Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Catra’s eyes flutter open against a barrage of unwelcome daylight, it’s not to the caliginosity of her usual morose background of a bed room, and the sight sends her sluggish and tired mind reeling into full on consciousness.

Uh, where the fuck is all my stuff? This sure as hell isn’t my bedroom, is her first thought of several more incoherent ones. A million and one times she’s opened her eyes in the morning to the sight of worn-torn posters of Echobelly, Garbage, and The Cardigans, what little light her thick black out curtains allowed to seep into her teenage sanctuary reflecting off the wood of her acoustic guitar as her alarm clock radio blasted 89.2 FM, AKA, the ET Rock House station throughout said sanctuary and blasted Catra up and out of bed still clinging to the cat hair covered wool wrapped around her shoulders.  

And this- where she's found herself now- is not any of that. It’s the hellhole fucking opposite of it.

Catra is surrounded, trapped really, on the prison cell floor of sparkle and shine: bright, willowy drapes lape at her ankles, their inverted blossom shape ensnaring a king sized bed lifted an entire three feet above her, the lilac blankets of which are a recipe for nauseating Catra’s already upset stomach, and an army of plush toys ( What is this place? A five year’s old room or a five year old’s crayon drawing of one?) following her every move as she scrambles out of the rust colored sleeping bag that once was her only refuge from this princess nightmare brought to life. Her palms suffer to get traction against the rough carpet that meets her, and her back, for some reason aching like a bitch and half, keeps her from freeing herself one hundred percent. 

Two possible scenarios to Catra’s still sleep addled brain stand out. One, she fell asleep at work- stupid late Friday night shift, stupid shut in Hordak making me close so he could sulk somewhere besides his office for once- and her douchebag coworkers led by their ring leader Lonnie somehow managed to get her out of the store and to the second floor without waking her, and they chose Claire’s to be the crime scene they dumped her body in. The second, maybe worse option, the one that was becoming more and more apparent as her actual reality, was that her desperation not to be act like such a fucking fool was starting to make a fool out of her.

Oh right. Our little conditional alliance meeting ran so late last night I had to spend the night. Fuck me.

“Morning sunshine!” a voice calls out from beside a nearby dresser, confirming her worst of the two possible epiphanies. Catra slumps boneless back into the sleeping bag that’s still eating her legs with a moan equal parts sour and sinking. 

Ugh, even when Glimmer talks it’s like the glitter already in the air gets denser, for Christ’s sake. 

Glimmer, because she’s in Glimmer fucking Bowery’s room of all fucking places, responds with a certain lark that all but straight up mocks Catra’s misery, “ Who’s ready to do their one good thing today?”

“My one good thing, your majesty,” Catra mumbles into her makeshift hoodie pillow (at least something in this pastel colored pandemonium holds familiarity and Catra stands by her prideful decision not to take up Princess Purple’s offer of one of her many one hundred thousand pillows last night) as Glimmer’s shadow comes to stand over her and grant her reprieve from the unrelenting daylight Catra’s hoodie can’t block out, “is going to be not strangling you for making me get up so freaking early.” she hits the last words like a hammer hits nails, nails in the coffin her own ignorance is building her, apparently.

Guess this town was made for Catra after all.

“Okay but you’re the one who has to work a ‘grueling after school job’ all day before the party tonight,” Glimmer says, Catra watching out of the corner of her eye as the other girl pulls the top tuft of her dyed a poor purple, lopped-off locks  into a shimmering scrunchy. 

Yeah, that’s definitely from Claire’s- Claire’s? Oh shit! Oh shit, the mall!  

One indirect association later and the arrogant air of Glimmer’s words sink into Catra’s self identified thick skull.

She bolts up, hoping and praying to see that her battered Levi’s and house keys will be somewhere among the messy multitude of her ‘I’m sorry’ speech drafts, because “Shit, shit, shit! Tell me it’s not past 11 a.m!” 

Panic ricochets through Catra’s half-awake, pre-coffee state, destroying with relative ease any indignation that flares up at Glimmer’s nasty little way of wording her previous sentence. God, it’s fucking karma that this is who’s throwing Catra’s own hubris back in her face.

“Relax,” Catra doesn’t appreciate the way Glimmer snorts- or that any ounce of hysteria in her is a free for all of happiness for the other girl. Rivals no longer, that still doesn’t mean Catra’s in the mood to deal with the reminder her former competitor has some very real reasons to be upset with her, “It’s only a little bit after nine.”

“Ugh, Jesus, Inez , you don’t have to scare me like that!”

“My dad probably made breakfast if you’re interested. Unless, it takes you two hours to skate from my house to the mall and you have to leave right now.” Glimmer says with a lilt in her voice. Catra lets out a sigh, her body draping until it’s frozen over the sleeping bag. One hand is trapped halfway in her left sneaker, the other ransacking the little rat’s nest she’s spent the last twelve hours in the heir to the Standard Oil name’s bedroom and no , she’s not going to clean it up, for a much more precious heirloom. 

By the time chipped black nails snatch it up under a flurry of paper near her hoodie pillow, Glimmer is fully dressed in a TLC top Catra can actually credit accompanied with a faded denim skirt, has like thirteen more scrunchies on her wrist, and is standing by the door, armed with that alluring wit of hers, “And why are you still calling me Inez?” she asks. Catra shoves her other foot in her other Levi with a satisfying ummph . “Inez was just the person who told Betty the rumors about James. It’s not like Inez helped James get back together with Betty.”

Catra stands, curling her lips over her teeth to keep from saying what her heart truly reckons- which is, Inez was a mouthy, backstabbing bitch masquerading around as Betty’s friend and until like a week ago, that’s exactly what you were to me. Instead, she settles for something more like the better version of herself she was trying to be, “It’s not like you have to fit Inez’s role exactly to play her part in the story.” 

I know you’ve been talking to Adora about me, I heard you bitching about me during lunch like it’s a sport and you just have to go for the gold, Sparkles. Catra shovers her keys in her back pocket, fingers pulling away smelling of metal. Your hands aren’t any cleaner than Inez’s ones, gossip or no gossip.  

“And legends are meant to be rewritten here in this little corner of nowhere , for some reason that doesn’t apply literally anywhere else on planet Earth.”

“ That sounds like something Adora would say,” Glimmer tells Catra when Catra reaches the doorway, fidgeting with her day old tank tap ( fuck, does she miss sleeping in her Eagles t-shirt) and trying not to trip over the shoelaces she didn’t tie. “The part about legends being rewritten, not the overbaked sarcasm.” 

“That is something Adora says.”  

But Adora wouldn’t say legend . Nope. She’d bite Catra’s head off just for even using that word, in that old fashioned civil way of hers. Because the infamous love triangle of James, Betty, and the nameless August free-for-all was not legend to her; no, it was living, breathing truth, faith beyond faith, realer than the broken cobblestone their long-forgotten town was built upon and a much more important foundation in Adora’s opinion. An abused little kid’s flotation device that years later she was bringing to life without even trying.

And who is Catra now to even dispute Adora's logic, not when after years of growing up bored with that juvenile story she finally understands how James could've been so prideful to throw away what he had with Betty for a thrill that would ultimately expire, or why he held the colorful grudges he did against Inez and the rest of Betty's stupid friends?

There’s a silence that Catra and Glimmer share better than they share anything else that comes back as they traipse down the hallway from Glimmer’s chamber to the grand staircase, through a foyer that’s never known mess and a kitchen that’s straight from a movie scene Catra secondhand film knowledge can almost place. 

Didn’t they make a movie about this place? Catra’s brain sputters with wonder before fizzing out like day old soda. No way in hell could they, the shiny Hollywood big leagues and their even bigger screens, have whipped up a story to hold the mythos of this house without Adora knowing every single second of it right up until the credits.

Glimmer’s whistling a Frankenstein melody of “ No Scrubs” and “ Just a Girl” that grates against Catra’s ears in the most irritating, confusing way when they enter this movie set turned kitchen. Sure to Glimmer’s earlier word, on the island of marble and mahogany there’s a line of porcelain dishes ( way to bring out the fancy shit, and for breakfast no less) brimming with pieces of toast, bacon slices, waffles that look freshly made as opposed to her usual choice of frozen even after three minutes in the toaster oven, and eggs- sunny side up. The smell of the warm meal blends with the salt air that wafts through the open windows. Where Catra hovers, tugging on one the flannel sleeves dangling off her waist, Glimmer wastes no time helping herself  to the food because she’s not a stranger in someone else’s- previously her sworn social enemy’s- house.

Which she can’t still believe she’s in, much less spent the night at in the name of ameliorating, by the way. There’s an ache in Catra that blooms at the sight of the food left awaiting her in an empty kitchen, an abscess of homesickness in the place where a more established ache is rotting her heart hollow, for the salt box house that she was raised in. It’s a different breed of homesickness, a simple kind of missing your usual surroundings how lowly they might be in comparison, than the heaviest kind Catra’s been wearing around her like a weight around her neck all summer.

I wonder if Sparkles will make some poor gardener call home for me after he finishes cleaning out the pool with Dom Pérignon, or if she’ll just let me use the freaking phone myself.     

“Hey, you gonna eat?” Glimmer asks around a mouth full of toast. Some show of manners for the richest teenager in town. “I kinda feel weird standing around here just like, eating in front of you.”

Catra shakes off her funk. The ache can wait, it’s been waiting, and so can her callow, kindergarten  homesickness. She grabs a piece of bacon in the fugue state she’s been left stranded in, but it doesn’t appease the other girl back into their treasured awkward silence as she hoped it would. 

“What’s the matter, Catra? Are you really that nervous about the party tonight? We went over literally every scenario of what could happen, up to and including the Lakes are harbouring some secret shark and it attacks the ranch.”

Yes, of fucking course I’m still nervous about the party, why would I start to relax when trying to make it up to the girl I love by apologizing might not even be enough, and “ No-,” Catra chokes on her bacon, “it’s just, I can’t believe I’m having breakfast in Holiday House of all places. Or that I slept  over. ”

Taking another mindless bite of her measly breakfast item, Catra hears a door open somewhere beyond the foyer. The heavy scent of sea salt and seriously offkey humming follow into the expanse of the manor. It’s welcomed all too well by the boards and the bones of this house; Catra swears she feels the place around her relax, like this entrance is the opposite of a haunting, the antonym of a curse. She swallows her jealousy, leaving bits of bacon at the back of her throat. 

“Hmm. I’m surprised hanging out with me isn’t on that list.” Glimmer’s eyes dance with amusement that Catra’s already sick of.

“Don’t sell yourself short, Sparkles.” Because it’s not a stretch to say the most grueling part of this trying thing was not extending the olive branch, but keeping the dagger of insults that would cut right to the heart of all Glimmer’s insecurities to herself so that olive branch wouldn’t burst into flames, to her fucking self. 

“Sparkles? Moving beyond the make believe and not calling me Inez?” laughs Glimmer, spitting several statements Catra takes issue with, “Who knew Catra Lewis was even capable of evolution? I guess my help really is working afterall!”

Catra’s fingers curl into a fist that does not go anywhere. Yeah, yeah, she’s trying to be a better person and all, trying to be someone worthy by coming clean to Adora tonight, but fuck it if she doesn’t imagine for the thinnest of seconds hurling her bacon straight for Glimmer’s scrunchie. Glimmer’s the one with egg on her face while yolk drips down Catra’s hand and arm in this shimmering, momentary indulgence. It’s the divine intervention of the briny air and discordant humming entering the kitchen that snaps Catra out of this maladaptive daydream, reminds her where she is, what she's doing, why she’s here in the first place. 

“Morning my dear Glimmer,” That one of kind of entrance belongs to the one and only Micah, Micah Bowery, an out-of-place down-to-Earth entrepreneuring Jack of All Trades enthusiast, the definition of an Average Joe if not for his means to money by way of marriage and brief stint as a child actor during the seventies. Fleeting fame or money that had not, by the looks of his rain boots the color of stomach bile, cargo shorts, and scruffy beard, changed in spite of his time in the limelight. Nor had being made a widow changed him less than like, what six years ago? Seven? Catra would have never retroactively wished to be paying attention to the mindlessness of small town drama- or contributing to it, for that matter- but she also never thought she’d been standing in that same small town’s nicest fucking kitchen trying to remember when the headache-in-a-hand-purse PTA president died exactly.

She’s trying to make herself small, something past expertise growing up in that saltbox house should make a no sweat snap, something she must be out of practice in because Micah spots her like the sore thumb she is in this situation. Catra blinks. She knows her scowl on the other hand, is sure as hell not out of practice because it can still bring Glimmer to a cower. But it does nothing- nothing- to assuage this strange man’s need to make eye contact with her.

“And good morning, person who is not Bow or Adora but who still slept over with my daughter-- Are you?” Micah points a finger in the direction of Catra’s ornery aura and where Catra wishes to find animosity somewhere- anywhere- in his tone, she comes up blank, “That’s right , you must be Selena’s daughter! I haven’t seen you since you were, what? You must’ve been less than three years old when I last saw you, now bigger than my boot here now.” 

I wish I was dead. Catra steals her face into a blank slate as Micah gestures to the height of the atrocities gripping his legs. He’s sailor stranded at sea all these years in the dust of Catra’s memories- a man she knows for dressing up as the neighborhood Santa Claus and teaching the driver’s ed course part time at school, experiences too of the world for good and civil daughters of pastors to indulge themselves in- and now he’s here like he’s washed up on the beach right outside the foyer’s french doors, reminiscing about the cruel passage of time, the devastating folly of youth.  

“That um, that must’ve been when your family started going to the Methodist service up by the elementary school you kids went to.” the sailor finishes, and when he’s done, Micah is standing in front of Catra once again.

Catra sends Glimmer a restrained, yet dripping with furiosity why the fuck is your dad talking to me so much? kind of look. If Glimmer’s useful for anything, it’s sticking herself between people as both a human shield and world class meddler, so any effort of her part to stop her father from inserting his nose where it certainly shouldn’t fucking be would be welcome as all get outs. But nope- Glimmer’s revenge saga continues when she avoids the packed glance for another strategy of eating the rest of her toast in silence.

Honestly, Catra’s sigh releases some of the mounting tension in her body, what did I expect?

Not for Glimmer’s dad to shut his damn mouth, that would be one. “How uh,” one of Micah’s rain boots lets out a deafening squeak and the old man catches himself on the counter, “How is your mother, by the way? I know how difficult those last few months were for her, and speaking from experience, with your father gone now-”

“He’s not my father.” Catra’s response is instinctual lightning. In her grip, the piece of bacon she was nibbling snaps in half like a crisp piece of wood.

“Dad,” Glimmer tries under her breath, but the admonishing look is both too lost and too late. 

“That man wasn’t my father.” Catra’s still talking, why the hell is Catra still talking? “Just because he married my mother,” and proceeded to make her life and my entire childhood a living, inescapable hell, “and then bit the dust out of freaking nowhere,” Is she laughing? What kind of sadistic fuck laughs at cruelty like this? “ doesn’t make him related to me, okay?”

Regret floods her the second the words, clipped with that off putting laughter that came out of nowhere, leave her mouth and die as they enter the open air, singed away by the touch of salt that lingers. Glimmer’s gaze falls to anywhere but meeting hers. Micah exhales in a half grunt, half blunder. And Catra- Catra bows her head and curses herself, again, for having such a fucking nuclear reaction.

If my words didn’t shoot to kill like they always do, Catra puts the bacon down on a nearby plate and wipes her fingers on her jeans, then I wouldn’t have to even be in this kitchen to begin with, would I? Like father, like daughter.

“My mom’s fine. Thanks for asking,” she says in a whisper. The actual answer she should have given out of respect to this man’s civility. God, what the fuck is wrong with her? How the hell is Catra supposed to muscle through an act as foreign as asking for forgiveness tonight when she can’t even be a human being at the goddamn breakfast table of all places?  

Thank God Micah perks up at this peace offering, the dorkiness he definitely passed down to Glimmer shining through like Catra’s outburst didn’t leave a mark, bringing her spiral to a fatal halt. “That’s uh, that’s good to hear about your mom, Catra. I was worried she’d be working herself to death like she always seems to be.”

“She’s not home a lot,” Catra’s speaking on autopilot now- the depressed autopilot that listened to In Utero for an entire afternoon until her brain melted out of her ears and the repurposed Entrapta rigged CD player she’d been gifted short circuit, the resulting spark setting the carpet she’d swimming in her melted brain on magnificently ablaze. Having less than half a mind, Catra almost let the house burn down that afternoon- with her in it. Wouldn’t be the first time she’d stared down an end like that. If it weren’t for Melog howling for the entire neighborhood to hear and pouncing directly on her face, Catra… Catra might’ve never gotten up to make a break for the fire extinguisher.  “Even with him, you know, gone now. So I’m alone, a lot.”

Her own voice bounces off the marble tile and comes back to her corrupted, estranged. For someone who spent the first seventeen years of her life wallowing in the hopes that someday everyone just leave her alone to the self imposed isolation she craved more than her loudest desire to be whole, being by herself- no mom, no Scorpia, no high end crowd of delinquents parading around as intellectuals, no Adora- was a hoax she’d been a moron to sink her faith into. It was different, when the ones you loved left out the side door you were never not gunning directly for, when it was not a choice to be alone but rather a punishment, an exile. 

Considering she came close to letting her loneliness burn her house down, maybe it was time to go back, tail between her legs, to what chased her away in the first place, swallow her pride and live for the hope they’d have her back at all.  

One super helpful, not at all pitiful wince from Glimmer later, Micah is at it again, picking up the pieces of this broken conversation as if it’s nothing. He’s a fixer, afterall. “Well, she’s a doctor, working in the ER. Those have to go to be some brutal shifts she’s pulling.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know and I know that what she’s doing is honorable and I’m proud of her, especially since he wouldn’t let her work at all, but-”

“You miss having her around,” Micah finishes for her, “I can understand that. Teenage rebellion, the whole phase of pushing your parents away,” he catches Glimmer’s eye, “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

Catra picks her bacon back up, “You’re telling me.”    

“So uh, Dad,” Glimmer says around the napkin she’s wiping her mouth with, “Have you been out on the boat today?”

“Yep. Been working on the old girl since about five this morning. It’s been a fun project these last few months, a good distraction from trying to fix up the house. And it’s been a blast to have something to work on with your boyfriend and your other friend, the singing one, cleaning the boat up and getting her ready for more than just a trip on the Lakes.” Micah tells her. He’s abandoned the awkward precipice of leaning on the ledge to help himself to a plentiful breakfast, a heaping of eggs, bacon, and toast that laughs in the face of Catra’s small helpings. 

His daughter features come alive with a disgust that throws Catra because didn’t Bow and Micah have a reputation for getting along maybe even better than Micah and Glimmer did? Like, in an almost weird way? “Ugh, I still can’t believe you’re hanging out with Sea Hawk. Of all my friends, you had to befriend the one that sings sea shanties all the time?”

Oh. Yeah, that sure as hell makes a lot more sense. As well as an overkill of validation to hear from Glimmer; Catra will never, not even in her attempt to befriend them or be friendly to them or whatever, understand why Adora drifted towards that lot of clowns in their particular circus. And Captain Dork of the U.S.S Bad Pirate Impersonation would be the king of those clowns- if Catra were not out here gunning for his crown. 

“What can I say?” Micah grabs a fork from across the island, “The kid knows a thing or two about boats.”

“Yeah, how to set’em on fire,” says Catra without really thinking. Glimmer spits out her sip of orange juice.

“Well he hasn’t set The Mighty Angella on fire so,” he replies before pausing, a flash of dread in his dark brown eyes, “yet… Maybe I shouldn’t bring matches in my toolbox anymore. Or let Sea Hawk use my tools from that toolbox.” The man mumbles to himself for a few more seconds, a mental list he makes verbal of every item on his new toy that could be considered combustible, “Well I guess if my newest project goes up in flames, I’ll just go back to rewallpapering the drawing room. That is what I was doing before I had to buy the boat.”

Repairing a boat and renovating a room. So that’s what normal fathers do. And here I thought using the Bible as a projectile device was a regular run of the mill dad activity. 

Catra’s fingers curl into her jeans, catching on the edges of rough fringe, her sweat slicked skin coming back with cat hair she wasn’t even aware was there. But of course it is. Just as with having a rather overzealous cat for her roommate (and only remaining friend, Glimmer notwithstanding), Catra’s yet to be put to rest daddy issues are an occupational hazard that cling to her like stands of Melog’s fur. And watching Micah now act with a gentleness that comes across as perplexing, and threatening in its unfamiliarity, Catra’s thrown back to the days of her weakest, rawest point, of watching someone else have a love she could never hope to hold in the palm of her hand. 

The urge to run, to sprint away from the table and hope her skateboard is still near the door, is strong. The urge to fade into the nothingness and become one with the salt that sticks to her skin is even stronger.

“What’s wrong, Catra?” When Micah pulls her back from thoughts of an escape plan, he’s speaking with a tolerance that makes her want to dissolve into the salt of her tears all while screaming the injustice of what could have been. “You know, she doesn’t actually mind when I mess with the house, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Catra’s mouth falls open slightly agape at such a left turn in the conversation. Her face might’ve stayed frozen that way if not for Glimmer’s seemingly practiced interception, “Rebekah Harkness’s ghost is not haunting our house, Dad. That’s a myth tourists like to speculate about, and people who own gift shops by the Lakes like to perpetuate to get those tourists to buy their crappy merchandise.”

“I beg to differ, my dear daughter. Her ghost is here, and so is that ailing husband of hers. I can hear them sometimes, when I’m working on organizing the attic, arguing, blaming each other for his bad habits, wishing she could relive her maddening glory days. She’s still giving him hooey for dying and letting everyone blame her for it, you know.” Micah finishes with a flourish of his fork.

God, no fucking wonder Adora loved spending so much time here. This kitschy crap is right up her alley, and right down the memory lane of my childhood. Does nostalgia always make your skin itchy or am I officially losing it?

“Well she’s right there. It wasn’t her fault his heart gave out.” Glimmer acquiesces.

“You’re not afraid of ghosts, are you Catra?” Micah asks her in a low, almost comical voice as if she’s seven, not seventeen, as if these so called ghosts aren’t the main characters of the stories her best friend lived for telling her, flashlight to her face, as they hid together in the closet of that saltbox house, trying in vain to escape their own hauntings. “There're a lot of ghosts in this house, and this town, too, you know.”

“No there’s not!” Shrillness incarnate protests.

“So is the dog here?” Catra answers Micah’s question with one of her own. Of all the tall tales about the scandalous Holiday House Adora dazzled with her during those days of their closet escapades, the dog theft was the one Catra always asked Adora to tell over and over again.

“It was a cat, actually.” says Glimmer and Catra wonders how soon she filled Adora in on that, too, if that information healed some of the tiny little breaks in Adora’s tired soul.

“But he is here,” Micah addition earns an additional grumble from Glimmer, “If you wait long enough in the east hallway on the third floor, key lime green paw prints will show up on the carpet, and then just like that, they’ll fade.”

“Da- ad !”

That goes on the list of things to ask if Adora did, Catra smirks only to bite her lip in solemn realization, if she doesn’t slam the door in my face the second she sees me. Oh God, I’ve had so many bad ideas this summer but this one might actually be the fucking worst in my entire life.

