The Junk Shack is actually not the best idea, and not just because Steph keeps up a facade of polite curiosity, while saying things like, "Was that Harbor Inn just down the road there, or the Country Hotel?" Mainly, it's not a good idea because it makes sad Chloe sad again. It makes her want to sit down and cry, and watch the flashbacks like reruns of old shows on basic cable.
Her and Rachel tagging the walls. Her and Rachel decorating the place. Her and Rachel playing darts. Her and Rachel watching the stars through the holes in the roof.
Her and Rachel…
Tears come, so she kicks the table, hard, knocking over nail polish and empty beer bottles.
This has to stop. She can't be fucking crying every five minutes. She needs an enemy. A target to channel her rage at. This guy Rachel met is not good enough yet. Too vague. Too ghostly. She needs more information. She needs the ray of sun that will make his Polaroid fade in.
Steph, meanwhile, is very careful not to touch the junkyard during the tour with anything other than the bottoms of her Vans. From the way her eyes dart around, she must be expecting giant rats, mutated ants and radioactive green slime (poison +3) to start spawning out of the mud any minute now. It's actually kind of amusing.
"Oh shit!" Chloe screams. "What is that thing?!"
Steph jumps, but gets a hold of herself quickly, rolling her eyes.
"So funny, Chlo."
"So what do you think now?" Chloe asks, spreading her arms.
"Well… I think this place is a lot more… you, than Rachel. Sorry. Is that a bad thing to say?"
"No. Just a wrong thing to say. Rachel loved it here. Her vacation bungalo away from the square."
"I guess I'm the square, then."
"You're so square, you're actually cool. Except you're also queer."
"OK, Chloe. You win the lukewarm compliment competition. Can we go to that hotel now?"
"You sure you don't want to just crash here? It's cheaper…"
"Uh… no. I got a credit card. So… it's not like… real money, anyway."
As Steph exits, Chloe looks back over her shoulder. A sunbeam slants in through the roof and illuminates the graffiti on the eastern wall:
CHLOE WAS HERE
RACHEL WAS HERE
"I was here," Max says, adding MAX WAS HERE to the wall.
And Chloe remembers and turns to the opposite corner of the shack, because that's where the bucket is. The bucket that no one ever looks in. The bucket in which Max, who wasn't there, found a crumpled up and heavily redacted letter, supposedly written by Rachel to Chloe, which made absolutely no fucking sense. The letter which hallucinatory Max, by the way, never even told that Chloe about. Like, hello? We gotta have a talk, Max.
A blue butterfly sits on the bucket in Blackwell bathroom, flapping its wings in slow motion.
She hesitates, sighs, stomps towards the bucket - decisive and brave, because the bucket is the enemy now - steps on the bottle that had fallen off the table, almost breaks her ankle, curses like a pirate, kicks the bottle, leans over the bucket to confirm what she already knows: that there's nothing in it, and freezes.
It's there. A ball of paper.
She reaches for it after a moment, half-expecting the flashback to end. It doesn't. She sits down and unballs the letter slowly.
The room darkens a bit. Steph has come back and stands in the doorway, saying nothing.
It's total madness, but the writing is in Rachel's calligraphic hand.
"I can't believe you, Price. Fuck! I spent a week working up the courage to talk to you, and you wouldn't even let me speak!
I can't do it, OK? The graduation. The plan. The life.
Us.
I'm eighteen!
I'm not ready to settle down. Get married.
In fact, I don't think I'm the marrying type.
I've been studying, working all my life. I want to laugh and be stupid and dance on the beach for about a year. I want what we used to do, but full-time. Not wait tables and pay rent. What happened to the roadtrip? It's been three years, and instead of climbing Everest we're over here planning adult life!
And yeah. I met a guy. A male, OK? He's older, and I like him. He seems so free.
Aw, 'He seems so free.' From the quill of Rachel Amber…
This is stupid. No wonder you stopped doing your diary three years ago.
Not that I'm trying to praise you, Price.
Fuck off, Chloe."
That's it. That's the letter. That's as far as Rachel managed to get before binning the thing. What did she do after that? Did she pace? Talk out loud instead of writing down the rest of her thoughts? Or left without looking back? Her new boyfriend waiting just outside? Both of them burying the backpack under the plank?
