(no subject)
"In our top stories, Neptune is still reeling this morning from a night of horror that saw the deaths of three of its own."
It's all over the television in the Neptune Grand lobby and on every radio station the cab driver flips to, once she uses the phone at the reception desk to call one that'll take her home.
"Movie star Aaron Echolls, recently acquitted in the 2003 murder of sixteen-year-old Lilly Kane, was found dead in his room at the Neptune Grand Hotel with two gunshot wounds to the back of the head. Meanwhile, investigation is pending into the apparent suicide of Neptune High School student Cassidy Casablancas, age seventeen, who fell to his death from the roof of the Neptune Grand at approximately twelve-thirty AM..."
The weird part is, the first thing that crosses her mind when she hears it is a calm, So that's why Veronica didn't tell me where he went.
Then her composure snaps, and, thankfully, the cabbie doesn't say anything when she leans over her knees and starts sobbing so hard that it almost makes her dry-heave.
"...as well as an explosion that destroyed Balboa County commissioner Woody Goodman's private jet in the skies above the hotel, killing all aboard. Goodman, detained by the authorities in Nevada, was returning to Neptune to face allegations of child molestation."
It stays that way until she stumbles out onto the sidewalk in front of 9715 Colony Place and has her twenty dollars waved away with a quiet, "Don't worry about it, kid. You go get some rest."
When she opens the door, her mom and dad are sitting on the couch, their hands interlocked around one another and bleached white by stress. She doesn't have time to speak before they're pulling her into a hug; distantly, after the murmurs of how worried they were and how glad they are that Cindy's home safe after everything they heard on the news, she hears Natalie Mackenzie gently ask in a way where it's not a question at all, "Cassidy Casablancas was that boy you were dating, wasn't he."
"We now go live outside the Neptune Grand with reporter Alan Kent."
All she can do is nod and pull her mom closer as she begins crying again.
"Alan?"
"No wonder he threw himself off a roof," Ryan says to her after dinner, in typical bratty Ryan fashion, "if he was dating you."
It hits like a blow to the face; she sits in shocked, trembling rage before she leaps out of her chair and chases him to his room, screaming elaborate threats of exactly what she's going to do when she gets ahold of him. The door slams, the lock clicks, and she's left to lean against the wall of the hallway, head bowed, red and brown hair swinging in her eyes.
Afterwards, her father deals out stern words to them both. She doesn't listen.
When it's time for bed, she locks her bedroom door overnight for the first time since they moved here.
She sleeps curled up in a tiny ball, quilt and sheets drawn tight around her like a shield.
She doesn't dream; she just wonders, in an endlessly cycling pattern, why -- if Cassidy killed so many other people without remorse, if he had a gun right there in his hand and she had no way of getting out --
Why he thought she was worth being spared.
There are phone calls over the next few days, endless, lengthy phone calls from people she doesn't want to talk to and hangs up on more often than not.
Some are sympathetic check-ups to see how she's doing. A lot of them are requests for interviews with newspapers, TV, and the sheriff's office alike, once word gets around that she was one of the last people to see Cassidy alive. (She wants to answer their questions regarding his disposition with a snappish sure, he was a quiet, sweet guy up until he robbed me and stripped me naked at gunpoint. Instead, she rips the cord out of the phone jack.) One is from Mrs. Sinclair; she lets that one go to the answering machine once she reads the caller ID.
Another is a clipped exchange with Kendall Casablancas informing her that Cassidy's funeral will happen the following day. She digs out a nice set of black clothes, slips on the black sandals left over from alterna-prom, and is turning the ignition of her Beetle when she suddenly shoves open the door and throws up on the driveway.
It was a small and somber service, they tell her later. Hardly anybody showed up.
One of the first purchases with her sparse graduation money is a packet of bleach and another packet of hair dye. While her brother's finishing up his last day of school and her mom and dad are at work, Mac erases the red streaks weaving through her hair and re-colors them a bright, electric green.
When she opens her closet to stash the leftover dye in a crate she keeps on the top shelf, she finds herself staring into Milliways.
After a few minutes, she closes it without walking through.
She spent her first night after graduation with Lilly Kane. Mac knows damn well that the dead can walk alongside the living in that bar.
And she doesn't jump at shadows, because she saw Cassidy clearly when he moved toward her.
And she doesn't feel exposed, because most of her clothes are baggy or long-sleeved anyway.
And she doesn't hesitate when the Neptune Grand calls to say that they found her stuff in the bottom of a laundry chute. It's her property, not theirs.
But she pauses every time she opens a calendar so she can take a minute to convert fall, winter, spring, and summer from another format: a bus crash; a first meeting; a break-up; a hotel room.
