Chapter 25—Playing Catch up (summary chapter)
Since it has been entirely too long since I updated this story, here is a very brief summary chapter for all you busy readers who don't have time for a re-read or would rather read the new stuff first and then do your re-read afterwards. In Reddit speak, this is the TL;DR, (Too long; Didn't Read) or as I like to call it, the Teal Deer (I didn't make that up, I wish I did).
Here's the good news, I have finished Postcode Envy, and will be uploading the rest of the chapters one at a time, approximately every 3 weeks, depending on my beta's availability. The entire story is finished though, FINALLY!
This chapter can be skipped when I've finally uploaded every chapter and marked it complete. If you're binging this story, you don't have to read this summary at all. I will probably leave it here, however, so I don't disrupt my chapter numbering convention. But when you haven't updated a story in almost 7 years, I think a bonus TL:DR chapter is called for!
My daughter was 5, I think, when I started "Postcode Envy", and now she's a sassy 14 YO. I must give her credit for bringing me back to the fanfic world. She's an anime fan, and she's not in this fandom (though I did finally introduce her to Veronica Mars, we binged the show in like 2 months), but she is following my footsteps when it comes to writing fanfic herself.
I'm a proud mom!
Thank you for your patience. I haven't been getting alerts for my PM's for a couple of years, so if you did PM me in the past couple of years asking for more chapters on this story, or my others, I didn't purposely ignore you. And thank you for not forgetting me, nor this story! I hope you enjoy it. It's been a while since I did any fun writing, so I hope I'm not too rusty.
I will be posting the brand-new chapter (the Sinclair brunch chapter) immediately after uploading this chapter, so I'm not doing a 'bait and switch' on you. I promise!
Now, on to the summary…
Summary:
The story starts on June 6th, 2009, the summer before Mac and Dick's senior year at Hearst College. For this story's purpose, and I took a lot of liberties in this AU magical realism world, June 6th happens to also be the "anniversary" of Cassidy "Beaver" Casablancas' death. It's not a good day for Mac, nor Dick, of course.
Mac is already feeling down due to the date, but she's forcing herself to go about her day as normal as possible. When she stops by a computer store, she briefly looks out the window, only to see Lauren Sinclair, her biological sister, walking by. Lauren is 15, almost 16, and she's with a friend of hers, laughing and gossiping like the average teenage girl that she is. On impulse, Mac follows them into Java the Hut coffee shop. She makes small talk with Lauren, which of course just fills her with even more longing to have a relationship with this blood related stranger. To Lauren, she's just a friendly stranger to chat with while waiting for their very similar drink order (chai latte), but to Mac this brief interaction is much more meaningful. Once she's back in her car, she sees a voice mail on her cell, it's her mom telling her about Ryan's baseball game in Settler's Park, a local place near their house. Deciding to kill a couple of hours, she heads to the park to watch her brother's game. She finds a seat in the bleachers and settles down to watch Ryan.
Dick Casablancas is also having a rough day; it's not even the afternoon and he was already waiting for the day to be over. He fills a water bottle with vodka and drives over to Settler's Park, which happens to be the home of this mighty oak tree that he'd started calling his thinking tree. He liked the park's location because it was not in '09'er territory, so he thought there would be no way he'd see anyone there that he knew.
He was wrong.
Dick spots Mac sitting in the bleachers, and as he's making his way over there, he sees a baseball heading right towards her. He watches in horror as her head and the ball, make contact. Thoughts of Cassidy are now crowded out of his head, but it's replaced with terror for Mac, his new "pseudo friend," which is how she jokingly defines their relationship.
Dick and Ryan both run up the bleachers to get to the grievously injured Mac, comforting her as they wait for the ambulance.
Mac, however, finds herself stuck between two worlds simultaneously. She wakes up at one point in the present day, 2009 timeline, but she can't remember names nor string coherent words together. She then goes back under, only to come back to full conscious in the ER of Neptune Memorial Hospital. The nurse is tending to her head injury and reassures her that they are bringing her mom back to the ER soon. However, the mom that comes into the room is Ellen Sinclair, not Natalie Mackenzie. The shocks continue for poor Mac when she hears she had a cheerleading injury. When they hand her a mirror, her hair is past her shoulders, exactly like she wore it in high school, not the chin length haircut she expected to see. It's Mac, but the high school Mac, only now everyone is calling her Madison.
To keep track of her new complicated reality, Mac mentally starts referring to both sets of parents as 'mom1'and 'dad1' for the parents who raised her in real switched-at-birth life, and 'mom2' and 'dad2' for her bio parents, the Sinclair's.
