep?" Bea asked, not even waiting for Mae to give an answer.
"Ha ha, this is so freakin sad. I think obsessively about college," she explained, "I think soo hard about it. And if I'm lucky, I dream about it."
"I have to dream about this," she said, "This thing you're so over already, is my most wildest fantasy."
"You have a life!" Mae exclaimed.
"No, I don't," Bea responded, "I have obligations. I have a routine."
"What's the difference?!" Mae asked.
"The difference is that it's not my life!" Bea yelled, "When my mom died, my life ended too."
"I had to take over the business, because my dad had a complete breakdown," Bea explained, "And the bills from my mom literally dying were so bad that we lost the house!"
"The house I grew up in. Gone," she reaffirmed, "Now some shitty family with their shitty kids live there! And I live in an apartment, as my dad slowly wastes away before my eyes."
"And like, any idea of the future?" she continued, "This big, bright, thing? Just gets smaller and darker every time I wake up. From a dream about nights like tonight."
"And you can't get that," Bea finished, "You can't get that through your thick effing skull!"
Mae could feel her fists clench as she listened to Bea finish her tirade, anger boiling up inside her.
"How is that fair!" she exclaimed, "You act like I knew all of that! I didn't! I had no idea about any of this!"
"How?!" Bea asked, walking towards Mae, "How could you not know about this!"
"I work hard!" she screamed, "And I take care of what's left of my family! And my life is slipping away before me, as I'm stuck in that stupid hardware store, in that stupid town! I'm just-"
Bea's words slipped away from her as she reached her conclusion, the fight that had once burned so bright inside of her extinguishing in a single moment.
"-doomed," she finished, voice quiet and hoarse from screaming.
And for a moment, everything was silent. It was like the life had been sucked out of the entire area. For just a single moment, not a single noise was made. The sounds of the inner city melted away, leaving behind a vast emptiness so large that nothing could fill it.
And then, something broke.
"You're not the only person stuck here, you know?"
Bea looked up at Mae, confused.
"You're not the only person who can't leave," Mae said.
Narrowing her eyes, a little bit of fight returned to Bea.
"You gave up the thing I can't have," she stated, "I… kinda hate you."
When that got no reaction, she continued.
"I can't not hate you for that," she explained, "At least a little."
"You don't know why I had to leave," Mae responded, voice tight.
"Oh, I'm sure it's a brilliant reason," Bea said sarcastically.
"You just sit there, judging me," Mae said, raising her voice as she spoke, "Have you ever even asked why I left?"
"Yes, actually," Bea responded, "First day you got back. You didn't answer."
Mae sucked in a bunch of air as the moment came back to her. She had avoided the question, not wanting to talk about it. Preferring to just bask in the fact that she was finally back home.
"So why did you leave, huh?" Bea asked.
"I-" Mae said, at lost for words, "I-"
"Come on," Bea said, getting enraged by the lack of answer, "What was so bad about all that that you just had to leave?"
"I-" Mae tried again, voice shaking as she tried to get out the words.
"What was so bad about college that made you give up my dream?! The dream that I've had for years, that you just had handed to you on a silver platter until you decided to give it up! Huh?! What was so bad about that!"
"I JUST COULDN'T!" Mae screamed, catching Bea off guard, "OK?! I JUST COULDN'T!"
At this point, Mae had started to hyperventilate.
"I just couldn't take it! Every day was like a living hell! I couldn't handle it!"
"Mae?" Bea asked, worried.
"You wanna know why I beat down Andy Cullen 6 years ago?!"
"What!?"
Now that was completely and utterly out of left field. One moment they were talking about college and now they were talking about Andy Cullen? What was going on!?
Bea didn't know what was going on, but the tone in Mae's voice scared her. She had never seen her this… broken.
Mae wasn't supposed to be broken. She could be angry, reckless, stupid. Mae could be many things, but not broken.
And yet, here she was. Watching as Mae's voice slowly broke as she tried to get her words out. Adrenaline slowly fading with her.
"Back then I was so into video games," she began, "I would play them twenty four-seven. All the time."
"But one day… I realized something."
Realized what? Was the unspoken question Bea had.
"The characters on the screen?" she said, "The one's whom I'd cared about so very much? Who I felt like I actually knew? They were just pixels."
"Just pixels," Mae repeated, "Bits of code that someone had programmed. Their words weren't theirs, just pre-written dialogue someone had wrote. They weren't real, never were."
Mae laughed, her voice breaking and turning into a sob halfway through, "'Just shapes', I'd thought. 'Just shapes'."
"They never existed! They never had feelings! They never would exist either!" Mae screamed, "They were just shapes, that's all! Just shapes!"
Tears began to well up in her eyes as she continued to speak, her hands moving around rapidly as if to convey the emotions she was feeling.
"And it was just so sad! 'Cause it felt as if I'd just lost all these real people. And this whole thing we'd had? Was just me. Sitting alone, all by myself."
"Mae…" Bea said, lost for words.
"And suddenly that realization just dumped itself out of the screen and into the real word," she said, "I went outside, and the tree out front?"
Another laugh bubbled it's way out of Mae's mouth, forcing it's bitter humor onto her, "I'd looked at it every day; it was like a friend outside the window! Now it was just a thing! Just a random thing that was there! Like all the stuff I'd felt about the tree was just in my head! Completely fabricated!"
"Mae…" Bea tried again, but Mae ignored her. It was as if she just couldn't stop talking.
"And there was some guy walking by," she continued, "And he was just shapes. Not real, just shapes, like the video game characters. Fake. Fabricated."
"And I cried," Mae said, tears pouring down her face, "Because nothing was there for me anymore."
"Mae," Bea said, "I'm sorry. I just… I didn't know."
