#consciously Efforteted to cut the introspection so it wldn't be long and Yet .

[lucefrs]

WHAT TIME IS IT? SUMMER TIME! The polaroids are stuffed between the pages of her childhood diary, which she’ll take back to America as fodder for her eventual tell-all she’s planned with Faith over a bottle of red wine sometime or when the apocalypse hits (she can’t remember which date they decided on). The pictures feel more like a revisited past. 

“We have summer students, your room isn't a storage facility. You're very lucky we didn't take these boxes straight to the dumpster.”

When Luce got back to Georgetown, she wasn’t able to enter her dorm room. She went to the porter’s office and was given her belongings, which consisted of five boxes worth of stuff, made heavy by her synths, pedals and guitar. She took her mail and promised that she’d come back for the boxes later. The porter was pissed off that she couldn’t take it now and Luce felt like a berated child. In her stack of mail she found out her credit rating had dropped to an R-2, with a notice of delinquency. She figured it was similar to when she got a warning for torrenting Game of Thrones, but never actually got fined.

“I was on Pluto. I wrote you a letter, but it was too cringy to send. Have you heard of The Magnetic Zeros? Let's listen to them for a bit.”

He always lets her talk first. Even after months of silence. Luce traipses around his high rise apartment and touches everything in sight ; the frames of pictures and the thin film of dust that has settled on the coffee table. Then she says sorry for an absence that wasn't her fault because she needs the money and feels immediately icky for acknowledging that her apology has a motive behind it. She can sense his disappointment radiating like underwater sonar pulses, dulled by the glass of whiskey empty on the side table. A year's tuition down the drain. It's not about the money. Need to go home. It's about the money. He kisses her cheek instead of her neck and writes her a cheque. Luce booked her flight that night.

“Oh Luce. My baby.”

Is what her Pa said over and over again, scooped in his arms at arrivals. She was already crying walking towards them, a visceral happiness so intense that the only other feeling it can be compared to is grief. Luce spends the first week as a tourist, waking up early and watching her parents do menial tasks: like making coffee and checking the weather report on their phones. She takes long walks, and when she doesn't, she waits for her parents to come home like a puppy eagerly waiting to hear the clink of an unlocked door. Family gatherings are planned for the weekends and she goes out with her parents whenever they do. In this time she drinks a lot of beer and no Four Lokos.

"No one uses Facebook anymore Lucie, relationship statuses are obsolete. Would you not have reached out if you knew?"

Weeks pass and waiting for her parents gets tiring. She walks around the house in her pyjama shirt and an old acoustic guitar with a fraying strap hanging across her. She drinks juice from the carton and eats cereal by the handful. She Facetime's everyone on her contact list and it's still not enough to bridge the space from 12-9. On a particularly boring Tuesday afternoon she messages her ex on Facebook and asks if he'd like to catch up and get drinks. He brings his girlfriend and their Yorkshire Terrier, Bozo. Like the clown. He says what he says in reply to a casual jest, it was her fault for saying it. "Always too cool too make it official." His girlfriend's several paces behind picking up Bozo's poop. When she doesn’t have an immediate reply to his retort back, he takes the few seconds of silence to his question as an answer, and his lips curl into a wry smirk. She looks away and takes a drag of her cigarette like she's a girl in a black and white French film.

"...Same old Lucie."

Jack calls her Lucie because he was there when the nickname was created and think it's degrading to call herself that. He thinks he's doing her an act of kindness when he calls her Lucie and thinks he's special for being allowed to do so. She goes home after the split pitcher is finished.

“Anything it is, anything. You can tell me.”

She spends her nights with her mam hanging upside down from the couch. This time though she's curled up like a cat in her lap, and mam's combing through her tangles with her fingers. Through trembling laughter she tries to explain, but it's a high roll on a game of Monopoly where she skips straight to the exact square instead of moving through them. Tells her she just really needs a job, has no money is all. Her mam gets her a job at the grocery store. She catches up with every familiar face to the sound of beeps and closed cash registers. She notices how whole lives are spent in this town, not a place to retire or spend your youth, the whole package. She misses America.

“Wa-sah!”

Scott visits the weekend she goes home to the States. It’s good because their flights are both on Sunday night, but bad because it’s her last weekend here, so her house is teeming with family. She introduces him as her good friend, but it doesn’t ease her parent’s enthusiasm, intent on giving him a proper welcome to Ireland, which for the Frear family includes an early afternoon pub crawl. He takes it like a champ, keeps up with the banter and doesn’t shake her nephew off his leg when he attacks it as soon as they enter the front door. When the night dies down she excuses themselves, wooden stairs creaking under their weight, silent until they’re sat next to each other on the edge of her childhood bed. Luce takes a picture with her phone, so close-up that his face doesn’t fit in the frame. A fit of giggles erupt looking at it, thankfully it doesn’t wake the little ones camped in the living room. She wants to thank him, or apologize, tell him it’s not usually like this and it’s a lot for anyone, but instead when her laughter trickles away she thumbs the hem of his shirt, tugging it upwards. 

“Call us when you land, love you.”

Is what her parents say and is what Marlowe and Atty say too. They're going to be together forever. Scott is dropped off at his gate first, which she prefers because she wouldn’t have wanted him to see her weepy with her parents. She spends the last few weeks of summer in complete bliss, basking in the South Carolina sun. She sticks a magnet with a naked leprechaun on their fridge and tucks a bottle of Irish whiskey away for them. Marlowe can’t drink right now, and Atty doesn’t really drink to begin with, but the bottle is pretty and her folks wouldn’t let her go home without it. She spends her days listening to Marlowe play, streaming on Twitch with Atty and buying baby clothes whenever she goes shopping because they're significantly cheaper than adult clothes and can't resist the temptation. They eat a lot of Taco Bell. She burns through her month and a half wage at the grocery store in the span of days. Luce wonders how that's possible while listening to Greetings From Asbury Park, then gets up and puts the kettle on.