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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 2 years

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North To The Future [Chapter 5: Sabotage]

The year is 1999. You are just beginning your veterinary practice in Juneau, Alaska. Aegon is a mysterious, troubled newcomer to town. You kind of hate him. You are also kind of obsessed with him. Falling for him might legitimately ruin your life…but can you help it? Oh, and there’s a serial killer on the loose known only as the Ice Fisher.

A/N: With the completion of Chapter 5, we are officially 1/3 of the way done with this fic series! In my opinion, things start to get really interesting in Chapter 6 so I am sooooo excited to have reached this little milestone. Thank you so so so much for reading and for your enthusiasm, questions, rants, analyses, theories, memes, and general emotional investment in NTTF. I go back to re-read your comments/tags ALL the time and they help keep me motivated to get new chapters out asap. 🥰💜

Chapter warnings: Language, alcoholism, addiction, murder, veterinary medicine, discussions of sex, questionable decisions, Kimmie-related chaos, Trent flexing his athletic skills.

Word count: 5.6k.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

Taglist: @elsolario @meadowofsinfulthoughts @ladylannisterxo @doingfondue @tclegane @quartzs-posts @liathelioness @aemcndtargaryen @thelittleswanao3 @burningcoffeetimetravel @b1gb3anz @hinata7346 @poohxlove @borikenlove @myspotofcraziness @travelingmypassion @graykageyama @skythighs @lauraneedstochill @darlingimafangirl @charenlie @thewew @eddies-bat-tattoos @minttea07

Please let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist! 💜

It’s November 29th, the Monday after Thanksgiving. It’s also your lunch hour.

You yank open the glass front door of Caribou Crossings, the souvenir shop where Heather works. It’s mostly abandoned now that tourist season has ended, and the unloved relics stare at you with cold, oddly sentient eyes: the owls carved out of cedar wood, bears carved out of jade, Russian dolls, miniature totem poles, plushie salmons. You climb over the counter and sit on the floor behind the cash register, your back pressed to the wall and your arms linked around your knees. Heather is breaking open rolls of coins to restock the register, probably unnecessarily; you are the only two people in the store.

She asks, wrestling to get quarters out of a particularly stubborn wrapper: “How’s it going?”

“Not great.”

“Have you fucked British Kurt Cobain yet?”

“We’re not speaking.”

She puts down the roll of quarters and looks at you. “What happened?”

You shrug, trying to act casual, trying to not let your voice crack. You don’t think there’s any threat of tears; you’ve cried so much in the past four days that you seem to be out of them. Your eyes are perpetually pinkish, puffy, exhausted. Despite your herculean efforts to remain hydrated, you have a constant low-grade tension headache that throbs like a bruise, misery trapped beneath the skin like blue-violet blood. “It’s a long story. He came over for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Okay.” Heather is perplexed. “And then he, what, drunkenly dropped the turkey on the floor? Tried to hook up with your mom? Offered to show you his collection of murder supplies?”

You smile wearily. “No. I told him that he had to get sober. And he freaked out, he was yelling, he was saying I don’t have any right to try to control him because he’s not mine and never will be. He said I was trying to use him to bail myself out of my spineless, unfulfilling life.”

She scoffs. “Well that’s not true.” Then she observes your face. “Is it…?”

You shrug again, feeling like you’re back in high school, petulant and powerless. “There are a lot of things I want to experience, a lot of places I want to go. But I haven’t done anything yet. Because I can’t tell my parents that I don’t want to stay in Juneau forever and run the vet clinic.”

This must shock Heather, but she doesn’t show it. “I can’t imagine that they would want you to stay if it made you unhappy.”

“No, they wouldn’t try to stop me. But it would break their hearts.”

There is a long, uneasy silence. At last, Heather says: “I think you should come to Ursa Minor tonight.”

“I don’t want to see Aegon.”

“I mean, Dale would probably kick him out if we asked.”

