white_oleander | Selkie Lake; Saturday [07/11].

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Selkie Lake; Saturday [07/11].

After realizing very quickly that any conversation with Sabine that day was going to lead to their apparent mutual mother issues, which neither of them wanted at all, Astrid knew she had no choice but to go and find somewhere to be where she could be alone with her own thoughts and her own truth and not risk spilling anything to anyone.

But with the power out, the pool was also out, and if she went to the beach, she'd probably start floating out to with the tides and just let them take her...

...maybe that wouldn't be such a bad idea, after all.

But, while she contempltated that idea, she chose instead the little lake by Selkie Cove, where she could float somewhere that wasn't completely dark, still feeling the sun on her face, and just exist, suspended in water, forgetting about everything else. The heat, the swimsuit she'd been living in for days now, the oppressive desire to suddenly open up and tell her truth, even though she herself was not even sure what that was.

This. This could be her truth right now, for the time being. Just her and the water and the sun and sweat on her skin and vast nothingness and the slow realization that she probably should have thought to bring sunscreen.

[[ absolutely open if anyone wants to deal with Little Miss Repressed over here and the fact that I am definitely taking advantage of getting this particular day off of work. Edit for CW for death and violence, because these kids got ISSUES. ]]

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Mae hadn't noticed today's weirdness yet.

She had, at least, finally changed her clothes. She was now wearing a pillow case as a dress.

"Hi Astrid! It is super fucking hot out here."

"...Shit."

She should have gone to the beach. She should have let the tide just carry her out into the middle of the ocean, where she'd either die of exposure or finally make it back to Iceland.

Astrid closed her eyes for a moment and tried to remember if there was anything they'd done to the Exxon Valdez to make it stop spilling oil, or if they just had to let it flow until it emptied all its toxicity out into the planet.

"Hey, Mae," she finally called back, tilting back her head from where she was floating on an inner tube with the hopes that maybe the heat was making her just hallucinate voices and Mae wasn't really there.

"So not hallucinating," she said, mostly to herself, before she added, a little louder, "The water helps..." Her face twisted slightly. "But not much."

Mae nodded, wading a little ways into the lake with her arms out like a tightrope walker. "Back home when it's this hot it usually means we're going to get a really big storm. Maybe big enough to flood the whole town." She looked up at the sky. "It's fun, but also pretty terrifying."

And in that moment, looking at the not-hullicination of Mae as she waded out into the water, Astrid felt a rush of something completely different than what she'd felt just a little while ago in her room with Sabine.

"I love hearing you talk about...anything," she said, like a revelation, because it almost felt like one, mostly in the fact that she was even saying it at all. And worry creased her brow for a moment over the fact that it had been said, but she pressed on. "We don't have floods back home, but there's the Santa Ana winds, which are said to make everyone crazy and sets the mountains on fire."

"That sounds spooky," Mae said with a smile. "And really cool. I didn't know you like it when I talk. I always figure I mostly just annoy people."

"I can see that," Astrid admitted, with a faint smile back, as she gave herself a little push so that she could drift a little closer, and then regretted it, because as she drifted closer, her mouth kept going and she wanted to push herself as far away in the opposite direction all of a sudden, where she could keep talking but maybe Mae wouldn't be able to hear her. "But you don't annoy me. The opposite, actually. I really missed you when I left. Talking to you. Your weird cat face that you don't even see."

She winced at that, digging around like a pig looking for truffles, only, instead of truffles, they were other truths that would maybe push those along. "Sabine's breathing when she slept. Norman sometimes brushing the tattoo I gave him with this thumb. Flowers that sing. I missed those things, too."

And feeling that the attempt wouldn't land, she added, "I'm sorry. I think there's a...thing today. I was hoping to escape it out here because Sabine and I kept trying to talk about our mothers."

"Ew," Mae said. "Mom's are gross. Even though mine's actually pretty cool."

She hadn't meant to say that.