This past summer Catra has stood in the weeds and called it happiness, because calling it anything else, forcing it to be anything else, meant the choices she made to get there were blunders she couldn’t erase, mistakes she had to own in order to right her long list of wrongs. And in that desperation of trying to own her mistakes, there were real lessons to learn before walking in from the weeds and going home. 

Lessons like Micah’s once baseless claim; turns out, he was right on the money when he said that this was a town populated by ghosts, ghosts beyond the ones being used to drum up tourism in the late August season and summoned by giggling junior high girls with an long emptied bottle of wine during the witching hours of their sleepovers. Adora was right for the show to believe the stories that featured those ghosts mattered, like the heroes that formed the constellations above and watched their lives become messier, more labyrinthine with every passing night. 

Adora was right (about Catra, about everything) when she spoke with reverence about the ghosts and their legacies that hung like cautionary tales over their lives, about how what dies in this town never stays dead, so what’s the point of trying to die anyway? 

Dying just means she’ll end up haunting Adora the way Adora haunts her. And after this summer, that’s not a fate Catra would wish anyone . Not even on her worst enemy- and closest love.

Catra wonders as she watches Micah butter his toast and Glimmer finishes sipping her orange juice, if Adora will give her the chance to explain what she’s learned this first summer, and she’s willing to cross her heart, only summer apart. If Adora will hear Catra out when she tries to find the words to say she’s started performing much needed exorcisms, that some of those exorcisms performed themselves, that Adora’s the one and she always was. This summer has left Catra without an excuse not to love her. That now that her house is no longer haunted, do the childhood plans to run away, travel together, have happiness together, the ones that died on their evergreen funeral pyre, have permission to live again? 

Nothing to do but dream about the answer and its promise of dread for the next, mmmm, eight hours. That’ll be a fun way to spend her shift.

“So,” Micah starts. Lesson number thirteen hundred thousand Catra’s learned this summer- Adora found a new best friend without control issues and violent tendencies, without a violently controlling pastor of a father and that father, as charming and goofy as he is, never shuts up , “You girls going to Adora’s shindig tonight?”     

“Don’t say shindig, Dad.” Again, Glimmer winces (because she’s lucky the worst her dad can do to her is to act embarrassing in front of her guest) as Catra wipes her palms on her jeans. 

Wait, when had they started sweating? Were they always sweating? Is she going to be sweating tonight on Adora’s doorstep? Covered in cat hair and sweat and tripping over her words- the epitome of romantic gesture drenched with the irresistible stench of desperation.

Micah flies past his daughter’s suggestion without so much as blinking, “Your Aunt Casta was telling me she’s whipped up some more of those decorations you wanted, Glim. She was going to drop them off from the guest house before heading to the Ladies Luncheon.”

Guest house? Ladies Luncheon. Jesus Christ. Catra can’t roll her eyes far enough back in her head- or at all, for that matter, since she’s a guest in someone’s home and trying not to be a grade A bitch like usual.

“Let me guess, did she throw in a bunch of matching scarves into those ‘boxes of decorations’ for me, Bow, and Adora because she thinks that’s what teenagers are into these days?” asks Glimmer. She’s turned around, rummaging near a white basin Catra thinks might be too fancy and too big to be a working sink, and in the light pouring in from the windows a familiar flash of spherical glass with a red handle for company gets Catra’s hopes up a familiar ladder of disappointment. 

“You know your aunt, worried about you kids getting too cold in this nice weather.”   

Glimmer stops dead in her preparation of Catra now knows has to be fresh coffee grounds ( finally, real fuel), “It’s September. ”

“Mhmm, and you’ll be sure to thank your aunt with a nice note. You don’t want Bow to one up you again, do you?” Micah says before taking another bite. Catra can’t help her momentary lapse in civility this time around; this conversation is that pointless and Sparkles is taking too fucking long filling a damn coffee pot for Catra not to be rolling her eyes.

Speaking of lessons learned about spectors to relate back if Adora will have her, Catra is- for lack of a better term- becoming a spectating spector as she listens to Glimmer and Micah go back and forth until they’ve carved a circle in time with their conversation. Her fingers dip deeper into the crater they’ve carved into her jeans. In this grand house with such an innumerable amount of lavish extensions and ornamentation, in the presence of this healthy father-daughter ribbing, Catra is an outsider the ghosts of this town will never be. They- Rebekah, Bill, the not-dog-but-cat- they all belong here.

Catra does not. 

And yeah, sitting here spectating is better than eating frozen waffles, sipping coffee that burns the roof of her tongue, alone, staring at a post-it note on the fridge that reads, “Covering Dr. Sisk’s shift again. Eat something real. Be back tonight. Love you to the moon and to saturn, mija!” her own spite the only force that keeps her from giving in to the pathetic urge to grab the phone off the wall and dial the first phone number she ever had memorized, because the only place she ever felt like she belonged was on the other side of that phone number, of that phone call.

Her stomach is a bottomless pit, her heart the cliff’s edge that her panic’s jumped straight from and into the bubbling, boiling pit. Catra can’t bring herself to try and eat anymore out of forced politeness alone, not if she doesn’t want to spend her shift vomiting. Trying not to tear a hole in space and time in the fabric of her jeans is the best- well actually it’s all she can do. What better punishment is there for antagonizing Glimmer for the entirety of a never-ending summer than to sit here, silently, and tolerate this never-ending conversation with her father?

“I made coffee, if anyone wants any?” Glimmer’s shift in conversation snaps Catra from her purgatory. When she looks up, the other girl is holding three mugs with three different fingers. “Hm, Catra?”

Catra’s violin string of patience snaps and the sound is cacophony amongst previous provisional harmony, “Of course I want some, Sparkles! Jesus, could you take literally any longer to make a pot of coffee?”

By the time her second outburst in fifteen minutes ricochets off the cabinets and marble island back to her, Catra has cursed herself a hundred times over and then a hundred times again. So much for trying to be something she was not. So much for the faith that trying to change would be the postage stamp that sticks.

I should’ve tried to get more sleep last night.

“...Is what I would have said,” Catra gulps. Her words are ringing in her ears in a deeper tone that turns every organ inside her inside out. Micah and Glimmer’s eyes never dare leave her. Her eye is twitching, the earthquake against her eyebrow fissuring her in two. “Before I started hanging out with you.”

There’s a clinking of porcelain against marble as Glimmer sets one of the mugs down- a blue one, like the eye that’s registering a seven on the richter scale- and lets the sound of the coffee flowing from the pot to the mug be her acceptance of Catra’s apology. If that could even be called an apology and not just Catra halfassing a hostile attempt at one. 

“Are you sure you’re going to be ready for Adora’s party tonight?” Glimmer asks what must be written all over Catra’s face and betraying her the first chance it gets. “You don’t want any more goodness training?” 

Catra takes a sip from Glimmer’s peace offering, reveling in the tension that leaves her body at the heat that floods her mouth, even if the taste is, ugh, comparable to one of Micah’s terrible boots. “You sure you don’t want training on how to make a decent cup of coffee?”

“I’m serious!” Glimmer plants her hands on her hips.

“So I am!” Catra laughs- maybe for the first time since she’s stepped foot into Holiday House.

“Goodness training?” asks Micah, looking up from his plate with an expression that reads that term wasn’t in this issue of Posh Parenting Monthly. “What exactly are you girls going to be getting up to at this party? I thought you were just going to order a pizza and eat ice cream, paint your nails and what not. That’s all I gave you money for.”

“Actually Dad, it’s far more important than our original pizza and ice cream  and En Vogue karaoke party. You know that growing up, Adora and Catra were best friends, but a few months ago they had a falling out because Catra here-” Glimmer’s pause to wave in her direction gives Catra opportunity to groan in protest.

“You’re not seriously going to tell him the entire story right now, are you, Inez ?”

“... Fine. Note taken,” Glimmer makes a face of feigned humility, “Long story short, Catra is planning on apologizing for her part in the fight, or fights I should say, by coming to Adora’s party and saying sorry for every ounce of pain she’s caused Adora over the last couple of months.”

Catra scowls into her coffee at this aggressive turn in tone. There’s a thought in her head that flickers like a lightbulb on its last leg begging not to burn out. I’m not the only person in this room to take Adora for granted, so why do you get to call me out on the price of my tab when you haven’t paid yours? Yeah, Catra’s been something of villainess from one of Adora’s favorite films these past months, but she’s made like that like the role’s made for her; the look, like all those fucking scrunchies, is not good one on Glimmer. Cleverness does not cancel out cruelty, another lesson she’s learned in the loneliness of her midsummer night dreams, and calling out Catra’s brand of it worked well enough the first time. Glimmer will have to put her pitchfork away sooner rather than later if she didn’t want to see that cruelty when provoked .

“Oh- um, okay,” Micah says. He’s pouring himself his own fresh cup of Joe and Catra bites the inside of her cheek as he starts drinking it straight unlike his daughter’s spree of creme and sugar. Huh. So Catra does have something in common with him- besides his weird interest in her mother, “Then I wish you the best of luck, Catra. Are you sure you don’t want some more breakfast?” Annnnnnd, there it goes. “Can’t say I see you making up with Adora on an empty stomach.”

The party’s not right now! I can eat in the eight hours we have until the party and that’s both a good thing and the worst thing to happen in the history of mankind.

“Uh,” she struggles with a response that’s somewhat amiable for a total cop out. The end result is something like choking, “Not- not really. Thank you?” 

“What? Afraid you’re gonna barf?” Glimmer teases, wiggling her stupid pink eyebrows and absolutely begging to be punched in the teeth.

That’s it! Catra’s nails almost tear another hole in her jeans, her coffee almost wasted on the marble surface and porcelain mug almost in jagged pieces flung about the room’s opulence; it’s only the image of standing on Adora’s doorstep, opal eyes catching sight of her in the softest light like something off a film screen from the ones that star in Catra’s recurring dreams, that stops her, makes her think twice. 

Trying. Right. She’s trying for Adora. Fuck, how many times is she going to circle back like this? Is this going to be her whole day? Her entire life? She’s trying for Adora, she’s trying for Adora.

Just not that exhaustively. “Duh, I’m afraid I’m going to barf! Is that not good enough for you or do you actually want me to barf on Adora, too?”

“Honestly I’d take it or leave it.” The other girl shrugs.

“Yeah, well if I barf, I’m not staying to clean it up, so enjoy that job.” 

“I have a hard time believing that. I’ve seen you do a lot of questionable stuff Catra, but even leaving your vomit in the place you practically grew up in and making the girl who you grew up with and are still totally hung up on clean it up seems like a stretch.” Glimmer paints her picturesque point, stretching out words as if general emphasis isn’t enough, all the while continuing to taunt Catra with her perfect pink eyebrows.

“Fine,” Catra grumbles. She takes another swig of liquid coping before continuing, “Bluff called. You happy?”

“I don’t think it would be super entertaining to watch you barf,” Glimmer says in response, milling about in a dangerous, bite-me annoying kind of way, “But watching Adora tell you to go straight to hell? Now that will be painful to see.”

Catra’s eyes almost get stuck at the back of her head at that not so hypothetical. 

“You’re underestimating Adora.”

“Oh yeah?” those perfect pink eyebrows ask as they raise.

“She’s gonna tell me to go fuck myself, that’s what’s about to happen!” Catra slams her mug down on the marble.

“Hey, I’m allowed to have doubt in your apology plan,” says Glimmer, and Catra does nothing to stop the thought, yeah ‘cause it’s you and you doubt that your own fucking house is haunted. At least that sentiment doesn’t fly out of her mouth and right in the face of her strained goodness efforts. “You’re supposed to be confident in your apology plan,” Uh, when did this turn into a lecture? Is it insensitive to think your mom is also haunting this house and is now possessing you like some Evil Dead crap? “Because it’s solid, and also because I helped you come up with it. And hey- you’re wearing your old band. Were you wearing that when you showed up last night?” 

Catra nods, letting out a sigh that dissolves into her next sip of coffee.

Glimmer’s next scoff is something of a redress. “Wow. Guess I was just so shocked you asked me for help that I didn’t even notice.”

“You and me both.” Catra’s hand comes to her head in the midst of her trademark deflective sarcasm. Pushing her frizzing and frayed bangs out of her face, the headband resting on her head is an eulogy for her old self, the one she’s still trying to find again. The one Adora might’ve- maybe- loved, the one she could love again if Catra made an effort to make it worth her while. 

Back when their days were adventures contained and brought to life within the boundlessness of forest floor, when childish wonder was not yet desperate escapism and all the two of them cared about was which of them could reach the highest heights on the peak of Razz’s old wooden swing, Adora gifted Catra her first headband. A treasure the color of rust bought from the clearance rack of Goodwill’s and lined with tiny metal rivets that left a map of bruises on Catra’s scalp.

“To keep your hair out of your face,” a tooth gapped smile told her, pointing to the uneven braids on her own head, the ones Catra put there with loving, fascinated care, “And so that I can always see  your eyes, even when we’re hiding in the dark.” 

Catra grew out of the first one and Adora bought her a new one with the dimes and quarters she found when they were playing barefoot archeologists à la the mighty Indiana Jones under the pier. Bright red, like a target for her head instead of her back. Every time one headband broke or Catra grew out of it (she never ever lost one, but couldn’t say the same for her pocket Bible or piano workbook), Adora found another one for her, just like the last. To keep Catra’s mass of unruly curls out of her face, so Adora could always find her by the sight of her eyes.

Then that era of childlike wonder dried up like ink on the last page of a chapter, and Catra started to suffocate at Adora’s side, sick of rotting until no trace of her existed away in her best friend’s shadow. She was so far gone that her jealousy was louder than her love (which was saying something), that pushing Adora away was the same as being left by her, was the same as being betrayed by her, there was no grace in her reinvention. Catra stood in front of her bathroom mirror after that parking lot confrontation, outside her body watching until her reflection broke down sobbing, and ripped the headband from her person. 

It was an iconoclast’s demise to burn it and despite the madness inside her screaming to break it into pieces until it resembled herself, Catra could only bring herself to throw it in the bathroom trash can and hope it would fade from existence before she did.  

Melog, being Melog, saved the headband from death in debris. The relentless cat left it everywhere and anywhere it would be in Catra’s line of sight. But Catra had already refused to wear it from that moment in the bathroom on because Catra refused to be buried in it. When she wiped her tears from eyes that afternoon, the touch was her own and it was lonely and violent and unfeeling.

Yesterday morning Melog’s ritual of saving it from the cupboard under the bathroom sink left it right where Catra hid Adora’s other stolen treasure. Before grabbing her skateboard and trekking her sorry ass all the way up to Holiday House to ask for a hundredth second chance at redemption, Catra lay it back on her head, savoring her delusional illusion that it was Adora’s hands placing it where it belonged- just like back in the days of their other worlds, of pirates and archaeologists, of fairies and gods, cowboys and bandits, princesses and magic.

Glimmer pulls the mug away from her lips, head tilted to the side as she takes Catra in. Catra starts to itch her exposed skin again when she says, “Hey, it looks good . It's definitely a note I think Adora’s going to appreciate.”

“Really?” Catra’s voice is dry, “‘Cause it kind of feels like I robbed Adora and now I’m wearing something of hers to like, her funeral.”

“Yeesh, that’s dramatic. You and Adora really are made for each other.” When Catra crumbles at this throwaway comment, itchy and sweaty and nauseated from a breakfast that’s ten percent protein and ninety percent utter shit, Glimmer swoops in with a laughable rescue. Micah munches on his eggs in silence as if he’s not even there. “I just meant like, Adora’s so worried that you’ve, you know-”

“Changed?” 

“Yeah. You did spend all of summer break with a bunch of weird smelling college dropouts-”

“You can just call ‘em crooks like everyone else does, Glimmer, including the crooks themselves.”

“-who are in some sort of improv group? Or they’re a traveling theatre? Nevermind. You hang out with those guys, you relentlessly antagonize us whenever we’re around, and then you go and burn a building down-”

“The crooks set the fire and it was an accident, they just blamed me for it,” Catra tries to correct, but Glimmer’s on a roll that does not threaten to grant Catra mercy by running out of steam.

 “-and now your hair’s short and that’s a weird look and Adora thinks that just because you cut it-”

Catra kills that sentence before it can grow past its infancy, “I didn’t cut anything. My step-dad lost his fucking marbles one night because I ask my mom one time if I can get it cut, and before I know what’s happening, that psychopath is cutting it off himself.”

At least, that’s what Catra thinks that’s what happened. Her memory of the event is… fuzzy. On purpose, or- or maybe not. In terms of compartmentalizing, Catra’s a natural, a mother fucking prodigy. Lowly coping mechanisms from the lowest places come to her as easily as breathing. Another occupational hazard that comes from the laying on of hands from batshit crazy father to fucked in the head daughter. 

So there’s a… a gap of that night. A gap that begins around an eating area like the one she sits out now with a request to fit in just a little better in teenage wasteland and ends with the sound of an electric razor dying, heavy breathing, and shouting too far away to make out. When Catra came to without any inclination of how much time had filled that blank gap, surrounded by pieces of herself on the kitchen floor and her mother nowhere to be found, there was nothing left in her than to figure dying there surrounded by the faint smell of cleaning chemicals, with no one to hold her or tell her it would be okay, would be the only way to end this paradox she carried within her.

Dear old step-dad never came back. Her mother did , smelling of sweat and gasoline and the leftover grit of lake water, crawling into Catra’s bed with her and the cat around two in the morning, whispering swiftly a prayer to Saint Michael that had not graced Catra’s ears in since their house had become a purgatory. Catra did not ask any questions. Not that night as she fell asleep cuddled against the tear stains she left on her mom’s chest, not when she found a swollen knot on the back of her skull when cleaning up her lopped off ends the next morning. 

She didn't ask questions and she didn't answer any.

“Oh, I um, I didn’t know that until like two in the morning last night,” Glimmer mends her previous statement amongst a pause of silence. It’s not that her acknowledgment of their concessions made late last night (or early this morning) under the influence of the truth serum that were the dead-of-night hours of a sleepover doesn’t mean anything to Catra- progress is progress and at least Glimmer reciprocated by showing her the skeletons in her own closet- but her relaxed demeanor in front of her father is fucking with Catra’s sense of reality.  

Catra side eyes a quiet Micah, making an even quieter note of his new found preoccupation with his breakfast. But concern is Catra’s burden to bear alone; Micah is no more perturbed by mentions of child abuse or the obvious Lilith Fair idiosyncrasies of his daughter's friends than he is by his empty cup of coffee.

“But that’s definitely something you should fill Adora in on, I know she’s been worried about it.” finishes Glimmer, bringing Catra’s hunt for suspicion in her father to an unceremonious close.

“You’re banking on her hearing me out?” Catra doesn’t know what part of her is asking that question: her skepticism of this rag-tag friendship, or her own stupid hope that Glimmer’s knowledge of Adora’s true feelings are not just some manifest of Catra’s own pipe dreams. 

“I’m banking on our plan, Catra.” Oh so it’s ‘ours’ now? Glimmer, voice dropping low, leans over on her elbows “You’re not going to forget to bring it, right? That’s what our entire plan hinges on.”

Trying or not, Catra can’t help but bite back with a wallop of well deserved sarcasm. “No Glimmer, what precious and historic item of Adora’s that I’ve kept under my bed and slept in like a total loser every night since we broke up am I going to forget to give her back? What was it again? One of your aunt’s scarves?”

“I’m done helping you,” Glimmer says with a sigh. Catra almost hopes that’s either a threat- or a promise. Not that there’s a discernible difference; add that to the ever growing list of lessons Catra’s learned the hard way this summer, of bitter pills she’s been forced to swallow.

Catra’s right on the precipice of throwing another Inez related comment in Glimmer’s face when her father clears his throat.  

“Well girls,” the scraping of porcelain against metal signals an end. An end of this conversation, an end of this beginning, an end of this continuously awkward interaction Catra’s had to muddle through ( Thank. God.) when Micah gets up, fork, knife and empty plate in hand. As he walks toward the open mouth of the sink, Catra gets a strong whiff of what she can only describe as The Lakes. Wait, is he not working on the beach right beside his backyard? Huh. “This has been a weirdly eye opening conversation. A fun one, but still weird, not that I’m not glad Glimmer is making new friends.”

“Dad!” Once more for old time’s sake.

“But I gotta get to it, or I’m letting that boating license go to waste,” he says, putting the conversation to rest the same way he brought to life- with a resolute look in Catra’s direction that makes her more uncomfortable than sleeping on Glimmer’s floor all night, “Catra, will you tell your mom I’ll see her in Sunday’s service, okay? It’s been nice having her back after all these years.”

Catra fumbles for a second before remembering that gawking like a fish is not a human response and neither is exchanging glances of insinuation with his daughter, “Uh- yeah. Sure?”

“Oh, and tell her that if she ever gets time off from work, Casta would love to have her at the Ladies’ Luncheon.”

  Jesus Christ, how is this still happening? “Okay.”  

“Have fun at Adora’s party tonight!” Micah gives them each a nod before turning one last time in Glimmer’s direction. “Be safe, sweetie. Call me when you get to Bow’s.”

“We will, Dad.” Glimmer waves him off. 

The scent of the sea water- and the fresh water- follow the man as he walks out of the kitchen and down the hall, like that sailor that manifester before carrying a love long lost the way the star of a foreign film would, one Catra scored for Adora when they were still on terms that included talking. Here Catra is, watching him go into a house haunted by a company of ghosts and their what-ifs and their what-could-have-beens, carrying a lost love of her own.

How fucking fitting that Catra would reconcile with all of her regrets here.  

“I should go too,” Catra puts her empty mug down, swinging herself off her seat at the island. With Micah gone it’s t-minus fifteen seconds until Glimmer either picks her witch hunt backup or starts talking about the Backstreet Boyz, and Catra’s worried enough about vomiting at some point in the day. She’d like it to be closer, in location and time, to Adora’s party. “It’s like forty five minutes from Holiday Hou- your place- to the mall. Not that Hordak cares if I’m late anymore, but he could still decide to care today, if he’s feeling particularly bitchy.”

“You sure you don’t want a ride? I can drop you off on my way to Bow’s, but we’d have to drop by the guest house first.” Glimmer offers. 

Scoffing- guest house? Seriously!?- Catra’s already got her back turned, “No thanks, I’d rather-” eat glass  “- just skate.” 

I can’t rehearse my speech in your car, and I definitely can’t pretend that’s not what I’m doing with you blasting No Doubt on repeat.

“Besides, there’s a road I haven’t taken that I- I need to.” One where she could come to grips with the promises she’s yet to make good on.

“Made for each other,” Glimmer whispers under her breath, every word like an individual nail dragged down a catholic nun’s school chalkboard. Then, “See you at 8:45, James ?”

“8:45, Inez, ” Catra affirms with a nod before excusing herself back into the immaculate foyer of Holiday House, hoping that her skateboard won’t have wandered off like a certain set of key lime paw prints.

“Are you aware you’re covered in cat hair?” Glimmer calls after her.

Catra sighs. Just like that her eye is back to twitching, and her mind is back to thinking about how Betty’s roundabout lover knew more than he thought he did.

Stupid friends? What a fucking epiphany, James.

