Chapter Text
THREE YEARS LATER
It is sometimes a beautiful city.
Easy to forget when she’s in the depths of it– the smog, the swathes of anti-homeless spikes, the samey bourgeois restaurants with their suffocating prices, the ever-busy tech workers teeming in the city center– but true nonetheless. There will be a moment when the streetcar rises over the hills and she will see the whole of the city laid out beneath her: the declining sun pooling fire across the Willamette, the play of traffic over St. John’s and Tilikum Crossing, the city giving way to thickets of red cedar and pine, and above all of these things the silhouette of Mount Hood, fading into distant blue, so that its peak seems to emerge out of the air and hang suspended in vacant space. This only happens when she is at her most angry and she is not sure if it’s consolation or mockery or what. Sure, kid, says the city. You want to leave this?
Not ‘leave’, okay. This is something she thinks about rarely and only to immediately dismiss. There is a lot going for her here and she would be a fool to abandon it and it isn’t her fault that eighty percent of what’s going for her is Max. Max, ensconced at Reed, who tromps back from campus in the evening to put her head on her lap and tell her about her day; Max, who has under Chloe’s eye and yet somehow beyond her notice gone from the shy, withdrawing boy she bound herself to protect to a serious, driven young woman, still quiet, still skittish, but with a seriousness now that makes people sit up and take notice, a drive she would never had believed was in Max if she hadn’t been witness to it herself.
It’s just.
You don’t live, as a teenager, as if you will see your eighteenth birthday. You steal your parent’s liquor, you stumble through the darkness, you hang out in scrapyards with junkies and dropouts. You become a great hand with knives and lighters. You realize you are desirable; you have risky sex with strangers. You are a death-enthusiast and several times you approach it. People you know. Kids you grew up with, kids you smoked with. Two ODs, one car accident. And you try, even afterwards, the rope, the pills, but you cough them up and the clotheshanger breaks and you are humiliated and furious and alive.
And then you are nineteen, twenty, twenty-two, and you are alive.
It has never stopped feeling like some accident of cosmic bureaucracy. Every morning she wakes up and finds herself with dull surprise Chloe Price still, a day older, in the shitty two-bedroom she shares with her Best Friend Forever. In the ruddy light of morning she will get up, fix herself a pot of coffee strong enough to burst the heart of a small-to-medium-sized dog, and sit stuporous at the kitchen table, waiting for the violent stab of caffeine to bring her to clear-eyed, twitchy alertness. She will shower, and afterwards stand for a while in the nude before the mirror, considering herself: the new padding of fat around her thighs and ribcage, the slight definition in her abs and biceps (of which she is inordinately proud), the brown roots showing through her dyed green hair. Her body’s testimony to time.
Max’s classes begin late, and though much about her has changed she retains a tendency to sleep to the maximum extent her schedule will permit, and as a result they rarely see each other before the evening. Sometimes she will pry the door open to Max’s room just a sliver– she knows, she knows this is a violation, and yet she can’t stop herself– and watch her sleep: her hair diffused into a brown halo on her pillow, errant strands disturbed by the steady rhythm of her breathing, the transient expressions that move across her face like the shadows of clouds over the earth in correspondence with some unknown dream.
She didn’t expect to get this far, is all.
She talks about this at the garage with Esmé: thirty-eight with a smoker’s cough, an estrogen prescription, and tattoos from her chin to her ankle.
“The listlessness,” she says. “I worry about her not needing me.”
“One day she won’t,” says Esmé. “And if you care about her, kid, you’ll want that for her.”
“I know that,” she says. “I just don’t know who I am, outside of this.”
“That’s on you to figure out,” says Esmé, and sticks a hand out from under the truck she’s working on. “Kid, socket wrench.”
