Disclaimer: I own the rights to more or less nothing seen here, nothing from Life is Strange or the Public Radio Alliance or Pacific Northwest Stories. This is entirely a fanbased work for personal enjoyment.
Chapter Eight: The Telling
Nic watched the woman continue to stare down at the backpack at her feet, after the implication that it was finally time for him – for his listeners to get the rest of the story, he was eager to get on with it. Nic's eyes trailed frustratedly from her to the pack. It was clearly more or less empty, filthy and ruined, but the woman in front of him acted as if it held some special significance to her. Does it remind her of being at school there? Is she thinking about her classmates? About her friends? Nic waited as patiently as he could, but when his eyes shot to Chloe, her arms were crossed over her chest and the look on her face was pain. He was no longer so worried that he and Geoff were being played and even his already thin insistence that the two women must have been delusional had begun to fade. This, however, was stretching things a bit. In this moment of nothing which might have been everything to the brunette in front of him, the cooling winter's day paired with the preternatural quiet of the ruined school building and together they threatened to drive him to drink.
All at once, the short brunette in the dark grey jacket shook her head once, wiped a lock of hair behind her ear and stepped back from the bag. The wall nearest to her stood tall enough for her to lean against it, though to Nic's eyes it looked like it was made almost entirely of cinder block, loose and ready to crumble. The woman stepped over the shattered tank of a toilet and leaned her left shoulder against this wall. It did not budge. Nic exhaled, unsure when he had taken the breath, but glad there were no surprise injuries to deal with. As soon as Max settled on where to stand, it must have been some kind of cue to Chloe, because the taller woman popped her knuckles and made to approach Max. Again, much as she had done outside the school, Max Caulfield waved her girlfriend off. Strangely enough, instead of hurt, he thought he saw frustration cross the bluenette's features once more. After just enough seconds more that he was considering asking Max if she would rather leave instead, Nic matched eyes with Geoff. At once, the photography student began to speak.
"I grew up in Arcadia Bay from the time I was a toddler until I was twelve." So, another 'my life's story' thing, Nic thought, glancing at the punk-looking woman to Geoff's left, whose face was smoothing out, calming into unbefitting neutrality. "What I remember most about those days wasn't school. It was the summers. It was going every night for a week to the little, shitty county fair outside of the city and blowing absurd amounts of our allowances playing everything from ring toss, to darts, to that stupid 'fill the balloon with this water pistol' game. I remember hot summer evenings, as the sun disappeared just below the horizon, my arm aching as Chloe pulled me behind her, running around trying to get on all the rides, even the ones we were too small for. I had my best friend with me. As long as it was me and her, none of those rides scared me." The most absurd – and, coincidentally the most honest – unadulterated smile he had seen her give began to form. It was an interesting transformation: while not as pale as her girlfriend, the shorter woman was still firmly what would be called pasty so watching the color ease into her face as she spoke, experiencing what looked like genuine excitement, was hard not to take note of.
"She would laugh at me if I was scared, anyway, and tell me that everything was going to be alright because she was with me, Supermax." Beside Geoff, Chloe was finally, smiling back. Yet, in ways, the pair of them still looked sad and regretful. "I remember running around in the woods every weekend in eyepatches and pirate hats we won from the fair when we were eight. I remember our families getting together to cook out in Chloe's back yard. I remember when I was eleven and Chloe was thirteen and we snuck her parents' wine and then, like a dumbass, I spilled it. I remember every warm night, every sleepover, every adventure on the seven seas of Arcadia Bay. Then I remember it going away." Her voice grew grave and Nic took the changing atmosphere as a reminder that these emotions the women were expressing were utterly genuine. The dirt across one of her still slightly rosy cheeks was interrupted, marred by a genuine tear which found its way down her face when she blinked. "And I know what you're thinking, 'you're not the first person to have to move away from their home, their friends, get over it!'" Nic had not thought anything of the sort. He had begun to comprehend the depth of their connection when they were younger as a result of Chloe's story in the junkyard.
"See, mom had found a better job in Seattle and dad was tired of working on cars and bouncing from whatever factory was hiring to whatever factory would take him after the fresh round of layoffs came for him. I remember my best friend being heartbroken because her father was killed and then, the very day of his funeral, I had to watch her, dressed in black, crying by his grave as she got tinier and tinier out of the rear window of my parents' car. You're right. I'm not the first and maybe it wouldn't mess with me if I had handled it better. See, I remember barely fitting in in Seattle and I remember how guilty I felt when Chloe and I stopped talking as much. Eventually, I felt like a horrible person she wouldn't want to hear from again, anyway. I hated Seattle for a year or two, and then I found a couple friends who made me hate it a little less, but that didn't change a ton. A few days before I turned eighteen, five years after I had left, I came back to Arcadia Bay to go to Blackwell. I wanted to call Chloe, but part of me said she wouldn't want to hear from me, so I didn't. " At the very least, Max's story was progressing more quickly than Chloe's had. Or at least, he thought so, but there was a difference. For all that Chloe had gone dull and a little numb, if angry, for most of her retelling the woman in front of him, with the camera bag across her shoulders and the dark blue eyes, the pale lips, she was not dull or numb. She spoke with a sort of nostalgic sadness befitting old novels. He hated the idea, but a part of his brain wondered if she didn't have a bit in common, emotionally, with the fictional Holden Caulfield. The woman shook her head when she realized she and Nic had locked eyes, robbing him of trying to look any deeper into them and pick out whether or not he should trust her.
