Chapter Text
The sky is purple to the east, slipping further into blue as the sun sinks into the ocean. Chloe drags Max to the top of the quarter pipe at the back of the park.
“It’s the best place to watch the sunset,” she insists, steadying Max with a hand on both shoulders before gently turning her around to face the horizon. “Look.”
Max ignores her, still fretting, but it’s not the height that makes her nervous. “What if other people want to use it?”
Chloe casts a glance toward the handful of other people in the park, recognizing each of them by face if not by name. Arcadia Bay is kind of a small community in the first place, but boiling it down to just skaters makes it positively microscopic. She knows her own rep. She knows what this looks like. Those guys are not about to interrupt.
“Don’t worry about it,” Chloe says, dropping her hands from Max’s shoulders and shuffling over to stand by her side instead. “Max, look at the clouds.”
They’re neon pink out over the water, glowing beacons against the pale blue expanse of the sky.
The horizon is a strip of bright orange blazing in the distance. Max gasps, just barely audible, and reaches into her bag to dig up her camera.
“Wowser.” She licks her lips, tongue still blue from the slushie Chloe had brought her from work.
“Yeah,” Chloe agrees, tugging her own bottom lip into her mouth, seeking the taste of sticky sweet syrup. But the only trace left of the drink they’d shared before is the faint pressure that throbs behind her forehead. She drank too fast again.
Chloe battles her restlessness for a few minutes longer, trying to enjoy the moment, but she knows she’s done a poor job when the tapping of her shoe against the piping draws Max out of her art trance.
“I haven’t seen you skate in ages,” Max says. Her hand glides through her hair, brushing it back from her face. Chloe wonders what she has to be nervous about. “I bet you’re really good at it now.”
It’s speculation more than praise, but it uncoils the tightness around her lungs anyway.
“You know it, Mad Max,” Chloe grins, setting her board at the lip of the pipe, angling her body for the drop. “Don’t blink. I’m gonna tear shit up.”
There’s a peace in this that she’s never found anywhere else. It’s in the momentum, the wind in her face. Skating’s not like life; it gets easier the more you do it. It’s in her body, the way it moves with barely a thought now, knees bent, feet sure. It’s in the sound, the scrape of wheels on concrete, the perfect slice of quiet in the hangtime, the clatter in the landing. It’s the certainty of that, the constant hunger of gravity, the indifference of the pavement. The easy jolt that rattles her ankles when she lands smoothly and the tidal wave of pain from the most brutal of wipeouts speak the same loving message: you are here, this is the proof, you are not going anywhere.
It’s easy, Chloe finds, showing off for Max like this. It’s like five years ago, maybe even better. Max’s eyes are on her the whole time, not straying to her latest skater boy crush. She feels loose, weightless, buzzing with energy.
A whoop in the distance draws Chloe’s attention, and she rolls out of the shallow bowl she’d been skating in to follow the sound.
Rachel’s here, picking her way through the sparse crowd of boys that seem to manifest whenever she arrives somewhere new, casually holding a canvas messenger bag to her side with a well-placed palm. Interesting.
Chloe shoots a look back to Max and cants her head in Rachel’s direction before taking off to meet her.
“Hope I’m not late,” Rachel says, rattling her bag lightly. Chloe recognizes the clink of glass instantly, a slow smile spilling out across her face.
“Nope,” she says, grinning wolfishly. “The party’s just getting started.”
Rachel loops their arms together and Max watches intently as they make their way across the park. Chloe knows, immediately, that the confession that had tumbled wildly out of her mouth last week is the source of Max’s scrutiny. She can’t help but wonder if Max can see through the cracks, if the lies Chloe had told in her bedroom, we fucked once or twice, I don’t think she even remembers, show on her face. If Max can see the truth in the half-moon indents Rachel’s nails leave on the inside of her elbow when they part.
She hadn’t meant to lie. Hell, she hadn’t meant to tell Max anything about the times she’d had sex with Rachel at all. It had all just come pouring out of her and once she’d started talking, she hadn’t been able to stop, even when she realized she was revealing too much.
Max, for her part, had been kind, handling Chloe’s tactless confession with uncharacteristic grace. There had been no hint of judgement in her voice when she’d asked how Chloe felt about the situation. It makes it worse, really, because she knows now she should have just come clean about the whole mess.
It’s too late for that now, though.
It sucks, but all the beds Chloe’s making these days seem harder and harder to lie in. Someday, she’ll probably have to deal with that, but for now she just catches Max’s eyes and smiles like she could really mean it.
Max smiles back, just barely reluctant, and right now that’s all she needs.
Chloe passes her board up to Max when she gets back to the ramp and turns to help Rachel up. Rachel slaps her hand away and hauls herself up the quarterpipe with ease, smirking defiantly at Chloe’s offended expression.
“Hey Max,” Rachel says, sitting on her left. She pulls the bag into her lap and opens it up. “Thirsty?”
“Oh,” Max says, dismayed, when Rachel offers her a bottle of liquor. “No thank you, Rachel.”
Rachel tilts her head, challenging. “Not your brand?”
“You could say that,” Max says. “I don’t drink.”
“Neither do I,” Rachel grins. “I just have fun.”
Max looks distressed.
Chloe hauls herself up the ramp, sitting on the lip of the pipe on the other side of Max. She tugs her beanie off, running a hand through her sweaty hair and tossing it behind them.