"I really missed you, too. You actually like the weird shit I do. Like Gregg does only . . . different. Gregg's my friend back home. I think you missed getting to meet him. He rules, but like. In a boy way. And anyway, he only likes boys, so he's always going to find someone else and leave me out of it and I totally get what you mean about there being a thing now, oh my god."

She'd never even admitted the Gregg thing to herself, before.

"I didn't really think anyone would miss me," Astrid said. "I figured everyone would just...forget. I sometimes wish they did, and I could just....fade into the background like I did at my last school, the one before I came back. But it's...hard to fade here. And I'm glad some people didn't forget. Like you..."

She stared up at a cloud, failing to make a shape out of it, trailing her fingers in the water.

"This sucks," she said. "I feel like the Hoover Dam with a big crack in it and all the water's just spilling out and nothing is going to stop it. And I wish I could have met your friend Gregg. You're right. He does sound cool."

"Gregg's the best. He's the only one at home who ever tries to get me."

Mae spun around and flopped over so that she was lying on the bank, her head just touching the edge of the water. So she could stare up at the clouds, too.

"I know what it's like to want to disappear. To wish people didn't know you. That's why I'm here, actually." She tilted her head back, looking at Astrid upside down. "I don't want to tell you that story. You won't think I'm cool anymore."

And almost as if she could feel Mae looking at her upside down, Astrid tilted back her head, too, her hair spreading out in the water behind her like pale seaweed, and looked back at her upside, too.

"If you don't want to tell that story," she said, "then you should probably just go..."

And she meant to leave it there, a nice safe, easy truth, one that kept either of them from saying something they'd wish they hadn't, but of course it couldn't just be left there.

"But I don't want you to."

"I don't want to go, either." That was Mae's safe truth, right there. She looked back up at the clouds.

". . . Do you ever wonder if any of this is actually real?"

"I used to," said Astrid, looking up as if to follow Mae's eyes, to see what she was seeing, maybe, albeit from a different angle. "I spent my whole first semester here thinking this was an institution for kids who just cracked and it was all in my head because I'd gone crazy. And then when I left and went back to California, none of it seemed real, everything was so normal back home, I thought I'd made it all up and none of it was real. Like it was all just a fever dream and that none of you even existed, this place never existed. I think that's why I stopped writing to everyone, it just felt like I was writing letters to my own imagination. And then that one weekend happened, where I was actually here, but as a doll, and I called Sabine, and she confirmed everything..."

She trailed off a little. "And then I came back and got kidnapped by a goat demon within the hour, and it didn't matter if it was real or not, because my mom was still crazy, Claire was still dead, and I was still back. So it didn't matter whether or not any of this was real, because all those things still are..."

With that, Astrid turned a little over to her side, so she could splash into the lake. Partly so that if her whole face was wet, she could pretend that she wasn't going to cry (Stop crying, Astrid. I forbid it! Astrid, stop crying, damn you!) and maybe if she was under the water for a little bit, she could avoid having to answer questions like "What about your mom?" and "Who's Claire?" or any of it.

But she came back up eventually (still no luck, just transforming into a Zora), through the hole in the inner tube, pushing the damp hair out of her face, dangling her arms over the side like her legs previously had been.

Mae didn't ask any of those things. She wanted to, but she felt like she had to offer something in trade, first.

"I almost beat a kid to death with a baseball bat when I was in eighth grade," she said. "Because it didn't feel like anything was real. So . . . not writing's pretty tame, really."

"Yeah," said Astrid, after a moment of looking at Mae and ignoring the water dripping into her eyes, "I guess so."

"Almost?" she then asked. "Eighth grade. That's about how old I was when I almost stabbed my roommate, at the first home they sent me to."

She blinked, frowning, because she hadn't thought of that in a very long time, and now she was remembering so much and how she was so afraid of doing that again when she was sent here and, God, could she even imagine trying to stab Sabine in the back of her skull anymore?

"It was at a game," Mae said. "The umpire pulled me off him before I could finish." She stared up at the sky, watching the clouds go by. "Maybe that's why we get along? Because we're kind of the same."

