The Morning After
Once through the front doors of her house, Rachel heaves a sigh. She didn't realize a day like today could ever feel so long. It started off normal, completely inane like every other day. Yet here she is, plowing through the underbrush to get to a main road so she can stumble home attached to none other than Chloe Price—who apparently has feelings for her? They've known each other for all of two days and suddenly Chloe has a nougaty center under her rock solid turtle shell? Rachel doesn't think so.
But Rachel has been watching Chloe for a while now. It was no coincidence they ran into one another at the mill. Rachel wasn't necessarily "following" Chloe that night… but if Chloe had stayed home, Rachel might not have been out at all. She had actually asked Chloe a few times what she would be up to that night, but only on the last time did she get an honest answer. Of course Rachel rewound the whole thing to make sure Chloe wouldn't be suspicious of Rachel being there, but it was one of the rare moments Rachel was actually disappointed to get rid of. Chloe had opened up and trusted her with something she was passionate about… and then had promptly lied about having permission to go and about having lots of weed that she intended to bring to the concert and might possibly share with Rachel… but that's not what matters. Chloe trusted somebody she barely knew with something intimate: her love of music.
Rachel knew then that, even though that particular moment had been erased from Chloe's mind, it wouldn't be erased from her personality. She was capable of it once, and she'd be capable of it again. All Rachel had to do was be patient… and wait. After all, she'd met Chloe at least a hundred times before the school-skipping incident… and rewound every one of them. The first time they met, it was in the hall outside Chloe's chemistry class. Rachel spilled Chloe's soda all over her shirt when they bumped into each other.
Definitely not how you want to meet someone.
The next time, it was when Victoria Chase put gum on Chloe's seat in the gym during an assembly. Chloe, gum stuck all over her ripped jeans, had punched the shit out of Victoria, and was promptly escorted off school property by Skip. Rachel couldn't let happen, especially because it was Rachel who gave Victoria the gum in third period… or at least… she did the FIRST time. She happened to "have just chewed her last piece" the next time Victoria asked for something to get the foul aftertaste of her spinach and peanut butter breakfast smoothie out of her mouth.
The time after that, Chloe tripped taking the stairs two at a time on her way to Steph's dorm room and Rachel caught her… the third or fourth time. That's when she started to realize that maybe it was her job to protect Chloe Price. But someone like Chloe would hate knowing somebody was taking care of her. She's stubborn and gets herself into messes to feel something, and Rachel knows better than to compete with the fire inside Chloe that makes her do reckless and dangerous things. So she dropped hints for Eliot, and he got to be the one to keep her from busting her lip on the concrete.
Chloe sometimes makes Rachel want to do reckless and dangerous things, too.
Like be found out while trying to save Chloe's ass.
Or burn down all of Arcadia Bay.
Or kiss someone she knows is retaining little fractions of their meetings… never fully erasing the muscle memory of bumping into each other time and time again.
It might not seem so, but of course Rachel wants to be kissed. And maybe even by Chloe, she isn't sure, but she definitely wants to know what it's like exactly with someone who she can tell cares about her. But maybe Chloe only cares about Rachel because they've spent so much erased time together. Rachel has to admit, though, that Chloe might not be the best option when it comes to saving people and keeping them so close. Though she does like Chloe, she isn't sure she's good for someone so touched by tragedy.
Rachel herself IS a tragedy.
She knows very well that she's a get-what-she-wants type of girl, and Chloe seems like the type to give her a hard time. Maybe she likes that about Chloe. Nobody ever tells Rachel "no" because the princess can do no wrong. Chloe isn't like that, though. She has no trouble putting Rachel in her place from time to time.
Rachel had spent the whole walk to her house from the burning tree thinking about how convenient it would have been for Chloe to put Rachel in her place before that trash can wound up on its side. That whole thing with the fire… God, that got out of hand fast, didn't it? She wanted to kick the trashcan over for effect… and there it went, the whole park up in smoke so fast it made her head spin.
In a way it was exhilarating. It was electric to watch something burn. Rachel knows it's wrong, but she's certain she doesn't want to rewind this time. She deserves this feeling. In every timeline, in every universe, Rachel deserves to feel the flesh of another living thing erode by her own power.
But she knows she has to. She has to rewind the entire day. She's done some unforgivable things, and there's certainly no cause to keep a botched evening alive. And then, of course… there are things she didn't do that she might have liked to.
She has to stop herself from kissing Chloe at the front door. Rachel is pretty sure she doesn't want to yet—not because she isn't attracted to Chloe… but because she knows the urge is fleeting. Adrenaline, she guesses. She doesn't want to go too fast and screw up something later. And besides, it isn't fair that their first kiss should be something only one of them gets to remember. Besides, Rachel might have only be feeling the secondhand energy of it from Chloe revealing her own feelings in the junkyard, and Rachel's natural instinct is to feed that… to act on it. If she waits, she might be able to say without question that it was entirely what she wanted. Maybe once she's safely up to her room, she'll stop thinking about all this nonsense and clear her head enough to rewind.
