CHAPTER SEVENTEEN | DANI ARDOR
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My life in Alaska has turned into a vignette of embarrassing moments.
After spending most of my appointment with Doctor Albott going back and forth about separating Jake from Him, arguing with her that no, I don't get to do it, but yes, I should do it for the sake of my mental health, I was convinced my day couldn't possibly get any worse. Then, as soon as I exit the elevator and start heading towards the front door, knowing Betty is waiting for me in the parking lot, the steel sky explodes into pouring rain.
I stop in front of the door, frowning.
I'm not carrying an umbrella and I'm not wearing a coat with a hood, either, after neglecting to check the weather forecast for the day simply because I had bigger, better, and more important concerns when I first left the house.
Walking in the rain is far from being the worst thing that can happen to me—have I not gone through much, much worse?—but, with my propensity to falling ill and with college's demands increasing by the day, I know I can't afford to miss out on precious time. It's not a healthy mindset by any means and I'm glad I still have the presence of mind to be aware of that, but the thought of falling behind all my classmates scorches my brain.
With a sigh, I send Betty a quick text to let her know I'll be stuck inside the building unless she has an umbrella in the car. She replies as fast as I texted her originally, complete with an emoji with its tongue sticking out, and gently lets me know that she's as locked in her car as I am in here. One of us has to leave the safety, dryness, and warmth of their hiding place to meet up with the other, and I'm suspecting it has to be me. There's no valid reason for her to get out of her car to come pick me up from across the parking lot just to return there, and it's much easier for me to go to her, but still.
Next to me, Sidney sits down, patient as ever, while she waits for me to make a decision. I don't want her to get wet—humidity isn't good for my perfect angel of a puppy—and I'd hate to ruin Betty's car seats, not to mention the lingering effects of wet dog smell, but it's a sacrifice we'll all have to make.
"Remind me to get you a raincoat," I tell her. She looks up at me, eyes open wide, and wags her tail in agreement. "This is Alaska, after all. Extreme weather. You know the drill, right?"
She probably doesn't, but I can't blame her for being sheltered. I allow myself to bask in the cuteness of Miss Sidney Collier-Prescott wearing a raincoat for a few moments, then I brace myself to face the storm outside. It won't be the last one I'll have to handle and it's not that long of a walk from the front door to Betty's car, which is easily distinguishable from the other parked vehicles by itself thanks to its light-blue coloring.
I've never been shot—thankfully—but the raindrops pelt my back as hard as bullets. I lower my head so I won't be hit square in the face, walking as fast as I can without risking slipping and falling, and Sidney doesn't run into any issues as she keeps up with my pace. She likes water and playing in puddles, but a rainstorm is far from her comfort zone, and I know her instinct is telling her to run past me and towards safety.
Betty's car is unlocked when we get to it and I open the back door so Sidney can hop inside, mentally cursing myself for all my failures from earlier. If I had checked the forecast, I'd know about the rain, and I would have brought towels to protect the car seats, especially when Sidney shakes away the water from her fur and soaks Betty's sleeve.
"I'm so sorry," I blabber, as I slide to the passenger seat. Betty hums in response. "I didn't know it was supposed to rain today. I'll pay for clean up if—"
"Those seats have seen much worse," she retorts. "Don't worry about it."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah." She twirls the end of her braid around her index finger, using her free hand to type on her phone. "Sidney's not that big." I look back at Sid, who has finally found a comfortable position to lie down in, and even crosses her front legs over the seat like she's the queen of Juneau—which, to be fair, she sort of is. "By the way, Odie's asking if we want to go out somewhere. I told her I still had to wait until you came back to give her an answer."
"Is Callum tagging along?"
She gags, tongue sticking out of her mouth. "No. At least, I don't think he is. She'd tell me if he were." She eyes me carefully from the corner of her eye, then puts the phone away so she can start the car. The windshield wipers immediately jump into motion, attempting to clear the path ahead of us. "She's worried about you."
I knit my brows together, buckling up my seat belt. "Why?"
Betty exhales through her mouth and looks up at the rear-view mirror as she starts rotating the steering wheel for the maneuver. "Look, don't kill me, okay? I'm just the messenger." Her word choice stings particularly harder today, but I don't waste my breath. It's one of those things I can't be mad at Betty for. "She told me about what you said to her the day of that meeting, about thinking the two of you weren't friends because you think she's a bit intimidating, and all that." I replay the scenes from that day in my memory, but I can't remember having ever used the word intimidating. It's easy to presume that thanks to everything else I said, though, and I suppose Odette really is intimidating. "She's been going back and forth between thinking she's been a lousy friend and thinking you were just having a bad day. To be honest, I didn't even know you guys had talked about that before I got there, so she caught me a bit off-guard, but she knows I'm closer to you than she is, and kindly asked me to ask you if you're mad at her. You know me, I don't turn down a chance to shit on Callum and blame it all on him, but I felt like I owed you both to at least get to the bottom of it."
After everything Doctor Albott and I talked about during today's therapy session, this is the last topic of conversation I want to get involved in, but I'd feel terrible if I refuse to talk about it with poor Betty, who has done nothing wrong. Walking out on Odette—just her, not Callum, who I'm still on the fence about—for Betty's sake was a choice I had to make and it felt like the right one at the time, but I'm starting to think there were no correct decisions.