“No!” you shout, too quickly. If he doesn’t have his preferred place to drink his demons away, he might leave Juneau long before the six month deadline.

Heather raises an eyebrow. “Do you want to see him or do you not want to see him?”

You glower at the wall strewn with large, framed photographs of the Northern Lights. “I want him to apologize.”

“I have many talents, but I can’t make that happen for you,” she says. “Look, is it possible that Aegon will be at Ursa Minor? Yeah, totally. But other people are going to be there too. Me, and Joyce, and Kimmie, and Trent and all his dimwitted muscley friends…there are going to be people who care about you. There are going to be people who can help you through this. We can comfort you. We can distract you. We can curb stomp that Greek boy in the parking lot if he doesn’t behave himself. There are a lot of options.”

Lyrics from The Distance, unexpected and unwelcome, spin around in your mind like a vinyl record: She’s hoping in time that her memories will fade. “I’ll think about it.”

“Can I interest you in a complementary Juneau-themed trinket? Glacial mud mask? Moose nuggets? Birch syrup? A slightly sinister-looking stuffed salmon?”

“No. I’m good.”

Heather asks with a straight face: “Do you want me to kill him?”

You laugh, your first real laugh since Thanksgiving. “No, thank you very much, but no.”

“Seriously. I could make it look like the Ice Fisher did it. No one would ever know.”

You gaze up at her from where you sit on the floor. “I love you.”