"Maybe," said Astrid, who wasn't sure what she was feeling right now, because the concept of comaraderie on any level was one she'd abadoned a long time ago, much less on a level like this. "There was no umpire there; I only stopped because...I just couldn't let myself be like her. Like my mother..."

She let out a shaky breath, clinging to the tube, feeling too rocked by waves even if the surface was very still. It helped to focus on Mae for a moment, especially since it shifted her thoughts away from Ingrid, even if that meant she was going to ask questions that Mae might not want to answer.

"What did he do? Or was it just....it didn't feel real, so...it wouldn't matter?"

"I don't know," Mae said. "I was playing this video game. You were like, dating ghosts or something. And I was really into it. Playing it like 24-7. Until this one afternoon. Suddenly, like, something broke."

She'd never told anyone this before. Not even (or maybe especially not) Dr. Hank.

"It was just like . . . pixels. The characters onscreen, I felt like I knew them, but they weren't people anymore, they were just shapes. And their lines were just things someone had written. They never existed, they never had feelings. They never would exist, either. And it felt so sad. Like I'd just lost these real people. And this whole thing we'd had was just . . . me. Alone.

"And like that realization dumped out of the screen and into real life. I went outside, and the tree out front, I looked at it every day. It was like a friend outside the window. Now it was just a thing. . . . Just a thing that was there. Growing and eating and just being there. Like all the stuff I felt about the tree was just in my head. And there was this guy walking by, and he was just shapes. Just like this moving bulk of . . . stuff. And I cried. Because nothing was there for me anymore. It was all just stuff. Stuff in the universe. Just . . . dead."

The clouds didn't look like anything as she watched them. She closed her eyes, not wanting to see their shapes anymore.

"And the next day there was this softball game. And when I went up to bat, the pitcher was just shapes too. Just lines someone wrote. Like there was nothing in there. And I got so scared and angry and just . . . I dunno. Before I knew it I was on top of him, smashing his face in with the bat.

"Just shapes. Red shapes, all over the grass."

[speech transcribed from Night in the Woods part 4, "The End of Everything"]

The longer Astrid listened to Mae, the more she started to feel a little like the distance between them wasn't quite right, it wasn't quite fair, and she moved forward toward her in the water, and by the time she was finished, by the time she stopped and there was a pause and there wasn't probably anything more after that, she made it to the shore, set aside the inner tube, and sat down beside her.

And that was it, for a moment. She just sat there, until the only thing she could really say was, "I don't know what to say, Mae. I wish I didn't have to say anything, because just being quiet is underrated, and that's what I want to do, but I guess the island isn't going to let me."

Mae opened her eyes and looked up at her. "I never told anyone that before. People back home just started calling me 'Killer' and avoiding me. I had to leave school, and eventually Dad heard about this place. Said maybe I needed a 'fresh start'.

"Nothing here really seems real, either. But . . . I dunno. It kind of feels like I'm not the only one who sees it here, at least."

"We're sitting on a lake," said Astrid, "in a pillowcase and a swimsuit I stole out of a tree because all out clothes have disappeared during a heatwave, unable to keep ourselves from being unabashedly honest with each other," said Astrid, "and that's not that weird for this place. I don't see how anyone could think it's real.

"I'm glad you told me, though," she added.

"I was raised to believe in God," Mae said. "And I don't really know if I do? But sometimes I think maybe we're all being controlled by some ancient, vast, unknowable force that scripts all our dialog and likes to throw us into preposterous situations."

She rolled over onto her stomach and looked up at Astrid.

"I'm glad I told you, too. And I'm glad you told me about the stabbing thing. Also that you didn't really, like, stab your roommate. That kind of thing doesn't feel as good as you think it will."

"For some people," said Astrid, "it does. People like my mom. But I don't want to be one of those people. I don't want to find out if I am."

She looked down at her feet, dug her toe a little in the sand at the shore.

