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beechersnope · 1 year

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is this anything

***

“You have a bug on your shorts,” Daniel informed Max, who immediately spun around with a start.

“Where?” she asked, sounding surprisingly panicked for someone who hadn’t reacted at all to the mosquito threat earlier.

“It’s—hang on, just hold still,” Daniel told her. He crouched down behind her, trying to figure out the best way to remove the gigantic, winged creature clinging to the back of her shorts without unintentionally feeling the girl up in the process.

Finally, Daniel steeled himself with a grimace and grabbed the thing between his thumb and forefinger. “Ugh, this is horrible,” he groaned. But he didn’t let it go even after standing back up. “Um, did you want a picture of it?” he asked Max as she turned back around. “For your thing?”

Max seemed surprised by the request. She nodded and quickly retrieved her phone from her pocket to take a quick photo so Daniel could finally let the horrible insect go.

“Thank you for not killing it,” Max said in a quiet voice as she tapped at her screen, her face illuminated in varying shades of light.

Daniel nodded. He didn’t reply that he felt like he had no choice in the matter, considering the sheer size of the thing. He was pretty sure an anvil would have been needed to actually squash it.

***

Daniel felt like a baby duckling as he trailed behind Max through every aisle, only giving input when it was specifically requested, and grabbing whatever personal items he thought he might need when Max happened to pass them by. It wasn’t until they hit the pharmacy section on the opposite side of the store that Daniel finally broke away to grab a bottle of aspirin, and it was at that point that he noticed something he’d definitely never seen in any pharmacies back home.

“Max,” he hissed as he poked his head around the next aisle where she was browsing travel sized hygiene items. It was the first time he’d spoken her name out loud, and it felt strange in his mouth.

She glanced up with a curious expression.

Daniel beckoned her over. “Come look,” he said.

It felt a bit juvenile to point out the shelves of vibrators sitting above the condoms and pregnancy tests that pharmacies normally carried, but it was so out of the ordinary that Daniel couldn’t help but show Max, hoping that she’d find it funny or shocking, at the very least.

Instead, Max just stared at the variety of sex toys with a bland expression. “Well, that’s interesting,” was all she had to say about it before going back to the cart in the aisle that she’d been browsing before Daniel’s interruption.

Daniel followed with his tail between his legs, kicking himself for even calling attention to something like that when every indication thus far had made it pretty clear that a vibrator sitting next to some cold medicine wouldn’t get so much of a giggle out of someone like Max.

***

Traffic had increased four-fold upon entering the city limits. There was a semi driving in front of them at a sedate pace after they moved over into the exit lane, and from the look on Max’s face, it seemed like a road rage meltdown was imminent.

Then the road merged with the interstate, and Max took the first available opportunity to switch lanes and dart around the semi that had been blocking their path. The stress seemed to melt away as they got further and further from civilization, until Max finally seemed to reach a state of equilibrium once more with Flint—and all its traffic—in their rearview mirror.

At some point, Daniel must have dozed off, but when he woke up with his forehead plastered uncomfortably against the window, the scenery outside hadn’t changed one bit. It was disorienting, not being able to gauge from anything in their surroundings just how far they’d traveled and how much further there still was to go.

“Are we almost there?” Daniel asked as he turned to Max.

She laughed. “You were asleep for twenty minutes,” she told him, “tops.” She then paused for a second before adding, “Also you snore. Just by the way.”

Daniel stared at her, completely gob smacked by her reply.

“It’s fine,” Max continued, seemingly oblivious to Daniel’s befuddlement. “I snore, too.” And that’s all there was to it.

***

“So what’s your problem now?” Daniel demanded.

Max didn’t so much as glance at him as she answered. “It’s a waste of space,” she replied in an infuriatingly calm tone.

“At least the land isn’t being developed,” Daniel replied, on the defensive for reasons he couldn’t articulate even to himself. “Surely it helps with like, the urban heat island thing.”