"I went to classes and I sat up in my room. I drank tea with a girl down the hall named Kate Marsh, because she was the only one who was quiet and shy like I was and she didn't expect too much of me. We talked about books. I wheedled her into showing me all of her art, because it was so bright, so cheery and I needed that and besides, it was good and she needed to know it was good. Warren started talking to me that first week and never went away. Since then, I've had to confront some things, things I'd never realized about both of them. They were imperfect people and maybe even - maybe even bad for me in ways, but they were also kind to me. I didn't make any other friends, really. A couple of people tried to reach out, but more didn't. A couple started to treat me like crap. The rest just went on with their lives and left me alone. I played the wallflower until early October, not long at all after I turned eighteen. Because that's when my part of the story really starts."
Max lifted her head again and this time offered him the eye contact. Awkwardly, Nic accepted. For just a moment, he stared across a ruined bathroom not at Max Caulfield, but at Veronika Pilman. Then he blinked, inhaled and Max was where she was supposed to be. You've got them on your mind. Nic looked left in response to movement from the corner of his eye. To his trepidation, Chloe had fished from her pocket what looked to be the last of the beers she had procured from the cooler in the back of Geoff's truck. Is she going to – Nic was dissuaded of the notion that Chloe was going to try to do some 'buzz maintenance' as Geoff would have put it, when the bluenette reached it out and locked eyes with Max. The brunette held out a hand in request and Chloe approached, taking that hand in her right.
"By this point," Max continued as she tried to smile at her girlfriend and instead grimaced, visibly squeezing the woman's hand tightly in response, "I felt alone. I thought I might be starting to really hate myself. I thought I was. I didn't know what that actually meant back then. I do now. I know what it feels like. I don't think I've entirely stopped hating myself since Arcadia Bay died. Nic, you and Geoff didn't believe much of what Chloe had to say earlier but, honestly that was not – well, it was tame. This is where the story gets hard to believe. This is where it gets strange." There it was, the reminder that they were both well aware that Nic and Geoff shared a serious amount of doubt about their story. Nic grimaced, himself and tried to consider the best way to answer. His left hand slid into his long jacket's pocket as much to have something to do as for any warmth it might provide and he settled on words.
"I'm going to listen, if you're going to tell me," Nic promised. "This is – you tried to tell me I wouldn't believe you back in Seattle, but we're all still here. So, please, if you're alright with it, I'd like to know."
"Absolutely," Geoff echoed. "After all, we're here, at your old high school." At this, Max looked away from he and Geoff, first at her girlfriend who stood calmly by Max's side and then at the ruined building around them all.
"Yeah," she said, sighing, "yeah, we are." The brunette's free hand reached across her body and took the proffered drink from Chloe. It was a little amusing, if a little sad to see them work together to pop the top without breaking the grasp their other hands held on one another. Max, as Nic had discovered the night before, was not particularly adept at 'chugging' a drink particularly quickly, at least in comparison to her significant other. That did not stop the woman from trying. He thought it was ultimately a wasteful endeavor: a single weak beer was not likely to have any notable effect on her. Then again, she is probably running on an empty stomach now, Nic thought, recalling her earlier difficulties keeping the contents of her breakfast down.
"That's the spirit, Caulfield," Chloe cheered, in a slower, sadder voice than likely intended. "I've finally done it. I've finally gotten you to drink in school." Nic snorted. After a second or two more the empty beer can sailed past Nic, toward the front of the school. Toward, he thought, the area Max had designated as the principal's office.
"You're the best bad influence a girl can have," Max assured the woman, squeezing her hand.
"Don't you ever forget it."
"I won't," the shorter woman told the taller. "I promise." When the two women broke their grasp on one another, and Chloe readjusted herself so that she wasn't standing with a leg on either side of the busted toilet nearest Max, Nic watched the body language the two gave off toward one another, the signals of amusement, desire and he wondered, not for the first time, how love forms. Chloe planted herself atop what remained of a sink, which only made her look even taller than she usually did in comparison to her partner. "I remember the date," Max declared, jerking Nic from his more abstract thought process to continue her story. "It's kind of burned into my head, you know? October 7th, normal monday, I was sitting in photography class, taking notes, being nervous as all get out about turning in a photo for a contest that our teacher, Mr. Jefferson, wanted all of us photography students to enter. I was just taking notes and listening to his voice and then, all at once I wasn't. I wasn't in the classroom. All at once, I was on the ground, in the middle of a nasty downpour. I didn't recognize where I was at first: it was raining too hard and the wind was strong – but not quite as strong as it would be. The storm, the Storm, wasn't as scary this time."
