Now that Rachel is gone again, Chloe enters a state of, like, permanent flashback. She registers the rest of the day as a series of still shots, superimposed against the background of moving, blurry colors.
Here is a shot of her and Steph at the Harbor Inn, which actually Steph is behind a closed bathroom door, and Chloe is in the motel room alone, in the space between the two beds, on the phone with her mother, in the process of asking her to mediate with the step-douche about the car. Joyce agrees grudgingly, but Chloe can hear that her grudge is fake. Joyce has already heard about Rachel.
Next it's Chloe and Steph in front of the auto repair shop. The "M" in the sign on top of the garage is crooked, hanging by a single thread of copper wire. Steph is wearing a maroon FUNK HEAD sweater and Chloe, showered now and no stranger to wearing other people's clothes, is in a gray and orange long sleeve t-shirt and some decidedly un-punk sweatpants, since Steph is wearing the only spare pair of jeans she brought. Chloe is seen handing a small quantity of cash to a large and (of course) goateed man, dressed in a sleeveless navy button-down, name-tagged and heavily stained with machine oil. The cash is just enough to pay for the two replaced tires and nothing else, but the man is amicable nonetheless. He, too, heard about Rachel. Everyone in the picture is damn near smiling.
The next shot is of the Blackwell parking lot, with Chloe waving from the departing truck window to David Madsen, who is descending the stairway and not smiling at all. In the background, the butt of his muscle car is seen. The car is parked diagonally across two handicapped spaces.
There is a shot of them in the laundry room at the Harbor Inn, and another in a booth at the Two Whales, with food piled on plates and Joyce hovering with a pot of coffee well past her welcome.
By the time Rachel texts and they come out of the diner, it's dark.
Junkyard, 20 minutes, the text reads.
Chloe stares at it, marveling at how simultaneously familiar and weird the words look. She almost calls back to say she will pick her up, but doesn't.
What if it just rings?
Instead, they drive to the junkyard.
She'll be fine.
American Rust flickers between eerie and cozy, based on memories - not flashbacks, but actual memories, thoughts and feelings now - that fall out of the dark clear sky like photons from dead stars. The truck, parked and unpowered, rejoins the great pile of trash from which it once came, blends into the landscape. Turning to look back at it from like 20 steps away, Chloe can hardly tell where it is.
In the shack, she gropes in the dark under the bench until she finds a lamp and turns it on. The shack, too, looks familiar but weird at the same time, with shadows that seem a bit too large and sharp, and corners a bit too dark, and everything moved an inch off its spot in her memory. They sit down, without talking much. Chloe lights up a smoke, checking the wall involuntarily to make sure her and Rachel's autographs are still there. Then she digs up an old marker and hands it to Steph.
"What's this?" Steph asks.
"You were here," Chloe says, pointing.
"I was?"
"You really were."
Steph adds her name under theirs, and it looks just fine. Looks like it belongs there.
But at the same time it's sad how everything is in past tense.
Chloe puts the marker in her pocket, to replace the one she lost.
A few minutes later, they hear footsteps and tense up.
"Hey, junkyard queen," Rachel's voice. "Is that you there?"
"And then some," Chloe replies, slouching down in her chair, then straightening up again.
Rachel appears in the dark doorway - it's really her, in a red and black flannel and torn black jeans - and plops down on the bench.
"Ugh. That was… rough."
"What?"
"Oh, you know… parents. Do we have any beer?"
"No."
"How about weed?"
"Uh, yeah, actually."
Chloe rummages for a pipe, finds it on one of the shelves and packs the last of Nathan's dimebag in it, while Rachel quizzes Steph on life in L.A.
"Surprised they let you out of the house," Chloe says, handing the pipe over.
"Did you quit smoking weed while I was missing?"
"Yeah, right," Chloe scoffs.
"Do the honors then."
"Just trying to be polite," Chloe mumbles, bringing a flame to the pipe and puffing on it several times. Rachel tokes up, then offers the pipe to Steph, who declines. They pass the pipe back and forth in silence, which only last two more passes. Then they sit and watch the smoke billow and rotate like the start of a mini tornado.
"So then you called Steph," Rachel prompts finally, having stretched on top of the bench on her back.