“I know, bitch.” Heather grins. “Wear something slutty this time.”

~~~~~~~~~~

You’ve spent a lot of time in your bedroom since Thanksgiving; you don’t want your parents to see you upset. They know something, of course, but they don’t interrogate you. They don’t intrude. They probably assume that you’ve broken up with Aegon—not that we were ever dating to begin with, you think sullenly—and, furthermore, that this is a painful yet indisputably wise course of action. It is a productive sort of pain, a necessary pain; it is like the deep maroon ache of a healing bone. It hurts less now than it would if you had stayed with him, married him, had children with him, attempted to build a life with him like a sandcastle razed again and again at high tide. It hurts less than if you had let yourself fall in love with him.

Oh, but didn’t I?

Alaska was purchased from Russia in 1867, just two years after the American Civil War ended, and was soon widely regarded by the still-recovering nation as a hopelessly remote and burdensome error. This impression was reversed only by the discovery of gold and the subsequent mass migration of miners to the territory beginning in the 1890s. After the booming gold industry came fishing and logging and oil and military bases, but gold was Alaska’s first saving grace. This is what you are thinking as you pencil on your black eyeliner, dust your eyelids with sheer gold glitter, paint your lips a vivid, glossy crimson. You stare at your reflection in the bedroom mirror, surrounded by photographs of your family and your friends, high school and college and vet school. There’s one image that doesn’t quite belong. It’s a cutout from one of those infinite travel magazines, a Ford Mustang convertible soaring down the Pacific Coast Highway in Southern California. The man behind the wheel—tan, beaming, carefree—is wearing sunglasses and a neon green tank top. The convertible is bright red; it is nearly the same shade as your lips.

You slip into a dress you haven’t worn in years: black, short, off-the-shoulder sleeves. Ever-practical, you opt for black boots instead of heels. When you arrive at Ursa Minor, Heather is wearing a sequined hot pink tube top and white leather pants. Joyce is wearing—to Heather’s abject horror—overalls, a rainbow striped T-shirt, and a massive mustard yellow scarf that nearly swallows her into oblivion. By a pure and unfortunate coincidence, you and Aegon match. He is sitting at the bar in all black: black turtleneck sweater, black jeans, black combat boots, black sleepless shadows under both of his eyes, a black mood that sweats out of his pores like a fever. Randomly, you remember the gold chain necklace he was wearing on Thanksgiving. It didn’t look fake, and it didn’t look cheap. To your knowledge, it is the only thing of significant value that he owns. It is a peculiar luxury for him to possess.

So what? Maybe he stole it. Maybe he traded drugs for it. Maybe he got it off a corpse that he strangled and then sank into cold, silent darkness beneath an ice-covered lake.

But no, you don’t believe that. You never did, and you still don’t.

Heather slurps down her Sex On The Beach. “Is this your revenge dress? Are you invoking the spirit of Princess Diana in this fine establishment tonight?”

You gaze miserably at Aegon. He is peering down into the caramel-colored bubbles of his rum and Coke. The stereo is playing Shania Twain’s Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under? “He told me he’s an awful person. That’s the worst part. Like he told me over and over again exactly what to expect and I didn’t believe him, because I was just…just…I don’t know.” Infatuated. In love. Blind. Naïve. Hopeful. “Stupid, I guess.”

“I hate men.” Heather glances to the bar. “Except Dale, he’s okay.”

“The fictional ones aren’t all bad,” Joyce says, flipping a page in her newest fantasy novel. This one has a pirate on the front, his billowing white shirt mostly unbuttoned and his long hair flowing in the wind like a hero’s cape.

“I’ve had a horrendous fucking day,” you moan. “There’s the Aegon thing, there’s the I’m never going to get out of Alaska thing, there’s the I’m going to die alone thing, and then on top of all that, I had to euthanize Ms. Ruland’s cat right before we closed.”

“Sylvester Stallone?!” Heather cries. “Sylvester died? That black and white homicidal little maniac? With the super long whiskers? Jesus, that’s tragic. I’m sorry.”

“In all fairness, he was like a gazillion years old. He probably remembered when dinosaurs roamed America. But it was still awful. Ms. Ruland was a mess. I felt totally unprepared, totally useless. I’d practiced in vet school, of course, but I’d never euthanized an animal I knew before. It was horrible trying to comfort Ms. Ruland. It was horrible seeing someone walk into the clinic with someone they loved and then walk out alone.”