Nonsense. That's exactly what this is. And there's no reason to focus on something so utterly devoid of reason… right?
Yet even in the dim light of her star globe with no one else around, she can't stop picturing Chloe: her voice, her laugh, her awkward gate as she lulled beside Rachel towards the highest point in the park… the fear in her eyes when she felt like she was ruining something beautiful in the junkyard.
Don't think about her, Rachel. Don't think about her. She's kindling.
Maybe she'll sleep it off and rewind in the morning. Things might go smoothly tomorrow… who knows? Probably not… but she can always go back. For now, she'll just try her best to keep her head cool and her thoughts free of Chloe Price.
Chloe locks her bedroom door. Her phone is both the silent villain and the bygone hero, striding between worlds at the whim of this tea-fearing savior. Funny how she doesn't want to text an all-knowing being because she doesn't want to seem desperate.
But she IS desperate.
She needs to know who this person is and what they want and why they're trying to help her… or if they're actually trying to help her. Maybe they're keeping her safe for some greater purpose… only to let her down at some other predetermined moment when an ordinary person might need saving most. Maybe in the morning she'll have more answers. Maybe Rachel will own up to watching her from the Amber House as she wandered off into the dark. Rachel might've sent those texts. Who knows? She's the DA's daughter, right? A burner phone would be easy enough to acquire.
She can't think about that now, though. She needs to get some sleep before she bites the bullet in Principal Wells' office for skipping today. But of course she's too wound up to sleep. Her eyes won't close longer than a blink, and long before the sun starts to rise, she can hear Joyce downstairs in the kitchen making breakfast for herself before work.
Chloe's stomach growls. She can't remember eating yesterday. Did she?
The front door to clicks shut behind Joyce and Chloe knows it's safe to venture downstairs. She doesn't go right away, though. She looks down at her phone, hoping to have missed a text from the unknown number while lost in thought, but there are no new messages—not even from Eliot, who is always texting her when she least wants him to. It's even worse that she has no new messages from Rachel, though: the one person she might actually tell about the strange texts… the one person who might actually believe her. Now that she thinks about it, it couldn't be Rachel sending her weird messages. Why would Rachel warn Chloe about tea? Does Rachel know something? Is tea a metaphor? What the hell would it be a metaphor for? Who even drinks tea anymore? She decides to google it, as any self-respecting person would.
It doesn't occur to her how long she's been researching tea until she starts to see the sun peeking over the trees.
She closes her laptop on a page about the healing properties of jasmine.
The hallway leading to the kitchen is lit only by the faint glow of orange coming from the small windows at the top of the front door and the warped glass panels to the left of it, but Chloe is guided by the fading smell of diner food. A plate of bacon and eggs sits on the counter covered in plastic wrap and labeled "C" with a Sharpie.
She looks down at the breakfast with more guilt than she thought possible this early in the morning. Despite the fact that Chloe ignores her texts, blows off school, sneaks out, lies about nearly everything, and constantly shits on her shitty boyfriend, Joyce still tries. Chloe feels like a human pile of garbage—and definitely not an awesome one.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket.
It's Joyce.
"Work might run long. Beth running late to cover shift. Meet you there ASAP."
Chloe checks the clock on the microwave: 7:38AM.
Time to start making her way to Blackhell.
She looks back at the texts from the unknown number:
DON'T TAKE THE BLAME.
Chloe wonders if Rachel has done something. Besides lighting the tree on fire, maybe there's something she's hiding that she might try to blame on Chloe. But Rachel isn't that type of person… right? She's good and kind and… an actress. A very, very good actress.
Who may or may not be in serious danger because of jasmine tea.
Chloe decides she's an idiot for trusting Rachel. Anyone with that much talent could fake liking Chloe for an afternoon. It'd be hella weird if she wasn't faking it. Nobody looks at someone the way Rachel looked at Chloe on the train after one evening of knowing each other. Nobody touches a stranger that much. Nobody admits to liking you back.
Chloe sighs.
Can she really blame herself for it, though? Rachel is good at what she does. She's probably the most convincing actress Chloe's ever met, although she hasn't met very many. Maybe that's what drew Chloe to Rachel: she was different… because she was fake. Rachel wanted to skip school, and Chloe happened to be there when she opened the front doors of Blackwell that morning. It could just as easily have been Victoria or Justin or Steph or anybody, really.
But it was Chloe.
And even though it might not have been real, she's glad. It was still the best day she's had in a very long time.