“Rachel,” Chloe warns. Play nice , she holds the words under her tongue, trying to stare them into Rachel’s brain through meaningful eye contact.
It must work because Rachel actually looks almost bashful when she speaks again. “Oh. You were serious. Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Max assures her, smiling tightly. “Don’t worry about it, I just--”
“I should have thought about that,” Rachel admits with a wince. “I could go grab a soda or something...?”
“No, no,” Max insists, voice strained. She’s blushing now, twisting her hands nervously in her shirt. Embarrassed. “It’s fine.”
“What’d you bring?” Chloe demands, leaning over Max’s body to yank the bottle out of Rachel’s hands. Her interruption has the desired effect, taking the spotlight off of Max, an old trick from when they were kids. Max had always been shy, wilting under too much attention. It’s always been different for Chloe; positive or negative, she’d just wanted to be seen. The dynamic worked well for them.
Once, when they were kids, Chloe had faked a stomach ache so intensely as to interrupt one of Max’s lectures; the Caulfields had rushed her to the emergency room, fearing a burst appendix. She got grounded for a month when nothing turned out wrong.
It had been worth it. Max wrote her letters tied to tennis balls and launched them into her room through her open window. The grounding only lasted ten days before her parents caved anyway, finding Chloe’s pent-up energy was more of a punishment for them than being cooped up was for her.
“Got that OE, baby,” Rachel smirks, releasing the bottle. “Drink up.”
Chloe thinks about the bottle of Glenfiddich tucked away in Rachel’s father’s study at the Cabin. She thinks of Rachel’s expensive car, her brand new laptop, and the forty-ounce bottle of three-dollar malt liquor Rachel just handed to her. Rachel isn’t defined by her money, but there’s a thrill for her, Chloe knows, in slumming it.
Chloe opens the bottle and takes a long pull, wincing at the taste before she passes it back to Rachel. Evan Michael Amber, with his two-hundred-dollar bottles of scotch, would throw a bitch fit if he saw his only daughter knocking back Olde English with a high school dropout on a Sunday night.
Rachel grins into the bottle and Chloe knows she’s probably thinking the same thing.
“Sweet camera, Max,” Rachel says, leaning over Max’s lap to pass the bottle back to Chloe. “Can I see it?”
Chloe tenses, tongue poised behind her teeth to interrupt again, but Max only hesitates for a moment.
“Sure,” she agrees, handing the camera to Rachel. “It’s a Spectra Pro.”
“It used to be my dad’s,” Chloe says, and it hurts a little like it always does, but then Max catches her eyes and smiles. It’s a gentle sort of smile, something for a scared kid or some wounded animal. It’s okay , it says. I’ve got you .
“Yeah,” Max adds. “Crazy to think he even used it here with you, Chloe.”
Her dad used to follow her around with a camera everywhere, back when she was learning to skate. She still has the VHS tapes back home, probably piled into a box in the shed somewhere. His excuse back then had been that he was helping her create a trick reel that would launch her pro skating career. A pretty good cover for a dad that was just scared his kid would break her neck doing something stupid.
“And now you’re continuing his legacy,” Rachel says, lifting the camera up to peek through the viewfinder. “They should make a documentary or something about you guys.”
Rachel hands the camera back unharmed and Chloe lets out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
“Did you manage any shots of Chloe eating shit?” Rachel asks.
“Hey,” Chloe mumbles around the mouth of the bottle, taking another sip
“No,” Max says, cracking a smile, “not this time.”
“ Hey .”
Rachel grins, “Too bad, that would have been hilarious. Can I see the photos you did take, at least?”
“Ah,” Max pauses, shifting nervously under Rachel’s gaze. “Okay.”
She pulls the photos out of her bag and flips through the first few in the stack. Chloe leans in closer to look and Max sighs and spreads them out on her lap so she and Rachel can both view them easier.
They’re good. She looks pretty badass in a few of them. Action shots: perched on the lip of a bowl; a nosegrind, eerily balanced, captured halfway down the rail; suspended in midair, board upside down beneath her, an interrupted flip trick. One picture stands out, so boring by comparison: Chloe alone in the frame, cigarette between two fingers, laughing against a backdrop of concrete and pink sky. It takes her a moment to place it, realizing Max must have taken it when she bummed a smoke from one of the other skaters at the park.
She taps her finger against it. “Hey, what gives, I’m not even doing anything cool here.”
“Chloe, Chloe,” Rachel shakes her head and sighs, like she’s talking to a particularly dumb child. “Look at the framing here. The colors! Look, check out this angle, she actually makes you look kind of majestic.”
Chloe collects her board and drops back into the park once Rachel and Max start talking composition and she finds herself totally lost. She’s a little shakier now, edging toward the tipsier side of buzzed, but she can’t fight the pull of the pavement, the ache in her bones for motion.
She skates until the sun dips down, nearly swallowed by the sea, and the lights in the park begin to turn on. The clouds have gone purple now, the color of bruises, and when she makes her way back to Max and Rachel their faces are hard to read in the halflight.
“Getting late,” Chloe says. “You guys wanna get out of here?”
They do. Chloe kills the bottle while they collect their things. It was nearly empty anyway, lukewarm and flat by the time she puts it down. She skates over to the trash cans near the front of the park to recycle it, and when she returns to Rachel and Max they’re ready to go. Chloe helps Max down from the ramp and, this time, when she offers her hand, Rachel accepts.