Heather and Joyce nod with sad, sympathetic eyes, wanting to help but not knowing what else to say. You gulp down your pineapple-flavored Bacardi Breezer. Aegon must have complained about the Shania Twain music; Dale switches out the CD and the opening notes of Sabotage by the Beastie Boys rockets out of the stereo.

Kimmie throws open the front door and blusters into Ursa Minor, shaking the snowflakes out of her hair and wearing a sleek, skin-tight, metallic silver dress and matching platform heels. She looks like a disco ball; she looks like a mirror. She canters to the bar like a racehorse and orders herself a Miller Lite. She says something to Aegon. He mumbles back, still peering into his rum and Coke. She tries again. He shrugs and downs the rest of his drink. He glances at you—almost glaring, almost sad—and then orders another rum and Coke.

“Oh no,” Heather mutters. “Oh no, oh no, Kimmie, no.”

The front door opens again, and Trent and his friends spill inside in a loud, riotous swarm. They order beers at the bar—Trent fist-bumping Aegon, several of the other guys descending upon Kimmie to make bungling attempts at seduction—and then they migrate over to the pool table like a honking, brainless flock of geese. Trent breaks off to make a pit stop at your booth.

“Hi,” he says, smiling as he sips his Heineken.

“Hi,” you reply. Heather and Joyce’s eyes dart between you and Trent.

He points to the spot beside you, which is presently vacant. “Do you mind if I hang out for a while?”

“I think you’ll regret it. I am currently extremely depressed and boring.”

To your surprise, Trent doesn’t act like a dumbass. His voice goes gentle. His face collapses into soft, attentive pity. “What’s there to be depressed about?”

Well, you see, I accidentally fell in love with your maybe-murderer alcoholic homeless friend and in a completely unforeseeable turn of events he ruined my life. “I had to euthanize a cat today.”

“Oh, that sucks,” Trent says. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s my job. I should get over it.”

“No, seriously, I’m sorry.” Trent tosses his hair off his forehead in his patented horse-like maneuver, and then his gaze comes back to you. “Your job is to help animals, so I get that not being able to fix one would be really tough. But I know you’re still great at your job. I know you did everything you could.”

You stare up at Trent. Heather stares up at Trent. Joyce, having completely forgotten about her fantasy novel (a rare occurrence), stares up at Trent. Trent swallows a mouthful of Heineken; stray beads of it drip down his full lips and stubbled chin.

I couldn’t fix the cat. I couldn’t fix Aegon. I can’t fix myself.

“You can hang out if you want to,” you tell Trent, scooting over to give him space. He grins and slides into the booth, tall and broad-shouldered and tossing his hair around again, looking like goddamn Seabiscuit. You steal a glimpse of the bar. Aegon’s jaw has fallen open; he’s gaping at you with scandalized disbelief, with something like horror. You move a little closer to Trent. And Aegon, at last, turns his attention to the dramatic, irritating, captivating Kimberly Barbieri.

“So, Trent,” Heather begins slowly, apprehensively, then picks up steam. Beside her, Joyce picks up her book. “How is the salmon genocide business going?”

As you half-listen to Trent talk about fishing, which somehow—as all topics seem to do with him—leads back to football and his high school glory days, you drink your Bacardi Breezer and watch Aegon with sharp, narrowed eyes. He has relocated to the barstool next to Kimmie. He appears to be asking her questions—tentative, stilted questions—and she replies with animated laughter and calculated little touches: her fingertips grazing his wrist, her palm briefly pressed to his shoulder. You hate the way Aegon talks with his hands, those gestures which had been becoming so familiar to you. They put an ache in your chest like a nest of barbed wire.

“Bro!” one of Trent’s friends is calling from the pool table. Others are waving encouragingly. “Bro, come play! Come play! Broooooo!”

“Looks like you’re being summoned,” Heather says.

“Oh, wow, I guess so.” Trent turns to you, nervous. “Do you…uh…would you…maybe…like to join me?”

“What, playing pool?”

“Yeah.”

You try to consider this in earnest; your mind is so tangled up in Kimmie and Aegon and everything that’s transpired over the past week that the words barely sound like English. Playing. Pool. With Trent. “I don’t think I know how.”

“I’ll teach you,” he offers, quite willingly.

“Okay, maybe. Give me a few minutes, I need another drink first.”

“Want me to grab a Bacardi Breezer for you?”

“Thanks, but I’ll do it. I haven’t decided which flavor I want next yet.”