“It is developed,” Max snapped back, and this time there was audible heat in her voice. She looked over at Daniel for all of a millisecond, but it was enough to have him squirming in his seat, wishing he’d never started this argument in the first place. “But it only benefits a select group of people. And those people are always rich people.”

“My family golfs,” Daniel blurted out. He’d played caddy for his mom and his aunt more times than he could count. “And we aren’t rich.”

Max paused a moment, and then slowly turned to look at Daniel with a carefully cool expression. “Where is it that you live again?” she asked in a light tone that belied the gravity of the question.

With a sudden, horrifying flash of realization, it dawned on Daniel that evidently, Max did know where Temecula was after all.

***

Almost as soon as they were under the thick canopy of trees, it started to rain, but not in the thick, heavy droplets that Daniel associated with an especially wet winter. This was a light mist, hanging almost suspended in the air rather than falling to the forest floor. Daniel lifted his hands in wonder, stopping cold in the middle of the walkway as Max trudged on ahead. It was only when she reached the next turn that she whirled around to see where he’d gone.

“What are you doing?” Max demanded in a voice that made her annoyance with Daniel’s lack of forward progress all too obvious.

“This is so weird,” Daniel replied as he stared up at the treetops and spun around like a little kid in a patio mister.

“What?” Max asked. She folded her arms over her chest as she waited for an answer.

“This. The rain.”

“That’s what rain does.”

“Not anywhere I’ve ever been,” Daniel said in a low tone, more to himself than to Max, who clearly wouldn’t be satisfied by any response he could give. But when Daniel tore his eyes away from the fine glistening mist sparkling in the muted sunlight, he caught a brief glimpse of something in Max’s face that could have almost passed for a smile.

***

At the center of the room was a scale model of what Daniel assumed was the logging museum mentioned in the itinerary, positioned on what appeared to be a display stand fashioned from wooden stakes. It was clearly the focal point of the reception area, but Max didn’t look twice at it before heading into the next section of the visitor center: an exhibit hall branching off to the right that showcased even more taxidermy of Michigan’s native wildlife in a faux forest habitat.

She stopped just inside the very first portion, staring down in delight at a creature positioned low to the ground that Daniel didn’t recognize. It looked almost like a cross between a bear, a cat, and a fox.

“I didn’t know Michigan had any wolverines,” Max said excitedly.

Daniel stared down dumbly at the strange animal. “I didn’t know wolverines were even real,” he admitted.

Max whirled around to face him with an incredulous expression. “Are you serious?” she demanded.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

***

“What was New York like?” he asked as they emerged from the trees and turned onto the highway, braving the minefield of a potential conversation with Max for the sake of satiating his curiosity about her.

Max glanced over at him with an uncertain expression. “The state or the city?”

“The place where you grew up,” Daniel clarified.

Max was silent for a moment before replying. “Not too different from where we are now,” she said in a softer tone than Daniel had already been conditioned to expect.

He avoided meeting her gaze as he asked, “Did you like it there?” Instead, he stared out the window, watching fir tree and pine alike go past in a disorienting dark green blur.

But Daniel couldn’t help but turn his head to catch a glimpse of her face upon hearing the first wistful note in Max’s voice as she replied, “Yeah, I liked it very much.”

***

The convenience store wasn’t packed to the brim, and most of the customers were also not wearing masks, but Daniel still felt awkward as he wandered around the interior of the store before finally spotting the entrance to a beer cave with a sense of tangible relief. He rushed over immediately and grabbed two individual cans from the fridge next to the beer cave arch.

He hadn’t spotted Max while searching for the alcoholic beverages, and he wasn’t sure that she would have followed him inside anyway, but he still found himself glancing around nervously as he waited for the cashier to ring him up, trying to keep an eye out in case she had also made a trip to the bathroom or decided to come inside looking for him specifically.

Slipping outside and around the back of the building without being noticed was an even more nerve-wracking process. Daniel crouched down behind an air conditioning unit near one of the back doors and popped the tab on one of his beers. He downed both in quick succession, nearly puking in the process just from the sudden influx of liquid assaulting his already sensitive stomach. He forced himself to keep the beer down out of pure desperation, and once he was certain that he could stand up again without vomiting, he crushed his cans and tossed them into the nearby dumpster.

