Chapter 13: Getting Unlucky

In a small courtyard outside the Cyrus Haverford Memorial Mental Health Facility, Chloe Price smoked a Parliament Light as Max Caulfield watched. They were both silent, and both with very different looks on their faces.

Chloe appeared to be taking no joy in her cigarette. She eyed the cement that made up the courtyard floor like a disapproving hawk. She appeared as though her brain was very quickly scanning the red haze on the surface of an alien planet for signs of life as she absent-mindedly puffed away.

Max, for her part, looked like the protagonist of a Twilight Zone episode after the credits had started rolling, trying to make sense of the all-too-cute and curiously writerly moral twist that the universe had thrown at her. She looked at Chloe.

"Was telling the mental patient to go fuck himself really necessary?"

"No," Chloe said. "Felt good, though. He earned it."

Max, opened her mouth to say something, and then stilled herself. More silence before Max looked up again.

"Is destiny really destiny if I keep avoiding it?"

Chloe looked at her. "How do you mean?"

"I mean, five years ago, I came to Arcadia Bay to take a photography class. It turns out, my coming was foretold."

Chloe immediately conjured at least five dirty jokes for Max's last sentence (and that wasn't including "That's what she said!") but the gravity of the situation stayed her tongue.

"But somehow, I even screwed that up," Max said. "I'm destiny-proof."

Chloe opened her mouth to say something.


The night that Max stopped the long fall. The air as thick with mystery and possibility as it was with humidity and fireflies.

"I'm so glad you're my partner in crime."

"As long as you're my partner in time."


"Chloe?"

Chloe snapped out of it. The sense of disorientation was so strong that she used her hand to close her mouth.

"What is it?" Max asked.

Chloe took a second.

"My partner in time," Chloe said. She looked at Max to see if her expression changed. Her eyes fluttered, but nothing more.

"I called you that, didn't I?" Chloe asked. "The night Kate Marsh tried to jump off of the Prescott Dorm."

"Yeah," Max said. "You did."

The deep breath Chloe took in shuddered on its way out. Another person's, another Chloe's memories were finding their way into her mind, and now they didn't have the courtesy of waiting until she was asleep to do it. She felt intruded upon, like the cops were raiding her brain. How many more of these memories were going to be coming back? All of them? If they did, would they displace her memories? If memory was the sum of a person's soul, would Chloe cease to be? She'd never taken a philosophy class, but Chloe doubted it would have helped if she had.

"Chloe?"

She snapped out of it again and looked at Max, who had her worry-face on.

"When was the last time you ate?"

That was a good question.


Chloe and Max were silent as they undertook their hunt for a place to eat. They told each other that they would stop at the first place they found. Chloe knew that Max was hoping for a diner: some middle-of-nowhere piece of forgotten Americana that she could just stare at and take pictures of.

They found a McDonalds.

Chloe went to the ladies' room to wash her face as Max got their order from the bored-looking and acne-ridden teenage girl behind the front counter. Chloe stared in the mirror for a moment before she put her glasses back on. If a nineteen-year-old Chloe's memories were coming to her, would there be physical manifestations as well? Chloe doubted it, but she was petrified of the thought of her vision clearing up and her hair turning blue on its own.

Chloe left the bathroom and entered the vaguely bleach-smelling area of the franchise that the sign on the wall generously called "the dining area." She saw that Max had taken a seat by the window, and that she'd ordered the biggest thing of chicken nuggets they had. A scattered cemetery of dipping sauce containers surrounded the greasy box of meat byproduct: honey for Chloe, ranch for Max.

"We don't come here often," Chloe said, "but you order us the nuggets every time. Since we were twelve."

Max swallowed what she had in her mouth. "The Chosen One demands nuggets," she said.

Chloe sat down. "The Chosen One?"

Max nodded. "According to Nathan's myth… prophecy, whatever, I'm The Girl Who Breaks the World. I went back when others could only go forward. I'm The Chosen One."

Chloe broke herself off a nugget. "You're not The Chosen One."

"I'm not?"

"No," Chloe said. "First of all, you were supposed to bring a storm that was supposed to wipe out a town. You managed to find a way around that. You can't be The Chosen One if you get to, y'know, un-choose yourself. And second, you and Warren's theory about someone, like, this Jennifer Healy chick? If she's screwing with the timeline, then you can't be all that special if someone comes along five years later to do the same thing."

Max tilted her head mid-chew and became unreadable. Sensing a wrong move she might have taken, Chloe scanned her last few words for piles of shit she may have inadvertently stepped in.

"I mean, you're special," Chloe said, trying not to sound like she was backpedaling. "Just… y'know… not in that one particular way."

Max smiled. She looked like she was about to say something, but closed her mouth again and went for another nugget.

Chloe smiled as well, but the flash of memory she'd had in the courtyard came back to her. The humid air. The fireflies. Chloe had forgotten to be confused and morose for a minute.

"What's wrong?" Max asked.