"This time?" Nic asked, blinking. Max did not answer.
"After a few seconds, I recognized the place as a trail around here. It led up to the lighthouse you probably spotted as you came in, up on the cliff. Somehow, I had this thought in my head: if I get to the lighthouse, I'll be safe. So I went. There was trash and things everywhere and all I could hear was wind and thunder and the sound of breaking tree limbs - I thought something bad was going to happen to me but instead I got up to the top of the hill. Then I got distracted from all that noise: there was a huge tornado coming in from the water toward the town. It looked wider than the town itself was and at that point, all I knew for sure was that Arcadia Bay was in trouble." Nic glanced sideways at Geoff, who shrugged. When he looked back, Max shrugged at him, too, as if to say that she had tried to warn them. "Something caught my eye, something flipping about in the winds which had just gotten strong enough to almost blow me over. It was an old fishing boat just spinning through the air. While I watched it it flew right into the lighthouse and brought the very top of it down, right on top of me." Clearly, by the way the woman spoke quicker and quicker as the narration went on, there was adrenaline pumping through her veins: the story meant something very important to her, at least.
"At that point, I opened my eyes in my photography classroom."
"So, you were dreaming?" he asked her.
"At first, I thought so too," Max answered, "but now I don't know if I was having a vision or if I was actually there."
"How could you be actually there?" Nic queried, confused. Somewhere along the line he had missed something, misheard her, lost the thread of the conversation.
"How could I be having a vision?" Max deadpanned back, as if she thought she had caught him in something other than confusion. Nic wasn't sure what that was supposed to be. From a step or two away from Max, Chloe laughed once, and clapped. It was – or at least it seemed - out of character for her. Nic decided to chalk it up to the inebriation, which otherwise looked to be wearing off. "Things were normal for a class, if kind of shitty. The girl to my left, Victoria, her phone went off, buzzing on the table. Her friend Taylor threw a piece of paper across the room and hit Kate in the face. I did what I always did when I was stressing out. I took a photo." That made sense. Artists channeled their emotions into their work all of the time and sometimes they simply created their art for the sake of those emotions, or for the sake of exercising them. "This just happened to be one of many- " the woman quietly trailed off and then continued, as if a little embarrassed, "many selfies. Jefferson called me out for it and then started asking us about how portraiture got its start, about something called the Daguerreian Process which let it become more common and affordable for people. I didn't know the answer, but Victoria did. After that, the bell rang and I decided to just shake this all off. I dodged turning in a photo for the contest, so Jefferson quoted fucking John Lennon at me and then let me go."
"John Lennon?" Nic prompted, unable to stop himself from perking up a bit. He had always been a bit of a fan.
"'Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans'," Max intoned. Her voice was not in mimicry of John Lennon's, clearly, so he wondered if she was not mocking Mark Jefferson. "It was his way of telling me to get a move on, I guess. Anyway, I went to the girl's room while everyone else fooled around in the halls." Nic glanced about. Was that why they had come out to the school? So that they could be in this room? "I did what everyone does in the bathroom, I guess. I washed my face, had a little breakdown and destroyed my picture for the contest because I wasn't confident in anything about myself. Then, I kind of got distracted. Some kind of butterfly flew in through the open window." Again, Nic thought that at some point, Max had said something to make this statement make some kind of sense, but he had not heard it.
"Butterfly?" He didn't mean to sound incredulous, but what the hell did a butterfly have to do with a storm that could wipe out an entire town.
"Yeah, but it was like nothing I'd ever seen before, or since. It was bright blue, almost glowing, itself. Well, obviously when it landed on something behind the stalls," the brunette jerked her head toward the farthest corner of what must have been the bathroom in question, "I pulled out my camera, went back there and took a photo. That's when the door to the girl's bathroom opened and Nathan Prescott walked in. I hid."
"Nathan Prescott," Nic mused. That was a name he knew. Not only did - or had – the Prescotts had a building on campus named after them, Nathan Prescott's body had been reportedly found in a shallow grave with Rachel Amber's shortly before the town was destroyed. "What was he doing in there?" Nic motioned for her to go on.
"I mean, at first, nothing. He just stood there talking to himself. I could hear it. He was ranting about how he was the boss, how he ran the school and could probably get away with blowing it up if he wanted to."
"Kind of dark stuff," Nic said.
"I thought so too. So I stayed hidden, waiting for him to realize he was in the wrong bathroom or something and leave. Then the door opened and someone else came in. She started checking the stalls one at a time, and I listened to them for a few seconds. The other person was a girl who sounded like she was trying to shake Nathan down for money." Despite himself, he turned his head slightly and locked eyes with Chloe, who shrugged and waved her hands as if to say, 'you know this part, already'. "Yeah, you guessed it," Max confirmed. "I peeked around the corner and... I didn't recognize her. She'd changed a lot. She hadn't been this bright blue haired hellraiser punk-lite quasi-grunge thing you see before you."
