Chapter Text
Max has never been a very good liar. Chloe was always the one who excelled at weaving convincing fibs to tell their parents, and Max was always the one who had to keep her lips sealed tightly lest she give the whole game away.
So she surprises even herself when her parents’ car starts down Cedar Avenue and she hears herself blurt out, “Wait, stop! We need to stop at Chloe’s house!”
“Max,” her dad starts tiredly, but she cuts him off.
“No, really! I… I forgot something there! Something important!”
“I’m sure Chloe can mail it to you when we get to Seattle,” her mother assures her.
“Sh-she can’t! It’s… too fragile to mail! Please ?” she begs.
“You couldn’t have brought this up at the funeral?” her dad grumbles even as he slows the car and pulls up in front of Chloe’s house.
“I forgot,” Max says. “I’m sorry. I’ll be really quick, I promise.”
She’s out the car door before the car has even come to a full stop, tuning out her mother’s alarmed shrieking.
The house looks so different already. The cheerful blue paint Chloe’s dad had started painting it, the blue she and Chloe had helped him pick out, feels like a mockery. She wonders when it’ll ever be finished. Somehow she can’t quite picture Joyce putting on coveralls and finishing the job. Chloe would probably do it herself, if she knew how. The house looks abandoned. Old paint stripped off, new paint covering only a small part of it. Windows dark and empty. Mr. Price’s car missing from the driveway, never to return.
Max finds the house key in its usual place under the welcome mat. Chloe’s usually the one to retrieve it. She’s never unlocked the door by herself before, never been in Chloe’s house without her.
It’s quiet. Max doesn’t dare to put the lights on, but the daylight coming in through the windows is plenty to navigate by. She tiptoes through the house like she’s expecting to be caught, flinching at every creaking floorboard though she knows there’s no one home to hear it.
She’s not sure why she’s here. She only knows that she has to be. She can’t leave without saying goodbye.
She goes up to Chloe’s room, her feet carrying her there automatically. The mess is even worse than usual. Dark clothes are piled on the floor. There’s a black dress laid out on her bed, untouched. Max swallows the lump in her throat. “I’m sorry,” she says to no one, tears burning at her eyes.
The honk of her dad’s car horn snaps her out of her dazed reverie. She needs to hurry up and do… whatever it was she came here for. She wants to touch everything in turn, say farewell to every part of her old life. She wants to curl up in Chloe’s bed and go to sleep, and maybe when she wakes it will all have been a dream and Chloe’s dad will be downstairs making pancakes with extra maple syrup.
Max trips over something hard and nearly spills right onto the floor. She stumble-steps to safety and looks down at the offending object. A tape recorder. The same tape recorder they used just three short days ago, the one that led them on one more pirate adventure… One last pirate adventure. She kneels before it and pops out the tape. A final message from Bloody Bill. Even thinking about it makes her want to scream.
Chloe doesn’t deserve this. Her dad didn’t deserve this. None of them did. What is life going to be like for Chloe now? For Chloe’s mom? For Max?
There’s a pile of cassette tapes on Chloe’s blue desk, the one they all painted together. Max finds a blank tape and pops it into the recorder. She didn’t say much that day, not after Chloe’s mom came home with the terrible news. What was there to say? How could words fix anything? She hasn’t said much to Chloe since then, either. And now… now she’s moving to Seattle. Will words come any easier then?
So Max presses record and she says what she can. It isn’t everything she wants to say. It isn’t everything she feels. But words have always been hard for her. She’s good with photographs, not words. Chloe’s the one who’s good at making words do what she wants them to. And she’s never seemed to mind Max’s silence. Not before, anyway.
Max does her best, and she hopes that it’ll be enough even as she knows that it can’t possibly be. She leaves a sticky note on the recorder, one more insufficient apology before she gets ready to walk out of Chloe’s life right when it’s falling apart around her.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It was supposed to be Max and Chloe forever. The letters they left each other in the time capsule proved that. They were supposed to grow up together and be best friends forever and buy a house and paint everything gold.
And Chloe’s dad wasn’t supposed to… to die.
Max stumbles again, blind with tears, as her dad honks the horn twice more, and this time she does fall to the floor. As she reaches to pick herself up, her hands find cardboard. Chloe never did finish cleaning her room. Max almost laughs when she feels how empty Chloe’s give-away box is. Chloe’s never been good at throwing things away. Max’s hands close around fabric, thick and pilled with age. Chloe’s hoodie.
Max buries her face in it and lets the familiar fabric drink away her tears. There’s no way Chloe’s really getting rid of this, is there? Of all the things for her to give away, this doesn’t make sense. It’s her favorite . Who cares what her new, stuffy classmates think? Who cares that it’s old and full of holes? Chloe likes old things. She likes things with history and memories.
Max hugs the hoodie close. She needs to bring something out to the car with her, she reasons. And if Chloe is really going to give away something so special to her… Well, she might as well give it to someone who’ll care about it just as much as she used to herself. Right?
Max’s dad leans on the horn, and Max scrambles to her feet. Her parents exchange strange glances when she dives back into the backseat of the car, red-faced and teary-eyed and apologizing profusely.
“ That’s what you forgot?” her mom asks skeptically.