Chloe looks away from the paper, discovers Steph and, after a brief pause, hands the letter over.
Steph reads it, twice.
"So we got an older male," she says. "But no name."
"John Doe."
"Still, that's something." Steph "The Bright Side" Gingrich.
Max flashes by in a pink Jane Doe t-shirt, followed by several doe sightings, ghostly and otherwise. One of those stomps its hooves in the spot Chloe had excavated with her bare hands the other day.
I can't do it, OK?
When did it become Chloe's dream instead of Chloe and Rachel's dream?
"You're right, Steph. She probably ran away."
"I didn't say that. And you can't take that from this letter."
"What the hell else can you take from it? I met an older man. I love him. You suck, Price. Bye."
"No. There's no 'bye' anywhere. She tried to talk to you. When that didn't work, she came here and wrote the letter, but the letter wasn't really for you. That's why she tossed it."
"Who was it for then, Stephanie?"
"Herself. She was trying to write down her thoughts. To prepare for your next talk."
"It's a nice try, but you're reaching way far right now."
"You're just upset."
"Did you read the fucking letter? No shit, I'm upset! It literally says, 'Fuck off, Chloe.'"
"Well, you're not going to just stop looking, are you? Because let me tell you, if you do, I… I'll…"
"I'm not going to stop looking, Steph. Stop threatening me."
Chloe sighs in exasperation, but a grin is peeking through the clouds of her face.
Freaking Steph. Crazy person.
"That's better," the crazy person says.
Chloe rolls her eyes and takes back the letter, and suddenly she's a different person in the same place at a different time, and the letter in her hands is gibbering about "stink-eyes" and "hooking up on campus."
"Jefferson," she says, as she stumbles out of the flashback.
"Thomas? Airplane?" Steph asks.
"No, Mark Jefferson, the celebrity photography teacher at Blackwell. After your time."
"OK. What about him?"
"In this… dream that I… continue to have… He was… the man Rachel met. The letter in the junkyard was about him."
"Wait. You saw this letter in your dream?"
"Not this one. It was… different. But it was in the bucket. And Jefferson is older. In the dream he was this hardcore psycho. But… his dark room is not a dark room, but a meth lab instead…"
The more Chloe mumbles, the more concern deepens on Steph's face.
"Fuck, Steph. My head hurts."
"Why don't you sit down… Where it's clean."
Chloe plops down into the floor chair and looks up at Steph with pleading eyes.
"OK, now can you explain this again, in a way that I can understand?"
Chloe just sits there staring for a while. Then she pulls a smoke out of the pack and lights it.
"So this dream or whatever that I was telling you about, these flashbacks, they keep showing me things that haven't happened, and shit that never will probably, like time travel and whatnot, but then there are things that… sort of exist, also? Like, it showed me Rachel in the… ugh… buried, right? But when I went there and dug, there was nothing. But then, it showed me Max lifting this huge-ass plank, and I went there, and there was the backpack."
"Max?"
"Caulfield. My former best friend whom I haven't seen in about five years. In this dream she's a time-controlling superhero."
"OK…"
"Yeah, and so, there was a letter in that bucket in the dream, and although it was different, you saw the letter in this bucket, too. So, the dream is sometimes right, and sometimes wrong, and sometimes partially right, and I feel like I'm meant to decipher it all somehow to find Rachel, but it's all so fucking random that it's driving me insane."
"So Rachel is missing in the dream, too?"
"Yes, you could say that."
"And this teacher had something to do with it?"
"Yeah, he was this serial killer type and he had this apprentice, Nathan, who accidentally overdosed Rachel and shot me in the school bathroom."
"Nathan… not Prescott, was it?"
"Oh yeah, you knew him."
"Mostly of him. Loads of money and a nightmare of a dad."
"Yeah, in the dream he's completely lost it. You know, I wonder if the shit happening in his head was something similar to what's going on in mine right now."
Steph stands in the middle of the shack looking around for a while.
"I can imagine it must be very confusing for you, Chloe, but the way I see it, if your brain brings us closer to a clue that brings us closer to Rachel, then it's good, right? We should use everything at our disposal."
"But what do we do next? Where do we go from here? I can't tell up from down."
Steph looks up and down and says, "Can we go to a hotel now, please?"