“Cool,” Trent says. He slips out of the booth and gives you one final, mock-stern, smiling warning. “Remember, I’m going to teach you how to play. Meet me at the pool table. Don’t forget. Don’t disappear.”

“I’ll be there,” you promise. He departs. You say to Heather: “I probably won’t be there.”

“Why not?” Heather asks. “You’re hot. You’ll be even hotter when you’re bent over a pool table lining up your shots. The Greek boy is already sad, but I want to see him devastated.”

“I don’t think I have that power.”

Heather smirks and wiggles her slender eyebrows. “I disagree.”

Across Ursa Minor, Kimmie leaps off her barstool and leaves Aegon to guzzle his rum and Coke in peace. She approaches your booth sheepishly, like a dog that knows he’s chewed a considerable hole in his owner’s favorite La-Z-Boy recliner. “So,” Kimmie says to you, nervously kneading her glass bottle of Miller Lite. She’s so fucking cool, you think mournfully. Cool girls drink beer, cool girls are lighthearted and fun, cool girls don’t take guys too seriously, cool girls never ask about the future. “You and Aegon.”

You drink the last of your Bacardi Breezer moodily. “What about us?”

“You aren’t…like…together, are you?”

“No. No way. I’d rather date O.J. Simpson.”

“Well…” Heather begins, and you kick her under the table. Bitch! she mouths, rubbing her shin.

“Okay,” Kimmie sighs in relief, a smile breaking across her face. The Christmas lights reflect off her silver dress; she glows, she radiates. “Good. I was hoping he wasn’t off-limits, but I wanted to check with you first. You know, in accordance with Girl Code.”

“How courteous,” you note.

Kimmie marvels dreamily: “He looked so freaking good strumming that guitar.”

“Um, Kimmie…” Heather begins again. You glare at her ferociously. Heather pivots. “He’s probably the Ice Fisher, so you should keep your distance.”

Kimmie laughs. “Aegon? The Ice Fisher?! I don’t think so. You have to be sober to meticulously kidnap and murder people. Besides, from what I’ve heard he’s slept his way through like half the souvenir shop cashiers, and none of them ended up dead.”

You stare down at the table despondently. Heather, floundering, puts her fist through the figurative In Case Of Emergency Break Glass box. “He has syphilis.”

Kimmie gasps. “Really?!”

Heather deflates. “No. Well, actually, I don’t know. Maybe. It’s certainly possible. We should assume the worst.”

Kimmie, for once fully in on the joke, winks. “I’ll let you know once I’ve investigated.” She strolls back to the bar in her short mirrorball dress, shimmering and lithe like a snake’s skin.

“To be clear,” Heather tells you. “I was not in the half of the souvenir shop cashiers that Aegon boned.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?! Why didn’t you tell her that…that…?!”

“That what?” you snap. “She asked if we’re together. We’re not. We never were. He made that crystal clear. And if he’s not going to get sober, I’m not going to get involved with someone like that.” Someone like Jesse. Someone like the man my mom still carries scars and bruises from, not in the flesh but in the soul.

“But…but…” Heather frowns at you with pained, condoling eyes. “You…you love him. Don’t you? You look like you love him. You look…and I mean this in the most compassionate way possible…you look fucking terrible. You look like someone died, and I’m not talking about Sylvester Stallone the geriatric cat. Joyce?”

Joyce gives you an evaluative glance. “Yeah, you look terrible.”

At the bar, Kimmie is leaning all over Aegon and giggling about a story he’s telling. His hands move in dramatic, expressive gestures. He is, for the first time tonight, smiling. There’s a jolt like knuckles jabbed beneath your ribs. There’s a profound, inky despair. Kimmie grabs Aegon’s hand—he has callouses on his fingertips, you think randomly—and leads him over to the pool table. As soon as they have vacated the area, Heather drags you to the bar.

“Dale?” she says. “My good bitch needs a Bacardi Breezer. Maybe two Bacardi Breezers. Maybe three. I think I’ll be driving her home tonight.” She turns to you. “What flavors do you want?”

“Apple,” you reply morosely.

“Okay, one apple, what about the rest?”

“All apple.”

“Goddamn, you really are fucked up about this. Dale, three apple Bacardi Breezers, please.”

He lines them up on the counter. Heather sits with you as you drink them one after the other, gradually feeling warm again, feeling a little lighter. When you peek back at the booth, Rob has appeared there and is discussing—politely this time—the plot of Joyce’s fantasy novel with her. She looks almost vaguely interested in his existence.

“Hey Dale,” Heather prompts. “What’s the secret to everlasting love?”

Dale chuckles huskily and runs a hand over his thick, wiry beard. “You’re asking the wrong person. My wife ran off with a cruise ship singer, remember?”