~

Working an eight hour shift on a laughable attempt at eight hours of sleep is proving to be a teenage tradition Catra thinks might be the only plight older than time itself. And where better to be honoring that shitty custom with a shitty work ethic than at the mall, at the center of adolescent coming of age amidst shiny, illustrious gift-wrapped suburban dreams, in the video rental store tucked into the furthest possible corner of this overhyped capitalist grime?

Catra’s on reshelving duty. Or, in the interest in being as truthful as possible because she’s supposed to be a good and honest person now, Catra put herself on reshelving duty because they’re severely understaffed and her boss is a Grade A prick and a half who decided half-assing the schedule would be a tolerable enough way to excuse not hiring another assistant manager after theirs left them high and dry so she could follow a hippie to the University of Vermont. Oh, and never see, speak, or hear from Catra again. That was an added benefit to Scorpia’s recent decampant.

At least she got out of here, Catra’s conscious speaks through metaphorical grit teeth as she puts back a beat up copy of “ Sunset Boulevard” and dives right back into the plastic crate of returns. At least Scorpia stood for something, even if she didn’t always have the backbone to keep her standing. 

The next thought slides in just like the VHS of Poltergeist she’s reshelving.

At least Scorpia is naturally a good person who cares for other people, and didn’t shatter her chance at love by dropping Perfuma’s heart just for shits and giggles, just to see if it would break. You, on the other hand-

Catra slams the next movie into its awaiting slot without forgiveness. No one shows these quote un quote greatest films of time any sort of mercy when they pull them off the shelf and rent them just to take them for granted, the cracking on the covers and the anatomically incorrect dicks drawn over Billy Crystal’s mouth and the gum stuffed in the tapes an exposé on their constant wear-and-tear mistreatment, so why the hell should Catra? 

Other than to pay reverence to the memories each of these movies hold for her, memories so soft and sweet against a background hurt that’s too big and trauma that’s too loud, ones where she’s hidden under the safety of a blanket fort of old quilts and sheets and pillows that smell of home, cuddled up and falling asleep on Adora’s shoulder as she holds down the rewind button of their momentary, twenty five inch adventure for the fourth time that night.

Catra picks up the crate a little bit more tenderly this time before stomping down another deserted aisle. 

For a Saturday in the town’s one place to be, the store’s vacancy is a fading unorthodoxy and the sound of just her and these VHS tapes is currently wrecking Catra’s war torn nerves. Nothing like an immense amount of time and space to taunt her, haunt her, make her regret and rethink her past, present, and future. When Catra first started here trying to shake the shadow of the only scorpion ever to not sting when fighting back, a break in customer activity like this one meant peeling off her tacky “How Can I Help You?” red vest and stealing off to the food court to grab an Orange Julius for Adora and coke for herself before seeing if her best friend was lurking on their preferred bench behind the mall. If Catra couldn’t find Adora there, she’d sneak through a back hallway into the movie theater projector rooms, where she’d be mouthing along with whatever feature film she was overseeing.            

There would be no one waiting for Catra in those rooms if she were to say “peace” to the empty store she stands in now. There would be no one waiting for her on that bench behind that mall. There isn’t even a shadow for her to ditch. She’s standing in the ruins, the echoes of what once was a marvelous run, a lively show one couldn’t miss, a love so great it would’ve been the one if not for her bad habits of always saying no to what deserved the answer yes.

Wonder if Adora likes working as an Olive Garden waitress better than she did at her dream job. Wonder if it’s haunted like everyone says it is, like everything and everyone is in this town is. Whatever, guess it doesn’t matter if it is, ‘cause I’m pretty sure whatever job involves not seeing me is Adora’s “dream job” and the place being haunted is just the fucking cherry on top.

Catra scoffs at no one, nothing. Her crate’s almost empty by now. What she’s going to do when her hand reaches in and comes up empty to leave her one hundred percent alone instead of just ninety five percent is a problem for her future self.

Not like that version of myself doesn’t hate me already. What do I have to lose?

Funny how this is how she’s spending her senior year of high school: restocking rental VHS tapes probably wiped of various body fluids and wondering how the hell she could’ve tarnished something so grand as to what she had right in the palm of her hands. Other people wasted their entire pathetic lives trying to find love, friendship, and all that sappy shit. Catra found it waiting for her across the street. And now that love will ultimately be leaving Catra, stepping on the last train out of this dump come graduation in nine months time, chasing dreams that were once theirs to be shared out on the west coast, while Catra will still be in this god forsaken place, hoping the pay of this insulting work wouldn’t be so insulting she couldn’t make a life after death here of all places. 

She knows what she says tonight under porch light might not change that, that it might not change Adora’s mind. Yeah, as wide eyed kids with nothing better to do Catra and Adora fantasized about leaving this dead end town for the wonder and whimsy of L.A. Together they’d made promise after promise, bricks for their best-laid plans, to take off on the cross country road trip to end cross country road trips the second their thirteenth year of schooling ended, armed with the purest love and unearned moxie alone- but those fantasies died ensanguined deaths that left Catra’s soul permanently bloodstained the second she took a dagger to their lifeforce when she severed her symbiosis to Adora. 

The ghosts of those pretty what-ifs follow Catra even now, as she walks through the graveyard of this store, empty and echoing. 

“We’ll take my mom,” her own words reverberate against the grainy carpet under her Levis and nearby window pane, “And she’ll finally be free of my asshole step-dad, because we’ll be somewhere he won’t ever find us, and he’ll never get to lay a hand on her again.”

“Where should we go first? I mean, what are you thinking? I was kinda thinking we could try Sunset Ranch first, or-or Amoeba Music? Oh, maybe we could find a place to drop your demos off, Catra. Okay yeah, I take it back- that’s what I want to do first when we get there.”

“I’ll be lucky if anyone wants to hear me without any sort of name recognition, Adora.” Catra had turned her face away from Adora’s eager expression, a desperate play to keep her rising blush hidden and discrete.  

“Then we’ll find some clubs for you to play at. Get you that name recognition you think you need so badly, as if your music doesn’t speak for itself.” Adora nudged her shoulder and Catra had cursed the way her stomach fell to her knees and her knees almost fell to the ground, “If you’re even brave enough to get on stage and not chicken out.”

“Chicken, I’m not- Shut up, Adora!” That little daydreaming for days-to-come sesh of theirs ended with Catra pushing Adora into the closest pile of hay because pure action tended to take over when words failed her (and words always failed her when it came to Adora, maybe that explained the compensation of 95% percent of her penned lyrics being anent to the girl next door), her knees falling to the ground and failing her next as Adora caught her wrist right before succumbing fully to a gravity that bought them both down. Gravity that brought them closer to the danger that was being that much nearer to each other. 

Adora had pieces of straw caught up in her ponytail from the impact. Catra can feel even now the hay rolling against the pads of her fingers as she pulled a tempting piece out her hair, a needle out of a haystack of pure gold, and the heat of that same danger swims up her nervous system against the feel of the mall’s air conditioning like that close call was closer than most.

How old had they been at the time? Like fifteen?

That sounds right, Catra grumbles for herself and herself alone, a copy of Rear Window tucked under her elbow,  that sounds like the honeymoon period of my pinning before I was out “making Adora confused” and ruining my step-dad’s reputation.  

Their double-entendreless roll in the hay ended not in Catra staring longingly into Adora’s eyes, until her reflection was made the embodiment of those glass cutting opal irises, but with Catra twisting her knuckles into Adora’s rib cage- touching her was touching her, even if it wasn’t like either of them wanted- tickling her until Adora was firing back and they were both so far gone laughing, trying to get the upper hand amidst their compromising situations, that none of their thoughts could dare entertain a future without one another.

Adora, if Catra’s buried hatchets don’t totally wreck her plans, will probably be taking off for L.A. alone once they tie the knot on this whole high school thing. Thanks to Glimmer’s intel, Catra knows Adora’s dreams of seeing what the other side of the country held for her still hold true- with or without Catra by her side. And Catra didn’t know what cut to the bone quicker: that Adora was cutting Catra’s string from the tapestry that was once their shared narrative, or that Adora was leaving and there was nothing left here in this homeland that would force her to reconsider.

Not with her guardian behind bars (good fucking riddance ) and lacking the visiting hours rights necessary to guilt Adora into staying, and Razz wouldn’t care. Razz, ancient and all knowing in the worst way , would be there in that kitchen out of time baking a pie and still mixing up Adora and Mara’s names while Adora left with the rest of the silent crowds on some night train. Adora was so dead fucking set on trading in willow trees for palms ones that she wasn’t even following Bow and Glimmer to what was supposed to be their college triptych upstate- a reason Glimmer found good enough to throw a rich girl fit over once she found out and start a fight with Adora, one that festered and magnified until there was no one left to sleep over at Holiday House except for Catra.

Adora refusing to give up her California dreaming for even her new best friends shone a bright light of truth that blinded Catra’s confidence in her and Glimmer’s last minute apology plan.

What if our dreams and our life and our dream life “together” were never really about getting to be each other’s without anyone else’s input? What if it was always just about her getting to leave this place?

“Whatever,  it doesn’t matter ,” Catra’s lack of faith is her only audience, “There’s no point in dwelling on it and getting paralyzed before the party.” Wouldn’t want to chicken out like we always do, would we? “I’m not doing this to buy back into her life plans.”

Even if they were “ours” before.

If Adora leaves, then Adora leaves. At least if Catra crashes her party tonight and puts all her cards on the table, Adora won’t enter L.A with only a frayed end of the truth. This truth she can thread through a needle and patch up that tapestry she’s shred in memoriam of Catra’s exile. 

‘Course… there is another string Adora could pick up and mend, another way she could react to Catra’s waylay appearance, where instead of slamming the door in a super deserving way in Catra’s super deserving face, she ties back the string that has always tied them together. Adora hears Catra out. Adora takes Catra, fucked up head and guitar string scarred hands, back. As her friend, as her girlfriend, whatever- something has to be better than nothing. Better than not even being of the thoughts in Adora’s mind that were heavy with hate.

And then, well Catra couldn’t say. All of Catra’s best laid plans have fallen at the sleight of someone else’s hand, so this time around it’s all but pointless to chart a path on ships that are about to sink. But if she were planning, betting on the hypothetical of it all, Catra would graduate and by some miracle, Adora’s Dodge Daytona would be there waiting for her in the West parking lot. Adora would hold her hand as they leave this town in the rearview, every item they’ve ever owned from all of Adora’s favorite movies to Catra’s guitar, listening to a mixtape Catra would’ve made to mark the start of their first adventure together. 

They’d drive up to Burlington to make one last extra stop before heading out west, where Catra could knock on a decorated dorm door because there was one last rite to perform before she could leave well enough alone.

Except I’m not expecting that. I’m not expecting any version of that. It’s hard enough just to have been dreaming about that all fucking summer long.

Catra falters in her reshelving, shuddering and blinking a familiar heat from her eyes. It hurts as much as it burns to entertain an ending where she hasn’t fucked up so deeply she still gets to ride off in the sunset with Adora in her passenger seat. Turns out that imagining happiness is just as gut-wrenchingly agonizing as never ever getting to see that happiness unfold. That’s just another lesson Catra’s learned the hard way this summer. 

It’s become her deepest hurt.

There’s no back up plan for Catra’s future because there was never any need for one. Since they were seven fucking years old, pinning up afghans and quilts around Razz’s living room to blanket themselves under while to watch the Peter Pan cartoon again because it was one the only movies they could agree on the timeless wonder of, their plan was to leave this ghost town in the dust for the splendor of Hollywood. Chase a music career there- producing, vocal backing, songwriting, instrumentation, hell throw in a record deal and LP of her own if they were truly shooting for the stars. Chase Adora’s history there- bring her treasure trove of unanswered questions about her past real closure.

That meant no college browsing and no light SAT prep on the weekends of Catra’s senior year. It meant dying a little bit more every time she showed up for a shift here at the Hollywood Horde Video Rental Store with the plastered, faithless aura of a sales rep who actually gave shit. Her mom had taken to leaving pamphlets for This-and-That university, including her alma mater on the dining room table before she left in the morning, along with calendars of audition dates for the music programs of This-and-That university. They always ended up in the trash can to be reunited with their corresponding pamphlets.

Catra’s calculations are simple, ironclad, a defense for which she has none. Either she dies tonight and becomes another name whispered in stories told around campfires here, or she dies tonight and takes her exile one step further by leaving for New York City. By far not new shit, a mockery of her old plans laying at her own feet in tatters, but if it’s over now then it’s over now. Catra will have to settle for a warped version of the story they were supposed to be the main characters of; they still end up big in a big ol’ city and they still get what they want- even if it’s half a torn polaroid of the whole picture.  

Either way, Catra is staring down a future where she wakes up alone. This way, she at least gets to choose where that loneliness will follow her. 

Unless Adora is somehow moved by her words, however choppy, and her gestures, however sloppy.

Well, gee, since there isn’t any point in dwelling on it, or are you just naturally a glutton for punishment?  

Catra frowns. In her hand she’s holding the last movie from the return bin, “Edward Scissorhands” and the urge to hurl up the contents of her “breakfast” from this morning is leaving a tartness in her mouth only the sight of seeing this movie can top. 

God, it’s like the whole fucking universe is rubbing in how stupid she was to ruin what she had with Adora and that the only way to do that is to leave little pieces of Catra’s ex littered throughout Catra’s universe like signs she’s too contrite to miss. 

“C’mon Catra,  we’re already past the part where Peg is introducing Edward to the family? Could you burn the popcorn any faster?” Adora’s ringing voice is the loudest sound the store has ever heard and maybe the entire universe too, smoothing down the rough edges of Catra’s psyche like waves brought back to the beach.

“This is a terrible movie, Adora, ” Catra’s past self sounds too happy to take the potshot of teasing Adora. Then again, Catra’s past self had absolutely no idea she was about to give that up, “And just for that, I’m gonna leave the popcorn in for forty more seconds. Hope you like burnt kernels.”

“Uh, by terrible, do you mean classic?”

“And by classic you mean were just watching this so you can swoon over Winona Ryder? Which you could’ve done just as easily if we had watched Heathers tonight.”

Past Catra’s voice dies an untimely death, smeared from the air as quickly as it had set in to leave chills up her spine, to fog up the glass of the windows that surround her. The movie is still in Catra’s hand when her present voice returns in full force.

I should’ve gotten Kyle to cover my shift. 

“Excuse me,” a voice calls out and the “Edward Scissorhands” tape almost shatters in half in Catra’s hand, “But do you have That Darn Cat in yet? I saw it in theatres and knew I just had to see it again.”

Catra slams the last of the returns into the waiting spot without responding to the voice in question. So the universe really is cutting her open to bleed her dry today? She really should’ve gotten Kyle to cover her goddamn shift.

“I’m not talking to you,” she hisses out every word.

The response Catra receives is patronizing in a way she has not missed for a single second. “Well, that’s too bad, because I want to talk to you.”

Catra turns her head- I can’t believe I’m entertaining this, am I really that undignified? Or that bored? - and swerves her trajectory just in time to avoid catching a mouthful of lime green boa feathers, the epitome of fashion taste. “What the hell do you want, Double Trouble?”

Or Crook Number One, as she should say. And if Catra really wants to aim for accuracy, Crook Call-You-Out just to have that much more fun Selling-You Out would work, too.

“To talk to you, like I just said.” When Catra falls prey to the old habit of letting out a growl for intimidation purposes, Double Trouble intones, “I brought a peace offering, if you’d be interested? I know it’s something you can’t resist.”

Her empty basket does not stay that way when the ghost of Catra’s recent, slandered past places three CDs in with a flourish. The CDs reflect the fluorescent light of the store in a way that can only mean they’re still in their plastic wrapping, aka the hardest substance to create a tear in in the entire world, and that can only mean Double Trouble is the one skipping out on their boring shift.

Either Catra’s not strong enough to resist a chance at new music for the grand cost of zero dollars, or she’s gambling on the notion she’s no longer weak enough to fall for Double Trouble’s bullshit as she pulls the CDs out to examine them. It’s not like she’d take them on blind faith, or any type of faith for that matter. That’s how she ends up with three of the same Weird Al albums. Either way, this is one hundred percent a trap.

And I’m about to fall for it. Like I always do. Hook, line, and sinker.

“Blink-182’s  Cheshire Cat, you know I already own this album, right? Entre a Mi Mundi- very funny, DT,” Catra all but snarls, “and Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Wait, what? You know I don’t listen to Alanis Morissette.”

Thought I was pretty vocal about that.

Bright green eyes join the shine under the store lights, “But she does, doesn’t she?”

Catra finds herself stuttering in indignation at this. Yes, DT’s always had the one up when it comes to reading Catra like a fucking book, and yes, it’s a skill of theirs that’s always been a pain in Catra’s ass considering it would just be better for everyone if that book remained closed, but this latest fixation of the washed out actor to be’s in fanning the flames of her burning love life is going to be what drives her finally mad.

“A little birdy told me what you’re planning for tonight,” Double Trouble says, continuing without permission- a specialty of theirs.

“A little birdy?” is all Catra can stammer out in reply. She’s still trying to figure out they got here and how quickly she can get the hell out.

“Mhmm,” DT nods, “The Ladies Luncheon is particularly chatty, if you know what I mean.”

Catra almost drops the CDs. 

Did Glimmer seriously fucking tell her aunt about the party tonight and then her aunt blabbed to her little wealthy women’s commission who then blabbed it to everyone else? Should I just assume someone told Adora too?

“I figured giving her dear Alanis’ LP might be good for a peace offering of your own.”

“How’d you get these?” Catra changes the subject strategically or cowardly, to put it another way. Discussing Adora’s   taste in music- or lack thereof- is a one way ticket to getting coffee-flavored bile all over the feathers of DT’s boa for several reasons.

Double Trouble hums again, “I have my ways, Kitten.”

“So, you stole them. You took the merchandise you were supposed to be selling. Of fucking course you did.”

This glamorous mall job reshelving rentals of Catra’s is an example of an assorted number of ways quasi- nepotism could be used as penance. When it came time to decorate her birthday cake with Sixteen Candles , she begged for permission to apply for a job at the mall’s record store, to be surrounded by vinyl paradise for this specific teenage right of passage. Nothing sounded better than the prospect of literally being surrounded by music- except for maybe the idea of tucking away new releases to bring home- and so it was either that or settling for the oubliette pawn shop she bought her Taylor acoustic from. The job application had been filled out, Catra’s name signed on the bottom line, a quick scribble of naivete before her mom had even signed off on the idea. 

The next day her stepdad passed on the news that in light of her request he, being the name dropping sleaze he was, had pulled some strings and found her a job at the mall. Then, because that monster loved dabbling in the art of getting his step-daughter’s hopes up, he promptly told her she’d be reporting the following weekend to her step-uncle’s video rental store and had the audacity to demand Catra thank him at the dinner table in front of her mom for his show of last minute “generosity.”

After their accidental dabble in arson, DT found a job opening to replace the one they’d lost in the now ashen theater known as The Disco (a misnomer of a place, not a club but a stage) at none other than the mall’s Tupelo Records, sticking half chewed gum on the unopened new releases Catra once dreamed of owning all to herself. Insult to fucking injury was it amounted to. Insult that DT had the freedom to come and go from Catra’s dream after-school job; injury in that it had to be DT of all people to snatch the position out of thin air, the same quid pro quo masquerader Catra swore off when three showers later she stilled smelled of smoke.      

“Why not?” the charlatan scoffs, “It’s not like anyone’s going to miss them. And as long as they can’t prove I did it, then there’s no harm in indulging one’s most selfish desires. You, of all people, know what that’s like.”

That depends on what DT means by selfish. 

“Can’t prove it, huh? Seem to be hearing that a lot this summer.”

She doesn’t elaborate. Instead, the absence of DT’s Corpus Delicti poses a headache inducing crossroads for Catra.

“Since you can steal all the CDs you want from Tupelo and no one gives a damn , then why give them to me ?” she steals herself with a breath that comes off cold and indifferent and somehow insanely insecure all at once. Why not pass them on to your improv friends or whatever hopemonger you're sleeping with this week? “What do you want from me? To steal you a movie you could rent for three dollars?”

Hollywood Horde doesn’t have That Darn Cat, Catra can tell DT that for free.   

The faux feathers of Double Trouble’s scarf brush against Catra’s hand and it paralyzes her the way she imagines snake venom might, “Credit, I suppose. I mean, who doesn’t want recognition for one of their greatest performances of all time? It wouldn’t kill you to give me a standing ovation. After all, where would you be Kitten, if it weren’t for my freely offered advice? You wouldn’t be on your way to Adora’s party now, would you?”  

Ugh, now I’m starting to think you’re the Inez in this version of the story. Catra scowls into the deep carve of her frown lines. Between you and Sparkles, you’re the mouthy gossip who always has it coming. At least Glimmer didn’t try to ice the burn of calling me out by bribing me with an Alanis Morissette CD.  And besides, I already have a goddamn peace offering!

“I definitely almost wouldn’t have died in a burning building.”

“Yeesh, dramatic much?” laughs DT, throwing a section of bleached blonde hair behind their head, “You know, we could workshop your tone for tonight, really ease up on that hostility because it is not a good look for sweeping women off their feet.” 

“No,” says Catra. She shakes her head, adamant. No more falling for any of these half baked get-love-quick-schemes as an excuse to avoid the work of doing the right thing, “I don’t want your help. I don’t need your help, so go back to your shift and just-” her shoulders fall, her new creed not to resort to anger at the first sign of anything coming back to her, along with an inescapable wave of exhaustion, “Just leave me alone, please? ”

“That’s the attitude that got you into this mess, Kitten.” trills DT. 

Then it might as well get me out of it. Might as well use the shovel I dug this hole with to climb out of it. Why does everyone and the ghost of their dead dog/cat have a problem with how I wanna fix the mess I made?

Catra sets the CDs down in the crate and elevates the crate on the jut of her hip bone before getting a head start in the front counter’s direction. A fitting post-mortem for this conversation, for this forgery of a friendship. 

“Well then, since you’ve got it all figured out,” there’s no bad blood laced in their words, their tone, their carefree easy-come-easy-go attitude toward all things genuine, “I suppose I’ll leave you be. But if you end up wanting to take me up on my offer, I’ll be on that bench behind the mall having a smoke. You know, the sad little one? No point in going back to work now anyway.”

They don’t wait for Catra to stoop to her usual level and offer some scathing cheek and tongue retort of a goodbye. Boa scarf thrown over their shoulder, Double Trouble sayshays back the way they came out the open doors. Goosebumps rise on Catra’s arms at the cold of their wake. She ignores it, doing everything in her pathetic amount of power not to imagine the utter irreverence of leaving cigarette ash littered over her and Adora’s last ineffable place, last holy memory.

“I’ll be done with riding lessons around five,” Catra sinks to the floor behind the counter where no one can see vulnerability bleed through the cracks in her armor, the plastic packaging of Jagged Little Pill sticking to the skin of her fingers, as Adora’s voice comes back to her, in a whisper, in a shout, in a scream, “Meet behind the mall, the usual place, okay?”

I should never have gotten in that car. I should have never driven away.     

