Nov 30, 2013 – First Choice Timeline

No matter David’s intention in confronting Max, the entire encounter had left her more scared than ever. Initially the news had been disconcerting, and more, plain infuriating. Max had felt some fear with Nathan freed, but she hadn’t felt that she was in any actual danger. Now, that had changed. She spent the remainder of that Friday in her room, completely forgetting about the Thanksgiving leftovers in the TV lounge. Even if she had remembered, she doubted she would have gone to get them. After that conversation she had kept her door locked, only leaving to go to the restroom, and she tried to keep that to a minimum. She hadn’t fallen asleep until nearly six in the morning clutching to the Captain and practically shaking from nerves.

The next day didn’t start much better. It was Saturday and she knew that Kate was due back and that she should get ready. She didn’t want her friend (yes, Kate really was her friend, right?) to see her so upset; but she also didn’t want to risk stepping out of the safety of her room. Stirring around eight and struggling from lack of sleep, Max turned on some music (whatever was on shuffle) and lay in bed, staring blankly up at the ceiling wishing that she wasn’t so scared and so weak. She’d been strong once… that week. She’d done so much, but it had ruined her and ever since then, Max felt as if she had retreated and left that strength behind. Now she was just broken, and she’d find glimmers of hope, but they were quickly squashed. She needed people like Kate around in order to ignite that spark again; with them gone it was quelled too easily.

What little hope to which she had still clung when the break had started, well Taylor had taken a bite out of it, then Justin had thrown the remainder of it on the ground, and David, well he had just stamped that beat-up shred of hope right out, grinding it beneath his boots. Max had been stupid to stay behind at Blackwell. She wasn’t ready to be on her own; she also wasn’t ready to let anyone in. She needed to make up her damn mind.

Max screamed into her pillow, then threw it across the room. It smacked into Lisa, tipping the plant onto its side and sending dry leaves scattering as soil spilled out from that hand-painted blue and white pot. Shit. I killed Lisa.

She couldn’t remember the last time that she had watered the plant, and now, well from the browning and wilting on the leaves, and the fact that it was tipped over onto her waste-bin beneath the window, half of its potting soil on the floor, she was pretty sure that Lisa was past saving. That shouldn’t make her so sad, but it did. She was a terrible plant mom. She screamed again, this time into her bedding, then rolled herself into a cocoon against the wall, and tried to go back to sleep. As she sat there, however, she kept picturing Nathan outside her door, just waiting.

She could hear him psyching himself up.

“It’s cool, Nathan… Don’t stress… You’re okay, bro. Just count to three…”

Counting to three right outside your door, gun in his waistband.

Max squeezed the image from her head. She was safe. He wasn’t outside and her door was locked. Everything would be okay. She needed to get up. She needed to get ready before Kate came back. The last thing that she wanted to do was worry Kate; Kate who must be so stressed herself with Nathan’s release. He’d actually assaulted her. What had he done to Max?

Kill your best friend. Attack you in the parking lot. Wave a gun at you in the dorms.

Yeah, but those last two hadn’t been this Nathan. Did it count if it happened in a different reality, a different timeline? Did it matter if it did or didn’t? Max still felt afraid — terrified.

“Dog,” she started, then pivoted! “God! I can’t!” She screamed, again, this time without muffling herself. She was all alone, anyway. What did it matter?

A moment later a knock sounded on her door.

Because of course it would. 

The knock sounded soft, Kate’s usual timid approach, and yet it still sounded off somehow. Which makes sense. You were just screaming like a lunatic. I’d be wary knocking on your door, too.

And that had to be it. Max tried to call out, to greet Kate, but she couldn’t force herself to speak. Nathan was free. Nathan was in Arcadia Bay. Nathan could be on the other side of that door.

“Don’t be scared… You own this school… If I wanted, I could —”

“Shut up!” Max yelled at the stupid aural hallucination as her panic escalated; and it worked. Hallucinatory Nathan vanished, his voice replaced by a different voice: a kinder, less manic voice, but one tinged with worry.

“Max?”

Max blinked, confused. That wasn’t Kate.

“Dana,” she said, but it came out barely a whisper, so soft that Max only just heard herself say the girl’s name.

“Max,” Dana asked again, louder this time.

Try as she might, Max could not find her voice. Instead, she slipped from the bed and stumbled towards the door. Whether from exhaustion or panic, she wasn’t sure, but her knees buckled and she fell to the floor with a loud crash.

“MAX,” Dana yelled, knocking on the door while simultaneously jiggling the handle as if she could bust through the lock and force it open.