She booked two sessions with a therapist once. She sat in a plush chair and fidgeted with a set of magnetic buckyballs and talked a lot about anger. She felt– frankly, she felt ridiculous afterwards, the conceit of it all, as if there was some particular importance to her problems. She prides herself on being able to Deal With Her Shit, even in the days when Dealing With Her Shit primarily meant getting fucked up and toying around with abject self-destruction. They found out later that there was some discrepancy with her insurance, and she spent the better part of three days pacing around their apartment on a series of phone calls with various equally-unhelpful operators, until finally she managed through a tremendous amount of willpower and about a dozen instances of stepping away in order to avoid tearing whichever hapless call center worker she was currently dealing with a new asshole to secure a reimbursement for the sessions. She never went again, and hasn’t since. If she’s being honest, the insurance thing just gave her an excuse.
The one useful piece of advice the therapist gave her is that physical activity might be a productive conduit for her anger, and as a result she took up the drums. She plays now for a hardcore band called Axaxaxas Mlö, fronted by a sort-of-sweet, sort-of-clueless boy named Caleb who plays jerky, angular guitar riffs while growl-singing weird surrealist poetry about labyrinths and tigers.
He says, after their first practice: “Chloe, is there something wrong?”
“No,” she says. “I dig it, it’s good. It’s just.”
“Just?”
“It’s kinda faggy, right?”
Sabine, bassist, says: “I also feel this.”
“What is…” His brow furrows, baffled. “I don’t understand what about the song is, uh. The word you said.”
“It totally is,” says Neil, then: “I’m sorry, man, it’s the truth!”
It is solid enough, as these things go. She does not detect incipient superstardom waiting to leap upon them but neither are they all on coke and at each other’s throats (yet) so it is not the worst. They are on track to release a pretty decent seven-inch, and this is satisfying. She plays Portland bars and the tiny little satellite towns that ring its edges (at least the less Naziish ones) and she gets blasted on free drink tickets thereafter and makes out with punk girls and, in one regrettable incident, a punk boy she figured for a butch.
(“You’re not…”
“No.”
“Pronouns…?”
“He?”
“Fuck.”)
She comes home sometimes late stinking of dull sweat and already feeling the looming shadow of the hangover which will harry her through the next days’ shift, and there will be that post-show decline when all the adrenaline of the gig has left her system and that spiteful little serpent that’s coiled around her brainstem ever since Dad died is whispering gutter-trash, nobody, this is all you’ll ever be, and it’ll be all she can do to try not to believe it. And there will be Max, lovely, impossible Max, who has stayed up for her until crack of fuck in the morning despite the fact that Chloe knows she’s got an 8:30 tomorrow, who has put the kettle on and laid out two bags of camomile tea in two mugs next to a giant bottle of Pedialyte. Ridiculous, this girl.
She says once, shielding her eyes from the morning sun while Max fries eggs and kimchi on the stove:
“I’m sorry.”
Max hums while she cooks– today it’s something serene and kind of naïve from one of those sadgirl indie bands she likes– and she stops when Chloe speaks. She wishes she hadn’t spoken. She has been training and her voice now is so soft and lovely (not that it was exactly the portrait of manliness beforehand, but that’s neither here nor there), and more importantly she can recall the way she was before: stiff and silent and perpetually terrified. She wants to say something like: it’s been beautiful watching you become yourself, but this is weird, so she does not.
Max says: “Sorry for what?”
“Last night.” (Her, home at 2, still tasting three screwdrivers and a girl whose name was Carly or Kylie or something and employed a frankly excessive amount of tongue.) “I kept you awake. And you have class, and I shouldn’t have–”
“Chloe,” she says, not ungently. “Stop.” She steps behind her and spatulas a folded egg into her bowl. Max smells different now. It’s not an overt change, but when you’ve been living around someone for most of your life you start to become accustomed to these sorts of details. It is probably indicative of something abnormal about her that she is paying this much attention to the way her best friend smells.
