Saturday, December 13, 2015

Three Months Before Not What He Seems Premieres

"Hazelle. There are literally snails passing us on the road right now. I can see them."

Hazelle took a deep breath and resisted the urge to glare at her impatient friend. "Joss. Shut up. I don't want to get a ticket two months after getting my license."

"Wow, look! There they go! Those snails sure are fast."

Hazelle ignored the comments, but Jocelyn could clearly see the nervousness in Hazelle's body language and couldn't hide her sly grin. She loved Hazelle, but getting her flustered was just too easy.

They came to a (very slow!) stop at the intersection before the Barnes and Noble, where the two were headed that chilly night. Hazelle, still an extremely cautious driver, paused at the intersection, waiting for another car.

"Jesus, Haze, just go! You literally have the right of way!" Jocelyn, who wouldn't be taking her test for another two weeks, drove with her mom whenever she got the chance. She was completely comfortable behind the wheel—which was probably part of the reason that she teased Hazelle so much about her fear of driving. It wasn't like Hazelle was a bad driver, but she took caution to the extreme. Letting other drivers go before her, pausing extra long at intersections, and waiting for birds to get out of the way were just a few of the things that Hazelle did that Jocelyn did not.

Pulling into the Barnes and Noble parking lot, Jocelyn saw many empty spaces fairly close to the store. But Hazelle, ever consistent, deliberately chose the most lonely, isolated space in the back of the lot.

"Hmm, let's see..." Jocelyn wondered aloud as the two got out of the car. "I count one... two... twenty thousand open spots closer to the store than this one."

"There were other cars around. I didn't want to hit them," Hazelle replied, clicking the lock button for the fifth time.

Jocelyn rolled her eyes. Classic Hazelle.

Her annoyance was quickly forgotten as she and Hazelle entered their favorite place in the world: Barnes and Noble.

Both Jocelyn and Hazelle were huge bookworms, so naturally, a place with hundreds of books would be a haven. The Starbucks was also a plus, despite how overpriced it was, so they enjoyed embracing their inner white girl while settling down with a good book.

Jocelyn breathed in the scents of coffee and paper, wishing it smelled as familiar as it once had. This time a year ago, a Saturday night trip to Barnes and Noble wasn't an uncommon occurrence, but she and Hazelle had been so busy lately portal jumping in search of Lucy that they hadn't come in months. They had mutually agreed they needed a night off from their endless otherworldly adventures, but the craziest part of their lives had slowly become the most normal.

Making their way back to the teen section, they passed endless John Green box sets, a Game of Thrones display (at which Jocelyn paused, looking hopelessly for The Winds of Winter), and some kids Lego books. Finally entering the Young Adult section, Hazelle and Jocelyn began to browse, commenting on book titles and covers.

Jocelyn noticed a copy of Mockingjay with the most recent movie cover and groaned loudly.

"What?" Hazelle asked, turning around with the latest copy of Pretty Little Liars in hand.

Jocelyn groaned again, pointing at the movie cover. "Seriously? Why ruin the book for the sake of advertising the newest movie? It's gonna make tons of money anyway."

"At least the book's still in print," Hazelle said. "I'd have thought all these other look-alike dystopian books would have pushed it off the shelves. I swear, you could play a drinking game with all these books and get smashed from all the similarities."

"True, but I'm not complaining." Jocelyn gathered up four of the so called "look-alikes." "I'm a sucker for these things. I don't know, there's something about a post-apocalyptic world and a feisty female heroine that will always get me."

"Don't forget the love triangles," Hazelle pointed out. "It's apparently not a best seller unless there's a love triangle crammed in there." She grimaced at an entire shelf of books. "Every one of these has a girl in a dress on the cover. Looks like I found another drinking game. This one could be fatal, though."

"Says the girl reading Pretty Little Liars," Jocelyn argued. "Nova told me like every book is exactly the same, and all her series are rip-offs of PLL."

"That is a true statement, but the difference is that Sara Shepard rips herself off. All these freeloaders are ripping off other authors." Hazelle paused. "Wowza, I sound like Stan."

Jocelyn snorted as she and Hazelle found a table in the cafe. "He wouldn't have said it better himself. Wanna go get drinks?"

"You know it!"

Getting in line before the Starbucks, Jocelyn tapped her cheek, wondering what to get. "What if when we ordered," she said, "we just gave them different names?"

Hazelle laughed. "Like what?"

"I don't know, stupid names, like...Julianne and Haley or something!"

"I'd pay you to do that."

In the end, Jocelyn was too thirsty to bother using a different name, and she and Hazelle got their drinks after a couple minutes of waiting. They returned to their table and cracked open their books, and for a while, Jocelyn's focus was only aimed at the story she read and making sure she didn't miss her mouth while trying to drink her Caramel Frappuccino. When she blinked back into reality, she was shocked to see on her phone's clock that an hour and a half had already passed and her drink was nearly empty. Hazelle was completely engaged in her book, only half of her White Chocolate Mocha gone.