“Oh yeah,” Heather says apologetically. That was around six months ago, at the start of tourist season; the guy was an Elvis impersonator. “My bad.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m better off, I think. Now I don’t have to pretend to like her soap operas anymore. Or her tuna casserole.” He guffaws and ambles away to serve a pair of middle-aged locals seated at the other end of the bar.

When you’ve finished your last Bacardi Breezer, Heather slaps your shoulder encouragingly. “Alright, you ready?”

“Yup,” you say, swaying a little as you hop off the barstool. You stumble and bump into Heather, laughing. She steadies you with a massive grin. She’s delighted; she’s relieved.

“Good. Now get your ass over to the pool table and do your best impression of Demi Moore in Striptease.”

You have no intention of doing that. But you do—with Heather’s stabilizing grip on your waist—make your way to the pool table. There is a crowd pulsing around it: Trent, Trent’s assorted jock friends, Aegon, Kimmie. Aegon is standing in the background and nursing his—fourth? fifth? tenth?—rum and Coke. His face is vague and his eyes groggy. Still, he is beautiful. He’s so beautiful you almost blurt it out before stopping yourself. Kimmie is lining up a shot to break the balls out of their triangular configuration. Her silver hoop earrings glint under the Christmas lights. She is covered in male gazes like the sheen of ice on a lake. The white cue ball collides with the pyramid-shaped conglomeration; the balls go flying in every direction. The solid green ball—number 6—disappears into a pocket.

“Booyah!” Kimmie cheers. There are claps and whistles. Aegon just stares blankly, gnawing on his lower lip, that chronically disobedient lock of hair resting on his cheek.

“You’re majorly talented,” Trent’s friend Gary swoons. Kimmie bats her eyelashes at him and then checks to see if Aegon noticed. He didn’t. Kimmie, flustered but trying to hide it, takes another turn but doesn’t manage to sink a single ball.

“Hey!” Trent welcomes you warmly. He slings an arm across your shoulders, which ordinarily you would shy away from. Now, you lean into him, your body melding with his, your muscles loose and sinuous. Aegon does notice this. His eyes are a dark, dangerous blue: riptides, maelstroms, trenches miles deep. Good, you think. Maybe I can get him jealous enough to reconsider. Maybe I can make him want to change. “Want to shoot for me? I’ll show you how.”

You smile up at Trent. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

He passes you a cue stick with large, rugged hands. “So you’ll need one of these…and then you have to chalk it…” He presses a tiny blue cube into your palm. You rub chalk onto the tip of the cue stick, feeling ridiculous.

“And what’s the purpose of this part? Superstition? To give me false confidence?”

Trent chuckles. “To help the stick get better contact with the cue ball.”

“So you’re an expert, huh?”

“I am athletically gifted.”

“Does pool count as a sport? I’m skeptical.”

“Pay attention,” he teases, flipping his hair out of his face. Seabiscuit strikes again. “Now Kimmie sunk a solid ball, so the solids are all hers. Ours are the striped ones. If we can sink all the striped ones before Kimmie sinks all the solid ones, we win. And you don’t want to sink the black 8 ball until all our balls are already gone. That’s the very last step.”

“Sink striped balls. Don’t sink solid balls or the 8 ball. Okay. Got it.” You take aim, your sights set on the striped blue ball, number 10. This is somewhat difficult; thanks to your plentiful Bacardi Breezers, the pool table feels like it’s listing like a ship. The tapered shaft of the stick is balanced awkwardly on the back of your hand. “Am I doing this right…?”

“Here,” Trent says, and then he gets to work repositioning you. He touches you without asking, which you don’t object to under the circumstances; Aegon’s face is flushing a gory, wrathful red. Trent spreads your fingers farther apart, adjusts the angle of your elbow, pushes you between the shoulder blades to lean a bit lower over the pool table. The hem of your black dress creeps up your bare thighs, fluttering like a whisper. Aegon aggressively chugs the rest of his rum and Coke, the ice cubes clanging in the glass.

You take your shot, and the white cue ball whizzes across the pool table. It ploughs into the number 10 ball and sends it down into the abyss-like pocket closest to where Aegon stands.

“Yes!” Trent roars. He swoops in, picks you up with startling ease, whirls you around once before setting your unsteady feet back down on the floor and accepting thunderous back-slapping from his hoard of friends.

“Wow,” Heather murmurs, mostly to herself.

“Ugh, you whore!” Kimmie jeers, but she’s clapping and giggling too. She’s still the main character tonight, and she always will be, and she knows this like she knows the lines in her own palms. She’s just that kind of girl.

