Chapter Text
The next day, she feels worse.
She knew this was how it would be, with things feeling worse before they got better. It’s what everybody said, all of the time.
The issue was that she didn’t have a timeline or even a vague concept of when and how things would get better.
It was probably three in the afternoon, and she was still laid up in bed with the curtains drawn when she noticed she’d been tagged in a post on Instagram.
Norah.
‘goodnight, sophomore year’
She strolls down to the comments and read them all. Heads into the likes, reads all of the names. And then she stares at the photo.
Brodie’s party the night before last. His basement.
She wasn’t even in the damn photo; at this point, she’d been at home, watching her family break down before her.
(The tag was nice. Wasn’t it? She had been there briefly. Or had Norah just tagged as many names in the sophomore class as she could remember?)
She stares at the photo for a long time before she likes it. And then she unlikes it, because nope; she didn’t like the photo nor its connotations.
And then she remembers Norah had already been notified about the post, so she might as well like it again, because unliking posts was all too dramatic, and she didn’t want to give any of them another reason.
She double taps, and then turns her screen off, turning the phone face up onto the mattress next to her, waiting for the next notification to come through.
-
It starts out as a game.
How long she could go without messaging anyone, to see who reached out first.
A challenge. A summer project.
Something to entertain her, if there was nobody else around.
She learns two days in that her biggest fan was the Mail app – in particular, emails from Zillow about all the various open houses and listings across the Wellsbury area.
Her second biggest fan? The Zillow app itself.
She laughs about it, and then the tears build and the laughter turns to sobbing into her pillow about everything all at once.
-
She plans to give herself a week to get over herself. One week of allowing herself to rot in bed, feel either nothing or everything, and after that, she’ll resume business as usual.
(As best as she could, anyway, what with school out and her brother gone and basically nothing the same as it was before.)
She gets to the fourth day and her body aches with the urge to get up and do something.
(Not necessarily a bad thing – she hadn’t actually made it past day sixteen yet in the ‘surviving summer’ proposition.)
She squints at the sudden burst of light as she opens her curtains, noted the lack of vehicles in her driveway. Grabs some jeans and a navy t-shirt from her dresser, and headed down the hall to the bathroom. Throws the clothes towel rail, turned to the sink and brushes her teeth until her gums bled.
She’s trying to ignore the fact that she hadn’t showered or even dressed since the beginning of summer break.
She could let herself be sad, but she couldn’t be sad like Marcus was sad. She couldn’t just stop functioning. She didn’t want to.
(She also doubted her brain would let her stop functioning, just like that. So, there was that, too.)
She steps into the shower and turned the temperature up as high as she could tolerate.
Maybe it was the steam from the scalding water, or the fact that she hadn’t done anything for a few days, but she feels ridiculously dizzy when she got out. She contemplates that perhaps the ‘stop rotting’ part of her grand summer plan had been enacted a little prematurely, and so sits on the bathroom tiles wrapped in a towel, wet hair dripping down over her collarbones and gradually onto the floor, scrolls through TikTok for an hour, and then fails to get Wordle.
(She cries about the latter. It’s ridiculous. It’s valid.)
She brushes her teeth again and wrinkles her nose at her reflection in the mirror at the way her waves were already starting to go frizzy.
But there was something else.
After staring for a several moments too long, scrutinising and circling back and thousand times, the realisation hit her that makes her face fall.
She looks just how Marcus did.
-
Depression was a word that Max learned in sixth grade.
Wellsbury was obviously one of those schools where they spoke about things.
Ellen didn’t always like speaking about things before they came up.
They had a talk. About mental health. Anxiety. Depression. Nothing too deep, nothing too heavy, just enough to give a vague sense of awareness and to make all of the students aware of the counsellors, if they weren’t already.
“It’s like being sad,” her mother told her. “But it’s– oh, it’s like a deeper version of sad.”
She figures that sadness is like the waves rippling at your feet on the beach. You feel it, but it’s superficial, fine. You can get out of it. You can just walk further up the beach, touch the warm sand again. And it’s fine.
Depression is when you’re deeper. When you walk further out to the buoys, and then you get so far that when you turn back, the beach is miles away. You try to turn and walk there, but it’s hard. The water is all around you, currents ripping, and you.
Fighting to stay alive, treading water despite the worsening exhaustion, unable to find your way back, when all you wanted was to float peacefully, be free.
-
It’s a wake up call, the way she’d looked at herself in the mirror that afternoon, with her eyes sunken in and skin pale like she hadn’t stepped into sunlight for six months. A reminder that even though she isn’t fine, knew she isn’t fine, knew that nothing was fine right now, that she owed it to everyone to at least try to be.
It sends her on a scavenger hunt of trying to find ways to distract herself.
She needs to do things, to fill this empty void because the weight of all that she was feeling clogged it. It was proving hard, really, to find things to fill the void. What, with her parents being at work, and school out for summer, and her friends with their silent treatment. The cruel truth was that life didn’t stop when one bad thing happened.
She notes the grocery list, stuck on the fridge with a singular pink LEGO shaped magnet, only a handful of things written on it. It was a Wednesday; her mom usually goes grocery shopping on a Thursday evening, straight from work.
