"Door's open!"

Chloe opened the door to her best friend's dorm slowly, almost afraid of what would find inside. She looked around and noticed everything was exactly the same as the last time they were there. What else did you expect, retard? She admonished herself.

"Have a seat," Max pointed to the couch without looking away from her laptop.

Boy Max and Kate went in first, and Chloe started to follow when something caught her eye. There was a new photo in the Max Caulfield Photo Memorial. The bluenette leaned closer to look at the new addition: a selfie with Mr. Jefferson.

The smile on her best friend's face gave the girl pause. It was so... big? Joyful? Chloe frowned, struggling to find the right word to describe the gesture. Then she found it, and her frown deepened.

Max's smile was unguarded, intimate – the same way she smiled at Chloe and Boy Max.

"Chloe?" the girl called.

"Coming," she tore herself from the wall with an effort. "Just checking that selfie with the hunk."

"It's from our last day in Cali."

"Tell us about your trip!" Kate said.

"How were the snobs?" the boy asked.

"Thanks for the heads up," Max looked at him. "It would had been a lot worse if I hadn't prepared for them."

"You're welcome."

"Come on, Maxwell, story time," Chloe's lips curled into a smirk. "Don't leave out the juicy, sexy stuff, okay?"

"So you want to hear how I hooked up with Mr. Jefferson?"

"What?!"

Max burst out laughing. "I'm kidding! I could never make you blush and now I did it twice."

"Don't get too cocky, Caulfield," Chloe recovered. "Second and last time, you hear?"

"We'll see about that."

Chloe listened to her friend's story, but with each second a thought fought its way from the back of her mind, until it finally exploded, pushing every other thought away:

This isn't my Max.

She covered her mouth, startled by the revelation. Max's voice faded away, along with her other friends and even the room, leaving Chloe alone with her thoughts.

She's so different from the Max who left last week... she can't have changed so much in just three days... Is this the real Max and she's been hiding it from me?

Maybe, she decided. Maybe this is Seattle Max, how she is when she's not around me, and after we reunited she went back to how she was when we were kids. Was I forcing her hide this side of her?

"And the end," Max took a sip from her soda.

"Wow, that's crazy, Girl Max," Kate said. "But let's look at the bright side, your work is finally being admired."

"Thanks, Kate," the girl glanced at her laptop and smiled. "Done."

"What are you doing, anyway?" Boy Max asked her.

"I was uploading my pictures."

Chloe saw Kate looking at the laptop, the question clear on her face and the fidgeting that said she was too nervous to ask it.

"What's with the new camera, by the way?" Chloe asked for the girl.

"Well..." her best friend looked at the photo memorial, her eyes clouding over, and a secret smile appeared on her face. "They look kinda shitty, don't they?"

"The Polaroids?" the boy said. "They look very vintage, very 'you'."

"I had a long talk with Mr. Jefferson," the smile grew bigger. "My gift is on self-portrait, and the analog format was holding me back.

"So I had to change."

"A big change," Chloe said, and wasn't sure if she meant the camera or her best friend.