She's released from the hospital into the capable hands of 'mom2', Ellen Sinclair. When she arrives home (the Sinclair mansion), she's greeted by Lauren, who is now 12. In this new reality where she's known as Madison Sinclair, she had never been switched at birth.
However, the Sinclair's and Mackenzie's were tied together by fate anyway. In this sandbox dimension, when Mac-as-Madison was a toddler, she and her dad (Bob Sinclair, 'dad2') were in a car accident, the car that hit them was driven by Sam Mackenzie, who is a contractor in this dimension. They win a big settlement, and the Sinclair's get rich once again, while the Mackenzie's flounder.
The best part of this strange new life for Mac-as-Madison is the close relationship she has with Lauren. They bond over cartoons, Star Trek, chai lattes, and books.
It's not always easy to keep track of her life in two timelines though. Occasionally she messes up and uses a slang term not yet invented (bucket list), or quotes lines from movies just released that supposedly she'd not yet seen. But for the most part she does a decent job keeping track of her two dimensions.
She works hard to balance her new life as a '09'er with her own intrinsic Mac-ness. Slowly, but deftly, Dick Casablancas charms his way into her life. She becomes friends with Veronica in this dimension, too, further merging the '02'ers and '09'ers. Things with Dick aren't all sunshine and roses though, when she finally told him about Cassidy (using her unique lens into the "future" to try to save her classmates), he's understandably shocked by the truth about his screwed up little brother.
Back in the 2005 dimension, an explosion rocks Neptune High and Mac is caught in that nether world between her past and her 'real 2009 life,' at the same time her team of doctors in the present time are weaning the medication to lift her out of the coma.
At the same time Mac is in 2004/2005 sampling life as Madison, she is also tethered to the present timeline of 2009 as Cindy Mackenzie, in a medically induced coma. Time flows differently in each dimension. The Madison Sinclair timeframe (her coma dreamlife) time goes quickly, it starts in November 2004 and goes past Valentine's Day 2005.
Meanwhile, in the 2009 "present time," all her friends and family gather in the waiting room. They are camped out at Neptune Memorial that entire week Mac is in the coma, living in their own purgatory hell, desperately clinging to the tentative hope that they will get some positive news soon. Time moves very slowly in this dimension.
Ryan beats up the kid who hit the baseball into the bleachers that injured his sister. He ends up with a black eye. Dick questions him on it, and Ryan bets Dick $500 that Mrs. Mac won't even notice his blackeye. Dick wins the bet. Since Ryan doesn't have $500, he promises to give Dick his X-Man comic, volume 1. But they get caught up in the Mac vigil, and that bet is all but forgotten.
A lot of drama happens in the waiting room during the weeklong wait. Logan and Veronica try (not very successfully) to fight the ever-present attraction between them, and Dick gets a bit jealous. He's also not fully ready to admit to himself how much he needs Mac in his life despite their unlabeled "pseudo" friendship. Wallace's mom, and Veronica's dad also end up reconnecting.
Finally, the story merges again as Mac comes out of her coma. She slowly starts to recover. At first, her friends who camped out in the waiting room during her coma, continued to visit her as she started the long road to recovery. Then, the visits taper off.
School starts again and Mac bumps into Dick. She was annoyed that he'd quit visiting her when she had been moved to a rehab center. He hadn't thought she'd want him around, so he did his typical disappearing act. They talk it out, and he impulsively asks her out. She surprises herself by accepting his offer.
The revelations don't stop there, though. Mac leaves campus after her talk with Dick. She has another headache, something she'd been getting frequently after the head injury back in June. She enters her house and sees that her mom is upset but trying to hide it.
Later that night, while eating pizza, which was usually a weekend food in the Mackenzie house, her parents drop the bombshell on her that she was switched at birth with Madison Sinclair. She neglects to tell them that it wasn't actually a bombshell revelation for her at all. Veronica had discovered that Gothic Secret for her back in high school.
Ellen Sinclair had contacted Natalie Mackenzie earlier in the day to invite them for brunch that coming Saturday, the same day she and Dick were going on a date. The chapter ends with Mac trying to accept the fact that the secret she'd been living with for years was finally out in the open. Her emotions catch up to her and the chapter ends with her crying on her bed.
You are all caught up now. There's lots more chapters to come (8), so I hope you enjoy the twisty ride this story continues to take.
And now, on to the continuation of Postcode Envy…
Enjoy!
TBC…