Max spends the rest of the day opening every cabinet, drawer, scouring the pantry, running up and down the stairs to scan the bathrooms for things they may need. She writes the list in boxes by the aisles she’d learned by heart in the Wegman’s over in the next town.
The week after, Max focuses on the task imagined the previous Wednesday, which was the pantry. She orders a bunch of mason jars from Amazon, and spends a day and a half deliberating the most orderly and practical manner of arrange them.
Ellen likes it. Really likes it. Ellen even shows it off to Georgia when she invites her round for coffee and a gossip that weekend, like a proud mom showing off her child’s first shitty kindergarten painting.
“Max did it.”
She was in the kitchen, looking for something to have to eat, and had been eavesdropping until then, but nothing of interest had really cropped up on their conversation. Mostly Paul. Then Austin. Then Marcus. A little bit of Ginny. Mostly their neighbourhood club drama.
Georgia looks over at her, eyebrows raised, something else there. And Max remembers that a week and a half ago, she’d broken down crying to her. Georgia then had seen her at her lowest point. Here she was now, scanning her over as she sat at the barstool, dipping breadsticks into a tub of Philadelphia and calling it lunch, not exactly her lowest point, yet still apparently not exactly ‘on fleek’ – because Georgia was looking at her like she was that same girl from the garage last week, all whilst Ellen went on about how proud she was of her to come forward about Marcus, and how pleased she was to have at least one child who was happy, who did well in school, who found life easy.
The day after, her parents take her to Blue Farm for brunch.
It was nine o’clock and the gossiping session with Georgia the day before must have done her mom some good, because when she walks into Max’s room to wake her, she’s dressed nicely – casually, but nicely – with a genuine smile on her face.
Max was already awake. Sleep really wasn’t wanting to be her friend at the moment. But for good measure, she pulls the sheets up to her eyes, pretends she’s sleeping in.
It’s easier, sometimes, pretending she was fine – she’d better practiced at it. It comes to her like riding a bicycle.
“Time to get dressed.” Ellen pulls the curtains open, voice all lively and loud and the sun from outside blinding. “I thought we’d get out and do something this morning.”
And so they pull into Blue Farm, sit at their usual table in the middle.
(Because why wouldn’t they? Everything was fine, everything was normal. They didn’t need to sit at a table with just three chairs, or to the side of the room, or anything like that, things were fine–)
Padma sets their coffees and a plate of pancakes – berries, with mascarpone cheese and maple syrup – down in front of her as her parents sit opposite, smiling a little too widely at her.
(Nothing was normal.)
That is when they start that they were so proud of her grades this year, her starring role in Mousse, how perfect she’d been and that they were sorry that they haven’t said it sooner, that they hadn’t gone for dinner afterwards like they historically had always done after her musicals, and that the night had ended the way that they had. And then, they go on that they were sorry that they’d been so absent, so sidetracked with Marcus and working extra to pay for his rehab, that they hadn’t been there for her much the past two weeks.
Max sits there and just listens, tries to take it all in without feeling overwhelmed. She’d wants to cut them off, to tell them that it’s fine, that obviously Marcus would be at the forefront right now and that she completely understands their reasoning to be absent and not prioritise her. That was common sense, right? She knew that. She got that.
“So, we were just wondering… is there anything you wanted to do this summer? Or did you want to go anyway for a few days, or anything?”
She purses her lips and stares at the glass counter, trying to read the white pen handwriting on the tiny little black cards in front of each cake and pastry, eyes straining.
It was nice, but it was overwhelming, to have someone thinking actively thinking about her needs.
“I’ll have a think and let you know.”
Later, she’s in her room. It’s after dinner where, again, it had been quiet and conversation just didn’t flow the way it used to. She’d needed to get away as soon as she could, suffocating under the silence, the new normal. She was sitting cross-legged on the centre of her bed, phone in hand but not really looking at it, when her father came in, sat on the edge of the mattress.
‘Are you sure that everything is okay?’ He signs. ‘You haven’t really left the house this summer’
She nods, purses her lips.
‘I just miss Marcus.’
She was glad that she didn’t have to say the words out loud to him. Signing them was more intimate, but didn’t risk the break of her voice, or tears welling up in her eyes as she tried to get the words out past the limp in her throat.
Her father gives her a sad, sympathetic smile and nods in acknowledgement of her honesty. He hugs her; that act almost tips her over the edge.
‘We’re going to watch a movie. Want to come downstairs?’
Max shakes her head.
‘I think I’m going to go to bed soon.’
She lays back down when she hears his footsteps descend down the stairs, groans when she realises the clock on her nightstand tells her it was only half seven. The day had felt like thirty hours long already, and she’s tired, but not sleep tired.
Just mind-tired.
She sighs.
She had to at least try.
She hadn’t slept more than six hours in the past two nights.
She turns the lamp off, then on, then off again, and that felt right, but an uncomfortable feeling crossed her which made her sit up, scan her room, in case something else wasn’t.
She did this.
She went through phases of it, and there was always something, but then other times it felt worse. Like, when she was stressed, or something was out of the ordinary was happening.
So, right now was kind of valid for her to be feeling like this. Bad, like this. But still, it was beyond uncomfortable.