"Yeah," Chloe says, and then watches the cloud for a while. It takes her a long time to get started again, but then she gets into it, finds a good rhythm, minus a few times she has to go back to add something she forgot, with and without reminders from Steph. Rachel offers an occasional surprised comment, like "No way you went to see the tribe!" and "The homeless lady!" and "Who the hell would slash your tires?!" But she doesn't seem to question any of the crazy stuff, like the blood ritual, which, to Chloe seems even crazier now that she's retelling it, in the sense that it sounds more schizophrenic than supernatural.
But then, aside from Steph, everyone is pretty high.
By the time she finishes the scene at the Prescott barn with "I guess you know the rest," it's 3AM. Steph is asleep.
Rachel sighs, but it almost sounds like "Do I?"
For a minute, no one speaks. Chloe remembers that she never mentioned her trip to the Three Seals motel still. Though, why would she?
"Space enough have I in such a prison," Rachel says, which sounds both, familiar and like a hallucination.
"Huh?"
"Just something I remembered. So where do we go from here?"
"Probably should take her back to the motel," Chloe says. "She wouldn't want to wake up here."
Rachel looks surprised for a moment, then grins, looking around at the interior decorations and the graffiti on the walls.
"Yeah, I guess the junk shack is not for everyone. Even if she was here."
They wake Steph up and drive to Harbor Inn, where Steph hesitates after getting out of the car, when neither of them move to follow her.
"Are you... taking Rachel home?" she asks.
"Uh…"
"I mean, you know we have enough room for everyone to sleep," Steph hurries to add, "unless you really have to… Which would be understandable I guess…"
"We're just gonna stop by Up All Nite," Rachel says. "The night munchies, you know. You can come, if you want. We just thought you wanted to…"
"Yeah, no. I guess you're like Chloe. Didn't catch her sleeping once since I've been here."
"Is that so?" Rachel turns to her.
"Sleep is for the weak," Chloe offers, weakly.
"You two be careful out there," Steph says.
"Careful is my middle name," Chloe replies, with a wince.
"Pretty sure it's Elizabeth," Steph says, pointing a finger-gun at her, before backing away into the room and closing the door.
They reverse out of the parking spot and turn towards the ocean. It's just the two of them now, and the small talk that worked just fine with Steph around doesn't seem to cut it suddenly.
"So, Up All Nite, huh?" Chloe says
Rachel gives her a squinty grin.
"Yeah. I haven't had sugary poison in three weeks. Unless you'd rather catch up on that sleep."
"Nah, I'm good."
They turn left on the deserted Arcadia Bay Avenue and drive slowly, under the traffic lights blinking yellow, past Two Whales, which is open but empty, past Arcadia Gas and ACFC, and closed shops, some for the night, some permanently. Cool sea breeze blows in through the open windows. Chloe is formulating all of the questions in her head, or maybe it's just the one question, really, asked a hundred different ways, and they all sound simple and obvious, but none of them are making it out of her mouth.
"So where do we go from here?" Rachel asks in a robot voice. "And this time don't say Up All Nite. That's not what I mean."
"OK, what do you mean then?"
"I mean how do we proceed?"
"You're asking me?"
"Well, you've been running this enterprise for weeks, and I'm not exactly up to speed still…"
"Oh, right. You mean the case." Chloe clears her throat and hurries on. "OK, well. Tomorrow, or today now I guess, we go back to Blackwell, find Stella Hill, hang her upside down from a mast and poke her liver until she gives up the robed freaks and everything else."
"So we are going to kidnap a student from Blackwell in the middle of the day? On my first day back?"
"I mean, we don't have to literally tie her to a mast. We can catch her in the girls bathroom, put a gun to her head and ask her nicely."
"And if she gives us names?"
"Oh, she will…"
"What then?"
"Then… we go and see those people, and…"
"What? You're gonna shoot them dead?"
"I don't know! Maybe! Rachel, we can't exactly take them to the cops and say please lock them away for imprisoning Rachel in another dimension for three weeks. What do you think we should do?"
"I don't think we should kill people, even bad people, because then we get caught and have to tell the cops that we killed these people because they imprisoned me in another dimension for three weeks."
"But they did imprison you for three weeks, and they did try to kill Steph and me, more than once."
"Was it really them, though, or was it these… spirits at war?"
"Both! Either! Who gives a shit?"