As slow shifts go, at least Catra expected this one to be torture and expected to have to scowl and bear it. Double Trouble’s surprise guest appearance is unwelcome to say the least, but it’s the only one the universe seems to have bothered to schedule. No chatty eldery women to make Catra miss Scorpia as she rings them up. No college dropout punk wannabes to make her retroactively regret her contrarian choices. No hyper-active kids coming from the arcade toward the centerfold of the mall to make Catra clean up their spilled Orange Juliuses.  

Just the empty store, Catra and yellow pad of lined paper to scribble out sad prose that no matter how fucking hard she tries comes out to the chord progression of You Oughta Know. And when the land of smeared black ink becomes a melody she can stomach finally, Catra’s staring at some more honest version of all those apology speeches free of Glimmer’s pretentious edits and suggestions.

The word “promises” is woven like an aurelian thread through every wounded sentiment; she’s back to cursing Adora’s name and reminiscing about that last night in her bedroom and accusing Adora of turning her back on her after throwing Catra to the ground and breaking the same bones her touch had turned to gold.

“Just this once, I’ll ask you to stay,” Catra hums the melody somewhere beyond her conscious awareness, “Just this once, I’ll say anything to make it okay/ promise I’d never say I’m sorry/ promise me it isn’t too late.”

Yeah. Okay. Maybe Glimmer’s revisions were a necessary evil. It’s not like Catra’s ever apologized before, her refusal to ask for repentance evident by this mess one could call song lyrics.

Despite her attitude towards this new tune (Catra’s calling it Never Have I Ever Before which she thinks she might actually hate and blames the suffering of Alanis lyrics currently cycling through her brain), Catra’s still hacking and slashing away at the damn thing. Right up until she hears the life straight up leaving her boss in the back office. 

Ugh, what’s chafing that big bald head of his now? Other than our lack of customers that means this ship is sinking faster than every other one I’m on.

Catra’s compelled- by sympathy or boredom or chance to revel in someone else’s misery- by Hordak’s sound barrier breaking groan. Tossing the paper pad down onto the counter along with the offending Alanis Morissette CD (has she been holding on to that this entire time?) she finds herself pushing back the cracked door and at his mercy.

The creak of where carpet meets floorboard gives her away when the door makes no sound.

“What do you want?” Hordak is ready for her, anticipating her. His words are spit with the same poison Catra spoke with when she asked that question a few minutes, hours, ages earlier. 

“Uh, are you okay?” asks Catra. She keeps out the part where his head has found a pillow in paper work, fingers clasped and held over his head in a prayer position to herself. It’s the kind of pitiful image that speaks louder than words could anyway.

“And why exactly do you care?” He sinks further into his black hole of white collar middle management. Catra swallows a snicker, squaring her shoulders. 

“Because-'' Why does Catra care? She’s spent her entire fucking life despising the man in front of her and the way he turned the cheek every time his older brother brought down his hands on her mother. Hordak’s about as spineless as the spineless come. Scratch that, the fucker is practically boneless . Boneless sludge slithering around that was never high enough to kiss his brother’s ass- and not for lack of trying. His pouting, manchild attitude is the only one to give Catra’s shitty hostile state of mind a run for its money. “- I don’t know, does it matter?” 

Does it matter. That is the million dollar question Glimmer threw in Catra’s direction about thirteen times last night as she tore her a new one- well, old one if you consider DT’s “act” of “kindness”- while Catra sat, sinking further into Glimmer’s sandtrap of a bed and deeper into what was unfolding to be the neverending hole of her regrets.

“Does it matter why you thought you had to bully me, Bow, and Adora all summer vacation? All that matters is that you say sorry, Catra!”  

“I don’t say sorry!” Catra had stood, fingers balled into fists parallel at her side. Standing at her full height gave her a full foot on the Queen of Suburbia, “Don’t act like you know me! Don’t act like you know what I’ve been through! And don’t you fucking dare tell me to say sorry when no one’s ever bothered to say sorry to me!”

Her words had ricocheted off the walls of Glimmer’s bedroom like a series of bullets she’d fired at her enemy only to leave entry wounds up and down her own soul.

“Does that matter?” Glimmer shot back and Catra’s heart aches even now under the weight of that particular exit wound, “You didn’t even hear Adora out, Catra. You didn’t have to watch her try and fail to move on from you. You just got to be cruel! You want to turn things around? Start there, Catra. Do something something good in life for once, just one good thing, and apologize to Adora.” Once finished, once satisfied, Glimmer turned her back and crossed her arms. Her shoulders shook as she hugged herself tighter.

Speechless was her speech ready tongue, and Catra dropped her fists. “I- I didn’t know… any of that stuff.”

“Yeah?” Glimmer had sniffled, “Looks like there’s a lot you don’t know.”

Hordak doesn’t assume the offensive like Catra had enclosed in Glimmer’s dominion. A time ago, he easily would’ve thrown up the defenses without letting Catra even get a single word out, barking an order to leave his office like he was a madman and this office was a madhouse made to entrap him, but now he only grunts something unintelligible that makes Catra roll her eyes nonetheless.

Such an act is not much of a prologue for her next statement, “Look, I’ve been- I dunno? Trying?”

“Trying? Trying what?” his voice is the dead entertaining the living.

 “To be better. It’s a newer angle,” winces Catra, “And there’s been a painful and weird adjustment period, but it’s gotta be better than what I’ve tried in the past. Gotta be better than whatever it is you’re doing right now.”

“That’s your enlightened epiphany?” Hordak says, laughing under his breath in a way that reminds Catra of those sad circus clowns. Well, he certainly is the leader of those. “Try?”

Catra shrugs, “I mean, yeah. It’s not like I have anything left to lose. And what, are you supposed to sit in your office forever? Just because Entrapta hired your younger brother to be her weird assistant and left town? Just because this place can’t keep up with the new Blockbuster on 16th avenue and is going down like a sinking ship-”

“Is this conversation going anywhere?” Hordak stops her premature eulogy with a growl.

 “You’ve got a new start, is I guess, what I’m trying to say,” Catra’s words crawl to a whisper. This part, this getting past her own blatant flaws to offer advice on someone else’s, this is the hard part. And this is just a warmup . There’s still a couple of doors that await her knock. “With him gone, you know. You don’t have to be under anyone’s thumb. Maybe it’s time to just let all this go,” her eyes trace the disappointments of twenty years surrounding her boss, “And try something new.” 

Her words mean something to her, at least. Catra has to hope this hail mary will lead her to the right thing. After treading these broken and beaten paths just to end up right where she started, Catra has to hope that in returning to the original path she is finally walking down the right one.

There’s no breath of life from Hordak, no acknowledgement he hasn’t completely given up the ghost. He sighs, again, lifting his head up and bringing his hand to his chin. Then, his bloodshot eyes take her in for the first time since she stepped a tentative foot in his office.

God I hope that I’m back on the right path with Adora, ‘cause I’m getting nowhere with Hordak- or anyone else, for that matter. Her mind wanders to thoughts of Glimmer, or Micah, of DT.

When she can’t take anymore of Hordak’s grimace in her direction, which is about a thirteenth of a second, Catra turns on the balls of her toes. By her own mental math she has at least another hour of her shift to go before Rogelio shows up to take her place and close and if Hordak finds the idea of their mutual Come to Jesus meeting more repulsive than the idea of her crowding his office, then she might as well kill that time hammering out discouraging first drafts of songs and rehearsing her real up and coming heart-to-heart.

Sticking my neck out for Adora is more important anyway. Not like Hordak needs me to apologize for being a shitty step-niece or something, and it’s not like he’s ever gonna apologize for being the world’s shittiest  step-uncle. 

Catra’s back is turned and her hand is on the polished surface of the door when Hordak speaks, “Catra… you can,” he sighs in his usual over the top fashion, “You can clock out early, if you so desire. I’ll cover the floor. Besides, I’ve heard you have somewhere more important to be.”

A grin betrays her gratitude and surely this is must be the fucking day of firsts because Catra finds herself saying words she’s swore on her future grave she’d never say.

“Thanks, Hordak.”

~

Catra doesn’t know jackshit. That might be the most important, if not damning, lesson Catra’s learned this entire summer.      

It’s almost fucking hysterical, the irony of it all, that she could’ve survived a lifetime of abuse and indoctrination knowing it was the hands of the devil parading around as an angel, yet never seeing the signs of her own untimely demise. Catra tore away at those excuses like flowers on a petal; this isn’t my fault, this is all my fault, not it’s not, no it’s not.

Why admit to her own fallibility when it was weakness in the wicked eyes of her stepfather, disappointment in the closed, tired eyes of her mother, from one which iris they both gave to her? Why practice humility when there was no one around to model it after? Why go with grace and learn from her mistakes when it was easier to save face by pretending she had it all figured out, even when she was so unmoored standing there in Adora’s shadow? 

Excuses, excuses. Picked like leaves off of poison ivy disguised as a daisy. That’s what Catra’s left with. Seventeen years and all it had made her into was the king of fools without a court to command or a land to defend. Seventeen years and three homes she’d given up; one by Adora’s side, one in her eyes, one in her arms. Much in the way Catra stood in the center of that theatre as violent orange and red lapped up the walls caving in upon her only exit, too had Catra let those homes around her go up like a goddamn blaze in the dark. She’s always started it; she didn’t have to know what she was doing. Not that it mattered. Catra knew now she would’ve stuck that first twisted knife in anyway.

As she pushes the NO EXIT door of the back end of the mall open, Catra is met with the putrid smell of rotting corn dogs and thrown out, bad perfume samples from the dumpster nearby and the purple pink skies of a setting sun. Her skateboard drops from her hands and hits the asphalt beneath her. The sound ricochets through the empty parking lot; there’s no one here to join her funeral procession. Helmet on, strap unbuckled, Catra has left DT’s shameless attempt at gratuity in an unmarked cubby back at Hollywood Horde. A dead weight on a dead girl walking at least, the lost cause of a lost love at most.

Setting off on the path back home will take Catra through the figments of her worst intentions. That much she does know. That much she’s used to as of late. Turns out, whatever version of herself died as The Disco went down has been haunting Catra ever since, materializing as her own memories, her own mistakes, following her around and walking through the walls she’s put up. If she was dead set on refusing to learn before, this twin from her dreams is hellbent on seeing that Catra learns now.

The parking lot Catra skates through with relative ease lingers with the smell of smoke left by DT’s cigarette interlude as it morphs from sunset back to the bright April daylight, sounds of September slumber becoming the shouting of their last parking lot rendezvous. This is where the haunting always begins- on the edge of the last known place you could’ve found Catra alive.

“Catra, just listen to me!” The back door is opening with a rush, Catra’s Levis taking her down the path of no return, Adora hot on her heels. “It isn’t like that, I swear-”

“Then what is it like, Adora? Are you just going to be her little puppet for the rest of your fucking life? Am I just a mistake to you? Was that night a mistake to you?” Catra pulled at the curls on her head until she wrestled Adora’s headband off of it. The urge to snap it in half was almost becoming her.

“Catra, no-”

“Then why can’t we be together, Adora? Why can’t it be like we planned?” Breaking. Catra was breaking into a million little pieces for what felt like the millionth time. She skates over those pieces now, igniting a phantom pain that runs deep at a diagonal angle against her being and threatens to erase any other sensation. But even that anguish pales in comparison to where this thread of memories will take Catra through next. 

“You know it’s not that simple, Catra,” Adora practically begged, like at any given second she’d fall to her hands and her knees in desperate communion, “I can’t go against her or what she wants, not yet-”

“Bullshit, Adora, you kissed me! I’d say you’re pretty fucking far from going against her. God, I’m so fucking tired of acting like I don’t exist just so you can please her. I’m so fucking sick of you trying to erase me so you can be her obedient little zombie! You ruined me, Adora.” Catra seethed, breathing flames, “And now you want to throw me away, like you were always going to.”  

“Catra, please,” Adora caught her by the wrist, “I need you. You’re my best friend-”

“Don’t call me that!” Volatile and distraught, Catra ripped her hand and stumbled backwards, “In fact, don’t call me anything, Adora.”

Catra had always been the kind to strike to kill. It was the kind of defense made for her: corner her, she’d go for your limbs if it meant she didn’t have to cut off her own just to escape. And that smoking gun of hers was the wound that put them both six feet under.

Because she doesn’t know anything, as it turns out, Catra has no clue how that great divide would’ve continued to schism or if Adora could have found it within herself to say something to mend it if Double Trouble hadn’t driven up, window rolled down and wearing a smirk dressed as a winning smile, asking with a snake’s tongue if Catra needed a ride anywhere. 

Catra does know that, as she skates across the lanes between the mall and the dirt road back home, that she killed herself as she killed Adora just the same when got in that car and said before closing the door, “Call me when you figure out what you want. Or better yet, just don’t call me at all.”

The look in Adora’s eyes Catra caught sight of in Double Trouble’s rearview mirror will haunt her for the rest of the lifetime of love she gave up in that one move.

Catra is traveling back in time now, pushing off the concrete of the road each time her momentum slows, every time her direction begs to be changed. She’s making good time, and so this matinee showing of her deepest miseries she can at least sit through knowing she knows the ending. Before the mall became the turning point in their story (or Catra thinks of it as that because she’s still trying to change the end and doesn’t know face a reality where she’s burned up the rest of book), the rising action bled over in their high school gymnasium. To the night where Catra wilted like a wallflower against cinderblock walls watching a stranger occupy her home territory dancing in Adora’s arms.

Their high school is a quarter mile from the mall and as Catra skates by, the phantom with her same eyes invites her inside the double doors, down the hall marked with broken tiles and lockers of rust and chipping paint, around the homeroom she’ll spend the rest of the year alone in, to the gym where the lights flicker low and reflect a thousand colors of what could have been. 

Everywhere by Fleetwood Mac, Adora’s favorite song at the time (it could still be, Catra’s spent a score of sleepless nights wondering what she might be listening to these days, if her choices would annoy the hell out of Catra like they used to or if they’re just reflections of the scars from the knife she put in Adora’s back) played over the speakers. 

Adora must’ve requested the song from the shit DJ the dance committee hired to summon Catra from the shadows where they used to sneak around. A calling card, a “come on out now,” a please. Catra heard all three loud and clear from the corner where she stood frozen in place, still reeling from the visit she had just received out of the blue, the thorns of a single red rose breaking the skin of her hands.

Adora, her modest crimson dress Catra recognized from Sunday school dappling with flickers of light, stood there in the center of the gym looking every which way except for right in front of her. The song played, first verse, chorus, then the second, and Catra stayed standing there, her knuckles bloody, replaying only the words of the wicked witch of the west herself,

“You two have gotten too close. For the good of Adora’s future, you will not be seeing each other again. You’re confusing her, and if you don’t want your father to get word of what you have done, you’ll listen and do as you’re told. Cease this embarrassment for Adora’s sake, if nothing else.”

And then, as the song began to fade out, Bow stepped and saved Adora from further embarrassment, further confusion. Seeing the smile that lit up on Adora’s face sealed the deal and wrote Catra’s tombstone. She abandoned the dance and the gym and Adora, threw open the double doors and left the rose on the floor, shattering the delicate thing as she trampled the stem beneath her feet on her way out. Waiting in their old spot under the bleachers wouldn’t ease the hurt, wouldn’t heal the wounds from the thorns, but it granted Catra the kind of darkness she could sob quietly and hope for a reprieve that would never come.

Catra’s eyes brim with tears that shouldn’t be there. The sadness of that night has never really left her. And how could it when she kept choosing it over and over and over because no other sadness in the world could even pretend to fill the space in her heart that belonged to Adora?

That empty space only exists because I erupted when Adora confronted me about showing her up the next day. I could’ve just come clean about that evil old hag confronting me but instead I turned it around on her and made it her fault. I don’t think the mall’s ever heard a fight between two teenage girls that loud, though.

It was supposed to be different, that dance around. The Spring Fling wasn’t supposed to be like the prom Adora skipped out on and changed everything about them by doing so. The coast was supposed to be clear- no more hiding, no more sneaking, no more pretending. 

No more waiting.  

But Catra is skating past that little clandestine alcove in the woods where Adora parked that night she gave a middle finger to her guardian and her guardian’s pageant schemes when she pulled up to the curb and told Catra, “Get in the car,” and she sees now that they were on begged and borrowed time fogging up the windshield glass of her old Daytona.

“What are you going to do,” Catra had asked, heart beating with an anticipation for something she couldn’t say what. The light of the crescent moon cast the night in it’s image, a heavenly ether where the whole world was a kaleidoscope of columns of silver light and dark blue contradiction. Adora sat deliquescing in the driver’s seat, white knuckles clutching the steering wheel, eyebrows pinched and decorated with a halo of stray hairs from her otherwise perfect ponytail. The moon’s glow illuminated nearly invisible streaks of makeup that must’ve dried up when Adora failed to take it all off with warm water and washcloth. Not that any kind of clown costume could hold a candle to the real thing. Splintering with starlight, she looked like a fucking movie star straight out of the sixties to Catra. “When she finds out you’re not going to be there to win Prom Queen? You know she probably rigged that, right?”

Adora let out a laugh that was half mad before collapsing back in the seat, “Honestly? I don’t care. I just- I had to do something, anything. I don’t even feel like I’m my own person anymore, Catra. Rigged the prom queen contest for me? Try her rigging everything for me.”

Catra’s fingers curled into a palm as she inhaled through her nose. They’d been here before- so close yet still at an infinite distance. Like the fool Catra was, she wanted to reach out, to take Adora’s hand and thread their fingers together until they couldn’t be separated, like Catra’s touch was the string that could yank Adora out of her insecurities, like Catra herself could be the wool that wrapped around Adora and protected her from her demons. Hell, there was nothing more that Catra wanted than to be the blanket thrown over the barbwired that kept Adora enclosed and separate from the world the rest of them were living in. 

Ever unmoored in the face of the consequences that would surely undo her, Catra forced herself to be still and forced her thoughts to be somewhere beyond the goosebumps racing up and down her arms.

“I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep pretending I want what she wants, or what any of them want. Catra, I’m so tired of being someone I’m not.” the tears that brimmed in Adora’s eyelids glistened like fragments of glass. The mixtape, the one Catra skipped out on one of her stepdad’s most critical fire and brimstone sermons to make, the one Adora kept amongst her stash of Shania Twain CDs and movie scores, had long reached the end of its eight track run. Neither of them had bothered to rewind it.  

“Adora, it’s just-” Catra spoke without thinking, because thinking meant overanalyzing Adora’s words and hoping to hear something Adora wasn’t saying in a speech Catra had memorized after the first few hundred times. For Catra, this venting session of a regular variety had always ended in disappointment, in addendums to her plans she’d tear up and songs she’d write but never sing. “It’s just one more year, and then we can get out of here. We can have what we want. The end’s near, Adora, it’s in sight. We just have to wait a little bit longer.”

Adora’s head turned towards Catra. Catra’s eyes lingered on the lip caught in Adora’s teeth and it felt symmetrical to sin. But she couldn’t tear her eyes away even if it meant life or death as Adora spoke lethargically.

“One more year, huh? One more year of everyone’s shiny play thing…” she drifted off, sitting up right and shifting her body away from the steering wheel and the dashboard. Catra was staring at her smile now, “I feel like, like everyone thinks I don’t get it. That I don’t see that they’re just projecting their personalities onto me, you know?”

“Yeah. I know.” Catra’s eyes flitted downwards. Adora wasn’t the only one annoyed with her tendency to acquiesce to the environment’s demands, to bend to the will of the strongest in the room.

“ And it doesn’t matter if I break, because I let them do it to me. I’m so scared of what they’ll think of the real me that I keep trying to be whatever they want me to be. ‘Be smart and beautiful and have it together, Adora.”’ the sarcasm in Adora’s voice cut through Catra like a knife. This was the part of the speech that never failed to strengthen Catra’s resolve to whisk Adora out of this town, be her Peter Pan and fly her to a Neverland that was all their own. No one else deserved her, they all kept proving that when they took so much joy in hurting her. Intertwined destinies as lost girls never looked as close as they did in that mirror. “‘That’s boring now, do the broken thing. Good thing you’re so obedient, Adora, or else we’d all be bored out of our own minds!”’ 

“Shit!”

Adora gave an encore to her speech this time around by throwing her fist down on the horn, letting the shadows that crept on the edge of the woods know where they were hiding. The blaring sound made Catra jump so far in the air she hit the ceiling of the car, cursing enough to make her poor mother blush and send her stepfather into the redness of rage and Adora into a flurry of apologies.

“Sorry! Sorry! I didn’t- I didn’t mean to hit it that hard, I promise!” 

“I know that, bozo!”

“Is your head okay? I really didn’t mean to, Catra.”

“My head’s fine, Adora. You just scared me, that’s all.”

Where Catra’s hand had been hers to worry about and keep to herself before, Adora had a hold on it now. At some point in the chaos Catra grabbed Adora’s hand, or Adora grabbed hers, but the who and the how and the why didn’t matter when the end result meant Catra was going to die at the electrifying feel of her touch. Adora was so close- too close. Catra could see a red flush on those pale cheeks of hers, hair that fell into place like dominoes, opal eyes that were an ocean in and of themselves that wrecked ships and stranded the bravest of sailors. Catra had always been envious of the same beauty Adora resented. Her lanky awkwardness, untamed curls, her sunburnt freckles and mismatching irises, they could never hope to have a fair fight standing in the shadow of Adora’s natural light. But right then and there Catra wanted to jump into that ocean that was screaming her name, beckoning her. 

No more waiting. No more wondering. She was going down with this ship.

“Adora, you don’t feel that way with me, do you? ” asked Catra, anticipating again. Hoping, again. Speaking again because she was the certain she was about to do something monumentally stupid. “That you’re someone you’re not when we’re together?”

“Catra, no- no. Of course not. You’re not like the rest of them,” Adora’s laugh twisted Catra’s stomach into a tapestry of guilt and she wanted to turn away, to drop Adora’s hand. If she had, Adora’s voice might not have gotten soft as she said, “ You… might actually be the only one who I actually feel like myself with. Who I-I feel like myself is good enough with.”

Catra swallowed hard. There was nothing else in the universe but what was right in front of her, speaking a language she found herself understanding. 

“Really? You’re not trying to impress your new friends Sparkles and Rainbow?” Catra covered the crack in her voice with a coward’s attempt at coyness.

“Well, I’m not trying to impress anyone, Catra.” Adora told her. She was smiling brighter than the moon above them and coming ever so closer to a fate fraught with danger. 

“Trying?” Catra’s heartbeat was becoming that of a broken drum, her skin a hometown for chills and her words illicit smoke and mirrors, “Adora, you’re such an idiot. You don’t have to try at anything. Everything you do, you’re a fucking natural at-”

And then there was no more waiting. There was only Adora’s hand leaving Catra’s and finding her jaw, forging an uncharted path in heat and touch, a resolve in those opal eyes that paled in comparison to any ferocity Catra had ever seen in her best friend’s eyes. There was only Adora’s lips meeting Catra’s, soft and tentative, chasing away that corrosive unspoken anticipation, answering every question Catra was too much of a realist to ever ask.

 “If this is all in my head Catra,” Adora pulled away, breathing heavily, “You have to tell me now.”

Catra pulled back her in, “It’s not. I swear to fucking God, this is not just in your head, Adora.” 

“Good, that’s so good, Catra.” There were tears in Adora’s eyes for a different reason than when this speech had begun its tired run. Tears of happiness as Catra ran her hand down over that halo of gold around her head and kissed her again. And again. And again.