She gets up, pads over to the far wall where the desk was. Checks the chargers, that they were flush against the socket rather than bent half in, half out like it sometimes was if she pulled the phone out of the cable if she was in a rush. They were fine.
She checks the rest of her desk. Everything was fine.
It’s all fine.
But it’s not.
In the corner of her eye, through the mirror in the corner of her room,she notices the slightly opened top drawer of her dresser.
Bingo.
Satisfied, she paces over to the dresser and shuts it softly.
But something is wrong.
She stares at it. She purses her lips, like it is a puzzle she’s trying to figure out.
She opens it again, closes it again.
Still, it makes her feel uncomfortable.
It was wrong. Again.
She stares at the drawer.
Opens it, closes it, a further ten times, but it was still wrong.
She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes in sheer frustration.
She knows that it was the drawer that she was trying to fix, the same way that she had known that something had been wrong with Marcus, but she just didn’t know how to fix it.
Could it even be fixed?
She steps back until she was sat on the edge of her bed, still staring at the drawer until she felt nauseated by whatever the unknown was that was wrong with it. She can barely breathe, can barely think about anything besides the drawer…
She chokes down a sob, desperately seeking a way to fix it, knowing that she has to do it alone, couldn’t run to her parents, because it was a fucking drawer, and her parents wouldn’t be able to fix it, and so she’d just look all crazy and unhinged and dramatic over a fucking drawer, and she can’t do that to them.
She can’t be a liability.
So gots up, tries again, because she has to.
She just has to do it alone.
But this time she pauses with her right hand on the handle.
She can’t remember how it happens, but one minute she’s innocently trying to close the drawer properly, and then next, her left hand is hovering in the empty space between the drawer and the dresser.
She stares at it, for a long time, eyes squinting at the puzzle she’s trying to work out.
Then, with as much force as she could muster, Max slams the drawer hard against herself.
-
Marcus broke his arm skateboarding when they were nine.
She remembered the day well. She’d been shopping in Justice with her mom, and they were about to go to Starbucks, when they’d gotten the call from Bridge Anderson’s dad.
She’d been in the fitting rooms when her mom had rushed in, a panic-stricken face, gathered the clothes on the hangers and grabbed her arm.
“Honey, we gotta go.”
“What?”
“It’s your brother,” Ellen said. “He’s hurt himself. We need to go to the hospital.”
“But– my clothes–”
“We can come back for them another day.”
“Mom!”
She stopped where she was, grabbing onto dress she’d been trying on as her mom tried to hand it back to the store clerk, a college student who looked thoroughly uninterested about working here.
“Maxine, please don’t make a scene.”
Her face scrunched, and she balled her fists to wipe at her face.
“This was meant to be our day out,” she cried. “We haven’t been been to Starbucks–“
Ellen sighed, leaned down to her level.
“We can come back and do it another day,” she said, peeling the fabric of the dress away from her fingers. “Marcus needs us more than you need that dress right now. And anyway, there’s a Starbucks at the hospital, if I remember it right!”
Marcus came home that day in a cast. It was black– his choosing. Their dad had bought him a white marker so that people could sign it.
Bridge signed it in big capital letters.
Max signed it even bigger.
“Maxine, you do need to leave space for everyone else to sign it.”
“You told me I needed to take care of Marcus,” she said. “Isn’t that what I’m doing?”
At school, two days later, everyone lined up to sign his plaster cast. Everyone wanted to know what trick he was doing on the skateboard, to which Marcus offered several different answers dependent on who the person asking was.
The week after, it was spring break, and they were supposed to be going down to Myrtle Beach.
The Thursday before the end of school, her mom sat her down quietly on her bed, and announces that they’ve cancelled the trip
“You know how upset you’d be if you broke your arm and weren’t allowed to swim, or climb or do anything. It wouldn’t be fair on him. And you wouldn’t have any friends to play with, either?”
“I’d find friends.”
“I know you would, honey, but then who would Marcus have?”
She went to school that day with her face streaky from tears, her voice hoarse from arguing with her mom.
Max spent spring break trying to find a way to break her arm, too. Flips on the trampoline is her favourite tactic. It wasn’t because she wanted a broken arm, but because she wanted the cast, wanted her friends to sign it, wanted the attention, the world to revolve around what she did, the same way that it was doing for Marcus.
She failed every time.
Maybe it was the innate reflexes stopping her, or maybe she was just afraid of how much it would hurt.
-
That time, it had been an accident.
She hadn’t meant to slam her hand in the drawer, hadn’t meant to wake up the next day with a line over the dorsal hand, pale skin tinged blue and pain at even the slightest pressure.
She hadn’t wanted this.
She’d just wanted everything to shut up.
And it did.
And that’s what scared her.
Because yes, the first time had been an accident. A planned, calculated, relatively conscious accident. But still an accident. Because nobody went about slamming their hands in cupboards on purpose, and she hadn’t really meant for it to happen, so of course it was an accident.
But maybe if it worked, perhaps if it quietened the voices the way that it had, then perhaps it shouldn’t be something she did just accidentally anymore.
-
The second time, it was again, kind, of an accident. At least, the circumstances of her ending up in that position were accidental.
It must have been a week after the first time. Maybe ten days. The summer was going quickly, yet so, so slowly.
For the nth night that week, Max had finds herself sat in the garage.
