Felixentric

Scene 33

When Felix walked onto Main Street, he wasn't a happy camper.

"Maybe we should just look for her," Quinn had suggested.

Felix tried his hardest to talk him out of it, that it was no use rushing through the city to look for signs of a girl who wasn't missing. "She just needs some time to herself," Felix didn't lie. "Everyone needs that."

"But I have a bad feeling about this." The Quinn Felix had known at the party and the Quinn Felix knew then were two, very different human beings. One had been menacing and powerful and slick with his tongue. The one rambling on and on about a girl he barely knew was a deflating balloon. His eyes were slanting with his lack of sleep and his voice wasn't as strict.

"I have a bad feeling about everything," Felix wanted to explain. "But I'm usually over exaggerating and the situation only gets worse when I get involved." What good would annoying the crap out of Janette do for him anyway?

"Just for an hour or two. Don't you think that if she's in trouble, it would be you who should come help her?" He was trying to make this about Felix.

I'm the one who drove her away, idiot. Only, he couldn't argue anymore without getting into detail about that awful awful moment in the Seer's shop. So he agree and they made a two-person, search-party plan. Quinn wanted the West side, so Felix had the East. They would start in the city, move Northward, and then curve around to the South end to meet at the laboratory. "Only an hour and half," Felix decided.

Once Felix said this, Quinn bolted off like finding her was some children's scavenger hunt.

Felix watched him run in and out of shops on the street, probably asking people if they'd seen her. Other people were doing the same thing, probably looking for any possible evidence that their loved one hadn't been Faded over the night.

It kind of reminded Felix of searching for his dad the other day, how he'd been a raving lunatic just to know if he was okay. It felt stupid, then, to think that Dad hadn't been around at all. He bet the people searching for their loved ones then would feel the same way when they made it to the police station and identified the corpses.

Finally, he made it as far East as he could go - the peak of Jupiter shore.

For a good second, he was actually wishing he would find Janette and he'd be able to go home. Maybe talking it through with her wouldn't be so bad. But he was stuck on the beach, one of those stupid places where a romantic thinker has no choice but to think irrationally.

He, mesmerized by the place, stared at the waves churn and crash and burn.

His first step onto the beach was a misstep. The sand pulled him in and his shoes filled with it from behind the ankles. Very little was ever a win for him, honestly.

Even the person he saw standing in the water, staring at him with glaring eyes was a lose-lose.

The ocean whipped around them on the earth at their feet and in the air waxing in and out of their lungs. Hale was standing in the middle of the water, a lot of it much bluer - but darker too - around where he stood.

Felix found himself starting to wade out into the water to where Hale was, but he didn't come too close. Hale's knees were invisible under the surface, soaked by all that black and blue. It was cloudy and musted, like a food coloring dumpage. He was still wearing that old, ratty sports jacket - half of it black and tarred and burnt off. With his face in smithereens and his clothes like a homeless, he looked like a zombie. But he really was one, wasn't he? The walking dead?

"I'lloozjhen is planning something awful." Hale was breathing heavily. "I went looking for you in the city, but I didn't know where you lived and I kept getting all these funny looks..."