"You're one to talk, you twenty-teen hippie," Chloe shot back. Max shrugged as if the words meant very little to her and Nic was fairly certain they did. This kind of banter seemed second nature for the women in front of him. In fact, Max continued speaking, more quickly than before, as if Chloe had never interrupted her.
"She pushed Nathan's buttons hard, because that is what Chloe does best. She pushes buttons. She is great at it, she is legendary at it. Never doubt her on that. Unfortunately, she pushed the wrong ones. She brought up Nathan's family and he decided that meant that he could pull a gun on her. And-" an unfortunate squelching noise sounded from the back of the woman's throat, as if it had just closed on her mid sentence, then Max inhaled deeply, cleared her throat loudly and continued, "and then I stood there and watched as Nathan backed her up against a wall and shot her in the chest. Chloe died instantly." Nic furrowed his brow as the words registered, and looked around to see if anyone else was as confused as he was. Geoff's right eyebrow quirked. "My best friend from the time I could walk died in a bathroom and I didn't even recognize her."
"What do you mean?" he asked, looking away from Geoff to the blatantly emotional brunette as she returned to leaning against the wall, her arms crossing over her chest as best as they could with the strap of her bag pulling on her shoulder. "She's obviously – obviously alive." He wanted to add that she was right here, in front of them, but that seemed absurd. He had stated the obvious enough by pointing out that she still drew breath. Instead of answering, the brunette continued her story, though Nic thought she sounded disturbed. By that, he did not mean that she sounded upset, either.
"I wanted nothing more than to stop this, to go back to before this happened, to not see this. I jumped out of my hiding spot. Nathan was freaking out so bad I don't think he even saw me. I reached out for Chloe even though she was so far away. All I could think was that I had to stop this from happening. As I reached out, my hand pressed up against something in the air, something I couldn't see but I could feel, cool and slippery. I closed my hand around it and I blinked and – suddenly I wasn't in the bathroom anymore. I was sitting in my photography class, listening to Mark Jefferson go on and on about photography capturing emotion." Nic felt his own stomach drop out. If she was saying what he thought she was saying, if she wasn't talking about bad dreams leading up to the storm, then that was just another weight on the scale which made it harder to balance her story and reality. It was an unpleasant reminder that the women before him could also be genuinely mentally unstable. He felt a little conflicted as the words processed. "That look on your face? I felt it, too, at first. I didn't believe this could happen. The problem is that after a few seconds, Victoria's phone buzzed on her desk and then Taylor threw a crumpled up piece of paper at Kate and hit her in the face while Jefferson's back was turned. So I did what I had to do: I tested to see whether I was insane or not. I took a selfie. Jefferson called me out on it and then went on to talk about the Daguerreian Process. All over again."
"Are you trying to tell us that you think you traveled back in time?" The brunette fixed serious eyes on him, eyes laced with anger not unlike her significant other's. The doubt in his voice, in his question, had obviously struck a nerve. This was not a response he had expected from her.
"No, Nic. I know I traveled back in time. There's no think about it, no matter what the doctors say. I was pretty sure even right then in the classroom, when everything played out the same. This time, when the bell rang, I quoted John Lennon at Jefferson and then ran like hell for the bathroom. I did everything the same: washed my face, tore up my photo and dropped it on the ground and I waited and watched. The butterfly came in, so I followed it, knelt down and took a photo before it flew off to other parts of the room. Nathan came in, Chloe came in after him and this time, listening to them struggle with the gun and Nathan's crazy babbling, I realized I could do something about it. Like, I knew I could." Nic shook his head. This story was going to go even further down the rabbit hole. He didn't need to be a mind reader to know that. "The gun went off and I reached out and focused. I focused on turning back time, just a few seconds. The colors drained out of the room, and I heard and felt things in reverse: their voices, my own breath. Then, all at once, we were back to normal. Chloe and Nathan were arguing again. I had to stop it. I ended up setting off the fire alarm before he could shoot her."
From there, as Nic stood and listened, listened to her voice and his own breathing, almost the only sounds in the world, the story slowed down. Max went on to tell them about talking to the principal who dismissed her concerns about Nathan in the girl's bathroom with a gun, forcing her to apparently rewind time again and tell a different story. She told them about the security head, a man named David Madsen who grilled and insulted her. In comparison to what she had already said, the idea of the school's security department being headed up by an asshole was not too ridiculous. He had looked briefly into the staff of the school, but he had only found anything of interest in relation to two names on that list: Mark Jefferson and Samuel Taylor. The first had been a photographer of some note out of Seattle who had been born in Arcadia Bay, who had been arrested a few hours before the tornado on suspicion of murder and kidnapping according to records MK had been able to track down. The second had been the school's groundskeeper and janitor and he was interesting mostly because his body had never been found.