I try to explain all of this to Betty the best I can, despite knowing my judgment is still clouded by the appointment, my nightmares, and my latest breakthroughs. I think I come off as coherent and endearing enough, as unbiased as I can be to the best of my ability, and I make sure to emphasize the fact that no, I'm not mad at Odette, and don't necessarily think she's intimidating. She's harder to get close to than Betty, which I've known since the moment we first met, but Callum never gave us an opportunity to clear the air. With me being the dirty coward that I am, I've spent nearly two weeks without approaching the subject, and things between the two of us have remained in a state of polite awkwardness.
"I guess part of it was also because I was having a bad day, but I don't know what it feels like to not be having a bad day, either," I tell Betty. The rain doesn't show any signs of wanting to stop anytime soon, which is making her drive much slower than usual—as in, not as a maniac on a sugar high—and raising her frustration over being stuck in traffic. "Of course I want to be friends with her, but we've never had one-on-one interactions besides that one conversation, and up until then I was under the impression she tolerated me for the sake of convenience. I didn't want her to feel like . . . like I was trying to steal you from her, or anything of the sort. I was scared I was coming between the two of you; you know, new girl in town, arrives with all her baggage, so many people are talking about her . . ." I shake my head, staring out of my window, though I can hardly see a thing. "It sounds super self-centered, I know that, but for a while I was the shiny new attraction, throwing everyone's lives out of balance, off their axis, and I didn't want this to be yet another thing I'd ruined."
Betty exhales through her mouth as the light ahead of us finally turns green. We might be arriving home much later than expected, but at least we'll be getting there in one piece . . . I hope. "Yeah. I get it."
"You do?"
"Sure. That's kind of what I expected it to be, and it's what I told Odette. I told her it couldn't be personal considering the two of you barely know each other and she hadn't done anything blatantly offensive to justify you not liking her, but that it's also normal for you to be a bit guarded. You know, after everything that happened back home."
I don't find the courage to look at her, knowing her TRUE CRIME JUNKIE keychain is right in sight. I don't know how she gets me so well without me having to elaborate, but she does, and I can't blame it all on her hobbies and interests.
A chill runs down my spine. It's never a good idea to have someone you barely know be able to decipher you this well. It's never a good thing when someone who was a stranger to you not that long ago can make these assumptions about you and your personal life and be correct, especially with all the prior knowledge they have about what happened to you.
Betty is small, and I don't think she's capable of heinous things, but I also trusted Jake at some point in my life. I'm not sure I have it in me to go through such an event again, even if it's not nearly as devastating; losing all my friends the way I did was the worst thing to have ever happened to me, but one of them was lost to betrayal. Somewhere along the way, something shifted, and I knew there was no going back. Even if he regretted it, even if he stopped, it wouldn't have changed anything.
The hollowness in my chest is particularly sickening today. Even when everything around me is uncertain, I can always count on my brain to be unable to stop remembering, to stop thinking about hypothetical scenarios. It does me no good to keep replaying that night, over and over again, wondering what I could have done differently, wondering how to shift the blame. When I dragged them all to the campsite, I damned them. That's not Jake's fault. That's not even His fault, either.
"I'll tell Odette you're not in the mood to go out," Betty eventually says, when the silence is no longer comforting. "She'll understand."
"I'm sorry," I mutter, flicking off a piece of chipped nail polish. "It feels a bit too early."
"No, of course. It's mid-September, the days get shorter and darker, the crime rates in Juneau are abysmal . . . I get it. I really do." She turns the car to our street, being mindful enough to stop closer to my front door than to hers. The sharp sting of guilt hits me square in the chest. When I finally gather enough courage to look at her, I find her already staring at me, but I don't find any signs of judgment in her eyes. "I know there aren't many places where you feel safe, if there are any at all, really. I don't want to act like I completely understand what you're going through, and I know we haven't known each other for that long, so you have absolutely no reason to trust me or listen to anything I say, but I promise you this is not all there is. You went through something terrible, but that's not all that's going to happen to you; there will be so many more good things, more than bad ones, even when you think all your days will be terrible. Your life didn't end that night, and you have to keep holding on to brighter days. You just need to believe they will come, as corny as it sounds. No matter what happens, you'll always have people on your corner, rooting for you."
After the days I've had, after the important conversations I've been dreading to have with her, with Doctor Albott, with my parents, I have no strength left in me to make any comments about what she just said. I appreciate the sentiment, I do, and normally I'd be reaching out for a hug to thank her for believing in me even on days when I don't believe in myself, but I can't do it.
I stare right ahead at Xavier's front door, thinking about all those Final Girls. I wonder if there's a Betty in their lives to tell them these things, if there's a Doctor Albott who's willing to support them unconditionally and help them ground themselves back in reality.
The unfortunate truth is no, most of them don't. Even those who get married and have families, they still live with their ghosts and their fears, looking over their shoulder at every chance they get. Even those who appear to have moved on, those who held on to brighter days with every ounce of strength left in them—they'll never get over it. Even if life didn't end for them when they were the last ones left standing, any semblance or promises of normalcy were thrown out of the window.
Life didn't end for me that night. Not exactly. My life did.
This isn't my life. Not the one I want.
When I'm standing outside the door, about to knock, and Betty leaves, I make the mistake of looking back. He stares right back, covered in blood—mine, His, Emma's, Zach's.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," Jake tells me.
"I live with them," I reply.
The door opens.
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