Max steadied herself with one hand to her bed, and pulled herself up and to the door. Her legs were still shaking. Her arms were shaking. Her everything was shaking and her breaths were coming too fast. She knew it wasn’t Nathan outside that door, logically she knew it, and she had shouted his voice down, but it still felt as if he were there, just on the edge of hearing; as if he were just down the hall — just out of earshot.

Reaching the handle, she fidgeted, fumbling in her attempts to unlock it. Her head hurt; she could feel it pounding in rhythm to the rapid beat of her heart. When had this all escalated so fast? She had been doing so much better before this week alone — before you stupidly thought you could get by on your own . Even then, yesterday she had been happy, even if only for a moment — before you proved how worthless you are; before David reminded you how vulnerable you are here; before, before, before…

Dana’s knocking sounded again, harder and louder this time, and as she spoke, that tinge of worry from earlier surged, overriding all other emotions.

“Max, let me in.”

Still unsteady on her feet, Max let herself sink to the floor next to her green shelves, just under her mirror. With one last feeble attempt, she managed to flip the lock, then let her arms fall to her side as she pulled her knees up to her chest, taking comfort as she curled into herself.

She heard a soft click as the handle turned and Dana let herself in; and immediately stopped at the sight of the room. Max could see her taking in the scene. It wasn’t that bad, was it? As Max looked with fresh, if still panicked, eyes, she realized that maybe it was.

Of course, Lisa leaned against her waste-bin, dead with soil leaking out onto the floor, her pillow caught between the plant and the wall, but Max had just done that. Her bed was unkempt, her covers knotted up and pushed to one side, but it was only eight in the morning, so that seemed fair. A few stacks of dirty laundry lay about, but what dorm room didn’t have laundry piles?

Yet, Max slowly took in the rest of the room. Two-day old food rested on her desk from an abandoned plate of Thanksgiving seconds. Her floor lamp lay on its side, its bulb busted. Max could vaguely recall swatting the lamp over the night before, as she panicked and had been trying to hurriedly shut off the light. And there was no light in the room either, was there? The windows were still blocked by the black out curtains, and her paper lanterns lay shredded on top of her ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ carpet, shredded and crushed by discarded storage cubes that had been randomly tossed from her IKEA-like shelving unit near the window — which itself had been turned on its side. Her room looked eerily the same as it had when Nathan had ransacked it.

Shifting her gaze towards her photo wall, Max half expected to see ‘Nobody messes with me bitch’ scrawled in red paint over the photos. Instead she saw large swaths of blank wall as half of the photos had been ripped away, shredded and discarded on her bed. An abrupt memory flashed before her, as Max recalled yanking photo after photo down in the dark, scattering them and ripping them to pieces, shouting and crying, and wishing that she had never been granted this stupid power — as if destroying the photos would rid her of this curse and somehow undue all her meddling, her meddling that had left Chloe dead and Nathan free, and Kate drugged, and on and on and on. Yes, Chloe would have always been dead if she hadn’t gained that power, but at that moment, all the rage burning inside of Max, that detail had seemed so trivial in comparison to her culpability in resetting the timeline through that damn butterfly photo. Had she shredded that?

Her panic surged to new heights and Max gasped as her chest spasmed and her breath caught. She hadn’t shredded that photo had she? The only photo that mattered? The one that could set this right if ever that need arose (if ever she broke her promise to Chloe)?

Max lurched forward on her hands and knees and tried to crawl towards the scattered remains of her Polaroids searching for that lifeline. She only managed, however, to collapse in a tangle in front of her door as her hurried breaths increased in pace once more.

Instantly, Dana was at her side, kneeling and hugging to Max.

“Calm down. I’m here.” She rubbed Max’s back, and lowered her voice into a soothing tone. “I’m here, Max. Just breathe, okay. Slowly. Can you do that?”

Max nodded. That’s what she was supposed to do, right? Dana wanted to help her, so she’d agree with her and she’d do what she said, but Max didn’t know how to slow her breathing, and where was that photo?

“Butterfly,” she asked, as Dana looked into her frightened, hectic eyes with a look of pity and concern and her own hint of fear.

“What Max?”

“Butterfly,” she said again, but through her hitched breaths and the tears that now fell unimpeded, Max doubted Dana had been able to understand her.

“Sure,” Dana nodded, pulling a blanket from the bed and covering Max there on the floor, while still rubbing at her back with her other hand. “There. Is that better,” Dana asked.