After a minute of waving to get her attention, Jocelyn finally asked, "Good book?"

Hazelle snapped out of her book trance and nodded fervently. "These girls are such idiots. They're still not calling the cops! It makes for good entertainment, though."

Jocelyn smiled before her face fell a bit. "Is it weird that this feels...weird?"

"What? Do you wanna change tables?"

"No, like…" Jocelyn wasn't very good at describing her emotions. Her natural instinct was always to just yell or laugh things off or punch the closest wall, not to talk things out. How could she describe the strange stirrings in her stomach, as if they were in a place they'd never visited before? "Sitting here. Just reading and chilling. It feels so weird. It feels so…"

"Normal," Hazelle supplied, pushing her glasses up her nose. "I get that. It feels like forever since we've just taken a night off from the search. I guess crazy has become normal and normal has become crazy."

Jocelyn frowned, sipping her drink. "We kinda sound like a character from one of these books."

"I'd hope not," Hazelle replied dryly. "I don't want -A stalking me and holding blackmail over my head."

"More so the 'getting thrown into something they weren't expecting' thing," Jocelyn said. She moved her straw around in her empty cup, not looking up to meet Hazelle's eyes.

Hazelle nodded, pensive. "That's us, all right. Except we were pretty familiar with the world we got thrown into." She laughed tonelessly. "We actually fantasized about it!"

Jocelyn's clouded gaze flickered upward to meet Hazelle's before settling back down on her book. "Lucky us, I guess."

Neither of them spoke again until later, when an announcement was made over the loudspeaker that the store was closing. On their way to the car, Jocelyn said quietly, "Would it be wrong of me to say let's come here more often?"

Hazelle knew what she meant immediately. Would it be wrong of them to wish to have more nights off? That would mean less time dedicated to looking for Lucy in the innumerable amount of realities that surrounded their own. Hazelle, like her partner in crime, wanted to return to their old life of a free Saturday night meaning a trip to the mall or a movie night, instead of a session of Jocelyn opening portals left and right and Hazelle sketching out a map of the universe.

"I want to say no," Hazelle said a minute later as she started up her car, "but then I just think of Lucy, out there somewhere, lost and alone. It makes me feel so guilty, you know?"

Jocelyn didn't respond, gazing out the window into the cold winter night. It was the person she had evolved into: happy one moment, apprehensive and sad the next. Hazelle had wanted to ask her about it, but the words died in her throat every time she remembered the portals Jocelyn had created in Gravity Falls. As much as Hazelle hated to admit it, Jocelyn's emotions had become dangerous to tamper with, and she had a bad feeling getting Jocelyn fired up about what had happened with Lucy could set off some fireworks.

As Hazelle pulled up to Jocelyn's house to drop her off, she said, "I think…" before she even knew what she was going to say.

Jocelyn glanced at her expectantly.

"I think," Hazelle elaborated, "that we should go to Barnes and Noble when we can."

Even in the dark, Jocelyn's widened eyes flashed with shock and surprise, causing the nearest street lamp to flicker.

"But not because we don't care about finding her," Hazelle hurried on. "But because we owe it to ourselves to actually enjoy our lives. Between the insanity of school, and our families and social lives, and this added challenge? If we didn't take these breaks, we'd kill ourselves, Joss. That's, uh...I don't think that's what Lucy would want."

Jocelyn considered. "So…"

"So," Hazelle finished, "next Saturday work for you to go back? We could go in the afternoon and do our homework if you'd want to search that night."

Jocelyn lifted and dropped her shoulders, feeling the rickety cracks in her bones. She was tired, but in more ways than she'd originally known. She didn't truly know how much longer she could keep up their adventures before something finally changed.

"Saturday night works for me," she answered carefully, stomping down the guilt that rose in her chest at the thought of skipping a night of searching. We deserve it. I deserve it, she repeated in her head. "I was at a really good part of that book, anyway."

Hazelle smiled. "Was she agonizing over her love triangle?"

"No, she was doubting herself in the face of a revolution against her tyrannical government," Jocelyn corrected, grinning slightly. "Duh."

"Whoopsie, I guess that book is doing the formula in a different order." Hazelle nodded and waved. "'Night, Joss."

"'Night, Hazelle."

As Hazelle drove off, Jocelyn fished for her house key and glanced up at the starless night. Her head was beginning to pound, and her bed was sounding better and better with every passing second. She was going to need her rest if she and Hazelle were going to search tomorrow night before school… No. Tonight is your night off. That means no thinking about it—her—either.

But as tired as she was, sleep terrified Jocelyn. The nightmares. Him. They were always there, every night, without fail. She'd rather stay up pouring over maps of where to look next than stepping into the treacherous minefield of her subconscious mind.

But Jocelyn took a shaky deep breath, trying to flush some of her guilt and fear out of her system.

I deserve it.