This time, it’s late. Almost half eleven at night, and her parents are in bed already, had been since maybe nine, and she had been in bed, too, but she hasn’t been able to sleep again.
Sleep really hadn’t been easy, the past couple of months. She spends her evenings in bed thinking, worrying, jackknifing from thought to thought, left feeling exhausting but sleep impossible.
She’s tried everything. Going to bed early, going to bed late. Waking up early. No caffeine, no screens. But still, nothing touched the matter.
To make matters worse, she’s started to have nightmares again. Not that they’d ever really stopped from the first time Marcus’ depression had taken occurred, that first time it had gotten so bad that her mom had come into her room and closed the door and spoken in that sad, serious voice in a way which wasn’t meant to scare her but did so nonetheless. They were in middle school then, but they were now a more regular occurrence.
(Now, she was morning to be the one initiating the conversation – not her mom.)
She’d decided that it was because he was so far away. She doesn’t really know where he was, or how he was, or what he was doing or how he was feeling.
She couldn’t control that.
So, she’d been finding herself wandering down the stairs, out the side door, into the garage – the place, alongside his bedroom, that she’d feel closest to home.
She’d go quietly to avoid waking her parents up, spending most of the occasion with her breath held and cringing at every creak of the floorboards and the way in which the garage light hummed. She knows they don’t really like her being in the garage, knows it is a spot too sensitive right now, particularly for her mom, so she has to.
The previous nights, Max had just sat there, at the desk, flicking through his sketchbooks laid out, fingertips tracing the lines of his drawing, the handwriting scribbled on the pages. Stay out there until she felt like she could breathe a little easier.
That night, Max steps into the garage and felt nothing but urgency to do.
Max scavenges every drawer, every nook, every cranny for bottles, and lines them all up on the floor once she’s found them.
She’d seen the drawer that Georgia had told her to look in, and that had been bad enough, but she’d known that Marcus was (somehow) clever enough to know to keep his stash hidden in separate places.
She’d been right. There were so many. Too many.
And there were other things hidden, too. Weed. Cigarettes. Lighters.
(God, how many lighters did a teenage boy need? How many did any one person need at any one time?)
She grabs it all from the drawer under the desk, and tossed it on the floor alongside the bottles, and that’s when she saw something shiny clatter on the concrete amongst it.
It’s a crafts blade.
Because craft knives are a great idea to have in a depressed teenager’s art studio.
Her clever, clever parents.
Max stares at it for a long time, and bites her lip.
She reaches out to it, and rotates it between her fingers.
She doesn’t want to, but the urge is there. Just like with the drawer. She doesn’t know where the urge is coming from, but knows that now that it was present, it would be a battle to ignore it.
Only, the concept of this blade felt heavier than the drawer. More serious. The drawer was an accident, a one off.
(Right?)
But the drawer hit the spot it needed to. It made everything quiet. The pain, the mark on her hand, the bruises which were now faded to green, would be completely gone in a week.
Was it really that bad, if it paused the pain she felt, quietened the voices, allowed her to continue living normally? If it hindered her ending up a a position her parents would start worrying about her too?
She purses her lips together, and then headed back to the drawer where the found the lighters and the cigarettes, and just like that, she finds more.
Then the door opens.
Max shoves the blades into the pocket of her shorts, spins around quickly.
“Max, it’s the middle of the night, wh–”
Ellen cuts herself off.
She’d been met by the sight of the bottles in the centre of the garage, the pile of lighters next to it, and her daughter, looking small and so young in her pyjama shorts and a vest behind it all.
Her mother glances between her and the bottles on the floor and looks like she’d about to burst into tears at the sight.
Max closes her eyes.
“I was tidying.”
There’s a pause between them, a moment of silence where neither of them spoke. Her mother taking in the sight of the problem she’d been ignoring, and Max hoping she didn’t catch on to the way that she had her hand shoved protectively in her pocket.
“Come on. Go to bed.”
Afterwards, once Ellen chaperones her up through the house and right to her bedroom door, Max sits on her bed for an hour, thinking over the logistics of it.
The logistics are that she shouldn’t do this.
But it’s had been well over a week, and the emails from Zillow are still her biggest fan, and she doesn’t feel quite right inside, and she doesn’t know how else to right the universe out.
She holds the blade to her skin and pulls.
She stares at it, watches as it turns from white to red, notices the world go quiet with it.
She does it again.
And again.
And again.
She doesn’t know why she does it, but it just feels right for her to choose to do it, even though she knows that it’s wrong.
-
The next morning, she’s completely sobered by it.
She remembers putting her Mousse hoody on after – remembers going to the bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror and wondering if she was real, if any of this was real, or whether she was truly just trapped in her head this time.
She remembers feeling numb.
She wakes up and feels the sting of rough cotton against her arms, and she immediately remembers.
She curls in on herself, the shame taking over, and in a way, she thinks that even though it felt better, quieter, now she thinks that maybe she feels worse.
-
Sometimes, she lets herself get angry about it.
The way that her brother just breaks in bright daylight.
The way that his depression gets to exist in front of everybody else.
The way that he can’t just pull through, the same way that she does. The way that he can’t do anything when he’s in one of his episodes, the way his depression makes him dysfunctional.
