A Hunk of Metal

Max dropped her bag on the desk, jumped on her bed and remarked how good it felt to be in her room after school. No, scratch that. Their room. Her and Chloe's. And the bed was theirs, too.

It was May now. Almost seven months had passed since the Storm.

When the Storm's fury was finally spent, Max and Chloe went to the Two Whales Diner. Or rather the place it used to stand. Once it became apparent that they wouldn't find Joyce, Warren or even poor Pompidou in the burnt-out ruin, not alive anyway, they left town, with zero reason to stay. Chloe drove them to Seattle. Not only her truck didn't break down on the way, it took them there so fast, that they arrived at Max's parents' doorstep before the news of Arcadia Bay's demise. Vanessa thought the girls simply came over for the weekend. Ryan thought Max had had to skip town because of her conflict with Nathan. He was furious. He wanted to call principal Wells and give him a piece of his mind for taking Nathan's side, even though he was clearly the instigator. He even wanted to go to the police about the anonymous threatening text messages he had received earlier in the week, either from Nathan or someone working for him. Max tried telling him that both Wells and Nathan were dead and the school was no longer there. In the meantime, Vanessa was chatting Chloe up, asking her how her mother was feeling and offering that now, since Max and Chloe were hanging out again, she and Ryan should meet up with Joyce, too. They would make up for lost time. She could introduce them to David.

Only when the evening news, playing on the TV in the living room, loudly announced Arcadia Bay's doom, Ryan and Vanessa got what the girls had been trying to tell them all along, but couldn't, partly because grief had made it hard for them to speak, and partly because Ryan and Vanessa couldn't at first comprehend the magnitude of the bad news they had heard. When Max and Chloe heard the newscaster confirming that indeed, their senses hadn't deceived them, they huddled together and burst in tears. They were crying over all the people they had lost. Joyce, Kate, Rachel, Warren, Miss Grant, Dana, Juliet, Samuel, Alyssa and David (although the last two would later turn up unharmed). Ryan and Vanessa sat next to them on the couch and hugged them form both sides, not finding any words to say in such a bitter moment.

Chloe, now homeless (and with her stepfather stricken with grief to the point he was not able to care for anyone and needed to hit the road and get as far away from Arcadia Bay or the ocean as possible), stayed with Max at her parent's house. Max and Chloe having sleepovers was nothing new to Ryan and Vanessa. And even a few weeks later, when they finally got what Max and Chloe had been trying to say to them, that they were no longer merely two friends who happened to be girls, but girlfriends, it didn't change their mind about letting Chloe stay with Max. One afternoon, after coming home a little early, Max overheard her father telling her mother: "You know what, honey? I'm kind of glad it's Chloe. No one will ever be good enough for our Max, but Chloe is the closest one to being good enough. Have you seen how she's looking at our daughter? She would jump after Max into fire. And the fact that she's a girl is kind of good, too. At least she will not get Max pregnant and run away".

Max was happy to hear her father's endorsement. She was also genuinely impressed by his social progressivism with a patriarchal twist.

And it's not like Max and Chloe were obnoxiously pounding on the headboards every night. They were taking things slow. Most evenings they were both so tired they were in the mood only to go to sleep in each other's arms. If anything, it was Ryan and Vanessa disturbing the peace. In Max's absence, they became a little less cautious and one night Max and Chloe heard them having fun. The girls giggled, finding it very romantic that people in their late forties (so positively ancient by their teenage standards) still were attracted to each other.

Max went back to her old school after two weeks, at her parents' insistence. And they were right. It would serve no purpose to drop out or even to wait until next September to repeat her last year of high school.