Max deposits her own egg into her bowl and begins to scrub the pan in the sink– her level of fastidiousness is equal in exact proportion to the disorganization that characterizes Chloe’s life. “First off, you didn’t ask me to do that. And I didn’t do it because I had to, or I felt obligated to. I did it because I wanted to see you when you came home. I’m a big girl, ok? I know my class schedule too. I made that choice of my own free will, and I don’t regret it.”
An apology almost passes her lips out of sheer reflex. She remembers, sometimes, the way it was with Rachel: the evasions, the half-truths, the fumbling in bathrooms and mutually traumatic adolescent sex. They had been terrible for each other for the exact same reasons that made them inseparable. She’s old enough now to no longer think of herself as a perfect victim: poor baby butch heartbroken by the gorgeous popular girl. She was never blameless. She’s trying to be better, now, and it is hard.
(She thinks about her still. Vanished into LA. She’ll see her any day now: in an ad, a movie, the pages of some glamour magazine. She should call her sometime, but— no. No.)
She does not apologise, this time. Instead she says:
“Thank you.”
Max smiles. “Anytime, Priceless.”
It is worth it.
So: gym, auto shop, gigs, apartment. These four places comprise the backdrop of ninety percent of her waking hours. It makes her feel kind of boring, actually, despite her typically ironclad punk dyke credentials. She got her fill of hard drugs from the Vortex scene at Blackwell so these days rarely touches anything harder than weed. She did acid once at Tualatin River Wildlife Refuge with Neil and Sabine, which was fun. She spent most of the time staring at the rippling sunlight beneath the water and giggling to herself.
(Max was insufferable afterwards. ‘Figure out anything important, Chloe?’)
Perhaps it is merely that the shape of her life remains obscure. This is part of what in her weaker moments she misses about Rachel: every day of their lives was merely a prelude to them fleeing to LA and stardom. Her pain and fury afterwards became its own justification. It was a character she put on: the girl with the dead dad and the box-dye hair, who never bothered coming out because there was nothing about her anyone couldn’t see on her skin. It’s not as if she’s abandoned that version of herself altogether. It’s a face she likes wearing for shows, for the drunkish girls who inspect her blacked-out sleeve as an excuse to touch her arm. But it’s a caricature of herself, and she’s just beginning to understand how much is left beyond its ambit.
Fuck. Should she reach out to Vic?
It is sort of bizarre that the ex with whom she remains on the best terms is Victoria Fucking Chase. Perhaps this amicability is aided by the fact that a continent divides them (Vic’s on the East Coast these days), but it still remains a prospect that Chloe of four years ago would have met with furious indignance. She never quite figured her out, even through the months of surreptitious hatefucking, followed by rivalryfucking, followed by grudgingrespectfucking. Beneath the Regina George facade there was something she could never fully grasp. A subsurface sadness. She wonders sometimes if that’s why, in the end, Max came out to Victoria, not her: because Victoria of all people understood what it was like to keep a secret.
They call, sometimes. She is alright as the eldest daughter of the Chase family can be reasonably expected to be. They do not talk long: work, New York vs Portland, girls they’re seeing or lack thereof. She asks, always, about Max. As far as she knows, the two of them haven’t spoken directly since they left Arcadia Bay. It baffles and sort of infuriates her. Max is sweet and charming and brilliant but her approach to interpersonal relationships often consists of imagining hypothetical situations in which someone else is mad at her and then convincing herself they are so. As for Vic… well, she won’t speculate. Sometimes she would give her proverbial left nut for a lesbian who wasn’t pathologically conflict-avoidant. (Is this problematic to say? Should check.)
“So, wait,” Neil says. “You’re thinking of calling your ex, for whose gay awakening you are partially responsible, who also slept with your roommate and best friend, an experience that was so traumatic it led to your roommate figuring out she was a woman?”
“You’re fudging some details,” says Chloe. “But yes.”
“Jesus Christ I'm glad I’m not a dyke.” He flicks a hand and attracts the attention of a bartender. “Another one of these, please."
