The dull ache of Max's bruised knees draws her attention away from coloured egg in her hand. The dissonant cries and laughs of younger children become increasingly claustrophobic as she glances first at her grass-stained knees, next at a pack of chattering adults, third at her mottled palms and fourth at the egg slipping from her clammy fingers. Max feels a tingling in her nose and a stinging in her eyes and, forgetting instantly about her duty to help out like the other kids her age, stumbles to her feet and darts away like a startled fawn.
Max fumbles through bushes, out of the green expanse where her parents and her classmates swarm and into a nearby parking lot. Her strength is spent entirely on moving a large blue trash can enough for her to slip behind it, and when she does she curls in on herself, hugging her knees to her chest and withdrawing into her shell. Here, she cries her eyes out.
"Never fear," someone giggles, "Lara Croft is here."
Max's hands, slick with perspiration, grasp at the hands on hers and struggle to hold on. Her chest screeches and she wishes she could wipe her eyes to clear her glassy vision, wishes she could see her clearly.
"Chloe," she groans, "don't leave me."
Chloe slips her hands from Max's unimpressive grip and wipes her eyes. Max's fingers reattach to her shoulders.
"Come on, dude, you just tripped over. If I were here, we would be laughing about it."
"But you're not," Max sobs, clawing at her grazed knees, "you're not."
And then she isn't.
The music is just so loud. The bass pounds at her entire being, ripping her heart out and taking its place, and Max wonders for a moment what it would be like to let it go. The floor and the walls and the bodies around her pulsate while she is deathly still, wanting nothing less than to be where she is, and yet she wonders if she can leave her heart behind in this place, wonders if she'll ever need it again. For a moment, Max closes her eyes and imagines her life without her heart. She imagines being able to breathe, being able to speak, being able to think of anything other than…
But later that night she sees it bouncing on the couch, swaying to her heartbeat. Max watches her push back long blonde hair, her smile part the odour of sweat in the air; she can't look away, can't leave her again, she just can't.
She jostles through the crowd and pushes through the bathroom door and slams it shut and splashes, slaps her face with water, breathes, washes, slaps. Your heart is in your chest Max, your heart is resting her cheek on her shoulder, holding her waist, burning the water on her cheek with the hot flesh of her own.
"It's such a shame," she hums, "I'll never know how you feel about me."
Max puts her hand on Chloe's and it falls upon her own shirt.
"Yeah," she chokes, "It is."
Max tugs her shoes off and stuffs her socks into them and steps into the snow. She immediately leaps out again and shrieks, but soon her teeth gnash and her fists clench and her brow bends determinedly, and in she steps again, hopping up and down and hissing until she is acclimatised. Then, cautiously, she lowers the rest of her body down into cold, colourless sheets and closes her eyes as her limbs begin to lose all feeling.
This would be a great photo op. A teenage girl lying in six inches of snow in shorts and a T-shirt, wondering if numbing her body will numb her mind. She knows emotions are in the brain, so it makes sense that it would, but somehow her chest still has yet to grow cold. Chiaroscuro; it would look great in black and white, her pale skin dissolving into the pale ground, her clothes a dark contrast, her only material remains.
"Only you would be cool with getting hypothermia if you got a photo out of it."
"And I don't even have my camera," Max laughs. She opens her eyes and Chloe is sitting beside her, holding her hand and brushing the falling snow from her lashes. As she leans over, her hair curtains Max's features and her breath keeps them from the deathly cold. Max closes her eyes again.
"I'm sorry," says Chloe.
Max squeezes her hand out of existence.
"Me too."
Max chews at her lip and reads the same paragraph on her laptop screen with consistent intensity for several minutes. The smiley face punctuating her mother's facebook message containing the link she just followed seems to taunt her from the window beside it, the window telling her that Mark Jefferson teaches at Blackwell Academy, that one of the best photography courses in the country is a scholarship away in Arcadia Bay, home of her childhood, home of –
"Your heart?"
Max glances up at Chloe's smirking face and rolls her eyes, fixating on the screen again and mumbling under her breath.
"It sounds so fucking stupid when you put it that way," she says.
Chloe laughs. "Hey, I'm in your head, so my words are your words. It's not my fault you're a nerd."
"You're a nerd!"
"Exactly."
Max looks back up at Chloe and tries to glare. Her hair pours over her shoulder like a golden waterfall and she leans against the wall, crossing her arms and looking very at home and very, very amused. Max can't resist smiling.
"I guess I'll see you soon," says Chloe, beaming. Max blinks and she's gone, but her smile remains.
"Yeah," says Max, grinning back, "I'll see you soon."