She hates the way that he was depressed first, that he is depressed louder.
Because she’s sad, too. She’s hurting. She hates herself sometimes. She doesn’t want to be here sometimes, and she doesn’t want to deal with it sometimes, but she does.
She just deals with it.
The deals with it whilst he doesn’t.
The deals with it because he can’t.
And because she can deal with it, why can’t he?
She smiles and tells jokes and she goes to school and parties and theatre and she continues like nothing’s happened, like her mind isn’t on fire.
She organises the pantry and gets A+ on every assignment, she gets the leads, she makes dinner.
She doesn’t do stupid things like drink, or smoke, or destroy classrooms. She doesn’t scream at her parents, hurt people, push her friends away.
She doesn’t need to flount that she’s hurting.
She doesn’t need to show it off.
Because why would she?
The world moves. The world isn’t going to stop because she’s hurting. The obligations keep coming, and there’s things and people she’ll never stop needing to take care of.
She doesn’t get to stop and be pathetic.
She doesn’t get to disappear.
She just copes.
She has to.
She kills herself coping, but she does it.
She copes.
Even if she can’t wear short sleeves anymore, even when she can’t sleep, even when her thoughts don’t stop, she gets through it.
She copes.
She deals.
She pretends it’s not happening.
If she can do that, deal with it that way, then why can’t he?
-
July 2nd, Norah catches her at Blue Farm.
She’d gone in with her mom. They were off to visit Marcus. Or, at least, her parents were visiting Marcus – she wasn’t sure whether she was ready for that, or even whether she’d be welcomed by him. They’d dropped in for takeout coffees for the journey, and to grab him a bag of Joe’s chocolate chip shortbreads.
(That had been her idea to get him those. They’d been his first addiction, back when they were young.)
It was the warmest day of the year so far – 98°F, not the faintest breeze and the sun blazing down on them. She’d opted for white shorts and that classic Ralph Lauren sweater, the navy one with the US flag knitted on the front. Hair tied back in a high pony. It was giving old money Nantucket housewife; hot and classy.
And, God, she was so hot, but maybe not in the definition she’d been going for. Accordingly, summer wasn’t a very convenient time of year to experiment with self-harming.
Genuinely, Norah seems pleased to see her. She all but runs over, hugs her the moment she’d spots her at the counter. Max strays away from her mother, following Norah back towards the table she’d been sat at.
“Did you get my text?”
Max shrugs.
“I haven’t really been on my phone.”
“Okay…”
The way she says it made it sound like a long word, rather than just two syllables.
Max could tell that Norah didn’t know whether to believe her, but either way, she didn’t push, and Max didn’t know whether she was grateful or upset about that matter.
“Well,” Norah continues, “Brodie’s having a 4th July party. On the 4th July. Like, duh – obviously. It’s not really a big deal, it’s just a few of us, but you’re welcome to come.”
Vaguely, Max is aware that Ginny and Abby were away this summer, and that Norah is probably bored out of her mind and just dying for someone to hang with besides Jordan and the boys, maybe Samantha, dependent if the thing with Press which had started at the back and of the semester had somehow lasted. She pities Norah slightly for that reason.
(She wonders how Samantha’s ended up with a better social life than her.)
She still loves her, still wants to be her friend, but honestly she’s terrified for after, when Abby and Ginny get back, because Norah is so anti-conflict that she’ll just go right ahead and side with whatever opinion is the majority view on that particular day.
She doesn’t know if she can risk that heartbreak all over again.
“You don’t need to decide now–”
She snaps her head up.
“No, it’s not that.” She says it quickly. “I want to come, I really do, Norah, thank you. It’s just– I don’t know if my parents have anything planned already. And also, I don’t know if they’re going to be weird about, you know, how there’s going to be drinking and stuff, after everything with Marcus…”
“How is your brother?”
“Oh, he’s– he’s okay, I think, I–”
But the words catch in her throat, because she didn’t really know and can only presume the worst – default response, her panicking about the outcome and all – and because suddenly, she doesn’t know whether the girl she used to tell everything to is still that same girl these days.
She glances to the counter, looking for an escape, but her mom is chatting to Bev still, even with the bag of shortbread in her hand and the coffees in a take out cup on the counter.
So she turns back to Norah, who now had a wad of napkins in her hand and was holding them out between them in case Max was about to start crying.
(Was she?)
“You can talk to me, if you need a friend?”
Max nods, smiles tightly, and lets Norah hug her again, which makes her wonder whether she actually was going to start crying this time.
“Maybe you should see if Norah wants to hang out around the house some time,” her mother offers as they sit in the car later, merging onto Mass Pike. “You haven’t seen anybody all summer. You could do next week?”
“Oh, no, she’s busy. She said she was seeing her aunt. And then she’s going away. And she’s babysitting a lot, too. For Cynthia.”
“Oh, yes, Bev said that they were going to Italy.”
Max had forgotten that her mother had been speaking to Bev simultaneously, but she’s glad that the lies match up, as awful as she feels staring at them. She stared out of the window, watched as the trees formed green blurs around her, clenching her jaw and unclenching as they come and go.
“You should still arrange something,” Ellen offers. “You should never be too busy for friends. Even Georgia managed to make time to hang with me when she was going through a murder trial– even when she was in jail!”