A few miles down the road, the head of the dance committee was holding an unclaimed plastic crown and sash, saying Adora’s name into the microphone for the third time. 

As the woods and their expanse fall out of Catra’s view, she leaves behind with it memories with an expanse of their own. The night Adora kissed her in the car was a seductive memory that held so much more than that single mercurial high, but flashes and images of tripping over her own feet and swinging from in the incandescent glow of the street light into Adora’s arms, not quite sober as they screamed FUCK CIVILITY together. 

A film reel of selective flashbacks forged from the tampering of the roll. In her head, she could replay it and replay it, each time giving up a piece of her spirit to that unforgiving void, until it was the only reality she existed in. 

Catra could get lost in it all if she was that hellbent on being stupid. There’s a part of her that’s amazed that those memories survived after her hundredth flippant attempt to cross out every good year and every good moment she ever had with Adora. But like all effective hauntings, fables, and campfire stories, the hero either learns the lesson the universe is trying to force upon them, or they die trying.    

“You might actually be the only one who I actually feel like myself with.”

Her story’s turning out to be no different. 

I thought we were out of the woods, fuck, I thought I knew it. I didn’t know that we were being watched.  I should’ve, though. We were always being watched.

Gravel turns under the wheels of her skateboard. Catra’s hands come to her arms and she suppresses a shiver; the woods cast a deep shadow and yeah, maybe it’s childish of her to think those fable characters are amongst the trees trading her deepest darkest secrets like currency, but they wouldn’t be the only ones in this town and they’d be doing the least amount of damage. 

Maybe she’s just blessed with twice the paranoia because she was born Catholic and then raised Methodist. 

Years of loving Adora in the worst way were a debt Catra was owed and then finally paid when Adora kissed her back. Years of wanting her when everyone else wanted her too, years of watching the way people would trip over themselves and fawn over her Midas’ touch, their jaws slack and their eyes twinkling wide. Years of Catra carrying inside of her a terminal disease, an infection she couldn’t cut out and time on her knees couldn’t make go away. Years of taking the next best thing that was being Adora’s “best friend.” All those years and their neverending turmoil made worth it when Adora said, “If it’s okay with you, it’s okay with me.”

Years of that shit for what, seven weeks in heaven? Getting to be with Adora the way she’d always dreamed of was better than any dream, sure, but it more than masked the signs that their nemeses were winding up to swing. Adora kissing her cheek and promising she’d tell her other friends soon. Catra getting sloppy and leaving her stuff in Adora’s room. Whispering over the phone, “Wait for my signal, and meet me after dark.” Breaking curfew and locks on liquor cabinets, damning the consequences and having the fucking time of their lives. Nothing could touch them. Nothing.  

But time was nearer than it appeared in the mirror. And those moments that she and Adora stole were crimes they had to pay for. Getting together turned new pages, ones of getting grounded, getting separated. Untethered, they were unprepared for the interrogations or the allegations spread by those fables foxes and wolves, the rumors that traded chattering mouths of snakes and swallows, until they were being spoken by Adora’s guardian. 

And Adora, like the good, civil, and obedient girl she is, caved.

Catra wonders- if however briefly because she isn’t the kind of person to spare a second thought to her stepfather, may he not rest in peace- if the anger that overcame her with the threat to rule her after something wicked came her way that night of the dance and told Catra she knew all the rules she broke and had a complete compendium of everything she had stolen, is how he operated all the time. Why he was always one wrong comment away losing his suffocating hold on poise and control.  

No, that bastard was all ego. He didn’t actually have feelings that could get hurt, so I’m gonna have to let that idea slide. Not like he deserves the benefit of the doubt, anyway.

Speaking of losing control, walking out on her date for the Spring Fling was nothing more than an invitation for said date to barge in the middle of Catra’s Saturday shift and start making accusations of her own. She was hurt, more than anything, and scared of what it meant that Catra didn’t show the night before or answer her innumerable calls. That’s what the rest of the mall heard, anyway. All Catra heard Adora say was “me, me, me, me, this problem revolves around me like everything does.”   

Adora had played her hand. “You know it’s not that simple, Catra, I can’t go against her or what she wants, not yet.” And because Catra saw she wasn’t winning, she quit the game altogether. “Call me when you figure out what you want. Or better yet, just don’t call me at all.”

But where Catra thought she knew that was the right thing to do, not everyone else agreed.

“You weren’t there when it happened, okay?!” she sobbed over Melog’s incessant, crescendoing yowling, trying to yank her headband from the cat’s teeth because it was going in the fucking garbage can- everything Adora had touched was, “She chose her again, not me! Adora doesn’t want me… not like I want her.” 

Catra had said that a hundred times before and each time, there always lingered a quiet hope that kept her coming back. But there, crying like a mad woman and collapsing on the floor still in her red “How Can I Help You?” vest, that hope died a quiet death that to Catra, was the loudest sound in the universe. The kiss in the car, their short lived run as more than friends- none of it meant to Adora what it had meant to Catra. Leave the pain of knowing it to be more painful than to never have known it all.

But I was wrong about that, too. 

Skating past the entrance to the neighborhood that up until a month and a half ago, she and Adora had shared for their whole lives, Catra’s stomach sours with nerves. She passes the school bus stop where she always thinks she sees Adora standing, but neither she or her spirit is ever really loitering there. One more sign Catra’s truly losing it. The last time Adora was trespassing this old haunt of theirs was when she was moving out of the house she’d lived in for seventeen years, back on the last day of July’s infamy- right after Catra’s mom started working full time again, DT was just starting to get on her last nerve but not yet revving up for their show stopping number, and Scorpia’s answering machine was not quite long past full. 

Adora had been loading a lifetime of cardboard boxes up into the back of Micah’s pick up truck, Bow and Glimmer standing by the For Sale in the yard fanning themselves with an old art project of Adora’s Catra recognized and bitching about the summer heat.

“Is this all of it, Adora?” Micah was asking over Glimmer’s lament for lemonade.

“Yeah, the rest of it’s at Razz’s-”

They weren’t supposed to make eye contact. Catra wasn’t even supposed to be around, her avoidance of Adora strategic down to knowing every last part of her schedule as of late- but Adora hadn’t been in that house since the realtor started showing it, and one more afternoon listening to Double Trouble butcher Emily Dickinson poems for an empty auditorium was to ascend to the seventh layer of hell. So Catra took the risk and braved a blistering sun to skate home, hoping to practice barre chords and scales for the rest of the afternoon until her callouses bled.      

“...already.”

Two different types of catastrophes occurred in that moment. The first happened when, having found herself staring at Adora and really seeing her since getting into DT’s car, Catra stopped breathing. Fully, violently, she was robbed of oxygen, not a single molecule of it reaching her brain. This certain lack of O2 caused a ripple effect of the second catastrophe, beginning with Catra forgetting where she was, why she was on the other side of the street and not standing on that truck bed, and everything that wasn’t the girl staring back at her, and ended in necrosis, with the upper right side wheel of Catra’s skateboard catching a minor concrete cataclysm from a nearby curb. The skateboard’s inertia was stalled by the impact- but Catra’s inertia was not.

“Fuck!”

Skating past The Three Moving Musketeers and their fatherly chaperone in broad daylight would’ve been embarrassing enough without flying off her fucking skateboard thirteen million miles an hour and skinning her hands on searing hot concrete as she barely caught herself before her teeth ate it, too. Catra lay there for only a split second that managed to last an entire decade, vision refocusing on the shine of Micah’s tires, the high pitched ringing in her ears not quite loud enough to block out Glimmer’s snickering and Bow’s voice cracking in shock. 

“Oh, are you alright?” Micah had started but Catra’s pride refused to let him finish. 

So what if her hands were lit was a certain inferno and her whole body ached like a bruise? Catra grunted, lifting herself up as she cursed and popped her skateboard up with a hit of her ankle before storming onto her own fucking front lawn, all the while Adora’s pitying gaze burning a hole in her back. 

Catra then slammed the front door with sufficient force to snap Adora out of it. There in her mausoleum of a kitchen she stood, Melog at her heels, running cold water over her bloodied and bruised palms until the telltale turning of the truck’s engine gave her permission to turn the water off and bandage her drying hands.

That afternoon, dissociating under a summer sun that flickered selectively through the window above the kitchen sink, Catra laid to rest her dignity and rose up from that tomb with a new epiphany.

“Call me when you figure out what you want.”

Those were words Catra ended their fight in the mall parking lot with. Those were the words she had ended them with. Bad was the blood in those words, ire in them still as they come back to Catra now as she skates into her driveway, just as they had tormented her and taught her when she was tearing at gauze with her teeth, practicing guitar no longer an option for at least a few days. 

Unlocking the front door with the swift move of her keys, Catra walks into a ghostly scene. Her mother is pulling another double shift to distract from her own bereavement, probably, birds of the feather that they are. Melog’s presence is once again scarce- no surprise there. 

For all her efforts to aim for Adora’s heart and go for blood, there was hypocrisy in her bullseye. Adora didn’t know what she wanted? Well, look at that, maybe Catra didn’t know what she wanted either- because Catra didn’t know anything . 

Catra thought she knew a summer lagging after DT’s thistle of thieves would be more fulfilling than dialing Adora’s number and saying she’d hear her out, and that she didn’t mean what she said behind the mall. Catra thought she knew the wisdom of a crook cost her less than a penny for Scorpia’s thoughts. Catra thought she knew that rock bottom was better than a grave. Catra thought she knew that sharpening the cold steel of her axe against the grind of own hurt just to throw it in Adora’s direction was more mature than leaving well enough alone. Catra thought she knew a lot of things.

Catra was wrong.

“You know she’s still in love with you, right?” Glimmer had said last night after reading Catra her last rites, wiping her snot on a nearby blanket. 

Scoffing, Catra hugged herself and turned away. She could do better than listen to Sparkles lie to her through the purple brackets of her braces just to humor herself. “Yeah, right. Very funny.”

“Yeah, well, I wish I was joking. I certainly didn’t get it at first, and definitely not after your guys’ fight after Spring Fling. But she does, despite everything. You guys are tied together by fate, or something, if you think about it.” 

“Adora’s made it pretty clear she hates me.” 

They all had made that pretty clear, but Catra thought that went without saying and that it was a somewhat justified hatred. Still, it was next to impossible not to take any of the shit Glimmer was talking without a heavy heaping of salt.  

“Pfft, what you’re interpreting as hatred Bow and I have had to deal with all of summer vacation.” Glimmer continued, “Why do you think Adora always takes your petty bait when you tease us? It’s ‘cause she wants to talk to you. That’s the only way she can get you to talk back. Adora thinks you hate her. She blames herself.”    

  “Why? She didn’t ditch me at the dance or take up Double Trouble’s offer for a ride. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

“She ratted you guys out,” said Glimmer. Catra’s shoulders fell, “Didn’t know Adora spent the entire summer worrying about whether you-know-who told your step-dad? Every time she saw you with Double Trouble’s friends and you were just there being bitchy it was comforting to Adora. Because it meant you were safe.”

Catra inhaled, “She didn’t tell him. She needed leverage on him, right up until the last time they saw each other.”

“You’re not wrong there. But even after he, you know,” Glimmer ran her thumb over her neck and clicked her tongue, “ Adora still worried. She never stopped. No matter how much Bow and I tried to talk her out of it, she’s Adora. I mean, being stubborn is her thing.”

Oh, of all the times Sparkles was so close to getting the point, to seeing the picture and not just the frame.  

“Adora can forgive you all day, but she can’t forgive herself. I think it’s why she can’t really move on, except for the fact that she’s still head over heels for you. Most people, they’d get over a break up in three months. But not Adora. It’s like she’s frozen in time, in that moment you broke up with her.”

“Ugh, you’ve never seemed like a riddle person to me. Use your words please, Inez.”

 “You’re so infuriating! And hey, quit calling me Inez! I am not a gossip! What I am trying to say is that you haven’t used up all your chances with Adora. You still have time to make things right, Catra.”

How tempting it had been to call bullshit on that last decree. The primorial reason Catra was standing in the Princess’s palace to start with was because time on the clock to make things right between her and Adora was dwindling into nothing. Adora had made that clear when Catra wandered Friday morning half awake into homeroom to take her seat at the back, and Adora wasn’t there at her desk in the front, fiercely annotating her copy of The Great Gatsby, highlighter in her mouth and about to break under the force of her teeth. A quick sabbatical with bathroom pass later proved Catra’s newest fear: the same image she expected to see now unbeholden to her behind a pane of six by three inch window in a graffitied, wooden door. 

Adora had switched her homeroom. For the first time in thirteen years of public school, they’d be sharing no classes together.

And that drove Catra’s last lesson home. She’d thought herself in fiction an untouchable oracle of knowing the way the world really worked. In reality, she knows jackshit, nothing, nadda, goose egg- except for one thing. 

Catra knows that she misses Adora. Catra misses Adora so much she’s spent all summer dreaming of her and spent every waking moment shoving down the way absence was making her heart grow fonder. Catra misses the tiny gap in Adora’s front teeth that shines when she smiles, the late night phone calls and early morning drives laughing riotously on the way to school. Catra realizes now that she’d give anything to be the person handing Adora her flannel when she sees her shiver, to sit in her room together and play her the songs she wrote over the summer, to kiss her in the car again. 

Anything. Even an apology.

The door to her room is cracked, inviting Catra across the threshold. The carpet fibres are dotted with the pilgrimage of tiny paw prints; it’s an image that calls her back to hallways of Holiday House and the key lime green apparition that may or may not be still walking among them.

Adora grew up one mad straw short from obsessed with the stories the people who own gift shops by the Lakes like to perpetuate to get those tourists to buy their shitty merchandise. It was a hand-me-down, this infuriating infatuation of hers, that was given to her by their mutual caretaker Razz and strengthened by the babysitter Razz would sometimes hoist them off to Mara, and Adora kept it close to the love in her golden heart the way old hand-me-downs should be.

Rebekah and Bill Harkness and their maddening run off the sea side cliffside. Dorothea and Marjorie West, sisters lost to the torrent of time. Este and her many hoaxes, curses, and casualties. James and Betty, reconciled lovers that there was no proof had ever existed here or anywhere else, except for in one single hand-me-down.    

Adora was right. They were never just stories or debatable history. They’re… who we are. Past, present, future. And there’s no escaping this, them. There is no other version of this story. 

This was a town woven together with the gold thread of myths, fairy tales, folklore; this town is a storybook come alive where the pages stick together and in their impossibility to pull apart, their fiction has become Catra’s fact, their histories repeated when the lessons learned faded from memory, their fables snaking in through the weeds, carving a path through the trees, out from the snow and into their homes were they became real, and irrefutable, and inescapable in the best and worsts ways.

And because Catra really doesn’t know anything, she doesn’t know if they’re rewriting the timeless story of James and Betty as she walks into her bedroom and meets a waiting Melog perched on the center of her bed, or if they are becoming the story of James and Betty.

Guess the rest is up to Adora and how she responds when I show up at her party and knock on her door. 

“Hey, Melog,” Catra says as the cat flicks their tail back and forth expectantly. She picks up the holy heirloom- Melog must’ve dug it out from its place under the bed, where it lived when Catra stripped if on in the morning and wear she tore if from to wrap herself in at night- and brings it to her face, the feel of wool comforting if not for the unmistakable scent of Adora woven straight into the fabric.  

The days of her summer have turned into the nights of her fall. An August of regretting and wanting and forming half made plans to say sorry only to abandon them, has faded into another nameless moment in time. Whatever thrill seized Catra before has released its grip on her as if it had never had a hold on her before. She knows now, at seventeen, what she wants. She knows now, at seventeen, what to do.

“You guys are tied together by fate, or something, if you think about it.” 

“This is it,” Catra sighs with anticipation as she pulls off her flannel overshirt and shoves her arms through the sleeves of Betty’s cardigan, “No more dreaming about this moment, Melog. I’ve got a party to crash.”

The cat meowls, head dipping in approval.

“Wish me luck, okay?”

Chapter Text

When Adora dreams, she is caught thrust about in the agitated waves of her subconscious mind amidst her tossing and turning ridden sleep, and she always washes up on the same immaterial plane, painted into her dreamscapes like a quiet empty hallway of a museum where the featured exhibit on display happens to be her most recent and terrible mistakes.

“Hey, Adora.” a voice calls out across time to her subliminal self. It’s gentle in a way that’s foreboding, like a musical note playing on repeat because the scratched record keeps skipping, and Adora is drawn to the call, walks forward despite the heaviness of her limbs. Her limbs are heavy because they’re coated, drenched in salt water that burns her nose and coats her tongue. The dress she’s trapped in is soaked and sticking to her skin as if she’s bleeding the garment as opposed to wearing it. The water of the ocean that swallowed her and spit her up here has darkened the color of until the bright red fabric is one big wine stain she can’t get out, one massive bloodstain she bears in this trek through her own warped memories.

Even in this dream, Adora is freezing all the way down to her bones. She’s shivering as she grips one arm with pruny fingers, and her teeth crash against one another like she’s a child who’s been playing out in Christmas morning snow. Around her the surroundings morph, organically transforming this phantasmagoric mirage, until the cliffside beach she was one second stranded on and the storm clouds she was one second standing under become an endless sea of tile, railing, and flickering xanthic light. Distant kitschy, carnival music echoes through the hall, then the faint ringing of the school bell follows. Familiar sounds of familiar places, all filled with familiar faces.

Adora’s feet are still covered with the gritty feel of clumped, wet sand though she’s made all the way to this gymnasium-mall food court dream hybrid where students she both does and doesn’t recognize mingle and mosey in their best Sunday dress. Once Mara told her that the human brain was incapable of creating a face it had never seen before and therefore, everyone you dream of is someone you’ve seen at some point in your life- whether or not you even remembered seeing them. Your brain has cast them to play extras while you sleep, keeping your eyes closed to the real world they’ve followed you in from.

But in this dream Adora does not look long enough to see if Mara’s milk carton fact stands true. She always means to, has lied down with that goal ever since she was twelve years old and her once in a blue moon babysitter became her afternoon riding coach. Because in this dream, like in every dream she’s found her REM in over the last three months, she’s looking for a specific face she could never forget seeing. 

It’s still calling Adora, the voice. She cannot hear it any longer, but she knows. She knows it’s calling her . Through tightening crowds and blustering palaver, Adora tries like hell to get to it. She tries to follow the golden flurry that has lit up the floor underneath her feet that has always led Adora to her, every night, for the past three months. 

“Hey, Adora.” A hand comes down on her shoulder the same way the atmospheric pressure around them drops and the sound slithering around them completely stops, warmth pressing damp cloth to soaking skin and Adora turns. The twinkling leading lights beneath her vanish upwards into an ephemeral gold rush. She’s here.  

“Catra.” Adora breathes only to find herself breathless. 

Catra’s brow falls, confusion permeating her expression and the upturn of her mouth straightening like she’d fully been expecting the response of a normal person. Her flannel is tied tautly around her waist- the way she always has it when she’s wearing her Hollywood Horde vest, Levi’s worn and weary giving her an extra inch that makes her equal in height to the girl that stands before her, dripping a puddle of salt water onto the gym floor in her bare feet. The color of Catra’s headband matches the color of Adora’s dripping dress and the ends of her curls say hello to Adora as they spiral past Catra shoulders.

“Aren’t you going to dance with me?” This version of Catra- Adora’s Catra- asks. She’s holding her hand out for Adora to take. Expectantly, yet merely biding time. “What, you’re going to leave me hanging just ‘cause you’re mad I was a little late? You were later than I was, you know. Geez, you really are a princess sometimes.”

Something about that doesn’t sound right.  You can’t be late to a place you don’t ever show up to. Adora knows that even just like she knows this is just a dream of a dream. But Adora forces herself to shake her head and put on a smile, forcing her doubts beyond her somnifacient consciousness. She’s right where she’s supposed to be. She’s right where the golden tresses have taken her for a reason. 

There has to be a reason.

Placing one hand on Catra’s waist and the other one on her shoulder, Adora allows Catra to lead them to the center of the room. There’s no spotlight, simply an incandescent glow around them that bleeds outwards and bathes the room in amber stroked with maroon and tangerine.  And they’re dancing in this dangerous game, not in the spotlight but in a glass box, on display and translucent all the same. Adora knows just like she always knows-that the eyes of everyone in the room are fixed on them, watching them, following their each and every move.

Catra’s forehead comes to rest on hers-she’s in Adora’s arms yet so far out of reach- and Adora’s breath hitches in her throat.

“Adora.”  

The music has stopped; the kitschy carnival music of a mall ride has played all the time it’s dowry of twenty-five cents bought. Really, the music stopped when Adora started dancing with Catra, yet in denial and in disbelief, she kept dancing. 

“Adora, you have to stop.”

No. No, Adora shakes her head and keeps her eyes trained on the lakes of water collecting under her heels, Catra can’t mean that. Their time can’t be up- because there’s nothing that comes after it.

“Adora-”

When Adora glances up to plead for a truce, the Catra she was spinning around in her arms with has been replaced. A different version dances around her now. Before Adora is black lipstick on a practiced scowl, trying like her life depends on it to back out of Adora’s arms and into the nameless crowds, only kept in place by their locked fingers as if she were a small helpless animal caught in a hunting trap by one single limb. Catra is split at a diagonal by a shadow now, half of her body flesh that feels and the other ash that still quietly burns. Her surviving, smoldering amber iris won’t look Adora in the eye. She smells like smoke. She breathes it, too.

“Adora, you did this to me. I'm a fucking mess, because if you, Adora.”

“Catra, I’m sorry- don’t leave, please?” Adora begs until her throat is sore. But the force of her words only speeds up Catra’s dematerialization, “Come with me, we can fix this- I can fix this!”

She will do anything to fix this. Catra just has to tell her what to do. This is the reason the gold thread ends here; this is why Adora keeps returning to the dream: to ask in a violent, desperate scream that almost ricochets her back into wakefulness, “Tell me what to do to make you want me again!” Scale the mountains and traverse the sea that stands between them? Stand on her tallest tiptoes so her integrity is no longer so goddamn small? Walk to the center of the tightrope just to fall and lose her balance and Catra can back away cradling one half of her broken soul? It would be a victory for Adora all the while if Catra is still laughing at her, still looking in her direction.

Anything, anything!    

But Catra never hands her an answer. Never gives her a commandment or even a sign, just an ending, time and time again.

“No, Adora.” Catra shakes her head with laden disappointment- a delivered, calculated blow of causal cruelness to her stomach. The subtle movement changes her again, and this time when she takes the golden tip of her dagger up through Adora’s stomach and into her chest just to take Adora’s heart into her other hand and crush million pieces with her bare, bludgeoning fist, she is a different version of herself altogether. Gone is menacing lipstick, gone are the curls, and staring back at Adora is a broken and sad girl she doesn’t recognize. 

Catra’s hand slides out Adora’s body, a wake of rust and penance the leaks from the torn gash just to match her dress. Spreading her blood-stained fingers over the broken dam that is Adora’s sternum, Catra shakes her head when Adora grabs her wrist in a silent desperation for her to tolerate the open wound she’s become just a little longer. “You can’t.”