"A few minutes later I met my friend Warren in the parking lot. I was about to tell him what was happening to me, what I'd seen and done when Nathan comes marching across the parking lot. Apparently, he'd recognized me from the torn photograph on the bathroom floor and figured out that it was me who pulled the fire alarm. He made a few threats but it didn't really phase me – until he grabbed me by the neck. Warren pushed him off of me." Nic tried to shut the doubting part of his brain down, or at least put it on the backburner and pay close attention. He was not sure how much of Chloe's story he had properly heard. Listening to Max's seemed only right. "At this point this ugly, filthy tan truck that sounded like it was going to die or kill it's driver and m-"
"You're going to have to apologize to him when we get home!" Chloe Price's exclamation of offense was unacknowledged by her girlfriend. Protective of her truck?
"-me comes barreling up to me. Barely stops in time not to run me over. I can see through the windshield because I'm half on the hood and behind the wheel is the girl with the bright blue hair and beanie who I had just stopped from getting shot. I'm looking at her, she's looking at me and then we recognize each other at the same time. Even panicking, even with Nathan on top of Warren throwing a punch while he yelled for me to run, hearing Chloe say my name was like waking up out of a shitty, shitty dream. Warren was telling me to run, Chloe yelled for me to get in. I got in. We sped right out of the parking lot and weirdly, the truck didn't kill us." The left side of the woman's mouth curled up into a smirk. Chloe turned, looking expectantly at Max, as if waiting for some praise. Nic assumed that was just part of their shtick with one another.
"And that's how you two reunited?" Nic asked, at least wrapped up in the story enough to finally set aside his concerns again for the moment.
"That's how," Max confirmed and shrugged as best as one could with neither hand nor shoulder exactly free. "It was pretty clear Chloe was livid with me for not talking to her for so long or being back a month without saying anything. Or both. It showed in everything she did or said to me but she still welcomed me back. She still took me to her house where we'd spent all that time as kids. And maybe my camera was broken because Nathan had made me drop my bag and my friend was taking a beating for me back at school but I was home for the first time since I moved away. No matter how much tension there was between us, I was so fucking relieved. But I brought you guys out here so you could understand this place, the same way Chloe brought you to the junkyard. This is where it started. This is where everything started."
"What do you mean?" he asked her, sure she was making some sort of point about their relationship. She didn't answer at first, instead she pushed off from the wall and with a steadying hand from Chloe as her support, she climbed out of the corner and took two huge steps forward, until she was practically right in Nic's face. He was forced to step back for a multitude of reasons. What is she doing?
"Nic," Max started, as if making sure to signify that this statement was important. The woman's eyes matched his once more and he got the feeling that it took great effort for her to do so, because as soon as she got the sentence out she looked down again. "This is where the storm started, right in this spot." The woman pointed down at her feet, at the stretch of trash that he had just been standing on, that she was now standing on having supplanted him. That was not only nonsense, a storm starting in a building, but it was also inconsistent with the facts.
"I thought the storm started over the water. The radar pictures certainly suggest so." After a moment, the woman sighed and averted her eyes entirely, turning around and resuming her post beside the stretch of ruined wall. Judging by the exasperation in that sigh, Nic had just said something stupid. In fact, the sad shake of Max's head made him feel as if he had just said something to MK that she found hard to even respond to and was being patronized for it. For a second, he thought she might do him the basic fucking favor of explaining, because he felt like either he was being silly as hell or she was, but instead the woman shrugged, leaned against the shoulder high wall segment and continued.
"It turns out that my camera was hella messed up from the fight with Nathan, so I was kind of devastated but my heart was beating really fast and I was in a truck with Chloe. I felt alive in a way I hadn't in a while. I also felt really nostalgic when we got back to her house. We had had a lot of good times there." Nic tried to let his embarrassment go, much as he did when MK felt the need to 'roast' him during particularly bad screw-ups, but MK was MK and this woman in front of him was not. A little courtesy wouldn't hurt. "Chloe told me everything about Rachel that night, everything she knew at least: when she went missing, how they had always planned to leave town together. I decided to try to fix my camera so I went down into the garage and that's when I learned that David Madsen, the head of security at Blackwell, was Chloe's stepfather." Nic turned his gaze on Chloe, who was more interested in moving closer to Max. This time, the woman took Chloe's hand again and pulled her close to her side. "Wowzers, he was a piece of work." Wowzers?
"He had a big, lit up gun case which was missing a revolver, a monitor in a cabinet in the garage hooked up to cameras all over the inside of the house, in peoples' rooms even. He wanted to do something of the sort at blackwell. David was complex, but he was ultimately not important until later. He played a big part in Kate's suicide attempt and spent the rest of his time kind of blundering around, getting very little right until he finally listened to SOMEONE else later on." Again, Nic looked for any kind of reaction on Chloe's face to hearing her stepfather talked about. He was beginning to get the idea, though, that there was some serious dislike at play, not just on Chloe's part but on Max's. "Well, my camera was a bust but Chloe had one around that used to belong to her dad and so I was really touched when she gave it to me and I guess while I was distracted, she spotted my photo of the butterfly. She'd seen it in the bathroom, too."
"How did you feel when you realized she'd been in there?" Geoff asked. Nic had been about to ask the same thing, but Geoff had beaten him to the punch. It was a good question, though, so he could hardly feel slighted. At odds with her silence about her stepfather, this question earned an immediate response from the punk.