Max hums in contemplation, but offers nothing else, plugging in her headphones and entertaining herself the remainder of the drive listening to her break up playlist she’d made about Sophie, and finding ways to associate the songs with MANG instead.
-
Later that night, lying in bed, she decides to message Ginny.
She knows that she’s away, knows that she may not even receive it. But, despite everything, she knows that Ginny at least still cares about and loves Marcus, and she loves Ginny too much to let the thought pass.
She also figures that she’s won the game, succeeded at her little project, because between her and the rest of them, Norah was the one who reached out first – Max somehow managed to stick to solitude for however long that too.
She opens her messages.
‘hey it’s max’
(Well, duh.)
‘just an update, marcus still in rehab, but parents say he’s doing better! they say he misses you. i miss you too. hope you’re having a great time. loves of love x’
She sends the message and spends a solid thirty minutes contemplating the fact that she just told Ginny she missed her.
She doesn’t wait for a reply, doesn’t expect one. Just rolls over, places her phone on the nightstand and tries and fails to fall asleep.
-
The nightmare comes like she jinxed it, as if merely speaking about Marcus getting better instantly made it impossible for him to.
It’s not the first time she’s dreamt about him in the context of death, and she knows it probably won’t be the last, and something in the back of her mind tells her that it’s probably normal for her to dream about him like this at the moment, and that everything gets worse before it gets better.
Regardless, the dream hits like a freight train.
She wakes up suddenly, sits up with a gasp and struggles to slow her breathing.
She scans the room, looking for maybe sometimes to blame – something out of place, something she forgot about, maybe she left her straighteners on or her the scissors in the wrong one pot. She can’t find anything, and then the room goes blurry, and it takes a moment before she realises that she’s crying.
She shuffles back against the headboard, wiped her face and presses her sleeves to her mouth to muffle herself as she starts to break.
The worst part about all of this is that it’s real. It isn’t one of those impossible nightmares about monsters, the irrational ones like sharks and wildcats in suburban Massachusetts.
She knows that his depression is real. Hence, she knows that the concept of her brother dying as a result of it is a reality she should be scared of.
She knows he could ride his bike into a ditch or a streetlight, either drunk or just being plain stupid, and that would be it.
She knows that he could just wake up and kill himself one day, because that’s what depression does – you can be fine, with things to enjoy and look forward to, and then ten minutes later, you can be dead as a result of your own conscious and willing decisions.
She knows that there’s nothing she can do about it, despite how she’s been trying to fix things, help him, enable him the help he needed even when he refused help, threatened her against it.
Now, his miles away in some strange place, and it’s as a result of hers, and she doesn’t know if he’s alive or dead or wishing he was, whether he’s eating, whether he’s depressed or fine, she doesn’t know anything.
Max gets up, tiptoes down the hall to his bedroom, and curls up on his bed, nose pressed into the pillow, dampening with her tears, breathing in his scent and pretending he’s right there where she can protect him from all that she’s scared of.
-
‘Did you sleep in Marcus’ room last night?’
It’s her dad that approaches her. She’s on the couch, laptop on her knee, and she’s playing The Sims 4. She’d become fixated on it since the beginning of summer, playing with other people’s lives to cope with the lack of control in her own. She’d managed to get Bella Goth to cheat on her husband and sleep with Eliza Pancakes, and then she’d gotten Bella Goth to cheat on Eliza at their own wedding with a new, much hotter and more sophisticated sim that she’d made.
(She then locked Eliza Pancakes in a burning room.)
She was building a new house now, and she had been deliberating which window to use in her house for the past ten minutes.
She looks up to her father standing in the doorway to the living room, staring at her. She slouches down in her space, nods, shame rushing over her.
‘Why?’
She finds that she doesn’t know the answer she’s looking for. She can’t find a way to say it without her parents worrying about her. So she just shrugs, bites her bottom lip.
Clint sits down next to her, hand on her knee, offers a sad, concerned smile.
‘Are you sure that there’s nothing you wanted to do this summer? No musicals you want to see?’
She knows that her parents want to fix things, that they so desperately want for her to feel like she’s being seen too. At least, they want to feel that they’re doing enough for her. She knows that she should be grateful for all the offers, everything they’re trying, but she’s just finding them exhausting now.
She doesn’t want to need help, but she’s scared that at one point soon, she’s going to give it to it.
The takes a deep breath.
“I’m fine, dad.”
She says it out loud as well as signing it, like if she says it enough, the heaviness in her chest that she’s getting every time she lies will fade to nothing.
-
She ends up going to the party.
More so, it slips into conversation, Ellen catches on, and spends the next day and a half all but forcing her to go.
She’s in her bedroom when it happens, Mousse hoody and shorts, sat on her bed again, playing Sims again, and her mom is hanging laundry in her closest and muttering about the mess of her floor.
“It’s Brodie’s,” she says. “There’s going to be alcohol.”
“Well, I trust you to be sensible.”
Max leans back, frustrated that the excuses aren’t winning this time.
“Well, maybe you shouldn’t,” she mutters, which makes Ellen turn around.
“Maxine, what is that is supposed to mean?”
She stares at the ceiling.