Sniffing, Mae moved to dry the tears from her face, giving up when she realized it was pointless, as new tears just moved to take the old tears place.
"The next day was the softball game," she stated, devoid of life, "And Andy was the pitcher when I was up. And he was just shapes too. Just lines someone wrote. Like there was nothing there, and never would be."
"And I was so scared and angry and just…" Mae said, voice trailing off behind her.
"Next thing I knew, I was on top of him," she said, "smashing his face in with the bat. Watching as red shapes intermingled with the green shapes of the grass."
"Oh my god, Mae," Bea said, moving towards her to give her a hug.
But Mae pushed her away, hands unusually rough as anger began to take over her body.
"I tried everything to fix it! They made me go to therapy with Dr. Hank and I did everything he told me to in some vain hope that it would work!" She cried.
"And for a moment, I actually thought I was getting better!" she said, "The town I lived in was no longer fake and the people in it were no longer shapes."
"And then I went to college."
Bea sucked in a breath, suddenly realizing what had happened.
"You want to know why I left college!?" Mae screamed, "You want to know why I gave up your dream?!"
"'Cause when I went there everything was just shapes!"
Bea cringed, hearing the pain in Mae's voice.
"I couldn't even leave my dorm room, I was so terrified! I either didn't eat anything or ate everything in sight! I was a mess!" Mae cried, "And then there was the stupid statue."
"Statue?" Bea asked.
"It was a statue of like, the founder or something," Mae explained, "And it was made of this stupid rusted metal. And it was just shapes. Just giant shapes! And it was pointing down at me. As if it wanted me to feel every single bit of pain I was feeling. As if I deserved it."
"I couldn't live like that," she said, "Having to down cough syrup just to sleep. So I left. And I came home; where everything was fine. Where I knew everyone and it wasn't just… dead shapes."
There was a pause, and Bea realized that the energy had finally drained from Mae. She watched as Mae just stood there, head down, tears still pouring down her face, eyes red and body dead.
"Something broke," Mae finally said, voice broken and hoarse, begging her to stop talking, "In my head. In my life."
She looked up, staring Bea dead in the eyes, "So that's why I left, ok? Are you happy?"
"Mae I-" Bea started, but stopped.
She could see the pain wafting off of Mae. It was as if someone had finally gotten to curious and decided to open Pandora's Box, letting loose all the pain and suffering inside.
Only that someone was her. She had forced Mae to her breaking point, forcing her to open her Pandora's Box and let loose all the content inside. It was all her fault. All because she thought Mae was a jerk for giving up her dream.
And yet, not once did it ever occur to her that she might have had a legitimately good reason for leaving. She had just assumed it was ignorance or stupidity, never once choosing to think that maybe, just maybe, something had gone wrong.
"I'm sorry," Bea said, causing Mae to jump.
"What?" she asked.
"I'm sorry," Bea repeated, "I really am."
Bea tried to think of the right words to say what she was feeling.
"Look," she said, "It sounds like you're suffering from some serious stuff. And the fact that I forced you to have to… reveal all that to me? I'm sorry. Really. I never meant to do that."
Bea gave a little laugh, "Heh. Guess I'm the asshole instead, huh?"
Mae gave a little laugh in return, "hehe. No way. No one can be a bigger asshole than me. I'm pretty sure I've got that title on lockdown."
"Eh, just you wait. You got competition now."
That sent the two of them into a laughing fit, Mae's tears finally slowed to a stop as she laughed.
"Look," Bea said once they both had calmed down, "We're both trapped here. But we're trapped here together. And in my opinion, it's better to be trapped with someone else, right?"
Mae nodded, drying her eyes of the last of her tears, "Yeah, it is."
"Listen, I'm sorry," Mae said, getting Bea's attention.
"What for?" she asked.
"Everything? Ruining the party, being such a bad friend?" Mae said.
"It's ok," Bea said, "Really, it is. I was over-exaggerating anyway."
The two enjoyed a short moment of silence, silently taking in everything that had happened so far as the two stood next to each other next to this random river in a generic college town that neither of them knew anything about.
"Heh," Mae said, breaking the silence, "We're like, the best available friends."
"Heh, yeah. Yeah we are."
"Do you think we'd still be friends if we weren't stuck together in the same town?" Mae asked, "Would we still choose to hang out with each other? Or is our friendship just 'cause of…"
"... Proximity?" Bea finished.
"Yeah," Mae said, "Is this all just proximity?"
Bea took a moment to answer, trying to think about the question. After a few more moments, she spoke.
"I don't know," she admitted, "I honestly don't. My whole life feels like running after something that keeps moving away into the distance. While I stay in the same place."
Mae nodded, as if that explained everything, "And I guess proximity counts for a lot right now, huh?"
"Yeah," Bea said, "But not everything."
"What do you mean?" Mae asked.
"You're right in saying that proximity does have a lot to do with our friendship. The fact that we are both stuck in the same town does play a part in our relationship. But that doesn't account for all of it," Bea explained, "At the end of the day, I could still choose not to be friends with you. Sure, it would be awkward, but I could still make that choice. Both of us could. But we don't."
"Why don't you?" Mae asked, "Wouldn't you be better off without me."
"I highly doubt that," Bea said, "You're not as big of a total idiot as I act like you are, you know? You can be pretty smart when you want to be. And besides, you're fun to hang around."
"I'm a jerk sometimes, I know that," Bea said, "But you're a genuinely good person."
"Heh. I'll take it."
"..."
"..."
"You know what the FT Lucenne Fish Fountain would say?"
"No. What?"
"Beatrice Santello, we should get burgers and shakes on the way home."
"Hehehe, oh wow! A revelation from god!"
"The good god. The fake one."