That’s not what I wanted, Max thought, but she didn’t have the energy to speak up. She cried, and she hiccuped, and she tried to breathe, while Dana did her best to console her and whispered to her that she was okay, and asked her to breathe with her, letting out her own slow deep breaths, and Max tried to match that breathing. She did; she tried so hard, but where was that butterfly? She needed her butterfly photo. She needed her lifeline to Chloe. She needed…

…sleep. How long had she been asleep? It was bright out — Max could see red through her eyelids, that easy, warm red of the sun against closed eyes — so it couldn’t have been that long. She should get up. She knew that she should; Kate was due back, today, and she wanted to look presentable. She didn’t want Kate to know how much of a mess she was, but —

— Max heard voices in her room. One came from nearby, just by her feet. The other seemed to be a little ways off, maybe from over by her futon. Why was someone in her room?

As she tried to puzzle out what was happening, Max suddenly remembered Dana finding her in a panic on her floor; she remembered the destruction of her room; and she remembered returning from seeing David and ripping her room apart, tearing it down just as Nathan had and just as he would again as soon as he found her. She remembered it all, and Max held still. She didn’t want her friends to see her like this. She didn’t want them to know how truly broken she was. Sure, it had been obvious when she returned after that week, but ever since Halloween she had done so much better at hiding it; at working through it with Kate, even if she could never let Kate know the true extent of her loss, of her pain, of what she had endured, but now, now they would know, wouldn’t they? How could she look any of them in the face again?

She couldn’t.

So, Max kept quiet and still and she listened.

“… say a thing?” Dana asked. Max missed the first part of that question. Dana’s voice came from across the room. She must be the one on the futon, but Max didn’t dare open her eyes to confirm her suspicions.

“No,” Kate said. “I mean, like I said, we talked that night, but she didn’t seem this bad. She couldn’t sleep, but neither could I, and really we all knew she took her friend’s death hard, so I wasn’t surprised. I should have known better, though.”

“No, Kate. She’s been so much better. You couldn’t know. But she didn’t say anything that would make you… sorry. That’s not fair. I mean, she didn’t say anything unusual?”

“No. Not really. She was so sweet, Dana. She was really concerned about me more than anything. She wanted me to know that it… that what they did… did to me… that it wasn’t my fault. She really… she made sure that I knew it was on them and not me. Yeah, I realized she was here, but after my dad dropped off that Thanksgiving meal, she seemed so happy when we texted.”

The two were silent for a moment, then Kate spoke again.

“I should have made my mom bring me Friday, like I wanted. I didn’t want her to be alone, but you know how my mom is. I just…”

“Kate, if Max needed help, she needed to ask. It doesn’t sound like you could have known.”

“But…” Kate started, then drifted off, her voice shifting into a low sob.

Max heard movement from across the room, followed by footsteps, then she felt pressure as someone sat down on the mattress beside Kate. Dana had come over to hold her, and Max felt so guilty. How could she do this to them? How could she hurt her friends like this? She wanted to make it all better… she wanted to be there for them, but she couldn’t open her eyes. She couldn’t look at them… and she was so, so….

…tired?

She wasn’t tired at all, and the light in the room had diminished. Either her blackout curtains had been closed again or the sun had set. Somehow, Max doubted her friends had closed the curtains, since they had already obviously opened them earlier that morning. Oh wait… her friends… Where were they, she wondered; but she quickly realized the answer.

Max could feel a soft pressure around her waist and a warmth against her back. Someone was wrapped around her, and Max could hear the soft sounds of their breath and could feel that same breath against the top of her head. She was afraid to move, worried she’d wake the girl behind her, so Max lay there simply listening to the sound of her friend breathing softly in her sleep and relaxed into her. She was too wired now for sleep, having apparently slept the day away, but at the same time not rested at all, anxious, and fairly certain that her sleep had still been plagued by nightmares of Nathan and fears of the pain that she had caused. Yet the feel of being held close was so comforting that Max had no desire to move. It reminded her of sleepovers with Chloe, but different.

With Chloe, at least that last week, there had always been that flutter, that burgeoning hint of something more. If Max was honest with herself, that awakening had started before she had even left for Seattle. She hadn’t understood it then, but it had confused her; and it was part of the reason that she had found it so difficult to keep in touch with Chloe. She hadn’t understood her feelings then, but she had understood enough to know that she didn’t need to burden Chloe with them, not while she had been dealing with the death of her father. The more time that had passed, however, the more uncertain Max had been about those feelings and if they had ever been there at all, and it had been harder and harder to reach out to her former friend; and then life became complicated, as of course it did – but she didn’t need to think about that.