“Chloe promised it to me,” Max lies, and it’s so easy to lie today. It doesn’t feel like lying at all. “She doesn’t want it anymore. It’s getting too small for her, but it’s still big enough for me. She said I could have it.”
“Doesn’t look too fragile to mail to me,” her dad mutters under his breath, but he doesn’t say anything else as he throws the car back into drive and pulls away from the curb.
Max tugs the hoodie on, struggling to maneuver it around her seatbelt. It still smells, faintly, of Chloe. She watches out the window, craning her neck until she can’t see Chloe’s house anymore. Her dad turns on the radio and starts humming along to some rock song from the 90s. Max pulls up the hood on her sweatshirt and settles into her seat, closing her eyes.
Today is the worst day of Chloe’s life.
Three days ago, she had thought that that was the worst day of her life. Surely, life couldn’t get any worse than her dad up and dying out of nowhere. But then there was two days ago, when she woke up and her dad was already dead . There was no pancake breakfast with her dad and her best friend, no corny jokes, no pirate treasure hunts. Nothing but a huge hole in her life where her dad used to be, and her mom staying shut up in her room all day with the door closed, the muffled sounds of crying and wailing barely muffled by the wood. Chloe ate cereal for every meal two days ago; she didn’t have the heart to disturb her mom for something as meaningless as food. So that, then, must have been the worst day of her life.
Then there was yesterday. She woke up, and her dad was dead. Her mom spent half the day crying in her room again and the other half on the phone making arrangements in a flat voice. If she saw Chloe, she didn’t seem to notice. The numbness that had kept Chloe breathing steadily through the day before broke as she was eating her cereal lunch, hot tears running down her face and salting her milk. She spent the rest of the day crying and sobbing in her room and didn’t bother with dinner until she cried herself out around two in the morning and stumbled downstairs to drink orange juice straight from the carton. It hit her empty stomach like pure acid and she threw it back up into the sink. Then she had to wash the dishes so her mom wouldn’t have to scrape her dried vomit off them in the morning, assuming her mom even noticed. So that was the worst day of her life.
And now there’s today. She woke up and her dad was still dead. The little sleep she had managed after puking in the sink was filled with dreams about him, and every time she woke up she had to remember again that he was dead. Today her mom finally noticed she existed again, which would have been a plus except that all her mom wanted was to make sure she showered and dressed nicely for her dad’s funeral.
Chloe showered, and it helped her feel a little less like someone who’d been sick and hadn’t slept or eaten anything other than juice and cereal since her dad died three days ago. But then she got back to her room and her mom had brought out a dress for her to wear. So she and her mom got into a screaming match. Dad wouldn’t care if she wore a dress to his funeral. If her mom had been the one to die, Dad wouldn’t have made her wear a dress to her funeral.
Her mom had gone white at that and left Chloe’s room without another word. Her silence was worse than her screaming. Chloe put on the nice slacks and blazer Dad had bought her for her junior high graduation. She felt a little guilty for screaming at her mom, so she wore the shoes her mom had picked out for her. They pinched her toes.
The funeral was horrible, of course. Strangers and family members who might as well have been strangers poked and prodded her and hugged her without asking and pinched her cheeks and made sad eyes at her, and she hated all of them. Her dad was dead in a box. She went and kneeled with her mom at his open casket at the reception, and it was the worst thing she’d ever seen. He didn’t look like her dad at all. He wasn’t smiling or joking or breathing. He might as well have been a wax sculpture. She knew she was supposed to cry. Her mom was crying. Everyone was dabbing at their eyes. But that couldn’t be her dad in that box. He didn’t look anything like her dad. So she couldn’t cry. And then she felt bad for not crying. What kind of a sick freak doesn’t cry when she sees her dad’s dead body?
Max cried when she went to the box with her parents. She cried so hard Chloe thought she might pass out. He wasn’t even Max’s dad. Why couldn’t Chloe cry?
The numbness was back, and it was even worse than the day before, because the day before nobody had been around to notice that she wasn’t crying like a good daughter should. She listened to people tell stories about someone who might have been her dad. She listened to other people cry. She listened to some religious guy who probably never even met her dad tell stories about Jesus or whatever, like any of that mattered. Like her dad would even have cared.
And then it was over. Her dad’s body was lowered into a hole in the earth, and everybody left. Max left. Max didn’t even say goodbye.
And so today is the worst day of Chloe’s life. She wonders if tomorrow, somehow, will be even worse. Maybe that’s all she has to look forward to for the rest of her life: each day somehow worse than the day before, descending down and down endlessly into a depthless well of awfulness.
She should probably be scared by how little the idea moves her.
She trudges up the stairs in a fog. Back to her room. Back to being alone. Maybe she’ll change into pajamas before she curls back up in her bed for the rest of her life. Maybe she won’t bother.
She almost trips over something on the floor, something hard and unexpected. Her old tape recorder. There’s a post-it note stuck to it with two words in handwriting she would recognize anywhere: “I’m sorry.”
Chloe listens to the tape. She must have heard Max’s voice at some point since her dad died. They cried together when they found out; there must have been talking then. Or at the funeral. They had seen each other, briefly. Had they spoken? Had Max said a word? Had she?
Max’s voice is a chisel breaking through the concrete in her lungs. Everything releases in a torrent of tears.
She curls her body around the tape recorder like that will bring her closer to Max. Closer to her dad. And she cries.