"I actually felt really exposed at first, to be honest with you," the woman admitted. Nic got that. Whatever the circumstances which had brought her there, Chloe had been through something traumatic that day only to learn that someone else had seen it. "Then I realized that the only reason I was probably breathing even was that Max had to have pulled the alarm. Even before she told me I knew that was what had happened: it made this weird, twisted kind of sense that Max would have swooped in and saved my ass that day of all days. I thought she owed me one, but I had no clue – I didn't even want to think about almost dying." So, she certainly believes Max, one-hundred percent. I wouldn't be surprised. "So as pissed as I was at Max, this girl had come outta nowhere like some hella ninja savior and saved my extra crispy bacon. I kinda figured out that was why Nathan was up in Max's face. Once I got Max to confess that she didn't recognize me on site, because I was a petty little shithead, I asked her to give me the picture. Good luck charm, memory of the first time Mad Max saved my ass - whatever you wanna call it, I held on tight to it. Our cool bonding moment got interrupted when my step douche came home, found a joint in the room and decided the right way to answer me not getting on bended knee and licking his ho- his boots, was to slap me." So, no love lost, Nic thought, his earlier suspicions confirmed. It was hard to imagine this woman letting anyone assault her, though. He didn't disbelieve her, but he couldn't help but wonder if she eventually got revenge.
Nic swiveled his head around for the first time in several minutes as a natural pause came over the group, eyes trailing, thoughts gathering. Part of what had once been the door to a bathroom stall was kind of creaking back and forth as Chloe's foot moved across it, but again there was otherwise an unnatural, eerie silence. As cold as he felt, there was also no wind. Nic didn't care for that. Sometimes, the deep woods of the Calm had been equally quiet when the animals had stopped calling and the wind had grown eerily silent. This isn't the Calm, Nic insisted. The Blur is quiet and, besides, you're in a city. Unfortunately, that led to him asking a fair question of himself: was it still a city if no one lived there and there were no buildings left intact? Was it still a city without a government or a community? Nic didn't think so. Doesn't mean it's wilderness either. The grounds of Blackwell Academy didn't strike him as wilderness. Brick, milled wood, various items produced and consumed by human beings littered the uncut grass. That was not wilderness.
Does this count as urban decay?
"Just - understand," Max started, apparently deciding she was ready to go on, "no matter what Chloe tried to say earlier, she didn't have 'no reason' to be pissed. Life had been shitty – I had been shitty and being pissed was how she handled it. Right or wrong, that doesn't make her a bad person." Judging by the awkward way Chloe shifted her foot off of the old door or the way Max was busier shooting sideways glances at her than focusing on Nic or even Geoff, this statement had not been for him or his listeners. "We snuck out of the bedroom and went up to the lighthouse. That's kind of when I remembered the 'dream' again. I was still dealing with that when Chloe told me why she was extorting Nathan. You've had that story so I won't go into it, but I kind of spaced out at the end and then..."
"And then?"
"I was back in the Storm. Same spot, same lighthouse, only the storm was, well, it was a little different."
"Different how?" Nic pushed.
"More brutal this time. Higher winds, harder rain. Listen, the Storm that wiped out Arcadia Bay was ugly. It - it just wasn't as bad as it was in those visions. It was like whatever we did, I don't know, tempered it somehow. Just a little."
"Something you did?" Nic asked.
"I'm getting there," she assured him. There was an edge to her voice again. "In this vision, I was back at the foot of the steps and I wasn't alone. There was a doe."
"There was a doe?" Max continued speaking without taking a break to let him finish speaking. Nic tried not to take offense to that.
"It was big, translucent and pale, but just solid enough for me to realize it was leading me up toward the lighthouse. I had to use my powers like, three or four times to stop myself from being taken out by rolling logs or a tree that fell or even the top of the lighthouse. When I got up top, where Chloe and I had just been standing, I found a newspaper stuck to a nearby broken fence. The newspaper was dated on October 11th, 2013 and the storm was coming in." It sounded like the woman was going to claim she not only had had a warning about the storm itself, but when the storm was coming. The idea that she did something to make it 'not as bad' as it could've been, too, is a little bit messed up. "I felt a hand clamp down on my shoulder – someone grabbed me. When I turned around the storm was gone and I was back in that same spot, with Chloe holding onto my shoulder. I spilled immediately." A self-deprecating smile popped up on the woman's face. Max looked down and shook her head, giving Chloe's hand a very tight looking squeeze. "Of course, she didn't believe me when I told her everything I knew on the spot." Nic could understand that. A small part of him didn't believe her, still, right then and there. "She thought I was on drugs until, well, what did you call them? The 'abnormal astronomical and ecological events' started. It was an especially warm day for the fall, so when the snow started falling, Chloe more or less believed me. She kind of had to. We both thought it was a bad omen. What says bad weather more than other bad weather, right?"