Max comes to shows sometimes, which is sweet. Chloe knows her well enough to understand that crowds and loud noise are things she struggles with more than most. She’ll see her sometimes, headbanging near the back or vanishing and reappearing from within the throng of the pit– she’s tall, sure, but E hasn’t much changed the fact she’s enough of a twig to vanish if you turn her sideways. All dressed up, too. She’s femmer than Chloe, easy, but apart from the first couple post-E months of ‘all skirts, all the time’ she usually just gravitates towards whatever clothes are most comfortable. Now it’s all black jeans and chains and that eye makeup that makes her look even more like a baby owl than usual. It’s charming to see her out of her comfort zone like this.
She’s been hooking up on and off with Sabine. It’s nebulous. (When hasn’t it been, with her?) She’s fun and she’s hot and– well, bassists can do more than just fret with their fingers, as Chloe has been very pleased to discover. There’s been no insinuation of anything beyond the immediate physicality of their relationship, which suits Chloe fine. Romance has never been a domain in which she feels particular facility. She hasn’t been madly in love with anyone since Rachel, and look how that turned out.
They’re staying in a friend’s place out in the Portland suburbs for a bit to rehearse. Downstairs Caleb and Neil are ironing out the last pieces of a guitar line. The two of them have snuck off towards an unused bedroom, and Chloe has her pants around her ankles and is biting the back of her hand when she realizes the guitars have stopped several seconds ago.
Two knocks & Caleb’s voice.
“Chloe? Sabine? You two in here?”
Sabine pulls her head away from Chloe’s thighs and hisses. “Fuck’s sake…”
When Chloe opens the door, she does her best to kill Caleb with her mind. For better or worse, her psychic abilities remain nascent.
“So, I was thinking: same basic melodic line, but we try playing it in 5/8 rather than 4/6. I was wondering if you could come lay something down while–”
Sabine shoulder-checks Caleb and shoves her way past, a cigarette already in her hand. When Caleb looks back, he’s got that baffled-puppy look on his face. Under other circumstances, she might find this endearing. At present she wonders if it could be slapped off.
He says: “Why was she…”
“Caleb. Dude.”
She watches him, with painstaking slowness, draw a line connecting the undone button on Chloe’s jeans with Sabine’s ruffled hair and the glower on both their faces. You can tell he’s figured it out by the blush that rises beneath his skin.
“You were…” He makes a gesture with his hands.
“Man, don’t ever make the scissoring gesture at me again.”
“Uh. Sorry. How long has it… nevermind. Aw, shit.” He looks genuinely ashamed. It’s sort of remarkable, actually, how someone so talented musically can be this dense.
“Is Max cool with you two… uh?”
She frowns. “Uh, yeah? Why wouldn’t she be?”
“Oh,” he says. “I didn’t realize it was that kind of, ah, arrangement.”
“Dude, what are you talking about.”
“I should,” he says, “stop talking!” This is the first unequivocally brilliant thing he’s said all day. Possibly ever. “Uh… practice again in five?” He glances over to Sabine, who does not look back from smoking a cigarette out on the balcony to flip him the bird. “Practice in ten.”
But for all that a gap remains. They fuck in bathrooms, in cars, once in a literal closet.
(Giggling: “Hey, we’re–”
“Don’t. Too easy.”
“...you’re right.”)
If in Sabine’s apartment they kiss and kiss and kiss while her roommates play DDR in the next room she’s still slinking off in the small hours of the morning to crawl back into bed alone. Is it greedy of her to dream of the other thing? Waking in the morning to the warmth of another’s body. To cook & be cooked for. The slow accretion of little intimacies. A life shared.
She has everything she could possibly want. So why doesn’t it feel like enough?
She does not speak about this to Max. How could she? She’s already laboring under more burdens than Chloe could ever imagine, and if she handles them all wonderfully it’s only because Chloe can’t see the effort it demands of her each waking moment. They’d taken her to get her ears pierced a few weeks after she officially came out. Chloe remembers the way she’d sat in the tattooist’s chair, eyes closed, breath steady, even as the piercer pressed in one swift motion the needle through her earlobe.