“Another round, another round!” Trent’s friends are chanting, and then they stampede together off to the bar to procure more beer. Kimmie, tottering in her silvery platform heels, moves to join them.

Abruptly, Aegon catches Kimmie’s forearm and pulls her to him. He whispers in her ear; her eyes go wide, her breath hitches, her glossy lips split into an exhilarated smile. And then they dash out of Ursa Minor together, stopping just long enough to grab their parkas off the coatrack by the door. They’re gone. They’re both gone.

You sputter to Heather: “What…? How…? No, they can’t! They can’t—!”

“What do you want me to do?!” she hisses back. “Tackle them before they can make it off the premises? Tie Kimmie to a chair? Force her to take a vow of celibacy? You didn’t tell her that he was off-limits when you had the chance. This is the consequence that we all have to live with.”

“Oh my god.” The room is spiraling around you. You feel nauseous; you feel ice cold. He wasn’t supposed to leave with her. He wasn’t supposed to…

“Uh, are you okay?” Heather asks.

“No,” you choke out. Aegon and Kimmie! Aegon and Kimmie!!! “I have to get out of here.”

“Well you can’t drive home like this—”

“I know. I’ll be back.” You push by her, snatch your parka off the coatrack, dive out into the starless, frigid night.

There’s no one in the parking lot, no one on the street. You make a hard left and walk with no particular plan down towards the harbor, your shaking hands jammed into your parka pockets, tears streaming down your face. The wind whips at you, howling and old, older than the creaking wooden planks of the dock beneath your boots, older than all of humanity. You pass bobbing sailboats and fishing vessels until you come to the end of the pier, sit there cross-legged and sobbing, gaze out through blurred vision over the Gastineau Channel. It separates mainland Juneau from Douglas Island, which began—like so much of Alaska did—as a gold mining settlement. You remember the sparkling gold eyeshadow that you applied in your bedroom just a few hours ago. You don’t feel very valuable at the moment. You feel unworthy. You feel alone.

It is silent except for the waves and the wind. It is very dark; the sky is clouded, and the illuminations of Ursa Minor and the streetlights are faraway. When you hear the footsteps behind you on the pier, your stomach drops; they’re too heavy to be Heather’s or Joyce’s. But when you twist around, it is Trent that you see in the dim, shadowy light.

“Hi,” he says, raising a hand. “Heather told me that you ran away.”

“Hi. I guess I did.”

He hesitates, flips his hair, drops down beside you at the edge of the pier. “You okay?”

You sigh heavily and swipe the tears from your cheeks. “Yeah. I’m just having a really bad day.” Like an absurdly, phenomenally, exponentially bad day.

“I know what that’s like.”

I doubt it, Trent. I really do.

You sit there together in the quiet, watching the sparce light flick off the crests of waves, staring at the bright dots of houses and shops across the channel on Douglas Island. Trent puts his arm around you. You let him, and—partially for the warmth, partially for the healing sensation of being desired, being cared for—lean your head against his chest.

After a very long time, you ask dully: “What do you like about working on a salmon boat?” It’s almost enough to make you wince. It’s the kind of pedestrian, unimaginative question that Aegon would make fun of. But Trent seems to consider it carefully.

“I like being outside,” he says. “I like the fresh air, I like the scenery. And I like how working with my hands helps me get all my frustrations out. I’m a better person when I stay busy. Commercial fishing can be intense sometimes, don’t get me wrong, that’s why I’m trying to get into the Forest Service. But I like it enough.”

“What do you like about me?”

You can hear the awe in his voice. “You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met. There was a time when I didn’t care so much about things like that. But now that I’m older and I’ve started to think about settling down…I feel like you’re the right kind of girl to do that with.”

You look up at him. He beams down at you like a full moon. And then he kisses you. He’s warm and strong and handsome in that obvious sort of way, but he’s something else, too: a little forceful, a little rough. Rough isn’t always a bad thing. But it’s like you can glimpse the silhouette of someone else beneath the surface, stars veiled by clouds, the shadows of fish under ice. He doesn’t feel anything like Aegon. He doesn’t patch the wound that Aegon left in you at all.

I wonder where Aegon is right now. I wonder what he’s doing to Kimmie.

When Trent breaks the kiss, you tell him that you have to go. He walks you back to Ursa Minor, his mighty palm on the small of your back.