It's all over the television in the Neptune Grand lobby and on every radio station the cab driver flips to, once she uses the phone at the reception desk to call one that'll take her home.
"Movie star Aaron Echolls, recently acquitted in the 2003 murder of sixteen-year-old Lilly Kane, was found dead in his room at the Neptune Grand Hotel with two gunshot wounds to the back of the head. Meanwhile, investigation is pending into the apparent suicide of Neptune High School student Cassidy Casablancas, age seventeen, who fell to his death from the roof of the Neptune Grand at approximately twelve-thirty AM..."
The weird part is, the first thing that crosses her mind when she hears it is a calm, So that's why Veronica didn't tell me where he went.
Then her composure snaps, and, thankfully, the cabbie doesn't say anything when she leans over her knees and starts sobbing so hard that it almost makes her dry-heave.
"...as well as an explosion that destroyed Balboa County commissioner Woody Goodman's private jet in the skies above the hotel, killing all aboard. Goodman, detained by the authorities in Nevada, was returning to Neptune to face allegations of child molestation."
It stays that way until she stumbles out onto the sidewalk in front of 9715 Colony Place and has her twenty dollars waved away with a quiet, "Don't worry about it, kid. You go get some rest."
When she opens the door, her mom and dad are sitting on the couch, their hands interlocked around one another and bleached white by stress. She doesn't have time to speak before they're pulling her into a hug; distantly, after the murmurs of how worried they were and how glad they are that Cindy's home safe after everything they heard on the news, she hears Natalie Mackenzie gently ask in a way where it's not a question at all, "Cassidy Casablancas was that boy you were dating, wasn't he."
"We now go live outside the Neptune Grand with reporter Alan Kent."
All she can do is nod and pull her mom closer as she begins crying again.
"Alan?"
"No wonder he threw himself off a roof," Ryan says to her after dinner, in typical bratty Ryan fashion, "if he was dating you."
It hits like a blow to the face; she sits in shocked, trembling rage before she leaps out of her chair and chases him to his room, screaming elaborate threats of exactly what she's going to do when she gets ahold of him. The door slams, the lock clicks, and she's left to lean against the wall of the hallway, head bowed, red and brown hair swinging in her eyes.
Afterwards, her father deals out stern words to them both. She doesn't listen.
When it's time for bed, she locks her bedroom door overnight for the first time since they moved here.
She sleeps curled up in a tiny ball, quilt and sheets drawn tight around her like a shield.
She doesn't dream; she just wonders, in an endlessly cycling pattern, why -- if Cassidy killed so many other people without remorse, if he had a gun right there in his hand and she had no way of getting out --
Why he thought she was worth being spared.
There are phone calls over the next few days, endless, lengthy phone calls from people she doesn't want to talk to and hangs up on more often than not.
Some are sympathetic check-ups to see how she's doing. A lot of them are requests for interviews with newspapers, TV, and the sheriff's office alike, once word gets around that she was one of the last people to see Cassidy alive. (She wants to answer their questions regarding his disposition with a snappish sure, he was a quiet, sweet guy up until he robbed me and stripped me naked at gunpoint. Instead, she rips the cord out of the phone jack.) One is from Mrs. Sinclair; she lets that one go to the answering machine once she reads the caller ID.
Another is a clipped exchange with Kendall Casablancas informing her that Cassidy's funeral will happen the following day. She digs out a nice set of black clothes, slips on the black sandals left over from alterna-prom, and is turning the ignition of her Beetle when she suddenly shoves open the door and throws up on the driveway.
It was a small and somber service, they tell her later. Hardly anybody showed up.
One of the first purchases with her sparse graduation money is a packet of bleach and another packet of hair dye. While her brother's finishing up his last day of school and her mom and dad are at work, Mac erases the red streaks weaving through her hair and re-colors them a bright, electric green.
When she opens her closet to stash the leftover dye in a crate she keeps on the top shelf, she finds herself staring into Milliways.
After a few minutes, she closes it without walking through.
She spent her first night after graduation with Lilly Kane. Mac knows damn well that the dead can walk alongside the living in that bar.
And she doesn't jump at shadows, because she saw Cassidy clearly when he moved toward her.
And she doesn't feel exposed, because most of her clothes are baggy or long-sleeved anyway.
And she doesn't hesitate when the Neptune Grand calls to say that they found her stuff in the bottom of a laundry chute. It's her property, not theirs.
But she pauses every time she opens a calendar so she can take a minute to convert fall, winter, spring, and summer from another format: a bus crash; a first meeting; a break-up; a hotel room.