Chloe put her hands on the table. "I feel like I'm going insane. Like… Like my brain is leaking out of my ears. I don't have anything to even compare it to. Having memories come back like this isn't fun."

"Chloe," Max said. "I don't know what this means or how to stop it, but I promise you. I won't let anything bad happen to you."

Max's face was resolute and steely… But there was a shadow of something behind it that told Chloe something unseemly.

"You're enjoying this, aren't you?"

"What?" Max asked.

"This. You're enjoying this."

"I'm… Chloe, don't start another fight in the middle of a McDonalds."

"I'm not starting anything," Chloe said. "I'm just wondering what it is about this situation that's appealing. What was it about that week five years ago that brings this out in you?"

Max looked like she was assembling a thin miasma of emotion into legible words.

"I mean, besides me," Chloe said with a grin.

Max grinned herself before getting back to business. "That week wasn't enjoyable, really. I mean besides… But… it was profound, I guess you could say. It… It told me something."

"What did it tell you?" Chloe asked.

"That I had to stop sucking."

Chloe raised her eyebrows.

"When I had my power," Max said, "I did stupid shit with it. And all the non-stupid shit I did with it, I… It was like I wasn't trying to do good. It was like I was trying to frame good being done. Like the pictures I take. Trying to engineer the perfect moment when a thing that would go wrong goes right instead. Without any input from me. But that's no way to live a life, Chloe. The only times I ever did good was when my back was against the wall and I had to save you. Or save myself. And those times, everything just… felt right. I want things to feel right. I want this to tell me something just as important as that week told me."

They were quiet for a moment.

"You didn't suck," said Chloe.

"Because the week I did suck is locked away in another timeline."

"Well," Chloe said, "If someone else's memory serves, you saved Kate from jumping off of that roof. You couldn't have been all bad."

Max smiled. It was a smile that denoted embarrassment at the happiness she was feeling. And it broke Chloe's heart every time she saw it.

"I'm sorry," Chloe said. "About that fight we had in the car. It was unfair, and…"

"No.," Max said. "You were right. I should have been upfront with you. I shouldn't have underestimated you."

"Hey, there's no telling what I would have believed. Only what I believe now. And I believe you. Every word you say."

A silence followed. As awkward as it was long. Chloe tried to see if Max was blushing. And something told her that Max was trying to see if Chloe was, too.


On the ride back to Arcadia Bay, they talked as they had in years past. Not like when they were eighteen and nineteen, scuffed by a world that was seemingly out to get them. But like when they were thirteen, and existence still seemed like a low-risk prospect. They laughed loudly, told stories, rehashed years-old gossip, sang along to the radio.

Max pulled her rental into the garage beneath the Embassy Suites, and Chloe offered to walk her up to her room; an offer that Max graciously accepted. They had smiles plastered on their faces as the elevator climbed to the fourth floor. They got to Room 412, and Max stopped and turned around.

"This is my stop," Max said.

Chloe nodded.

"You see, now I'm tempted to walk you back to your truck," Max said. "Whoda thunk? Two women trying to act gentlemanly."

"You don't have to walk me back down," Chloe said.

Max broke into an exaggerated curtsy. "But you are a lady!"

"Stop it!"

Max laughed, Chloe smiled, and then they just stood there for a moment. Max went in for a hug, and the tiny Max's head came up to Chloe's lips. She held her breath, and when they parted, she let it out.

Just a little too loudly.

"Were you holding your breath?" Max asked.

"What?"

"Your breath. Why were you holding your breath?"

Chloe scratched her head underneath her beanie. "Well, I, Um… I breathe through my nose, and I thought that… that smelling your hair would be, um… weird…"

Max smiled and put her hand on her hip, and Chloe wished that something would come along and save her from this punishing awkwardness.

Something did, but not in anyway she had intended, or would have liked.

Because that was the moment a bomb went off in the hotel parking lot.

At 4:33 PM, the hotel's security camera picked up a 2006 Honda Accord coming to a stop in a space far away from the other cars clustered close to the hotel's entrance. A man in a black hooded sweatshirt exited the car and left the camera's field of view. It was this car that was packed with roughly three pounds of C4 explosives near the gas tank, and a detonator that could be triggered remotely by phone.

The resulting explosion, fortunately, did not kill anyone, but did result in massive damage to the rest of the cars in the parking lot, as well as the hotel itself, shattering the glass of the lobby entrance, as well as the windows of the first five floors.

Including the fourth floor window, from which Chloe and Max were standing not six feet away. The blast knocked both women to the floor, and Chloe instinctively crawled on top of Max, trying to shield her from whatever harm might have come next. When none came, she got up and helped Max to her feet.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Max said, getting some hair out of her eyes.

Chloe's jacket started vibrating. She reached into her pocket, pulled out her phone, and saw that the incoming call was private. She answered.

"Hello?"

"Howdy, Chloe," The Bull said. "I trust I have your attention."