"Where in the fuck were you?" Madi is standing in the living room with her hands on her hips as soon as Adaline walks back in the door at roughly seven am.
"Out," Adaline answers, walking past the shorter girl. Madi follows behind her, starting on her usual lecturing.
"Addy, you can't just leave in the middle of the night like that and not answer your phone!" Madi half shouts, probably afraid of waking up Dante and Maira.
"I was doing stuff, I didn't want to be rude," Adaline answers. It's not easy to deal with Madi when she gets overbearing like this. "I was just driving around with a friend, it's not like we were doing drugs or whatever."
Adaline reaches for the door knob to get into her room but Madi cuts her off, blocking the door with her body. Adaline crosses her arms and it's only then that she remembers that she's still wearing Clay's sweatshirt.
"You need to tell someone if you're going out with a friend at two in the fucking morning, Addy." Madi practically seethes.
"I'm a grown adult," Adaline shoots back. "I can hang out with my friends if I want to, you are not my mother."
Madi has always done this, always been overbearing of everyone but especially Adaline. After the time she disappeared in senior year. It's not like she was kidnapped or anything, but she was gone for at least three weeks, Madi, Maira, and Dante were the only ones who cared enough to look for her. That was when her mental illness was really bad, bad to the point where she would black out for what felt like seconds but was actually days or weeks or, on the rare occasion, months.
Like Theodore Finch and the asleep, from that one book she read and Dante forced her to watch the netflix adaptation of. It hasn't happened it upwards of a year but Adaline supposed Madi's still scared of what would happen if she did black out again, if she did disappear and come back like nothing happened, waking back up in her room as if she just spaced out for a few minutes.
But the thing about it is she didn't. She didn't black out and she didn't disappear for three weeks, she was just out with Clay. There shouldn't be a punishment for hanging out with her friend, even if it was a little irresponsible not to tell anyone. It's not like she thought anyone would be up when she got back. It's seven am on a saturday, nobody in the apartment has work this early. Why is Madi up this early?
"Well it's not like I'm expecting you to go out in the middle of the night! Of course I'd be worried!" Madi huffs. "It's not like you have any other friends, why would that be the first thing that comes to mind?"
"What the hell is your problem today?" Adaline feels tears start to prick her eyes. Having no other friends has never affected her like this before, why is it that suddenly when Madi is upset with her that it hurts so much?
There's silence. Madi and Adaline look at each other, and over the few seconds that no words are shared Madi's expression softens, she moves out of the way of the door and lets Adaline through. She then storms off, but not to her and Dante's room, but out the door. Adaline watches her leave with a sort of dazed confusion at what all just went down.
Madi's not usually that upset, Adaline thinks as she enters the darkness of her room. There's no way she'll be able to fall asleep, so she might as well use this time to catch up on the homework she was supposed to do days ago, because Adaline Belle Brazier is perpetually behind.
She throws her lanyard on the bed and sits down at her desk, looking down at the papers she has to do and letting out a sigh. It's going to be a long day.
The girl still can't wrap her head around the events of tonight. Driving with Clay, arguing with Madi. Part of her feels like it should be the other way around. She shouldn't be fighting with Madi, she hasn't fought with Madi in ages. Maira and Dante, sure, but Madi? Never Madi. It'd be more likely, more reasonable for her to fight with Clay like that then it would be to ever fight with Madi.
Her phone buzzes, it's a tweet from one of Clay's twitters. His private one. She clicks on it and there it is, a picture of her. It's her staring out the window on their drive back, when he was taking the long way through a neighborhood and driving slowly. She recognizes it from the background, she was in the middle of singing a song quietly under her breath. The picture is lopsided, probably from him taking it with one hand while still driving. She didn't even realize he took it.
Adaline makes the mistake of clicking open the replies and seeing all the responses. Some people are asking who she is, others are awwing at how cute it is for him to be taking a picture of her in the car, and others are making unneeded comments about her, whether it be about her boobs (which they can't even see due to the hoodies she's wearing) or just generally hating on her for using Clay for clout. She closes the app, and when she comes back ten minutes later after thinking of some witty reply, the tweet has been deleted.
Adaline appreciates the sentiment. Maybe her twitter might blow up with loads of questions about it, but hey. It's not that she hasn't been dealing with that since she started talking to Clay online.
She chooses to focus on her schoolwork. That's what she moved to Orlando to do, not to become a streamer or befriend one of the biggest minecraft youtubers in current time, or fight with her best friend. School. Focus on school. Focus on school and maybe one day you will get out of this godforsaken state, that's what she always tells herself.
When she leaves, will she be leaving Clay behind? He's begun to mean so much to her that it would be weird to be in a different timezone if that was where she ended up. It would be weird to know that she can't see him, even if, currently, she's only ever seen him once.