~~~~~~~~~~

Heather drives you home, shellshocked. She asks, in reference to your confession about the kiss on the pier: “So…uh…do you want to talk about it, or…?”

“No. Definitely not.”

“Are you and Trent…like…a thing…?!”

“I don’t know. He seems to think we are.”

“Oh god, oh god, oh my god.” She rubs her forehead with one hand, her astonished eyes on the indigo-black horizon.

When you get home, your dad is already asleep. Your mom is straightening up the kitchen, wiping off countertops and scrubbing dishes in the bubble-filled sink. When you ask if she needs any help, she bursts out laughing.

“You’re the one who looks like she needs help,” she says. “What happened at the bar?”

You grimace down at the floor. “A lot of things. A lot of things.”

“Nothing you feel the desire to share?”

“No. Not quite yet. Can you drive me back to pick up my Jeep tomorrow?”

“Sure. Why don’t you take a nice bubble bath and then go to bed?” she suggests. “You’ll feel better in the morning. Do you need a snack? I could make pancakes. Or a grilled cheese.”

“That’s really kind of you, but no thanks, Mom.” I’ve completely lost my appetite.

You sulk in a bubble bath for a while, drag yourself out, brush your teeth and hair, try to rub the night off every part of you like smoothing rough edges off a gemstone. When you wander out into the hallway, your eyes catch on the door to the attic, a rectangular outline in the white ceiling. You are mostly sober by now, and yet still the idea that strikes you seems ludicrous at first. It’s a muddled, disjointed thought. It might be a dangerous one.

If I can learn more about Jesse, maybe I can understand Aegon too.

The box of journals is up there, you know, dusty and untouched and waiting. The rope hangs invitingly. You pull the door open and unfold the ladder. You climb up into the attic, turn on the single naked lightbulb, and push aside bins of holiday decorations and family heirlooms until you find a small, unlabeled cardboard box that’s sealed shut with duct table. You peel back the tape and peek inside the flaps. The box is filled with thin leather journals in a variety of colors: olive green, navy blue, rust red, earthen brown. You gather the cardboard box into your arms and carry it down to your bedroom, slipping it discretely beneath your bed to live beside childhood stuffed animals and mounds of old yearbooks. You close up the attic and then venture downstairs to get yourself some water to stave off a blossoming hangover.

Your mom is at the kitchen sink, washing a plate with a green Scotch-Brite sponge. “Did I hear you up in the attic, ladybug? Do you need help finding something?”

“No, I got it.”

“Okay.” But she studies you, puzzled. She’s going to worry unless you explain.

“I don’t want to make you talk about it,” you say. “And I don’t want to upset you. I’ll never mention it again. But just so you know, I want to read the journals. For my own reasons. That’s why I was up in the attic. I was bringing the box down to my bedroom.”

“Oh.” She freezes, stares out the window over the sink, goes vacant. “That makes sense. That’s fine.”

“Mom, are you alright?”

“Of course, ladybug.” There is nothing outside but night. You can see her reflection in the glass like a mirror. Long, slow seconds tick by. “It seemed like he was getting better,” your mom says, her voice faint and weightless, an untethered balloon, a feather on waves. “That’s the strange part. At the very end, it seemed like he was getting better.”

Then she lets the plate sink beneath the pearlescent bubbles, wipes her hands dry on a dishtowel, and goes to bed without another word.

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