This is a part of the dream where Catra drops Adora’s hand. This is the part of the dream where love slips beyond Adora's reach, and there is no more dancing. Salty tears run down Adora’s face like acid rain and catch in her lips before joining the salt of the ocean water that has dowsed her, baptized her, drowned her. 

Catra fades, and fades, and fades back into the nothingness that birthed her, the sad smile etched on her face her last goodbye, until there is nothing but the bustling crowd Adora’s sleeping mind has silently created for her. Adora is never ready for this part of her dream, and so she always, always watches Catra go.

“Please Catra. Come back. Come back to me, please.” 

No one hears this pitiful prayer, save it for these crowds of cynical clones carved out of Adora’s deepest memories. Their faces masked, she hears their whispering words growing louder and louder and louder in her ears as they, start to perform their clairvoyant ritual of rumors that will spread, and spread, and spread throughout the room around her like a gossiping cancer until it’s an inescapable gospel chorus of Adora’s most personal horrors.

Adora crumbles to her knees- the clones and their shadowy magicks are coming closer and closer to tie her up and cast her onto the burning pyre, they don’t like what they see any more when they treat her life like their mirror, they hunt her for being the way they made her- sobbing and shivering as she clutches herself.

 Alone and freezing slowly to death in this decaying dreamland. Double crossed and left to face the pandemonium of this once sacred paradise.

The faceless faces have now encircled her with the intent to suffocate; there’s nothing but cracks of light breaking through their synergistic darkness. Adora thinks little of their approach, of these witches hunting witches, gives no response to their war of words. She wants to be back and lost in the current of those merciless waves again, tossed and thrown about and almost drowned. She wants to wash up on the dream line shores of her high school-town mall like a wrecked ship and walk dripping water towards the music. She wants one more time to see the floor light up under a golden path that will map her a clear path to warmth and to safety and to home. 

Adora just wants to start this dream over.

“Catra!” Adora knows there is no one out there to hear her swan song. Yet she cries out as the darkness caves in. Somehow the coldness inside her is so much closer. Adora knows- she can feel how close the chill is, even as there is nothing but the swirl of the shadows whip around her trilling and tolling a deathly “BRRING, BRRING, BRRRING!” The tips of her fingers brush away tessellate tears, frozen by the coldness of the bitter winter radiating from her bones. Frost crawls up Adora’s arms as it forms over her skin leaving icicles like the most brittle of weapons forming in the palm of her freezing hands.

Oh. So, she’ll freeze from the inside out, it seems. And that way she’ll shine like ice splintered when this twister of darkness surely leaves her shattered on this ballroom floor.

“BRING, BRRING, BRRING! BRING, BRRING, BRRING!”

“Ah! Huh- wha?” 

Ripping herself out from the claws of shadows and smoke that want to see her trapped and broken forever in her slumbering psyche, Adora bolts upwards into an abrupt reality that meets her without the kindness of familiarity. Oh no, where am I? She’s quick to panic, eyes scanning her horizon for any commonplace to ground her. 

“BRING, BRRING, BRRING! BRING, BRRING, BRRING!”

“Ugh, stupid alarm clock! I said thirty more minutes- oh.” Adora’s hand pauses over the nearby black box of screaming doom’s snooze button and she just about brings her palm to her forehead.

Right. She hasn’t woken up in the middle of the woods or worse, some stranger’s unassuming bedroom. Adora is in her new room. That’s where she finds herself this morning. And of course, like every morning for the past six weeks, she has to go through the process of relearning what it’s like to wake up here. In fact, this fight or flight reaction is a morning contemporary ever since she moved out of her, for lack of a better term, childhood bedroom and into Razz’s attic- her temporary cozy quarters for the next nine months.  

Emphasis on cozy. This space cannot be more than sixty square feet. Whenever she’s up and moving around, Adora has to crouch down an inch, sometimes two, everywhere but the center of the room. An interior of wooden walls that would rather hold light over heat is a far cry from the pastel pink surfaces Adora grew up taping report cards and photos taken at the mall arcade to (the latter of which always fell down), but somehow the enclosed setup of dust and dimness holds a more… romantic kind of comfort. 

Cardboard boxes marked with her immaculate handwriting, now officially emptied out and cause for celebration, stay stacked on top of old trunks of backlogged memories and dreams from the dozens of brokenhearted poets and bandits who have made this attic their refuge of solitude, too. Her more than enough for a lifetime display of trophies and awards make the surface of Razz’s ancient mahogany dresser seem claustrophobic. Adora’s entire wardrobe- save for one well-worn and well worshipped piece now missing in action- fits folded neatly nestled in the oak confines of the three bottom drawers. The cracking plastic of one of Razz’s old laundry bins is the holding place of a few pairs of dirty jeans, underwear, and her Olive Garden uniform she’ll have to wash ASAP if she doesn’t want to show up to her Monday night shift smelling of three-day old alfredo. A small bedside table covered with a few photos taken in the back of Sears, is a graveyard of scrap memories where crumpled up grocery store receipts and piles of mixtapes lay like headstones. Next to it, a bookcase that Adora’s suspects many people have tucked their heart away in (hers will go there too, when her times come to check out of this inn for lost boys and girls) occupies the rest of the scarce floorspace the bed and the dresser don’t squeeze up. 

And that’s it. No “approved” outfits ironed and laid out for Adora to put on in the morning and change out of into her pick of the day once safe in the school bathroom, no vanity mirror with another person’s mocked calendar of her life frozen behind the class, no lock on the outside of the door when otherwise closed is supposed to remain a contrarian five inches open, none of those ghostly premonitions of her past meet her in this room she gets to call her own- if she’s willing to share it with a few other eidolons, if only for a brief moment in time.

Razz’s attic adapts without a single thought to Adora; it doesn’t revolve around her the way her childhood stockade was made for her. Not the center of the universe but a corner of it tucked away. Not to belong to her but for her to belong to. That’s what Adora thought made this attic space safer than most other dwellings in this town. That’s why Adora kept forgetting she went to sleep in this room once she woke up in it.        

Catra always liked to tease Adora that her fatal flaw was, or is, her lack of mental object permanence.

“Honestly, it’s like if you covered your eyes and counted to ten, you’d forget about me completely, even if I was still standing right in front of you!” she had laughed in that squeaking giggle of hers that meant she was only half serious, and it made Adora’s heart ache in simple remembrance. 

For most of her life Adora believed her “Have You Seen This Missing Memory?” approach to interacting with the world around her was in part because she lacked a family history for her reminiscence to stay rooted in. Orphaned, like left in a wooden bassinet on someone’s doorstep with only a mysterious yet ordinary object to connect her to whomever dare gave her up- in this case, an engagement ring still encased in a red velvet box now tossed among the many gold things making a home atop the crowded dresser- at an incomprehensible age, Adora had been engaged in a constant struggle of shirking of this history she’d been assigned ( “You are Adora Finlay.  You do not need to worry about who your family was before I took you in. You only need to wonder about your future, not your past.”) to try on the metaphorical robes of belonging to another.       

“Did you get cursed? You’re not brain damaged, are you?” followed Catra’s squeaky thirteen-year-old laugh as she grabbed Adora’s head with both hands and yanked her forward, “Oh, the Wicked Witch is gonna kill me if I let you get brain damage on my watch!”  

Adora had wanted, so much so she had to bite down on her tongue, to tease Catra back that if it was a curse indeed causing her selective anamnesis then the obvious cure would be True Love’s Kiss. She held back in the end; Catra would rather sputter and choke than indulge Adora and would likely just give her more crap for being cheesy. 

Really what Catra was teasing her about was not, as it turns out, based on pages torn from a history book, but a nasty survival instinct imprinted on the very crevices of her brain that read in bright red neon letters, “WARNING: DANGER PRESENT. SOURCE: EVERYWHERE . ” Acclimating to her surroundings was not a skill Adora ever needed to learn, because it was never an option presented to her. She could only shush her anxiety the way a disgruntled librarian would shut down a patron making themselves too known- over and over and over again. The only constant in Adora’s existence was that if she played the role of a good enough girl and accommodated everyone in her space, her surroundings would acclimate to her and cease to be a danger anymore .

So, it made sense Adora was more than a tad amnesiac. If she never stopped being vigilant, she’d survive to see another day. And if she was always forgetting about spaces she never really had to learn to begin with- then she would never stop being vigilant. 

Maybe that’s why my recurring dream doesn’t feel so recurring every time I have it. Adora sighs. She takes her hand off the alarm’s snooze button and rubs her eyes, her temple, her brow bone. A grief at the back of her head tells her she slept with her ponytail still up, again. Great. Grabbing the worn elastic that holds her together with two fingers, Adora pulls until straw colored hair is falling into her periphery, bemused all the while by the sight of the pilfered Eagles shirt she’s still wearing. Because she forgot to take her hair down before face-planting into her pillow last midnight, but not to strip out of her waitressing clothes and into the last commiserated memento of her ex. 

Sounds correct.

Sitting there on the edge of her (somewhat messy) quilted twin bed straight out of Little House on the Prairie, Adora tries to force herself into taking a few deep breaths. A few sustained inhales and exhales are not going to do her any good in the long run- they sure as hell won’t prevent her from being right back here again tomorrow morning- but breathing this way holds off the dam in her brain for just a few more seconds.

Catra, Adora thinks, scoffing at herself. Head in her hands, the weight of her dream- well, it’s more a worst nightmare than dream, at least the last half- sinks past her physical forms and starts seeping into her soul. But what's a few more pounds when she’s been carrying the heaviness of her aggregated guilt and self-hatred since the beginning of May? At least if she collapses completely, that kind of mid-daylight stumble might entertain a few people.

Enemies. They’d entertain her enemies , but at the end of the day, Adora figures she deserves a small victory despite what she’s done.

If she knew I was dreaming about her like this, she’d probably think I’m a loser. And a coward. A cowardly loser! Maybe she’d be right. Is there any chance she’d, I dunno, feel some kind of pity for me?

Deep, deep down, Adora harbors the kind of suspicions that draw shallow breath from the flickering lifeforce of her hope that if and when Catra is thinking of her a universe away on the other side of town, her thoughts about are not crawling of vengeful anger or of the treatment Adora thinks she rightly deserves for destroying whatever magic they had. She was there, after all, at the center of cruel suburbia and basking in an even crueler summer when Catra’s skateboard became a concrete casualty and sent its rider tumbling to the pavement. She was there the split second before Catra’s eyes met hers and she saw her own festering and infected pain and loneliness and ever mounting regret in the mirror skating right by- on the other side of the street.

Adora knew that look. She had it memorized in a way no compartmentalizing survival tactics could ever hope to erase. Adora knew that particular walk of shame, tail tucked between her legs look on Catra the same way Adora knew the back of her hand, the same way she knew every story delineating this small-town purgatory inside and out, the same way she knew rose stained lips and eyes brighter than every star in the sky as Catra smiled and stared at her, swinging around a streetlight and singing Alanis Morissette at the top of her lungs. 

Tipsy Catra was the only version of Catra who’d admit she loved All I Really Want. 

Adora knew the Catra that started a fire in the front yard with every step she took away from her (again) just like Adora knew the Catra who bruised Adora’s toes with her beat-up Levi’s as she stumbled over broken and cracked cobblestone.

Her Little House on the Prairie bunk groans in protest as Adora stands, shaking out her lackluster locks just to throw it back up in her signature ponytail. Underneath her bare feet, the wooden floor creaks in a warning, Tread softly and with tenderness, your weight is enough for the floor to cave in and for you to find yourself in the living room, and she pushes forward, understanding the risks . This is the room in which hide-n-seek spots were nothing short of novelty when she was child; she knows the fragility she trespasses.  

Like she’s seven years old again, Adora shifts forward until she’s walking on the tips of her toes. She yanks off the Eagles shirt, trying to focus on keeping her spine straight and her toes curled so she does not have to linger on the way the shirt smells of the woods and Razz’s 50’s detergent, not of a trifle of jokingly sampled mall perfumes and the no-man’s land of the girl’s locker room.

“Did you guys see Catra’s face when she tripped! ‘Cause it was amazing! Talk about karma being real, right?” Glimmer had rioted, turned away from the gentle condemning gaze of her father and twisting herself further in the passenger seat towards the backseat. Bow and Adora were mumbling apologies and sharing goodhearted winces as their knees bounced together as Micah drove them out of her old neighborhood and to Razz’s neck of the woods. 

“It kindaaaaa looked like she hurt herself,” Bow had stretched the word out as if his point wasn’t a hill he was willing to die on. Adora’s teeth came down on her tongue. She had debated, if ever for a sorry second, trying to change the subject by asking Micah to explain his new truck tires to them. But Adora refrained because she was trained in the art of restraint, and because she was not so desperate to look like a fool, at least in such an obvious way.

“So? She got back up.” Glimmer said.

Bow conceded with a shrug. “Yeah, that’s true. She did get back up. I mean, as bad as that fall was, it pretty much proves the existence of karma.” 

Rubbing a phantom pain in her sternum with her open palm, Adora had turned her focus to the countryside that often played second fiddle to the woods and the Lakes, and kept her mouth shut for the rest of the truck ride.  

Adora didn’t want to fault Bow and Glimmer for the venom spit so recklessly from their tongues. Her friends’ opinions of her ex were armory forged from weeks enduring Catra’s retaliatory harassment and her naturally surly reputation did nothing if not reinforce their impressions. In the line of fire just by being Adora’s friends, Glimmer and Bow did their level best not to sink to Catra’s level- or the theatrical troupe of goons newly minted and begging for fresh meat at her side every time their sides happened to cross paths. 

Of course, if Bow’s account was to be believed, the same self-respecting behavior couldn’t be said for the times Adora wasn’t around to stand in between Catra and Glimmer, to see that her body was a shield and that Catra’s taunting bounced off her like a reflection, to catch the fury of Catra’s claws first and foremost because being touched by her was being touched by her, and Adora’s feelings weren’t enough to keep Glimmer from pulling her punches or her pride.

“Just move on, Adora! There’s plenty of fish in the sea! Don’t you ever want to get back out there?” That was their logic, based on the biased ideas from Cosmo magazine quizzes and Saved by the Bell Reruns. Glimmer, Bow, Mermista, Glimmer’s new lacky Frosta, fuck even Sea Hawk were convinced Adora’s trapped herself willingly inside some cinephile’s willful delusion. Adora knows what they think- even if they think she can’t hear them whisper to one another about what a sad sight she’s become, what a world of wonder it would do her if she just listened to their advice.

But Adora isn’t her astrology sign, isn’t a shallow result hammered onto vapid pink print by some chain-smoking editor-in-chief-wannabe, and this is not the kind of heartbreak that a fortune cookie slip held the cure to or could be mended by the end of a twenty-two-minute run time.

Adora is starting to believe this is the kind of heartbreak no amount of time, or distance, or rebound love interests, is ever going to mend. And her friends- sipping on the saccharose sweetness of their spring and summer flings- don’t know what it’s like to know a flicker of love just to lose it.

Why else would I be having the same dream every night, over and over? Adora picks at that thought like she picks at the nail of her thumb, rifling through her bottom of her three full drawers for an outfit a little bit sturdier than her P.E. shorts and Catra’s shirt. Definitely not because I need closure. She almost laughs but she’s just as happy not to have to hear such a hollow sound.

Her subconscious is betraying her. Adora can’t fathom any other reason why every single dream is molded to such a tired structure, why every night is a lecture of a lesson she thought she’d already learned. Coming to in an endless, raging sea without a flotation device or lighthouse in sight- which Adora feels the need to note, it’s terrifying enough to dream about drowning already, if that’s what her sleeping mind is trying to get across- and then washing up on the same shore for the umpteenth time. Adora’s danced with Catra in this one film reel, that seems to be the only one her brain knows how to play, than she ever danced with Catra in person. She’s had her heart ripped out repeatedly, she’s been at the mercy of the darkness transmuted from the unadorned crowds so many times she no longer trembles at the thought, she’s frozen to death again and again and again and again and again because that’s what always comes after that the floor-ripped-out-from-under-her sensation no longer leaves her gasping for breath in real life, wiping real tears off her face and off her pillow.

As far as the “originality” of her nightmares goes, Adora would consider herself bored of the spectacle, if not for the gaping hole in her chest that looks and feels a little bit bigger every time she wakes up from the dream, still alone and still unmoored in this strange little attic that’s supposed to be her room.

Well, there is some variation, Adora corrects herself, coming to stand straight and parallel with the dresser. Eye level with what little of her lifetime of achievements and memories she was able to keep in her emancipation and able to take with her into this next chapter, she thinks to the night where she isn’t begging through near hypothermia about how mend this divide but rather what she could’ve done differently to keep Catra’s love, to make sure Catra came to the Spring Fling dance, to make sure Catra didn’t get in that car and drive away just to show Adora how much better she looked in the rearview mirror. 

What could Adora have done differently? Would it have been enough so that everything would be different today?

You shouldn’t have said you saw Catra on Prom night, you should have just lied like you lied to her all the time, because when has the Bishop ever really listened to her or ever taken anything she says as the truth. T he thoughts are like daggers to her abdomen, slicing through skin and sinew, but Adora can’t and won’t stop this self-imposed masochism, she deserves every perforate and puncture wound she can stand to breathe through. You shouldn’t have kissed her that night. You could’ve waited just a little bit longer. Wanting her would have been enough. It should’ve been enough.

Wanting was definitely treason enough, a transgression in and of itself Adora could not even sometimes speak about because there was so much to risk in making it real somewhere beyond her heart and her mind. But even in those sacred, secret places her secrets were never safe from lurking shadows. Adora knows that as she picks a tiny piece of sparkling plastic among the glittering gold ruins of her youth. 

A false gemmed ring that bloomed like a star caught mid implosion, adorned with a fake opal stone. Catra won it from a score of red, rippable tickets during one their shared afternoons off, bragging about her win the entire time they stood at the counter of the mall arcade while the Cheeto-fingered, grumbling employee dug it out from behind the glass.

And then, as they were sitting on a bench right outside the kid’s play area- a miniature, somewhat germ-infested amusement park of padded matts and coin operated merry-go-rounds known cheekily as Coney Island- and Adora’s stomach grumbled for the kettle corn she knew they sold around there, Catra grumbled and slapped the clear plastic sphere that bounced with the ring into Adora’s palm.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she had said through a snarl, her eyes trained on her feet, “This is only because you helped me beat that Primal Rage level by holding the joystick for me-”

Adora had to go and ruin it. She was good at that. “Aww, Catra! Is this because you like me-”

“This is not because I like you!”

“It is, too! God, that must be so embarrassing for you-”

“Shut UP, Adora. Can you even be a bigger idiot-”

“You gave me a ring, Catra! What’s next, you gonna get down on one knee- OOF!” 

In hindsight Catra driving her elbow in Adora’s stomach might have been the only effective solution to ensure Adora didn’t blurt out the rest of that sentence for the rest of the mall to revel in. Not that the sparse Saturday evening patrons pushing strollers and sampling orange chicken were paying much attention to the way Adora reacted resolutely to the reflex by pushing Catra off the bench, or the way Catra hopped off the mall floor and threw an arm over Adora’s neck when Adora rushed over to see if she was okay, or thought much of the way they wrestled each other straight into the centerfold fountain Adora kissed pennies to tie wishes to the copper before tossing them in. 

If Adora’s wishes had come true, it would’ve been Catra. It would’ve been that same Catra who, soaked in fountain water slinging those very same pennies her way whenever Adora dug her hand in and splashed her, was plucked from the fountain water by the bloated security officer who threw them both out, laughing and dripping and stumbling against each other through the parking lot. It would’ve been the same Catra who won her a fake ring from an arcade in the middle of the mall. That would’ve been enough.

Adora closes her fist around the plastic opal piece that would’ve been enough before placing it back down in her graveyard of lovely, fake things. The arcade ring spins once or twice before falling next to a closed velvet box.

It’s funny, Adora thinks, how carrying around her origins as an orphan like a superhero’s secret identity all the while trying on the different costumes of different loves from the different stories of this town she ended up in, she thought one day one of those costumes would fit and she would have her great story, that she would one day be worthy of love. What she never understood about the stories of this town was that they were the folklore of a con artist peddling happily-ever-afters as their wares, swindling naive believers like her left and right. All but one story that took place in this town ended with a love that became a real something, not just the idea of something, and ended with a genuine apology. And if her two A.M. nightmares turning into nothing but late-night TV reruns of convoluted symbolism and a chronic lack of closure are anything to go by, it’s that Adora’s story will not be the kind that ends with another arcade ring, with an apology, but with just another velvet box filled with a heartbreaking amount of haunted what-ifs.                 

Adora still loves Catra, loves her still so much the heat of it might melt this frozen state she’s trapped in, but she cannot dare to dream about her anymore. She cannot stand for one more second to continue grieving for someone still living. 

The arcade ring forgotten on the dresser surface, Adora turns away, swooping down in a balanced motion and grabs with one hand the riding boots that live nestled beneath her Little House on the Prairie bed. She then ducks through the attic door, leaving her dream to the ones forever trapped in this room behind her. 

When she descends down the stairs, the stretched length of her legs with which growth spurts pull on like taffy taking her down too fast, there’s a humming coming from the kitchen that is as welcoming as the smell of baking gooseberry and golden crust married with a satiating helping of butter. 

Looks like Razz has been up all night, Adora’s plastered on practiced smile falls away and reveals a small real one. She kicks up dust as she walks through the den, the kind that settles in the crooks and crannies of the individual fibrous strands as it finds its way from the barn and the trails and the woods prior to settling down in the carpet whenever Razz forgoes every other household chore to make a stink like the one she’s making in the kitchen. Vaulting over a couch as ancient as the Pyramids and sidestepping a neglected coffee table at the last second just in time, Adora makes a note in the back of her head to run the vacuum before her friends get here. 

This old wooden and stone house at the edge of the woods is the home that raised Adora. The true home, not just her home away from home, or the closest she might ever get to spending afternoons in the care of a grandmotherly figure. Razz’s cottage was and is a page of a children’s fairy tale ripped straight out of the book and willed to life out in a wilderness where Adora herself could be just as wild and welcomed for it.

Her once legal guardian was more than jubilant to keep Adora prisoner, to stifle her childhood and suffocate any free will that dare made Adora stand up for herself by shoving her in boxes marked by Barbie pink and lip gloss on gapped tooth smiles. Hers was a hoax of childhood, one made to be judged by cards that gave a number between zero and ten, but her astute and haughty governess could not afford to dress Adora up all the time- not when Adora’s blonde hair-blue eye winning combination failed to score any number higher than four after she tripped up the stage and delivered her flashcard answers without the charm of the other little girls.

Adora wanted to win the sash and the crown if nothing just to avoid the cold silence that rode with her and her guardian on the ride home ( “Why does it matter so much if I lose the county beauty pageant?” Adora asked once only to live to sorely regret speaking her mind, “I’m good at everything else! I’m a straight A-student, I’m the fastest runner on the playground, even faster than Lonnie and the Bishop’s daughter, I even learned all my multiplication tables up through seven already, and that’s for third graders!”) but no glassy eyed panel of dairy farmers and their saga of blue ribbons ever bought her act.

“I wanted to win. I tried to win,” Adora told her guardian through sniffles she could just barely swallow. She’d been so unspeakably spared by the double obstructed view that came with being in the backseat. Big girls didn’t cry, and it was bad enough for her to whine on and on this way. “I wanted to make you happy.”

