Tuesday & Max

4

OUCH, I HAVE LOST MYSELF AGAIN

LOST MYSELF AND I AM NOWHERE TO BE FOUND

YEAH, I THINK THAT I MIGHT BREAK

LOST MYSELF AGAIN AND I FEEL UNSAFE

"Are you drunk?"

Julia wears a blue dressing gown with white polka dots all over it. She still has her makeup on. She clearly hasn't slept. Tuesday closes the door behind her, the harsh yellow lighting of their hallway burning her eyes.

"Julia—"

Is this the point where they fight? Does Julia play the concerned-guardian role, and Tuesday the defiant teenager? Their parts feel old, tired. Tuesday doesn't want to play.

"You're sixteen! You can't do this, it's – Tuesday?"

The tears come heavily. Tuesday wraps her arms around herself, pulling herself in, holding herself together as her body heaves with the effort of giving in.

"Tuesday!" Julia's anger fades immediately to concern and she hurries over, but Tuesday pulls away. "What happened?"

"Nothing."

"Clearly not nothing. What happened?"

The monotonous stress of the day, the endless gazes she avoided, Jack and Naomi, alcohol, coming back here after it all to be met with Julia, Julia, who is incapable of just accepting things and seeing through to the bigger picture, whatever the bigger picture is, of taking Tuesday into her bed and waiting out the tears to deal with the specifics in the morning.

Julia, who is not her mother.

"Nothing!" Tuesday yanks her wrist away from Julia and stalks across the hallway to her bedroom door. "Leave me alone."

"I—"

"No!" her voice is a slurred shriek. "You don't get a say! You don't get a say."

Julia looks defeated. "In what?"

"In—in—anything. You don't get a say in what I do."

You're not my mother.

"Alright," Julia says, voice low, trying to diffuse the situation maybe; but she still follows her to her bedroom door. "Alright. I just want to make sure that you're okay. That nothing bad happened."

"Why?" Tuesday opens her bedroom door, steps inside, turns around. She laughs, but it's humourless. Her tears have left two pale train tracks down her face, slicing through her makeup. "Bad things happen. So what? What are you going to do about it?"

Suddenly, they aren't talking about this stupid impromptu night out anymore, and they both know it.

Tuesday shuts her door, switches on her light and swears at its brightness, slapping it straight back off again. She stands there for a moment, shaking from the exchange, then strips off her clothes in the dark and crawls into bed. Her scar seems to weigh heavily on her shoulder.

Beyond the door, she hears silence for a while. The fridge door opens and closes.

For a moment, Tuesday hopes that Julia might try again; knock the door, say the right things so that Tuesday can tell her how shit it is to start the first day of sixth form college without her mother even knowing what subjects she finally chose, without advice, a little bit of nagging, a morning getting ready together, her mother inevitably packing her lunch full of unpronounceable things like quinoa that she'd never eat. How unfair it is. All of it.

But, after a couple of moments, she hears the flat, low buzz of the television in the living room and knows that she's finally alone.

She has to chase sleep despite the sluggish low the alcohol – and the evening – have brought her to, but when she finds it, it's all-consuming and deep.

☂

Tuesday jerks awake.

The curtains are still opaque, so she knows it's sometime in the night, and the line beneath her door is black. Julia has gone to bed.

Her lips are dry and she peels them back from teeth that feel furry, sitting up, squinting at the pain in her head. Somewhere in her torso, vodka has made one of her organs ache pitifully. She picks up her phone, scrambles to turn the brightness down as the outline of her patterned lock screen wallpaper and its buttons burn themselves into her eyeballs.

04:52.

College starts tomorrow – today – at nine. She needs to set off probably an hour in advance if she wants to walk to the train station, catch the 08:15 train, not have to run through the city centre and manage to find the right room for first period without being late, so that means leaving at eight. She needs an hour to bathe the shame of last night out of her skin and make herself look presentable: seven. Another half an hour for breakfast; make that an hour since Julia will no doubt try again this morning. Six.

Dragging herself out of bed and slipping on a t-shirt from the floor, she wonders if she might as well just stay up now.

The door to the sitting room is creaky so Tuesday opens it slowly. Everything is dimly lit by the bright blue lights of the internet modem, but she turns on her phone torch to navigate the two cheap black leather sofas, pass the pine kitchen table and reach the far end of the room, where the kitchen is.

The fridge light is another set of needles in her eyes and she drinks quickly; Coke, from the bottle. The bubbles burst in her throat, her chest. It hurts, but it's so good. She rubs her eyes, pauses for a moment, drinks down a few more gulps and puts the bottle back in the fridge, returning to her room.

The bed feels like a cloud to her exhausted body but her mind is awake, so she checks her phone with a clearer mind.

Her text notifications are mostly Julia asking if she wants picking up with increasing urgency and anger, but there's one from Jack, asking if she got home safe. She has a bubble with a surprisingly high number on the Facebook app, and taps to open it.

Daliyah Jelani has tagged you and 6 others in a photo.

Fuck.

Tapping on the notification brings up a small album of photos, but Tuesday is relieved to find she isn't in most of them, and the ones she is are from before the vodka era of the night. There's one of her playing pool, leant over the table unflatteringly, and another smiling from her place jammed between Stella and Daliyah in a booth. Daliyah is laughing, mouth wide and smiling, and Stella is halfway through a hair-flip, her waist-length strawberry blonde hair blurry, some of it dipping in Tuesday's glass.

Lazily, she scrolls through the rest. The last image is a selfie; Naomi and Jack close-up, her lips pressed against his cheek. The one following it is another one of them, this time with Jack looking off-camera and Naomi making a peace sign. Her eyes stare straight into the lens. Tuesday wonders if she knew the picture would go up, knew that she'd see it.

Bitch.

Back to the notifications.

Stella James has commented on a photo you are tagged in.

Emil Kristoffersen and 8 others have reacted to a photo you are tagged in.

Uninterested in following them up, Tuesday is about to close the app when she notices another marker, this one on the friend icon. She taps it, and Max's face in a blurry, badly lit holiday photo appears in a little square.

Confirm.

Refreshing the feed, Tuesday spots him in the sidebar, one of five of her active friends. She wonders why he's awake, if he'll speak, and flicks through his profile absently. There's little on there. He doesn't have many friends. His birthday is September 10th, a few days away.

Feeling foolish for wondering if he'll send her a message at 5am, Tuesday sets a timer for fifty minutes and closes her eyes again.