She doesn’t know if it’s a cumulation of the fact that she feels dreadful right now both physically and mentally, or more to do with the dozen red lines hide under the sleeve of her hoody, or whether she just wants another reason to not speak to anyone.
Maybe it is just truly the fact that she’s scared.
The thing is, she knows she feels so much of what Marcus does, and she’s become scared to step too far in the wrong direction and fall down another rabbit hole.
She knows alcoholism runs in families, just like depression does.
She’s already lost control once, she thinks, as she tugs the cuff of her sleeve tighter into her hand.
She shakes her head, decides that she doesn’t want to elaborate.
“I just don’t really fancy being around any drunk people right now, mom.”
Ellen sighs, and Max hears metal twang together as she places a hanger over the rail in the wardrobe. She walks over to the bed and sits on the edge beside her, places a hand over Max’s leg and gives it a gentle squeeze.
“Honey, you can’t at home and avoid people for the rest of high school because you don’t want to be around people getting drunk.”
“It’s not that, it’s–”
“I got drunk in high school. I worked out pretty fine. And you– you’re sensible. You know your limit. You make good, mature decisions, just like when you told us about Marcus, and just like you told us this party you are going to is going to have alcohol. Your father and I trust you to be responsible. You need to live a little, too.”
She wants to be compliant, doesn’t want her parents to give her any more questioning glances as to why she doesn’t want to get out the house anymore, so she does her hair and make up and scours her room for a nice top which she knows won’t look too ridiculous in this heatwave.
(Her mom was right. Her room is a mess at the moment. But putting clothes away is just exhausting, and she can’t do the job half-hearted, so she procrastinates it to an unbeknownst time in the future.)
She’s more or less dropped off at Brodie’s front door that night without a say in the matter. Her father drives off before she has a chance to run back to the car and change her mind.
She’s been to Brodie’s more times than she can care to acknowledge, knows the blueprint of his house like ht back of her hand, but this time, she hovers on the porch with her fingers frozen over the door handle she knows won’t be locked.
Her hands shake.
She hasn’t seen anyone since Brodie’s party on the last day of school, and she knows how that last social event ended.
The spit in the back of her throat tastes sour. She swallows hard.
She stares back to the street. She could turn and walk home. It would only take…
Well. She doesn’t know, but it’s not like Wellsbury is sprawling exactly.
No, don’t be ridiculous, Max, it’s a damn party.
She braces herself, pushes open the front door, and this time she can see people in the kitchen rather than hear the music from downstairs, so she makes her way through the house, heading straight forwards from the foyer.
“You made it!”
Norah’s skipping barefoot across the grass and at her side instantly, grabbing her hand. She’s in a bikini and shorts, and that’s when another cold dread runs through the Max.
She’d completely forgotten that Brodie had a pool.
(Did Norah mention the pool? Did she have to?)
Max allows herself to be enveloped in Norah’s hug, then dragged further out into the garden, to the patio across the lawn where the brick alcove of the pizza oven was tonight lined with various bottles of alcohol and soft drinks.
She watches as Norah pours her a drink of something whilst rabbiting on about something else, and then she goes quiet, and it takes her a moment to realise, but when she looks back to Norah, the other girl’s face is crestfallen.
“Oh, what’s wrong?”
Max doesn’t clock that she’s crying until Norah’s putting the drink down on the brick, reaching out to brush her cheeks.
She’d swats her hands away and drags her own sleeve over her eyes.
“Nothing.” Her voice is shaking. She takes a deep breath, tries to steady herself. “I just– I don’t really want to drink that much tonight. After… everything.”
Norah frowns.
“I get that.” She says it in a voice which suggests that actually, she doesn’t get it, really doesn’t get it, but will try to understand for her sake. “What about just one?”
She purses her lips, contemplates, shakes her head.
“Maybe later.”
“Okay, so what do you want?” Norah asks. “Coke? Water?”
(Is her tone off? Did she give a wrong answer?)
“A coke would be good.” She pulls out her phone, checks herself in her front camera. “Thank you.”
“I’m glad you came,” she says, walking back towards the pool. “I didn’t know if you would. It must be hard without Marcus. Are your parents weird about you drinking now? Anyway, it’s good to have a girl here besides Samantha.”
Max still personally wishes she was at home, is still very much contemplating an Irish exit.
In retrospect, it isn’t too awful to begin with.
She doesn’t hate it, doesn’t spend the entire time feeling overwhelmed and wishing she was at home – only the majority of it.
The thing is, she’s finding the simple, unimportant conversations harder than anybody should for someone who’s known these people and hung out with them most weekdays for most of their life. Her attention span isn’t all there, and she’s dipping in and out, missing whole segments and having to play catch up, hoping nobody asks her a question because she knows that people around her are speaking, but it all just sounds so foreign.
She gets up abruptly and heads back over to the patio.
She decides to drink, in case it makes it easier. It isn’t fun being the only one sober, even if she enjoys the element of control she gets out of it. Pours herself a drink, heads back to the pool, sits back down next to Norah.
And then it gets later, and everyone – her included now – has had a few, and she knows that she’s drunk, but the way that she’s out of it is more than her being just the alcohol.
The music is too loud, and there’s too much happening, Samantha is really drunk, the other side of the pool, and one of the bulbs on the string lights has gone, and she can’t stop staring at it.