"I'm saying self-defense is understandable if one or both of us are in danger - you know I'll be the first to swing a two-by-four - but I don't want to hunt these people to shoot them. It might not make any difference to the spirits anyway."
"So then what? Should we just wait for them to do it again?"
"We could maybe figure out how to deal with the spirits… Or I guess I wouldn't be completely against sending those assholes to another dimension, for a few weeks or months, if we can manage. But mostly I think we just got another reason to skip this fucking town."
"Skip town?" Chloe echoes, incredulous, then adds, "We?"
"Well, the way I see it," Rachel says, looking away, "this whole thing happened when we were… apart. The blood ritual you did with Sera... What happened to us when we met three years ago... First at the Overlook and later on stage during the Tempest and after... I think it was kind of like that."
She turns to Chloe.
"You know what I mean? Like if there ever was supernatural shit in Arcadia Bay, it was then and there. I felt it. For real. Is that crazy?"
Chloe nods.
"Thanks." Rachel grins. "And so we haven't really been apart since then, until… three weeks ago. And suddenly one of us loses memory and the other is gone missing for three weeks. Coincidence?"
"So you're saying… you want to go to California again? With me?"
"I mean, we can start with a road trip."
"But what about all that stuff you said? What about that guy?"
"Tommy Hill? Are you still mad about that?"
"Mad? Why would I be mad when my... when the girl I… am fucking in love with... says she met a guy and doesn't want to be with me anymore?"
Chloe stares ahead, feeling Rachel's gaze.
"I didn't say that." Rachel says quietly after a pause. "That's not what I said."
"You wrote it in a fucking letter I found in the junk shack!"
"The letter? All I wrote there was that I met a guy, not that I didn't want to be with you. And anyway, the letter wasn't for you."
"Yeah, that's what Steph said, too. 'Letter isn't for you.' But it says 'Fuck off, Chloe,' and I'm pretty sure I'm Chloe."
Just do not start the crying shit now, she thinks, gripping the wheel.
"Listen, Chloe. What I just said about what happened to us three years ago. It was awesome, and special, and beautiful, but was it a little too good? I mean, I already told you how it felt supernatural, literally magical, and we were, both us, in pretty shitty spots in our lives at the time... Haven't you ever wondered?"
Chloe glances over at her. Rachel's watching her from the far corner of the seat, her hair flying in the wind.
"Not until you left."
"Well, I do wonder sometimes. Or did you forget I was crazy? And whenever I wonder, I will freak out and do stupid shit, say stupid shit, to test this, us, or to convince you, or myself, that this is wrong, that you - or me - should be with someone else, because what we have is not really real. Because it's too good to be true. What if it was the spirits? Hooking us up for some stupid purpose of their own? For this way they're fighting? And maybe going away now is another way to test us. Maybe this sorcery that binds us only works in Arcadia Bay? Maybe once we escape, I mean really leave, not just drive to a rave in Portland, the blood ritual spell will break, and we'll see each other in a different way. Do you still want to come with me and risk that?"
"So, should we take Steph to the airport tomorrow and then just keep driving east?"
Rachel laughs.
"Tempting, but I think I should graduate first. I worked too fucking hard."
"So we're not leaving."
"It's just two weeks, Chloe. I'll make sure they pass quickly… As you know, I'm something of an expert."
Chloe grudgingly agrees, but she knows her grudge is fake. Her gruffness, too. She should be mad at what Rachel said, but she's so stupidly giddy, in fact, she can hardly contain herself. They get coffee and stale donuts from the critically high teen they don't recognize and drive back out to the ocean, parking facing the water at the beach. Frank's RV is not in its spot. To help maintain that gruffness, because she feels like she'll be letting Rachel off some vague hook otherwise, Chloe gruffly insists on hunting down and interrogating Stella. She stares out at the ocean as she says this, thinking about what Rachel said, water stretched before them still as a mirror, the eye of the lighthouse sweeping across the bay back and forth. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees, feels Rachel sliding closer and the words catch in her throat, as she hears Rachel whisper, "OK," her lips brushing her ear, before she dives down like a hungry vampire for her neck, making her yelp. Then Rachel is holding her face with both hands, and they kiss, and they kiss, and they kiss.
And then there is a still shot of Rachel, mostly her silhouette, her earring the only thing possessing color, glowing bright blue in the reflected light of the lighthouse, lifting her shirt.