Daniel sighed as he leaned back against the wall. He closed his eyes, waiting patiently for the feeling he knew would come. Once he started to feel a little more like himself again, Daniel pushed off the wall and casually walked back to where Max had parked the truck.

Daniel climbed into the passenger seat and instantly came face to face with an unfamiliar sight: Max’s blue eyes widened in blatant concern.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked as he buckled himself in.

“Just car sickness,” Daniel replied lightly. He kept his eyes down. He’d never been a good liar.

***

It wasn’t much longer before the trees started to really crowd in on them, the canopies hanging lower and wilder, filtering the late afternoon sunlight through a lens of brilliant emerald green. Daniel forgot the lake for a moment. This, too, seemed worthy of every ounce of his attention, and he stared at the seemingly endless tunnel of green that lay ahead with his jaw slack, eyes wide. Even Max looked a bit wonderstruck.

For a while, Daniel contented himself with the magic of the forest, but then he started to get antsy, glancing down at his phone every minute or so to check their progress along the route to Whitefish Point.

There was a portion of the road that they were rapidly approaching on his map where the lake was practically right there, though the line of trees continued to prevent Daniel from seeing anything. Still, he wasn’t to be deterred. He quickly lowered the window and stuck his head out as far as he could without removing his seatbelt, sucking in as much air as possible through his nose as the wind forced him to close his eyes.

“What are you doing?” he heard Max call out to him, though it was barely audible.

Reluctantly, Daniel pulled his head back into the car. “I want to smell it,” he replied stubbornly before tugging at his seatbelt and leaning even further outside, though it was apparent now that there was nothing to smell, and his efforts had been in vain.

“It’s not the ocean,” Max scolded. “Get back in the truck.”

***

When he turned around again, Max was nowhere in sight. It took him a few seconds to locate her, but once he did, Daniel quickly rushed over past the extent of the grassy lawn surrounding the lighthouse, to where Max was standing in the sand in front of a roped off memorial adorned with a large, bronze maple leaf.

“’Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,’” Daniel read out loud. “Does that mean you can see the wreck from shore?”

“That’s what I was wondering,” Max replied without turning to face him. “Shall we go down and look?”

“Sure.”

Daniel carefully trudged through the sand and over the rocks directly behind Max, who seemed much surer footed despite her choice of footwear. They made their descent down to where the waves were lapping at a pebble-studded beach, but despite the amount of driftwood littering the shoreline, Daniel couldn’t see any signs of an actual shipwreck.

“Maybe it’s high tide,” Daniel finally suggested after a minute or two of walking along the beach without seeing much of anything. “Do they have tides here?”

He glanced back in time to catch Max’s quizzical expression as she replied, “No?”

***

For a while, Daniel was afraid he might fall asleep again, imperiling the odds of him falling fast asleep in his tent later that evening. He blinked aggressively, trying to keep his eyes open, but it wasn’t until they passed a sign that read ‘Betsy’s Bear Ranch’ that he was able to jolt himself back into alertness.

As Daniel craned his neck to make sure he hadn’t misread the sign, the significance of the taxidermy black bear at Tahquamenon Falls suddenly dawned on him. “Wait, does that mean there’ll be bears at our campsite?” he asked, turning toward Max with a panicked expression.

“Most likely,” she replied without taking her eyes off the road.

Daniel grimaced.

Max must have seen it out of the corner of her eye, because her mouth suddenly pulled into the barest hint of a smile. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you,” she told him.

“Yeah, great, thanks,” Daniel grumbled.

#no your eyes do not deceive you it is yet another girl max au #truth is i starting writing this in 2021 based on a road trip i went on #but then i had my breakup and entered a deep depression and lost all my friends #so i never finished it #but i have most of it outlined and i wrote like 30k of it at the time so #have some bits and pieces #oh also this was original fiction bc i didn't know these people existed in 2021 #but i feel like their personalities fit #my fic

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