A cloud passed over the sun and draped a deep shadow over the car. “Wanting is not enough, Adora.” she’d said. But what had echoed throughout the car and woven itself into whatever of Adora’s DNA it had not shattered upon impact was, “Whatever you do, it is not enough.”

Having driven a promising pageant career into the ground at six years old, Adora had one less path to stardom for her guardian to strongarm her into. Of course, her guardian was a bad faith creditor with past debt and a tried-and-true faithless gambler’s mentality, her worldview was that the only way out of the hole was to find another angle at which to keep digging. To continue funding the Ponzi schemes that would put Adora on top on the pyramid, she made one too many Faustian deals, deals that made for a less than forgiving bed to sleep in (a cot in a cold and lonely cell to be specific), the first one taking root when she dropped Adora off at Razz’s little cottage for what was supposed to be one afternoon and one afternoon.

Adora will always remember pulling up to Razz’s cottage that first fateful day. Spectacular for the peculiar circumstance it was- she and the she-witch never drove up to the woods in all their daily exploits, much less into the woods, where Adora still swore trolls stalked around in the nighttime while the other creatures of the forest buzzed about their gallivanting in a secret language no human alive today spoke- Adora can feel even now her palms pressed up against the window as her breath fogged up the glass around her. 

“Adora, move away from the window.” came the command from the driver’s seat of the car. Adora was quick to lift her hands until any contact was lost, but moving a minimal distance was all she did. Her gaze stayed determined on the curious lake-side house she’d been brought to with little explanation.

“What is this place?” Adora had asked. Bright blue eyes were reflected back from the window like rays of technicolor light cutting through crystalline ocean water as she continued staring out the window (breaking several rules by doing so, including “Staring is rude and impolite,” and “Children do not speak unless spoken to,” ) but even for a six-year-old she was completely and utterly enthralled by the sight in all its strangeness. 

The house was incomparable to anything her hungry, curious vision had ever laid eyes on. To begin with, the two-story cabin was constructed from two different opposing yet complementary materials; unlike the brick and mortar three bedroom they’d driven here from, this place was built into the surrounding environment from weathered stone and slabs of wood from trees cut down nearby, a graveyard of tree stumps acting as the last indicators of the life that was once existed and grew there. Yet in spite of the death that had acted as means to provide its foundation, the cabin seemed to crawl into the breast of the forest floor as if the house were one with it, as if it was never the sum of its parts but its parts given new life, a resurrection of sorts, in this different form. 

Adora’s second observation were the vines of Delphic green, popping in contrast against the quieter tones of gray and hickory, their sea of leaves giggling and gossiping to one another as they climbed up the north and east side of the house in an upside-down waterfall.

Ivy. Adora had read about the vicarious plant that was swallowing the house in a school library book a couple months before. Once the vine overtook the tree upon which it wrapped its tendrils around, conniving and embezzling the tree’s cardinal ability to reach out towards the sun, it would eventually kill it.

On the first floor of this ivy kissed palace was a wrap-around porch, gentle and so inviting unlike the concrete sidewalks and slamming screen doors of Adora’s neighborhood. Willow branches had been knit together to form the railing and the tresses above; the wood of the steps that mounted the wrap-around porch had been bleached overtime by continuous gentle sunlight and were dwelling with large, gaping holes that became great big eyes in Adora’s six-year-old mind. Eyes that watched her with mirrored wonder when she narrowed her own, catching sight of the lone inhabitant of the otherwise vacant porch. 

What’s the Bishop’s daughter doing here? Adora remembers thinking, clearer than the cracks of sunlight that slipped through the trees’ natural rooftop. 

The Bishop’s daughter- Catra was her name and soon, Adora’s assimilation of what everyone else called the other girl would be easily forgotten, for no box or label that existed could sum her new friend up- sat unattended on a porch swing as if she was waiting for someone to walk through the open door, knees bunched up against her chest and eyes watery. Her gaze met Adora’s for a brief second only to flicker away without any reason why. 

Adora did know of Catra by then. Catra and her parents lived across the street- of course, Adora knew of Catra. She knew this familiar face on a stranger because beyond being unacquainted kids lingering on the same block, they were in the same class at school together, this year and last, and because they were in the same grade at school, they were in the same Sunday School class, too. 

In school, Catra did not raise her hand with any kind of eagerness the way Adora did and rather than speaking when spoken to, she instead chose to blurt out the correct answers just to spite their teacher. And upset Adora’s winning streak. She’d stick her tongue out in Adora’s direction after beating her to the punch and then at recess, when Adora found herself on the swings alone again having made eye contact not so much on purpose with Catra as the other girl trailed after Kyle and Rogelio, who both trailed after a determined Lonnie. 

At Church, Catra scribbled in hymnals and took fifteen bathroom breaks during the Sunday School lesson, ripped tears in her dresses on purpose, giggling as she made crude gestures whenever the teacher’s back was turned. Whatever was deemed an inappropriate action for the Bishop’s only child, Catra found a way to turn it into an entertainment of good trouble. Adora envied Catra even as she stuck her tongue out, legs spread out so unlady like, on those Sunday afternoons of itchy cloth under armpits and a grumbling stomach so loud it was hard to think, back when the only task more difficult than listening to another parable was to sit still and listen to another parable. 

Adora doesn’t know why she did what she did next after spotting Catra sitting there curled in on herself on the porch-swing. She knows that all of Catra’s previous behavior did not net her an act of kindness or friendship, but she remembers the way the sight of Catra wiping her eyes wrapped around her heart like an unforgiving fist and squeezed. From that squeezing in her heart a blade of gold bloomed within her chest, opening like a flower that spilled a golden shower beyond the window, up the steps of the porch and to the swing. And Adora was pushed to action as she wrapped her pinky around aurous thread that wove itself together as spread from the spool unwinding against the walls of her beating heart, as if she was yanked back to the window her guardian verbally forbade from getting too close to by the force of the string’s own desire.

It was then Adora made the defining decision to follow this golden string, however imaginary or fictional, wherever it’s magic would take her. 

Pressing her nose into the glass until the force of the windowpane bent her nostrils into that of a pig’s, Adora willed the twinkling lights rushing up to pool around Catra’s feet would alert the other girl to her funny face. For good measure and emphasis, she wiggled her nose, knowing not to make any snorting sounds- or any sound at all. 

Adora giggled under her breath when she saw, out of the corner of her peripheral vision, Catra’s body shake like she was laughing. Yet any momentary feeling of relief Catra had not recoiled further into herself in disgust of Adora morphing into her true wild child self was shattered promptly but a force in front of her.

“Adora, what did I say about touching the window?” her guardian dealt the blow with the disapproving click of her tongue and just like that, as quickly as it had made itself known, the golden string evaporated and returned home to the forest’s halcyon. Adora sat back with haste, her hands falling into her lap, and she mumbled an apology she found herself not really meaning. “I did not raise you in a barn. It would do you best not to behave like a barn animal.”

Whatever collusions the sorceress who then unbuckled Adora’s seatbelt dropped her off at Razz’s to run off to, whatever deals she made to be in debt to a devil in a holy man’s robes, those would most likely remain unbeknownst to Adora. The reasons, whatever they were, were laid to rest when the Bishop's disappearance shocked their small town only for the “It’s ten P.M. do you know where your children are?'' type fervor to die down faster than the man himself (probably) did. Adora suspects the reasons themselves smell of Lake water, of fish bones and sandy sentiment- you know, wherever they are. The reasons, whatever they were, were license enough to hold up as motive in both criminal and civil court. They were enough to free Adora of those conniving, twisting tendrils when her branches were succumbing and the darkness was crumbling in, just in the nick of time.

And those reasons, for all of their insidious origins, created that imaginary golden string, woven out of wishes and childhood wonder, that wrapped it’s slip knot around the very chambers of her heart before leaving her chest, wrapping around her pinky, and taking her to Catra. Only years after meeting Catra did Adora see this little girl’s delusion as a haphazard string of fate. Adora couldn’t forget that even if she gave her everything and tried. Yes, Catra cut her heart out every night and every night took that spool of fate’s thread from in between her lungs, but Adora remembers even with the emptiness that weighs her chest down these days. It’s impossible to forget how she turned her heart to gold in the hopes of keeping the twinkling lights bright. 

That first afternoon, after her legal guardian and a softhearted Mrs. Lewis left them in Razz’s living room to go and see Mrs. Lewis’ coldhearted husband, was the beginning of what Adora and Catra really were. Catra said nothing, choosing to force a mean stare instead- and of course, stick her tongue out. But this time, under the guise of no adults with the power to make or break her future and/or make her feel lament the rest of the day, Adora stuck her tongue out back.  That simple act of standing up for herself gained her the respect Catra held for her, well, until May, in those wide, split irises. 

Despite having been hired by Mrs. Lewis to watch two six-year-olds, Razz spent the afternoon sweeping the kitchen and chopping wood for the fireplace, nary a bother to check up on Adora and Catra save it for a few scattered times, one of which included a dinner of roasted chicken, steamed vegetables, and fresh lemonade. (Maybe if her legal guardian gave her meals like that, gave Adora a feast instead of locking her in a cage and feeding her empty promises, she wouldn’t be the one in the cage right now wondering why Adora left.) So, for better or worse, Catra and Adora were left to their own devices, hopping around barefoot over those golden showers that ran down different paths that unlocked different locations on Razz’s ranch property to explore together, unencumbered together, laughing at the way Razz was always talking to herself and her “imaginary friends” as they tried to figure out how to work a device mysterious yet magical in the living to their respective restrictive households, Razz’s VCR player.

It wouldn’t have mattered if a done deal was not so wrapped up that Razz’s service would be needed by Mrs. Lewis and Adora’s guardian the next afternoon, and the afternoon after that, and the afternoon after that , Adora just knows. She knows from the way Catra sat next to her in the class the next day and again on the swing set, asking with a shine in her split eyes if they could play Peter Pan again like they had the day before. She knows from the way Catra found her in the church pews and sat by her during Sunday School, making her laugh so hard Adora wound up in trouble. That first afternoon together, the first of hundreds and hundreds more, was what sealed the envelope and kept it sealed, right until the day it met its address in the fire. 

Adora walks through the living room towards Razz’s loud rendition of Motherless Child , choosing to ignore her mind’s projected apparition of two young girls, one wrapping a strand of pure light so thin and fragile around the pinky of the other, as the film reel burned up their stronghold of pillows and blankets up. She knows how that movie ends. She’s seen the ending a hundred times before.

“Hi Razz!” Adora says in a loud and cheerful voice that just barely announces her presence over the banging of the elderly woman’s pots and pans.

“Good- good morning, Razz!” She tries again, dropping her riding boots from her hand to the fossilized tile food beneath her to intercept Razz’s war path. Razz was never more selectively deaf when she was a woman on an intransigent mission. 

The cabin’s caretaker shuffles to a brief stop (it’s more a pause than ceasefire), her comically enormous glasses, thicker than window glass and muddier than lake water, magnifying the way her eyes go wide when she catches sight of the teenager trying to get her attention. In her hands in a pie pan that almost knocks Adora out with its scent of lye and lemon scented soap. “Oh, Mara dearie! You’re up! And so late in the day, too, don’t you know it’s bad to sleep in when there’s so much work to do?”

Adora swallows a laugh. Sure explains why Razz never sleeps.

“Yeah, I know. I had to work late, remember? Spinerella wanted me to close?” Adora doesn’t try to correct Razz’s misnomer. It’s a repeated offense around here, an occupational hazard of Razz’s prehistoric age- or maybe just from having spent her life here in this town, in this part of the world and in this part of the woods where the lines between life and death were weakened by the magic that seeped in between them. 

“Why doesn’t she call anyone the right name?” Catra had asked one day of Razz’s one and only ranch hand, Mara, who was in charge of watching them while Razz made a quick trip into town.

Mara shrugged and without even looking up from the saddle she was stitching up said, “Oh, Razz sees ghosts. I mean, so many people have come through this area and stay at the cabin. People even come out here to die- if you can believe it. Razz helps them cross over because she’s been here longer than anyone and she knows how. And of course, some people don’t cross over. But even the ones that do are still around for her, there’s just been so many that she doesn’t know any better. Who do you think she’s talking to all the time?”  

That answer of casual intention had always terrified Adora. In the moment, it was nothing short of exciting to imagine a world of paranormal wonders that existed in a dimension parallel to her own, to add this story to her growing collection of wisdom passed down from her riding teacher, to play pranks on Catra where she jumped out behind Razz’s couch when the other girl was messing around with a dust covered guitar she found in the attic screaming, “BOO!” Coming home and internalizing Mara’s explanation was a different story. Mara’s words rattled around in her head every night for the next couple of years as Adora tossed and turned trying to get to sleep, the light coming in from the mandated door crack casting one spine-chilling shadow. The idea that someone could be trapped by grief- theirs as well as others- so exhaustive and so inescapable until they were practically a ghost in their own right, Adora never wanted to believe it was possible.

Eventually, Adora herself could see the ghastly forms they kept Razz company. She could herself reflected in them. It took a certain type of heartbreak, the kind that killed so quickly and without mercy, for you to see the ones killed by it before you. Eventually, Adora realized Razz never called her the right name because everyone, especially around her, was just a repeat of the ghosts who had starred once upon a time in this same tired story, one Razz read so many times she could recite even from her going memory.

“You did not have to work late, silly,” Razz waves Adora out of the way and Adora’s back hits the cabinets just in time for Razz to breeze on through back to her warpath, “You were out late because you do not want to rest. You can’t fool me, Mara.”

“I thought- you just said that sleeping in was bad. Isn’t that resting?” asks Adora, opening and closing her mouth in pointless confusion. 

Razz shakes her head, “No, of course it’s not! Rest is good, sleeping in this late is bad, don’t you know that, Mara? Now grab that broom dearie, we need to give this kitchen a going over before we check the garden shed to see if those baby possums are back. There is much to do today for Adora’s party!” 

A soft laugh escaping her lips, Adora just nods and plays along. She grabs the old wicker broom from the cramped confines of the pantry. Without protest she gets to the work that keeps Razz awake, watching evermore out of the corner of her eye as the caretaker whispers to her most favorite of her imaginary friends that are her friendly haunts, “You see, Loo-kee, I told you today was the day. And you called old Razz crazy, you did! Have you not noticed the way the willow tree is bending, you silly croak?”

Adora, the broom handles pressed against her palms, smiles to herself. Not a day has passed since the night Adora showed up on her doorstep, orphaned again and breathing heavily that had nothing to do with the ways she was lugging every belonging (she wasn’t exactly easily winded, if her success as a highly decorated equestrian proved anything) that could fit into the first suitcase she could find, had Razz not talked about the of the willow tree that extended its branches over the shores of the Lakes. Never had the direction of the trunk’s bend changed once in Adora’s life; it’s branches and the gentle flutes of leaves that hung in peace from them simply bent to different winds. 

There’d been no wind that night Adora walked up the porch steps and knocked on the door, determined if not trembling, to ask Razz to take her in. The branches were frozen in late July humidity. Months and months of struggling to emancipate herself from her legal guardian, of rushing to tear each tendril of ivy off of her faster than another could grow in its place, and no sooner had the words, “You are old and bitter, and I am nothing like you! You ruin people! You ruin any chance they could ever be happy!” left her mouth had the sirens lit up their neighborhood, had Adora made a break for the first place she knew would take her in. 

With the Lewis household thrust into an Old Testament kind of madness and the main attraction for staying there still wielding a knife with intent to hurt her, Adora was without anything besides Razz to relate to, to be related to. Glimmer’s mansion on the beach- Holiday House- Bow’s place were both options that ensured a safe landing, but Adora understood she could not scare Micah or George and Lance with tales of silver handcuffs and the Miranda rights, and that she could not stay where she could not relate. 

She’d been pushed to the edge of the woods- like so many of the distant strangers that had become ghosts in the cabin when they’d been pushed out their own homelands, she drove then in a fugue state to. Perhaps that’s why Razz had not been so taken aback by Adora’s surprise visit but expecting it. 

“Ah, Mara!” she announced before Adora could get a panted, near-crazed word of explanation out, “I have the attic all set up for you. Now don’t just stand there, Mara. Come in, come in!”

Adora has never been so indebted to someone’s kindness as she has Razz’s. 

The broom comes to a slow stop in her hands, like the way a film projector fizzles out before stalling entirely. Razz looks up from the open oven door wherein she’s inspecting tonight’s pie, her mouth in the shape of an ‘o’ and a noise of confusion begging Adora to speak up.

“Thanks, Razz. For everything.” Adora tells her as she rubs her arm.

“Mara, what are you thanking me for? You’re the one who will have to feed the baby possums! Loo-kee here’s too lazy- you hear that Loo-kee,” Razz starts shouting over her shoulder, “You get off your lazy tooshie and help my Mara with the possums in the garden shed!”

“No,” Adora laughs. “Razz, it’s- it’s me.”

“Huh?”

“Adora.”

“I knew that!” the old lady swats her hand behind her.

Did- did you? Adora blinks. Again, the broom stills.

“Yes, of course, I knew! You are such a reflection of so much of my Mara, Adora. So polite you are, thanking me for nothing. You forget, Adora, never be so polite, you forget your power.” As she speaks, Razz shuffles her way over to Adora, whisking the broom from Adora’s grasp and touching the empty space where Adora’s heart should be with the end of the handle.

“And never wield such power you forget to be polite,” Adora answers back the call. She could do this in her sleep (and well, she probably did.) This sanctioned wisdom is a piece of herself Razz gives to everyone who comes through, who takes refuge up in the cabin’s attic, who helps her with chores and with work around the ranch. She figures that after a summer of trying so hard to be clever she has forgotten how to be kind, that staying here would be the best way to relearn the most paramount of her childhood lessons.

“Good girl! Now get back to sweeping, Mara. You are not usually this terrible with a broom!” Razz shoves the broom back in Adora’s arms, where the handle bounces from palm to palm before Adora secures her grasp on it.

Adora knows she can’t stay here sweeping forever. She knows that across the expanse of the ranch Mara is long past expecting her to show up and help clean the barn stalls like she promised she would. Adora knows but she idles here in the kitchen, thinking back to Razz’s throw away comment about resting more, how sleeping in was not resting. It’s just, how’s Adora supposed to get any rest at all at night when dreaming turns into drowning turns to dancing turns to freezing to death turns to doors opening- doors opening? 

Realizing she’s been staring through the kitchen out into the living room past the front door, Adora realizes where her exactly train of thought slipped off the tracks.

“Uh, Razz, the wind blew the front door open again.”

“You know it does that, Mara dearie. A little autumn breeze will not kill you, you should not worry so much.” 

Adora tries to take Razz’s bold and carefree acceptance in stride. She tries but she falters, takes a deep breath in, and lets out an ineffectual exhale (like she always does) when she realizes what the wind has blown through the open door. 

What do you know, I’m going crazy. Adora can’t help but laugh. Or I’m really dead, this time around. Wouldn’t that be a wish come true?

Shimmering, sparkling paths of golden light, like the ones from her dream, like the ones that led her to Catra the first time and the ones that led her again every night to a failed exchange that ended with having her heart ripped out and the empty cavern of her chest fill with ice, have spilled in through the forest floor outside. That same empty cavern aches inside the space between her lungs now, as if the ghost of her heart knows that it is being called. But no. Adora knows where these paths always lead. She knows their promises of flying end with the crush of her bones hitting the pavement. Face in a familiar red flush that’s not from the kiss of heat this time but from the violent touch of ice, Adora grips the broom tighter and squeezes her eyes shut.

No. No! This isn’t happening. It never actually happened, not even when I was a little kid and I was sitting in the backseat. I was just imagining it then and now? Well now, I’m just going crazy!

She tries to will it away. Will it away like she’s tried willing everything else. But when has wanting ever been enough? Never when it was her want.

“I’m just going crazy, I’m just seeing things, I just worked too late last night and then slept in too long by accident,” Adora whispers under her breath in some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that promises she’s losing her mind. 

But Razz is not so selectively deaf she can’t hear Adora reliving a story she’s heard and seen hundred times, “You’re not going crazy, my dear Adora. Of course, I see it. I always see it with you. When the time comes to follow the lights, you’re going to follow them, aren’t you?”

“I-” Adora stops in a stutter, her hand coming to her chest on instinct. Against the pressure of her palm her heart beats quietly; there’s no ice in the cavity, just an unmoored and lonely organ beating on without its muse. She looks to the door where the golden paths have set off only to find them gone- again. Albeit the door is still open, the autumn breeze it brings in is still waiting. Whatever has just happened here, Adora knows it must mean something. This would be the part of the movie that meant the story was approaching a turning point, the swerve around a corner that would always lead to a happy ending- or at least, one with some closure. And yes, she knows her life isn’t a movie, it’s no greatest film to never be made, but the sight of the golden string has strengthened that flicker of hope that just refuses to die. Unlike the rest of her.

When the time comes? What could Razz mean by that? Like time to go, to leave?

“I don’t know.”  

And yet, Adora does know. Adora knows, like she always knows, that she would drown and drip and freeze to death, if only there was something on the other side of the door to die for. 

~

Tolerated.

That is what Adora has been her entire life.

Tolerated and put up with, while she was shiny and therefore useful in her short-term luster, never mind her overeager chronic need to please. Tolerated and tossed aside, when her reflection built up grime from years of secondhand abuse and it caused something in her to dim, to fade, to lessen. People around her had a history of building Adora up to match their expectations. Adora formed her habits around such luxurious treatment because yes, she could be stronger and smarter and faster, whatever was needed of her, whatever was asked of her, Adora could and would comply. After all, there was no possible way to win the prize of their love without the shortcut of her gleam and glisten.

And then, when she could not grow to the height of their thirteen story expectations, she fell back down to her true size- the one of that tiny infant left on the doorstep because there was no one to want her and love her or respect her or listen to her- and found all her habits to be sacred rituals of self-sabotage.

Adora was and is a “tightly wound,” “somewhat insensitive,” and “extremely selfish” “self-preservationist.” She never had to have those words thrown in her face by those who tolerated her to know them to be true. The writing was and is dripping down the wall in familiar, runny hues: she is an ugly amalgamation of those traits because she is tolerated, and she is tolerated because that is all she is and will ever be.

Adora can see the pattern as it emerges in her shiniest, most broken pieces, the ones that cut and scar her palms as she tries to pick them back up. 

The birthplace on her birth certificate is a glamorous city on the west coast, yet only her earliest weeks were spent there before she lived and began to die here on the opposite side of the country.  

The masqueraded pretender who “saved” Adora in bringing her here and stole in black and blue ink the ownership of her life only to find her over and over and over to be a failure in the reasons she did so in the first place- pageantry, modeling, singing, acting, Adora could do none of it without tripping and nothing Adora could do could the shadowed con artist find a way to peddle- and in her increasing frustration with the teenager with whom her calculations had not worked, chained Adora up tighter and pressed the masking tape to her mouth harder, chanting all the while: be smaller, be quieter, be better.

To think Adora had been so foolish to really believe she discovered a twin flame burning in the window across the street, to think Adora thought she found someone who saw her past their own reflection was proof on paper she had not learned how to be smaller, be quieter, be better . And for a brief, flickering moment in time, her inability to see the love she found as simply nothing more than a reversed image of herself, was not a bad thing. 

