To Chill Out [On Hiatus]

03 | wherefore art thou video

She doesn't know if it's the loudness or the intensity of her voice, but her parents look up from their animated conversation.

"Something wrong?" Her dad asks before her mom elbows him in the side. "Christ, Alicia! What?"

"What is it, Ember?" She asks instead.

"It's a bucket list." It's a fully written out email, addressed to her and containing eight different things. It looks like it was meant to be sent, but she's met enough teenage girls with bad intentions to know that not everything looks like what it is.

"Can I?" She walks over in one swift motion. November shrugs and hands her the tablet.

"Hey, that carnival's coming up soon, you know. Oh, Arnold's Arcades?" She laughs. "Is that place even still open?"

"They have bowling now," her dad calls from his chair in the kitchen, finishing his (or his wife's) coffee. "They renovated that one area after that wall fell down, remember?"

"Yeah. Yeah, they did. Hey, your school's haunted house starts tonight. You could go tonight and cross that one off before Jessie gets out."

"It's only the sixteenth, though?"

Her mom raises an eyebrow. "Would you rather it be earlier in the month?"

She hums. Good point.

"Okay, she wants to force you to—Buchanan, that's a familiar name."

"Bucky Barnes' middle name. James Buchanan Barnes." When both parents turn to her with puzzled looks on their faces, she puts her hands in the air. "Hey, Max is the big fan in the group, not me."

"Do we know any real people with the surname Buchanan?"

"Nope."

"Don't think she was asking you, Em." Her dad rises from the table. "Oh, Elizabeth, from high school."

"But did she have a daughter?"

"You know what, I'm not sure."

The name Buchanan is sounding more and more familiar to November in a non-Marvel Cinematic Universe context, but she couldn't say (and also doesn't know) why.

Her mom scratches at her lip with her finger and moves down the list. "You never sent in that resume to that record stor—you don't know how to ice skate?"

She is noticeably quiet at numbers seven and eight. "Well, this seems like a good bucket list, for the most part," she says eventually. "And you're definitely volunteering for the haunted house event at school tonight."

November couldn't disagree more.

—

At six o'three precisely, November knocks on Jessie's door, with a final hope that maybe, just maybe, this is some sort of prank or sick joke, that Jessie will be behind the door.

That hope is (of course) immediately shattered when Cameron opens the door. "Hi, honey."

November whips her head around to see her parents backing out of the driveway as the rain starts. "Hi. Sorry again."

"Don't worry about it." She will. "When does the haunted house start again?"

"Six thirty."

She pulls the door open. "Great. I can drop you off before heading to the hospital."

November has seen this trick before. She's giving her an out. She's realizing she's doing something she doesn't want to do. She's hoping she'll say 'actually, wait, can I come to the hospital with you?' Except the hospital's not letting non-family visitors in yet, so the question would be pointless.