"Dark storm clouds?" Geoff shot at her. Max took no offense to his off the cuff humor.
"Yeah, well, I saw those, too. Just, on the 11th, that Friday." Max paused at this, as if pondering how to proceed. A thoughtful look passed across her face and then she shrugged. "I still needed to prove it to her, but she was listening. The problem was I was tired and a little bit freaked out."
"Naturally," Nic said.
"Naturally," she agreed. "So I went back to the dorms. The next morning I heard some students bullying Kate, so I went to talk to her. She told me that, at a party run by Nathan Prescott and his friends, she blacked out and apparently made out with a lot of guys, which got posted on the internet and spread everywhere."
"Ouch."
"If you'd ever met Kate, you'd understand how absurd this is. She is a quiet, shy conservative girl with all kinds of strong convictions about abstinence from sex and drugs and booze." Max shifted from foot to foot, uncomfortably for a moment, as if there was something she was considering saying and then she shook her head and went on. "What really upset me after the day I'd had before, was that she said that she remembered that Nathan offered to take her to the hospital, that she came to briefly in a bright, white room with someone talking to her and then she came to in her dorm room, which is not bright or white. After what Chloe had told me, well –"
"You thought that Kate Marsh had been one of Nathan's victims?"
"Yeah, I did," she answered. Max had so far let her bag kind of hang down around her. In that moment, though, she pulled it up higher on her shoulders and released Chloe's hand so that her left could hold onto the strap at about shoulder level. "I encouraged her to hold on while I found proof and then left to meet Chloe. If I could convince Chloe I was telling the truth, then we could go find proof together of what Nathan was doing and then maybe we could figure out what to do about the storm." There was an obvious question, one which Nic hated to ask but figured he wouldn't be really covering his bases if he did not. Nic glanced to Geoff to see that the man was wrapped up in the story and not thinking of it himself. He sighed.
"Did you ever consider telling someone?" Max looked taken aback for a moment and then made a funny face, wrinkling her brow and smirking at him.
"Nic," she told him, "you claim to have experienced some scary, paranormal stuff, right?" Nic nodded. He didn't claim to, he just had reason to suspect he had. The difference seemed minor. "Okay, but here you stand in the middle of what used to be my hometown, in the middle of all this destruction everywhere and even YOU don't believe me right now." He felt sheepish, his shoulders lowered slightly. "What was I supposed to say? Imagine, 'Oh, Mr. Policeman, I had a vision of the future and the world's going to end'!" Each word came closer to being spat out than the last one.
"I take your point," Nic told her in what he thought was a calming voice. Max was certainly not as forward about every moment of irritation as her partner had been but Nic could hear the tension building every time he interrupted with a statement that implied or even could be brought around back to the fact that he was skeptical of the girls' story. "So how did you prove your powers to Chloe?"
"Well, it involved a revolver, an old car and five beers. Don't look at me like that, I'm not even kidding." Nic had to admit that he had just pulled a face. "The point is, in the process I had another vision of the storm, again. Like last time it was mostly the same, but a little different. This vision was a lot quicker, but the storm was much more brutal. There wasn't much time to relax when I came back to myself, either and all of that using my power had given me a headache, not to mention a hell of a nosebleed. I mean my head was splitting. I started to get worried I was doing some kind of long term damage to myself." Nic could sympathize on one front: he had worried a time or two exactly what big picture consequences of the Blur would be like for him. Then, after living with the Blur buzzing aorund his head for a day or two in the woods, he had simply stopped thinking about that. If there was brain cancer in his future, he couldn't do anything to stop it now.
"I was reeling from the headache and the vision. The storm had been so scary. To be honest, this much of Blackwell still being upright is amazing." Nic thought that that might be going a step too far. A few short walls did not an upright building make. "While I was trying to recover, Frank showed up." The woman dropped the name so casually that Nic rather thought he ought to recognize it. It took him a second, during which he held up a finger to tell her to wait, but eventually it came to him.
"The drug dealer that Rachel Amber got involved with?"
"Mainly he came by to threaten Chloe and get some money she owed him but in the process we spotted a bracelet on his wrist. It had been Rachel's. This is kind of when Chloe and I started working on trying to find Rachel Amber together. Frank didn't like Chloe asking questions about Rachel so he made a couple of threats, stole the gun Chloe had taken from her step father and then promised to see her on Friday with it." It sounded to Nic like they might have gotten lucky to only lose a gun. "I went on back to school, because, well, I was going to be in trouble if I didn't show up at all. Unfortunately, that was a bad day, like, a really bad day." Nic gestured for her to go on, but as soon as he did he regretted it. Max had not been pausing for dramatic effect, she had been doing it to gather herself together. The woman grimaced.
"I saw David following Kate around the grounds taking photos of her and like, a minute later one of the big bad jocks ran into the photography classroom and warned us something was going on. We all got out of the building, hurried toward the dormitories and Kate was on the roof. I got there in time to see her step off the ledge."