Later, driving her home, Chloe had said:
“Honestly, I’m kinda surprised you weren’t afraid.”
And Max, laughing:
“Are you kidding? I was terrified.”
This is Max, now. Brilliant and beautiful and terrified and doing it anyway. And Chloe?
Here is the terrible thing about her: she is afraid. Not of Max but of losing Max. What if she decides someday that she is capable of more than being anchored to a dropout fuckup? Each day the frightened shell she grew up alongside recedes further and further from view and Max Caulfield comes sharper into focus. What if Chloe is just another part of her past she’d be better without?
How terrible, to imagine her best friend capable of something like that. Max wouldn’t– doesn’t– think like that. But still. But still.
She goes drinking one night with Esmé. They hit all the gay bars, because dyke bars are fun and all but there’s not a one in Portland with beer cheaper than eight bucks.
“You were a roadie for Dinosaur Jr.?”
She downs the rest of her stout and nods. “Lou Barlow owes me $50.”
The night elapses in a pleasant blur. They float from bar to bar, Esmé getting nods from staff and patrons alike. She has a hard-won ease about her that Chloe envies. She’s reminded of how much of her own presentation feels, even now, like unearned affect. When Esmé rests her arm on the bar, or clasps some old acquaintance into a bearhug, or laughs and says “Fuck, Phil, how much of a cradle-robber do you think I am?”, there’s not a moment’s artifice therein.
And then she and Esmé are sitting in a park, waiting for a late-night bus, and the night wind is chill and bracing against her skin.
“Kid,” says Esmé, “you wouldn’t happen to have a joint, would you?”
“Hm?” She pats herself down and– yeah, sure enough. She pulls it from her jeans. “It’s a little crushed.”
“Smoked worse.”
Chloe lights it, and for a while they pass it back and forth in silence. She does not know she will speak until she does.
“So um.”
Esmé raises an eyebrow. “Um.”
“It’s– nevermind.”
She groans. “Jesus Christ. Look, I’m nearly forty. Don’t do this ‘you’ve gotta pry it out of me’ shit, I don’t have time. Say the thing you obviously want to say to me.”
Chloe rubs the bags under her eyes, which she would swear to anything are significantly more pronounced than usual. “There’s this girl.”
“Your girl. The trans girl.”
She nods. “Yeah.”
“And…”
“And…” she says. “It’s getting worse, isn’t it? I mean…” She gestures vaguely at everything.
Esmé lets out a half-laugh. “It’s not exactly getting better.”
She pulls her knees up to her chest and rocks back and forth on the concrete fencing. Sometimes 22 feels ancient and sometimes it’s as if she never stopped being a child.
“I’m scared for her. And… I’m scared for me. Because I don’t know how to help her, and I don’t know who I am if she doesn’t need me.”
There is a look on Esmé’s face she does not know how to parse. After a while she turns and lets a long trail of smoke escape from her lips to ascend into the higher strata of the sky, where it becomes invisible before the light of a waxing moon.
“Chloe,” she says. “I’m only going to say this once. I knew by nineteen. I mean knew as in–” she gestures, vaguely, to her breasts. “When I came out I was twenty-eight. All this to say– I know extremely goddamn well what it’s like to waste time pretending you don’t want the things you do. Do you understand?”
No. She nods.
“Bad liar, kid. But you will. Just hope it doesn’t take you as long as it took me.” The noise of an engine. Headlights from the road. “That your bus?”
Through the bus window the city by night. No one in the cabin but her. The lights blur pleasantly through a haze of crossfaded exhaustion. There’s just enough of her rational self left above water to mark off the stops as they pass one by one. She thinks: fuck, I forgot we have practice tomorrow. She thinks: I should’ve gotten a Gatorade. She thinks: this place is so beautiful at night.
She thinks, sometimes, of Max.