"I wouldn't be surprised," she said, "if this island was some sort of ancient, vast, unknowable force like that. It would explain a lot, wouldn't it? But do you think...if there really is something like a god that's writing all our scripts, giving us all our words, dictating everything we do....do you think there's a way to...I don't know...break the system? Or all we all doomed to be victims of someone else's design, do you think?"

"I don't know. I think trying might be how you go totally crazy, but. I don't know if that's a bad thing?"

"Yeah," Astrid said softly, "I think I'd rather just go crazy, in that case."

"How would you ever even know?" Mae asked. "If it worked or not?"

"I guess you probably wouldn't," Astrid allowed, after a moment to consider it. "Or maybe breaking from the script was actually part of the script the whole time. I guess you can't really be sure either way."

"Yeah. You can go in circles like that for hours. Why do you think I spend so much time hiding in my bed? Or running around being random?"

"I just sort of figured that's just how you were," Astrid shrugged a little. "All the random stuff, like you just had too much imagination to contain inside your body. I'm kind of envious about that; my mom always says I don't have any imagination, and you've got it in spades. The hiding in your bed thing I didn't know, though. But that sounds kind of like me hiding down in the pool. Or out here in the lake. Or the ocean. It just makes me feel...safe. It reminds me of a simpler time, before everythign got so...complicated."

“. . . So your mom sounds terrible. I recommend against ever listening to her again.”

Astrid's expression went a little wry. "I'm working on it," she assured her. "It's not easy. You were raised to believe in God, but I was raised to believe my mother was God. And gods tend to get vengeful when you start to lose the faith."

She intended to leave it there, because that was firm and poignant, but she wasn't at all surprised when it didn't stop there.

"And she's trying to get out of prison; she's getting a lawyer to revisit her case. She says she has a whole new flock of followers to support her; she calls them her children now, surrogates to replace the child abandoning her..."

She shook her head, eyes skittering across the water as if she didn't know what to do with this newfound surge of dread.

"I don't know what I'm going to do if she gets out, Mae."

“Maybe someone here can help? They have all classes on weapons and not dying and shit. I bet someone could keep your mom away.”

"Try Not To Die," Astrid said with a little sardonic humor, "isn't really about not dying; it's mostly just traveling around the world and doing random challenges, but I'm sure we can always rally up everyone together with their sword and laser guns against in invasion of Ingrid Magnussen.

"Or sticks," she added, a little more softly, a little more endearing, with a sigh to match.

"It's not the kind of problem that can be solved with weapons," she said. "I need to find a lawyer. Eleanor was telling me a little bit about emancipation; she said it's expensive, though, but I have some money that Ron...that was my foster father, the one I lived with while I was gone...it might be enough. Or I just wait two years, and I'll be eighteen, but...I mean, women in prison for murdering people don't exactly care what the law says anyway."

"Yeah, probably not. Maybe you could, like . . . change your name? Hide your identity somehow?"

"It wouldn't work," said Astrid, shaking her head. "She'd still find me, if she wanted to. She says we're connected; she writes about stuff she shouldn't even know in her letters, about the school, about Sabine. It might just be lucky guesses, but sometimes, I'm not so sure...

"I appreciate you trying to think of ways to help, though," she looked over at Mae. "I really didn't want to bother you with any of this."

"You listened to me talk about getting so into dating virtual ghosts that I broke my own brain," Mae said. "Also, you're probably my favorite person on this island, so I want you to be okay."

"I kind of liked listening to you talk about it," Astrid admitted, "even if didn't like that it happened to you. Because you're probably my favourite person on this island, too...even if I kind of thought you didn't like me very much. Especially after I got back.'

"I thought maybe you didn't like me," Mae said. "Because I'm so awkward and weird sometimes."

Astrid's laugh came out as sort of a bark, short and dry and maybe a little desperate.

"I'm awkward and weird all the time," she said. "I don't even know how to act around people, I never even had any friends before coming here."

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Selkie Lake; Saturday [07/11].

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