Their relationship-friendship-means a lot more to her than she previously thought, Adaline realizes. She knows that because there's nobody else she doesn't think about leaving anyone else behind in Florida except for him. Not her mother, or her father and his weird girlfriend, not her brother or her sister. Just the boy she met online a few weeks ago and decided to stick around. Adaline remembers laying in bed that night before she said she wanted to go on love or host thinking that she wasn't going to stay in contact with whoever won the love or host and yet here she is. She talks to Wilbur almost daily and she fucking stargazed with Clay last night.
That sounds like a date, Adaline thinks. And that simply does not sit right with her at all, whatsoever. Adaline shoots him a text (Knowing he probably passed out minutes after getting home) confirming that whatever happened on that drive was not a date. Though, she doubts that he thinks of it like that. She doesn't think of it like that.
Do I think of it like that? Adaline can't help but think, making her shake her head and reread the entire (finished) homework she just did. It's not long before there's a knock on her bedroom door and none other than Maira walks in. What time is it? Adaline checks her phone to see both a text from Clay confirming that it was not, in fact, a date and that it's nine am. Of course Maira is awake.
"Hey. Do you know where Madi is?" Maira asks, leaning in the doorway. Any other time, she definitely would.
"She stormed out this morning." Adaline swerves around in her office depot chair that can even roll because of the carpet. "She was really upset. Do you know why?"
"Uh..." Maira glances over her shoulder, very obviously feeling guilty, before stepping in the room and closing the door. This causes Adaline to raise an eyebrow. Maira doesn't normally go into her room to talk to her, not without everyone else around. "Maira and Dante got into a really big fight at like three in the morning? I don't know about what, I can't remember. But, they were screaming at each other and Madi came in here, but you weren't in here so she started freaking out."
"Oh."
Madi needed her. It wasn't only about worry, it was about her best friend not being there. A feeling of guilt creeps up in her stomach, and then a twisting feeling of worry. The same feeling she gets when she has nightmares, except this is time it's real and it's that she doesn't have a clue where Madi is.
"You call her, I'm going to go out and look for her, I'm sure she couldn't have gotten far." Adaline stands back up. She knows Madi is safe, or at least she's pretty sure she knows Madi is safe, knowing she would have roundhouse kicked whoever tried to hurt her in the face with those three years of martial arts classes.
She's out the door as soon as Maira tells her that she took the bus down to her favorite store, a little cornershop about 45 minutes by bus from their apartment. So Adaline does exactly what Madi did, she boards the bus and in 45 minutes (53, technically but details are unimportant) she's walking up to the cute little shop that Madi has loved since they got to Orlando.
"Hey," she says. Madi is sitting on the curb outside.
"Hi," Madi replies, making a move to stand up and being slightly surprised when Adaline sits down next to her.
"I'm sorry I left without telling anyone," Adaline says. She bites the inside of her cheek. It's not enough. She should have been there. Does Madi hate her now? "I'm sorry I didn't pick up my phone, I should have been there for you."
"Maira told you?" Madi has a hint of a defeated tone in her voice.
"She told me that you and Dante got into a fight, she didn't tell me about what." The two of them watch as a car goes by, this road isn't a very busy one, especially not at almost ten in the morning.
"They want to move out." Madi blurts. "And they want me to go with them, but I want to stay here until you finish school. And they were upset because they said it was really important to them, and then I said you and Maira are really important to me, and I know for a fact that Maira wouldn't let you be alone here and I don't want to leave Maira either."
"I'm sorry Mads..." Adaline puts one arm around Madi and brings her closer. "If you want to go and stay with Dante you shouldn't let Maira and me hold you back.
"That's the thing though, I don't want to go either way. If we're leaving, we're all leaving together. It's always been me, you and Maira. Even before Dante. And I love them to death, Addy, I really do. But you and Maira mean so much to me." Madi admits, laying her head on Adalines shoulder. "We've had this plan for so long, we're all going to stay here and when you finish school we'll move up north. That's been the plan for as long as I can remember."
"I know." Adaline does her best to listen. Madi has never wanted advice, ever since middle school she's gotten things done her own way. She's always figured it out. It's always something Adaline has admired about her best friend.
They stay that way for a while. Madi rants and Adaline listens. This was her last night, Adaline realises. She thinks about her breaking down all of her issues to Clay the night before and going on that drive with him and how much it helped her. So when Madi pauses;
"You wanna go bus hopping? Just to see where we end up? I know there's not really much I can do, or much you want me to do, but I want to take your mind off of it. Even for a little." Adaline offers. Madi looks at her, smiles, and nods.
Words: 2138
A/N: Subplots my beloved. I decided I wanted to flesh out Madi, Maira and Dante so they're getting their own little storyline going alongside Clay and Adalines.