Norah notices, nudges her.
“You good?”
“I–”
She hesitates, tries to swallow but her mouth is so dry.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t think I’m okay.” She feels suddenly nauseous, her chest tight, her voice small, and she thinks she’s going to cry but she doesn’t want to. “I– I think I need to go home.”
Norah leans closer to examine her face, and that’s when it all just happens.
She’s acutely aware of Samantha getting wasted, has been observing her all night. She knows it’s because Samantha thinks alcohol is a one-way ticket to being cool and fitting in with guys like Press and Brodie, and she’s learned that she either doesn’t know her limit or is constantly trying too hard to push it.
She gets up, almost stumbles into the pool, and Brodie catches her, pulls her to her feet.
Press laughs, the noise grating on her.
“Slow the fuck down, girl. If I take you home and your parents answer the door and see you in this state, they’ll put me in hell and send you where Boy Baker went.”
The words hit her like a freight train.
Everyone else hears them, too.
Excluding Press’ obnoxious cackling, which persists through, the yard goes completely silent.
“Oh, fu–”
She stands, her legs trembling, and heads indoors, straight up to the upstairs bathroom, locks the door behind her.
She feels dizzy, and she doesn’t know if it’s the alcohol, but also she knows what a panic attack is, she’s had them before, and her lungs burn like she’s having one now.
She slides down the wall, ends up crouched near the toilet just in case, gasping sobs cutting up every attempt at a breath, drunk, thoughts too loud yet clouded over and indecipherable.
She can hear Norah calling her on the other side of the door, but she can’t reply, can’t move to unlock the door.
Outside of her head, in the real world, it goes quiet.
She’s alone.
She’s gotten used to the quiet. In a way, it’s comfortable, familiar, even though she still craves everyone.
In the end, Brodie’s eldest sister, a college-aged girl with mousey brown that she doesn’t really know, is knocking on the bathroom door. She can hear voices outside, one of them is Norah, one is Brodie.
“Guys, not cool. You don’t fucking joke about stuff like this.”
“It wasn’t us, it was–”
“–let me guess, Press? Again?”
Silence again.
“You need to quit things with him, and then fucking apologise to her.” The girl sounds angry. “Also, I’m telling Mom he’s not allowed round anymore. I don’t like the way he speaks to girls.”
“Oh, Jesus, you’re so fucking dramatic–”
The door clicks unlocked, and Norah walks in, reaches for her hand, holds her tight. Then, Brodie’s sister, drives her home, walks her to the front door. Ellen answers, and she tells her mom what’s happened.
At this point, Max is comatose. She walks between them, goes straight upstairs and immediately falls asleep in the same clothes she went to the party in.
-
Apparently sleeps in Marcus’ bed again that night.
When she wakes up, she feels dizzy and disoriented and ashamed and hungover as heck, then she notices the bed sheets are navy and the window is to her right instead of on her left, and, well, supposedly there is she.
Her mom is there in the doorway, holding the laundry basket, staring at her with this far away look, like she doesn’t even recognise her.
She takes the glass of water which has been placed on the nightstand besides her, takes small sips.
“I’m sorry.”
Her voice is croaky, and she feels rough, and she’s almost crying again because she doesn’t remember coming in here, can’t even really piece together that much of the previous night.
Ellen just shakes her head.
“It’s fine, Max.”
But she knows that it’s not fine, she’s she’s not fine, and now her her mom is going to be thinking the same way that she is, questioning whether she is okay, in the same way that she knows she’s probably not going to any more parties this summer.
Ellen leaves, pull the door so it’s just slightly ajar, and Max knows she’s screwed up, not just by getting drunk last night, but by sleeping in Marcus’ room and indicating to everyone that yes, she is actually affected by all of this.
She really has to level up in this game of pretending everything’s okay.
-
The day after that, Norah comes round briefly with her shoes and her phone (she doesn’t realise she had left either) and acts as if nothing ever happened.
She follows suit.
Pretending nothing ever happened.
As do her parents, just like they generally do with things– like, if they ignore it, the problem will go away.
It’s not that her parents don’t want to acknowledge the problem and fix things, she thinks. They do. They so obviously do. They just don’t know how to deal with her and Marcus. The parenting guides didn’t have a page for whatever this stage was. It’s like they’re waiting for an impossible solution to appear in front of their eyes, waiting for someone to tell them the right thing to do in case they guess and get it wrong and make things worse if they try any other way. Like they’re hoping the problem will fix itself so they don’t need to figure it out. The impossible solution and magic fix obviously never come, and they end up in the place they are at now.
She gets it. She really does. It infuriates her, but she gets it. She understands the why.
Max on the other hand?
She knows there’s not going to be a magic fix to all of this. So she acknowledges the problems, and lets them eat away at her instead, silently, until there’s nothing left.
She tries impossibly hard to be fine for the rest of the summer, and in the end realises that it’s just easier pretending to be. She’s pretended before, spent a lot of her life pretending for the sake of others. In theory, it should come as second nature to her.
But it just doesn’t.
She’s exhausted from trying, pretending, she’s so tired of being scared all the time that she’s going to mess up or do something wrong but she has to do it.
Everything has to be fine.
It has to be perfect.
She has to be perfect.
She can’t be anything but.