"You're saying you witnessed Kate Marsh kill herself? Because my notes say she –"
"Yes and no." Max interrupted. He had interrupted her, to be fair, so turnabout was fair play. "She jumped, but by this time I was starting to get confident. I rewound. Only, it hurt. It hurt a lot. I hadn't exactly recovered from earlier and when Kate jumped again before I could come up with a way to stop her, I rewound again. Something felt wrong. The pain was so bad. I thought I was going to just drop dead of some kind of freak aneurysm. There was a pressure in my head. I could barely think, I felt like my eyes were going to explode. I know I had another nosebleed going but I kept trying to rewind. I couldn't. The thing was, that's when I realized something. If I focused through the pain, on the moment, I realized that I could keep myself frozen in that moment of time." Max's serious tone of voice softened a little. "It worked, too: Kate stood there on the ledge, not jumping, not moving."
"So, you hit some kind of a cosmic pause button?"
"If hitting a pause button felt like someone stabbing you in the brain with something sharp and white hot, drenched in alcohol and then using it to pump air into every corner of your head until it popped like a fucking balloon and rained grey matter on the crowd like a confetti cannon then yeah, a pause button." That was oddly descriptive. It was easy to see ways in which Chloe had influenced Max. He wondered, if he watched, if he might be able to spot ways it had worked in reverse. "I kept the world paused and I went inside the dorms. I climbed the stairs. The door to the roof was unlocked. It shouldn't have been. David got suspended for it. Nathan got suspended, too, after I accused him of drugging Kate later, but I got to the roof." Nic had suspected where this was going to lead the moment that Max began to talk about her magic pause button.
"So, you're the girl who talked her down, the one from the news reports?"
"Yes," Max said quietly. "It was nothing. Kate just needed to know she had been loved. She needed to be reminded about something good, someone who gave a damn. Like her little sisters. She loved them a lot." Oddly wistful, the woman paused and then made as if to shift subjects. She was spoken over, instead by the taller of the pair, who was looking askance at her partner.
"Max is being modest. It was not nothing."
"Anyway," Max exclaimed over Chloe's objection. "I told Wells what I thought I could. David and Nathan got suspended. Nathan threatened Wells and then I left."
"You left?"
"Yeah, Nic, I just left. I didn't want to be around any of the people in there. Mr. Jefferson had made Kate cry. Wells had done nothing for the school. David was a douche and Nathan, by then it was already clear that Nathan was a real piece of shit. So I left. I went out and sat around on campus until my friend Warren came by and found me. Everyone else left me alone. He sat down beside me." At that, Max pushed out of her corner again and made for the gap between wall segments through which she had led them some minutes before. Nic blinked at the sudden departure and hurried to follow. Chloe or Geoff one was hot on his heels but he didn't turn around. Max did not stop as she pushed aside or sidestepped various bits of school ephemera.
"What happened next, then?" Nic pushed.
"To tell you the rest of the story, I'd need to take you to the last location."
"The last location?" This caused Max to pause. She turned back with some frustration in her eyes, but also sadness on her face. Nic did not understand the blonde's pursed lips or her set jaw. Why did people so often react to his questions with irritation?
"The lighthouse," she finally told him, as Chloe moved past Nic to join her girlfriend. The lankier woman looked as if she was fairly sober by that point. "The honest fact is that I think I've had enough for a day. I know that that's going to suck to hear, but I have. Besides, maybe after some rest and time to think, you'll be sure you believe me." Somehow, Nic wasn't so sure but he stayed silent as Geoff passed him and Chloe, not Max, led the way out of the school.
That afternoon was kind of quiet. We left Arcadia Bay limits the same way we entered: past the displaced roadblock. Once we got back to the hotel, instead of any kind of wrap up, Max went back to her room. She voiced a desire for a little time alone so, Chloe and Geoff hung out outside while I had a shower. The junkyard, the Blur, Blackwell Academy, honestly I felt like I needed a shower after that. Ultimately, I decided that I didn't believe in time travel, at least not the kind that Max described. However, the Blur had marked this place as, at least, Tanis Adjacent. When they finished telling their story, I intended to push them to take me out to the woods, to the places they used to go sometimes. After reviewing most of my recordings for the day I came to the conclusion that despite my beliefs in time travel, personally, I had to accept that something outside of the natural happened here. Between the Blur acting like I was in the Calm and the damage done to the city, I was begrudgingly starting to accept their story.
I was also beginning to confront the whole 'loss of life' thing and I had to think about how best and most tastefully to tell this story whatever my own beliefs were. Over a thousand people died that day. This is why I have pushed aside most of the conspiracy theories about Arcadia Bay from Lizard Man to Weather Machine. Now, I had stories about dreams, time travel and some sort of nature-controlling teenage girl. I did not want to sound like the biggest conspiracy nut of them all. I went to bed that night unsatisfied with my plans for laying out this narrative.
The next morning, we met for breakfast and I could tell from the moment Geoff and I walked into their room that something was different. For one thing, neither of them could stop smiling. I figured they would when it came time to go to the lighthouse, but during breakfast, it was like they were privy to some joke that Geoff and I were not.