Tonight, there would be none of that, only comfort and a sense of safety that Max so desperately needed. Easing into that feeling, Max rested there in the arms of Dana(?) or Kate(?), too afraid to move and figure out exactly who was there beside her lest she wake them and lose that sense of security that they provided. Another thirty minutes or so passed (Max had no way of knowing just how much time for certain) when at last she decided that she had to extricate herself from her mystery friend’s arms. Sleep refused to return, but a different urgency had set in and Max realized that she hadn’t used the bathroom in at least 24 hours.

Slowly and ever so gently, she lifted the arm from her waist and slid out from under its grip, then carefully lowered said arm back to the mattress. She wasn’t sure when she had made it up off of her floor and to her bed. She suspected that Kate and Dana had made that happen, while she was asleep, and that thought brought with it a dual sense of love and guilt: love for the friends that had been so kind to her, and guilt over letting them see her that way and burdening them so.

Freed from her sleeping partner’s grasp, Max at last noticed the photo clutched tightly in her other hand: the butterfly photo from the bathroom. She couldn’t remember when she had found it, but she did remember the panic she had felt searching for it and worrying whether she had shredded it in her fury the previous night. Letting out a deep sigh, and with it so much tension that she hadn’t even realized was there, Max held the photo close, the thought of parting from it too frightening to entertain.

Slow and steady with her movements, she eased out of her bed, taking note of the tall girl lying there under the blankets. Apparently Dana had been her mystery cuddler; although as she took another step towards the door, Max noticed a second girl asleep on her futon. Kate lay there curled under her own blanket that she must have brought in from her room, now deep asleep, and that same sense of love and guilt reared its head once more.

That was not going anywhere any time soon, but unless Max wanted to really embarrass herself ( even more ), she knew she had to move with a little more haste. Quickly, quietly, she slipped over to her messenger bag, and tucked the butterfly photo securely inside, and then, with great urgency, she slipped out into the hallway. A sense of panic eased in as she left her friends behind and ventured alone into the hall, but with a long, if nervous, sleep finally under her belt, the panic felt smaller and more manageable.

A few minutes later, without encountering another soul, she slipped back into her room. Before closing the door, however, she took note of the change in her dorm since that morning. The shredded photos were nowhere to be seen. Her storage bins and her shelving had been restored to their rightful place. The discarded food and laundry had been cleared away and the broken bulbs and lanterns were nowhere to be found. The floor lamp had been righted, and she suspected had a new, fresh bulb. Even Lisa and the spilled soil were gone, though the now emptied and clean pot had been relocated over by Max’s closet. The biggest surprise, however, came from the photo wall. The chaos of that sundered collage had been mended with new photos, photos from Dana and Kate, photos of the three of them, of Warren, of Allysa, and of Trevor, had filled the gaps that had been ripped through it in Max’s previous panic.

Max felt tears welling up, but for once they weren’t tears of grief or despair. There was something so beautiful about this simple act from her friends that she could barely keep the emotion at bay. She stood there just within her room’s threshold, the light of the hallway spilling through behind her, and she was mesmerized by how much these two cared for her.

How had she ever suspected that their friendships were false, a figment of her imagination? She knew the answer of course. Distance and self-doubt were always Max’s enemies; but tonight with them here with her, she knew better and for now that was enough.

“Max,” a soft voice whispered, careful to not wake the other sleeping girl.

Max broke from her reverie and noticed Kate sitting up on the futon, wiping at her bleary eyes.

“Are you okay,” her friend asked.

Max smiled at her and wiped her own eyes and the fresh tears that had welled up there. “Yes, Kate. Thank you.” She choked on that last bit, her words caught in the emotion and Kate looked at her, expectantly, ready to run to her side.

“It’s okay,” Max said, regaining her composure. “Just, thank you…”

Her voice trailed off, but Max didn’t feel that she had said enough, so she gently shut the door and crossed the room to Kate. Sitting down beside her, she leaned over and pulled her into a deep hug.

“I’m so sorry, Kate,” she said, and Max hugged the girl tighter. “I’m so sorry.”

“Shhh…” Kate whispered, brushing her hands through Max’s hair, and slipping off Chloe’s beanie as she did. It was only then that Max realized that she was still wearing Chloe’s clothes and she felt her cheeks blush with embarrassment as she realized how much more her friends had seen than she had previously known.

“But…” she stammered. “I didn’t mean… I didn’t want…”

“Shhhh…” Kate whispered again, still stroking her hair, and pulling Max down to rest. “It’s okay, Max. Just go back to sleep. It’s all okay.”

And for that moment it was, and Max felt her exhaustion creeping back in with the surge of so many emotions, and she let Kate brush her hands through her hair and ease her back into a deep, and at last, peaceful sleep.