All her life Catra like Adora had been tolerated; all her life there had been the weight of expectations she could not meet without killing herself causing the droop of her shoulders. From her stepfather, who’s disappointment could not be separated from unbridled, undeserving rage that he wielded like an unholy sword. From her mother, who did love her but could not, with the force of that love alone, protect her daughter from the wrath of her husband’s wicked animus that haunted their home.

It was a natural fit, Adora standing next to Catra. Their behavior when together was natural- Adora with her hand tucked safely under Catra’s sweatshirt, Catra running her finger over the ripped hole in Adora’s jean, drawing a sky of stars on the skin of her knee where falling of horses for years had left behind a constellation of scars- because they were best friends and no one dare had to worry their attachment at the hip signified anything more, anything worth raising an eyebrow over. It was natural because Adora was tolerated and so was Catra, by everyone and everything in this dead-end town that had spoken their names with such unwarranted familiarity since they were in diapers, everyone except each other. With each other they could be their wild and unkempt, natural child and teenage selves without fear of the retribution: be better, be quieter, be smaller!

And so it goes that it was natural- perfectly natural and understandable- for Adora to have fallen in love with Catra (even if she realized she loved her too many voicemails late). Even if to everyone else it remained the opposite of natural and why won’t Adora consider that handsome young man in the youth choir? He’s never late on Sunday and he’s a quarterback on the football team, a shoo-in for a full scholarship upstate. Can you imagine what handsome babies they would have? I just don’t understand why she spends so much time with the Bishop’s girl.

But no, Adora was never a natural. Hence why she was always tolerated as opposed to loved. What was natural for everyone else was sacrilegious for her; what was sacrilegious for everyone else was natural for her. Adora was never what anyone wanted, not at the end of the day when no amount of polishing could make her shine again, and so out of fear of finding herself to be tolerated by the one person she could not stand to be erased by, Adora did what she always did. She overcompensated, and then overcompensated some more just to be safe.

Adora spent her entire run with Catra using every color in the box to make a panchromatic portrait of her best friend- opal blue for the mind behind those cunning and clever eyes, gold for the soul that stayed up late on school nights making her mixtapes of Alison Kraus and Sleater-Kinney, the brightest red for the heart beating behind the intensity of her laughter, her anger, the fire of her touch leaving scorched earth kissing Adora’s skin. Colors Adora could not see with just about anyone else.

Adora’s conception of Catra was a rainbow of reasons to love her and Adora hung it in her head where reason and logic should be, even though the artistic liberties of the portrait exaggerated the best parts of Catra. In that exaggeration, Adora could not see the most clandestine of truths, highlighting without mercy the deepest of Adora’s indiscretions. 

Catra didn’t love Adora. Catra was like Adora, yeah, and she liked Adora, but where Adora wanted and hoped that wanting would tie her over until days of driving down Hollywood Boulevard soaking in the west coast sun and the smell of sunscreen and acoustic guitars, Catra merely…  tolerated Adora, for what she was not.

It was undeniable that Catra wasn’t like everyone else in that she kissed Adora back in the car that night in a way that could have fooled a fool like Adora, but she was just like everyone else in that she had expectations of her that Adora could not rise to meet. Catra, like everyone else, wanted to see herself reflected in Adora so desperately she would’ve gone to those same lengths to change her, when that red heat of her beating heart got the better of the cool blue of her mind, and she screamed in the mall parking lot as if it would end the world and take them both with it for the better, “I’m so fucking tired of acting like I don’t exist just so you can please her. I’m so fucking sick of you trying to erase me so you can be her obedient little zombie! You ruined me, Adora.”

That was the plunge of the murder weapon that followed Adora into her dreams. That was the one-time Catra actually drove her gold-tipped dagger into Adora’s stomach and reached to crush her heart with her bare hands, killing her softly with every word she spit.

“Catra, please, I need you. You’re my best friend-”

Last words to eat for a petty last meal. 

“Don’t call me that! In fact, don’t call me anything , Adora.”

And a timely epitaph to inscribe Adora’s tombstone with. 

How natural that felt, to write the words that killed her on the grave that will forever mark where a part of her will lay for the rest of her life, for the rest of time, always bleeding profuse opal blue and fiery red from where her perforated abdomen oozes the color of the gold-tipped dagger Catra left when she striked, her aim true for Adora’s heart. Where Adora knows a slivered silver-screen specter of her former self still haunts the painted white lines on the sunsucking, night-sky of the asphalt, she also knows that her whole self lay there hemorrhaging her best colors, trying in vain not to die those days that creeped by from early May ‘til the passing by of July. She could not bring herself to get up during those violent dog days. She couldn’t afford to lose the weight of her own soul by allowing death to take her right then and there.

“You ruined me, Adora.”

Adora could do it. She knew she could. Every scrap of first aid she’d absorbed her life preached it wasn’t wise to rip out the object that was punctured layers deep within your own body, not unless you wanted to trim your chances into slim to none, but Adora knew she had it in her to take the dagger Catra drove into her (“Call me when you figure out what you want. Or better yet, just don’t call me at all.”) and remove it. And yet, she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Adora couldn’t let go of this last piece of her first love. It was better that Catra hate her than forget what they had altogether. Adora’s knuckles shook against the dagger’s handle; she kept it in place when thoughts begging her to let go and move on like everyone else is came and she found wells of strength simply in the knowledge that one day she would. 

Adora lay there on the pavement causing no harm to anyone so long as she minded her business of bleeding and sobbing in silence and shivering despite the summer heat the ground radiated, hoping time around her would soon unfreeze and give her another choice beyond laying there forever. A fate such as this was one she willingly chose, because to take the dagger out was to lose Catra for good, for the better and worse they promised one another, and Adora did not think she could come back from a death like that.

This had happened to her, Adora had died like this, because Adora took up too much space and time for Catra to love her. Had she listened when they said be smaller, she wouldn’t have grown so tall she cast a shadow that trapped and mutilated and burned Catra. Had she understood when they said be quieter, she wouldn’t have let her mouth run her into this grave on the ground when she tried to explain that she never meant to hurt Catra, no Adora was trying to throw her body in between Catra and something much, much worse. But Adora's fractured self made for a pitiable shield and in the end was no match for the skeletons they'd left behind in both their closets plotting hard to fuck up everything, whispering "haven't you hurt each other enough?" as they climbed out of their upright graves.

Maybe if Adora had followed through when they had demanded be better she wouldn’t be left to wonder whether she’d still be on the ground right where Catra left her as she walked away, one hand wrapped around the handle of Catra’s dagger keeping it in the place where it severed, when Catra went out and found a wife, kids, and sent Adora back a family Christmas card while she stayed trapped in this town and stuck to the ground, begging for footnotes in the story of Catra’s faraway, successful, glamorous life.

If not for the sirens that reflected off her sorry state in alternating reds and blues, Adora might have stayed there frozen forever. The dagger, too. But Adora heard the whispers and saw, back in the dimension where her corporeal form limped around from hour to hour, the local news broadcast where a woman reported into a microphone, “Neighbors are still confused about this alleged disappearance. The Bishop was a beloved man by his congregation and had few enemies, but it is hard not to rule out foul play. The investigation is ongoing, and police are worried a suspect may still be at large. Mrs. Lewis, the Bishop’s wife, is here to comment,” and knew that when that inevitable knock came on the front door, she’d have the chance she’d bided so much time for. 

So, back in that parking lot where her real self had stayed frozen in the place between death and the afterlife, what had died did not stay dead. It refused to. Adora slid the dagger out, coughing up and choking on clots of opal blue and fiery red that ran down her jaw like tears and words unspoken. She closed the book without finishing the last chapter. She ended the battle all the heroes in movies welcome. She walked out on this- this goddamn fight of her life, vowing to find a better one with a better ending even if she would never be whole again. 

Arching her back higher and higher and higher as the dagger glissaded from her abdomen, Adora collapsed back onto the pavement and felt herself breathe for the first time in months. With that newfound air she laughed, a certified madwoman in her grief, despair, and loneliness evermore, in spite of her newfound hollowness. Her palms were stained with opal blue and fiery red and a rush of gold; they left those colors running down her cheeks as they came to shield her face while the sound of laughter drowned out the ever-creeping song of the sirens. 

As the dagger fell from Adora’s iron grip and clattered to the pavement, Adora could only live for the hope that Catra would come back. Maybe one day Catra would realize how wrong she got it and find it in herself to return to Adora's arms. Afterall, she would always be able to find a piece of Adora here, right where she had left her.

Adora rose up from the pavement as if she rose from a death such as this all the time and stitched up the wound with fragments from a woven string of gold that would no doubt leave a brand-new kind of scar; she rose up and she let it scar in the effort to get back to some mimicry of her former life. 

And scar it did. Running up the smooth porcelain of her abdomen like a versant path to old sights, the fissure healed back wrong. The haphazard stitch job Adora performed fused that emotional scar tissue from her chest cavity up her throat and kept her from saying the right thing. It left an empty atrium in the place where her heart used to be instead of sealing the chamber together. 

And it aches now with a constant, concerning thrum that vibrates through the rest of her body, as Adora’s boots kick up dirt on the well-worn path she wears down as she walks toward the barn on the other side of the property.

C’mon Razz, Adora thinks as she digs her knuckles at the summit of her sternum, work with me! What do you mean I’m supposed to follow the lights- which I’m not really seeing and are just a symptom of me being a forest recluse too long- when the time comes? What time? Is it a specific like hour, or just more of general thing-

“Ow!” hisses Adora, stumbling back into a bramble of thorns. In the weeds of her thoughts, she hadn’t noticed the double barn doors growing closer than they appeared in her peripheral vision and ran her nose straight into their wooden paneling without even bothering to look up.

Okay, Adora brought the palm from her chest to her throbbing nose, the other to swing open the cracked twin doors, I’ll just worry about it later, I guess.

“Nice of you to join me, Adora.” a voice calls out from the depths of the stables, from the farthest corner of the barn not yet a century young. A shuffle of hay can be heard as Adora follows, dragging her feet at the tone that ricochets off the timber surroundings. “And here I was, wondering if my protégée was too busy planning a party to remember there were chores she agreed to help with.”

“Sorry, I got caught up with Razz. She had me sweeping and then she wanted me to deal with the baby possums in the shed. But I didn’t forget, Mara, I promise.” Adora, making the final turn to where her riding coach stands making sure the saddle on one of the horses is secure, says.

Mara is quick to abandon her work on her chosen horse and chosen object of her focus, Swift Wind's saddle, as she looks up in Adora’s direction. The horse neighs a scintillating thank you (despite Swift Wind’s on-the-record opinion renouncing saddles that often meant Adora rode the horse bareback and hated herself for it the next morning, and that Swift Wind isn’t Mara’s first preference for riding around the ranch, and- what is going on here?). 

“Oh, is that all?” Mara asks. A familiar mischievous glint in her eyes betrays her bored expression.

Adora’s shoulders sink, “And I slept in. But only until like 8:30!”

“Adora!” Mara’s jaw drops in feigned shock. 

“I. Had. To. Work. Late .” comes Adora’s tired defense. 

How many times am I going to have to explain this? What, are Mermista and Sea Hawk going to interrogate me tonight, too?

Swift Wind blowing a disbelieving groan through his lips is a shovel of dirt down the six feet of Adora’s grave.

“Mhmm,” Mara says with a nod, “I saw your car come in from Windermere around midnight. Any luck yet catching sight of her?”

“Do you really think Este is haunting Olive Garden? That seems like a really sad place to haunt, Mara. And not sad as in this house is haunted by the ghost of the woman killed by her stalker and that’s heartbreaking and infuriating for so many reasons, but sad as in Olive Garden might be the least interesting place to haunt.” Adora explains, dodging Mara’s question without any semblance of grace. 

In the spirit of truth, the answer is that Adora’s late night shifts closing the restaurant are unmatched in their boredom and lonesomeness. Adora less notices the wine mysteriously vanishing by way of the conspicuous apparition still mourning her cheating, murderous boyfriend, known and celebrated throughout the town’s lore from unfinished glasses than she does dump them out without flair into the kitchen sink.

“You know what’s really sad, Adora?” Mara raises an eyebrow and Adora comes to stand on the other side of Swift Wind, looking across his back and perfectly positioned saddle at the other woman with anticipation, “Being broken up with at an Olive Garden.”

Well, it sure beats getting brutally dumped by your best friend behind the mall.

“Not that Este’s lover was doing her any favors when they were together, so I would take that with a grain of salt.”

Swift Wind bellows out another neigh that conveys his agreement and Adora face-plants into the leather of his once-despised saddle, letting out a long moan she knows will garner no such sympathy with this crowd.

“Look, I finished cleaning the stables, without help, so you can tell me all about your super late shift last night ghost hunting on the ride, and whatever else is on your mind.” Adora dares to peek up and find Mara dishing out the tinsel of sisterly love to wrap around her sisterly advice. “I’m getting the impression that working late is not the only reason you slept in.” Mara’s voice falls low with an annoying level of knowingness, her eyes trained on the exhaustion radiating off Adora like a nuclear isotype. 

Adora sinks deeper into Swift Wind’s saddle-much to his chagrin. Yes, Adora is tired, because she isn’t “resting” or whatever other cryptic commandment of Razz’s that she's breaking in by sleeping in half past eight in the morning, but more so she’s tired of everyone bringing it up!

Ugh, the party tonight’s gonna be a disaster.

That being said…  riding Swiftie through up the path to the cliffside is the best sounding idea to clear her mind of the sloshing opal blue and fiery red that make it hard to think before party festivities start in earnest tonight, so Adora mutters an acceptance of Mara’s offer- to both ride and to talk.

I can find a way to talk about what I’m feeling about Catra without talking about the whole weird string of fate metaphor/hallucination, right?

“Okay,” Adora breathes out as she rights her posture.

“Alright then, let’s go!” Mara calls out and Adora rolls from the ball of her heels to her toes, ready to sling her leg over Swift Wind saddle (thank God he’s in the mood to wear it today, sore hips and legs would just be the cherry on top of this sorrowful sundae)- right when Mara beats her to the punch by doing the exact same thing.

“Wait,” Adora stumbles backward into the stable’s nearest pole, “ You’re going to ride Swift Wind?”

Mara nods. She then makes a clicking noise in the back of her throat that encourages the horse to step out of his stable, the twinkling Christmas lights that took a painstaking amount of time for Adora to hang up (in hopes Swiftie would come to see his stable as a place more welcoming than say, a prison cell) casting Mara in an auriferous glow.

“But… he’s not yours.” finishes Adora and the second the last word comes clipped from her lips does Swift Wind start bellowing again, this time in vocal protest.

“That’s right, Swiftie,” Mara brings her hand down to rub his neck, “You’re not Adora’s either. You’re not anyone’s. And if Adora wanted to ride you today she should’ve gotten here earlier to clean your stable like she said she would.” 

Adora scoffs, “Uh, you try cutting up twenty carrots and five apples in a timely manner and then feed them to a bunch of baby possums without them clawing your hands off! Have you been letting Razz feed those guys? No wonder they keep coming back to the shed, Mara!”

“Maybe she’ll get to ride you back,” that mischievous glint in Mara’s eye returns with a vengeance and Adora scoffs again, “If she can beat us to the cliffside!” 

“Hey-”

“Ha’yah!” Mara’s boot kicks back and Swift Wind sets off not in a trot but in a full-blown sprint so unsafe for the confines of the barn, kicking up stray hay and rust colored dirt that Adora ends up inhaling when she tries to get in a word of objection. 

I should’ve stayed with Razz and the possums.

But it is too late now the same way it is too late for so many of Adora’s wants. Her dejected sighing rings off the thin walls of the barn as she turns on the heel of her boot and steps out of Swift Wind’s stable. Adora doesn’t throw a second thought away on checking the stable lock because the white horse has nothing short of a rebellious streak and his distaste for his saddle was infinitesimal compared to the confines of a stable within a barn; from what Razz told Adora, Swiftie learned as a foal learned how to break locks and even stable doors that were not even his own, an indicator of high intelligence his previous owner found too annoying to justify keeping him. 

Of course, I picked the horse that’s been tolerated since he was colt to bond with. What’s the saying? Birds of a feather pick the next best thing over each other?

Adora decides to fight fire with fire after walking up and down the stables, quelling her competitive side down the way one might struggle to roll up a sleeping bag or put an air mattress back in its designated box, because Mara flagrantly cheated. The older girl now has at least a five-minute head start since there is no human way Adora could say “giddy-up” in a safe and proper fashion before then, choosing instead to scratch noses and whisper quiet hellos before stopping at the stable of Kitty, Mara’s usual choice. 

“Hey, girl. What do you say we leftovers rub it in Mara and Swiftie’s sorry face when we beat them?”

Mara preferred the palomino filly of the seven horses in Razz's care for the majestic creature's gentle nature that stood in contradiction to her lightspeed gallop. Kitty wouldn’t respond if Adora vented the way Swift Wind’s vocality lent him to, but she would listen and might even dare to take Adora’s side if her usual riding buddy decided to continue betraying her for the rest of the day.

Adora sets off with Kitty after grabbing the hat Mara abandoned in Swift Wind's stable in the heat of her frivolity and placing it over her ponytail’s poof. It’s a quick walk through the already open barn doors, a steady trot up to the beginning of the path, and Adora and Kitty are off with one simple kick through the path that opens up to the north of the woods.

Therapeutic are the rides through these trails. Adora knows the land as if it were mapped on the back of her hand. The south parts of the woods were a circus in their own right, a kind of free-for-all rodeo where the sea of trees kissed the shores of the infamous Lakes, allowing for a calvary of fishermen to dock their boats and waste evenings watching other townsfolk swindle the straggle of unlucky tourists walking up and down the sand with metal detectors, their out-of-place Hawaiian shirts covered in another layer of gift shop merchandise that made them easy marks.

Weeks ago, the city held their annual Fourth of July fireworks show near the docks and those same tourists craned their necks from their “best seats in the house.” Used to spending the midsummer holiday on Razz’s back porch, sunburnt and drinking sweet tea, and trying to beat Catra by having fewer mosquito bites than her, Adora fell a little out of love with their red and blue sparkling shower from the balcony of Holiday House.

The north of the woods was a different story. They were a different world. A city of maple and oak trees, their trunks young giants and their leaves a disco shining down a shower of green light, there were few hikers or tourists or an unlucky pair of teens hiding out in an old Daytona to be found in this part of these backwoods. 

Few traversed the forest floor as it was covered in an explosion of fauna that had spurned a mythology of attracting poisonous snakes and antagonistic insects. Neither were true; yes, snakes and insects whispered to each other in this sacred place, but they followed the simple rule of if you left them alone so would they to you. Adora knows this because she’s the next in a grand legacy of riders to use the miles and miles and miles of dirt paths that run like water through the northernmost parts of the forest. But even before her years sitting in the saddle did Adora know the forest’s wonder. She’d spent her childhood trying to decipher the way the woods whispered. 

“If you scream out here, I bet no one can hear you.” giggled Catra, scrambling from the branch Adora sat on to haul herself up to the next one higher. At seven years old, they spent afternoons scratching their legs on tree bark trying, and learning quickly, to climb trees. Catra, being the nimbler of the two, beat Adora’s lanky and uncoordinated legs to the top every time.

“Catra!” Adora huffed as she followed with as much gusto as her tiny body could conjure, “That’s so creepy. Why would you say things like that?”

Catra had swung her head down so that they were at eye level. Adora would later say she looked like a bat, so close up there to being above the trees. “I didn’t mean something bad, dummy! I just meant you can be as loud as you want out here and no grownups will yell at you.”

It was when their tree climbing days were a lifetime ago that Adora realized Catra was speaking to the civility that they were raised to adhere to. The don’t speak until spoken to lives they were trapped in . The children should be heard and not seen way they were treated . Catra screaming until birds flew shocked from their nests and whacked Adora with her foot until she joined in was an unapologetic ‘TO HELL WITH THAT’ to the Be smaller, be quieter, be better mantra she and Adora were taught day and night. These days, Catra wasn’t there to scream with her, but Adora rode out with Swift Wind everyday of August to the center of the forest just to scream at the sky as if she’d never learned civility and had been brave enough from the beginning to do what was right. 

By the time the path she and Kitty gallop on grows sparse with a dotting of trees, sweat drips down Adora’s back from the constant September sun that promises autumn is a few more warm days away. Her head’s a little clearer; the endless stretch of time behind her listening only to the symphony of woodland creatures whispering and the pa-dunk, pa-dunk metronome of Kitty’s hooves on the dirt, has provided a place to wash away her memories. The woods have always cast a spell that falls over Adora without fault, and she has no choice each time but to let a mindless current sweep any doubts or insecurities or memories away like she’s dumping out a priceless bottle of wine. 

A permanent solution it’s not, the memories will be back (the current always washes them back up when it spits her up on the shores of her dreamland) but for now it’s enough as she slows Kitty down to trot to keep the two of them from meeting a plummeting death off the upcoming, rocky cliffside.

“Did you take another sabbatical to help the baby possums again? Or did you just take the long way?” Mara asks without turning around. She’s still on Swift Wind’s back, staring off the edge as if she’s gazing at the end of the world. Not moving. Not thinking or fretting or worrying a hole in her soul. Mara is simply taking the sublime sight of the ground giving way to an endless sky in, for no other form of gaiety in the world could capture her heart like this. Her serene expression is one Adora recognizes with worn-out envy.

Adora lets out a low laugh of sarcasm that might make Catra- wherever she's stomping around- proud, giving a gentle tug on Kitty’s reins so she knows to stop next to Swift Wind. “I didn’t take the long way, I took the same way you did- you just cheated.”

Mara’s smile grows wider.

“I thought you said we were going to talk.” Adora melts further into her saddle. She can’t meet Mara’s gaze. This is the uncomfortable part where rejection taunts her by waiting possibly, on the other side. Instead, Adora chooses to stare at Kitty’s blonde mane. Many times during their instruction Mara would bring them out here; there was a certain mystique about the cliffside that beckoned her and made it her favorite place to think. That might be why she chose to bunk by herself in the petite ranger’s cabin near the highway that ran alongside grandiose geographical wonder rather than the room Adora was occupying now. Windermere was this place’s moniker- the ranger’s cabin and the great cliffs. No one alive today was privy to why, not even Razz.

“We are going to talk,” Mara says as she shifts Swift Wind, “I just wanted to get here first. And you have to start.”

“Shit.” Adora’s curses under her breath, just barely audible to any present ears as Swift Wind putters, prancing his front feet up and down.

Adora does her best to make a long story short without forgetting which specific details to leave out so she doesn’t end up giving Mara the idea she’s headed straight down the path of losing her mind. Of course, it helps that Mara holds a draft of this story that’s dripping in the appropriate context; many times over the summer has Mara been a sound board, her eyes trained on the horizon beyond the cliff’s edge, her mind making mental annotations in the margins. 

The recurring dream that’s keeping her from resting. Razz’s weird oracular advice about the front door opening. Once Adora starts to talk no end in sight appears. The words just keep coming like the current’s overflowing. For someone who wholeheartedly believed talking about this would make her feel better, Adora finds that the more she speaks the more the space between her chest convulses inwards on itself like the way a black hole might. So unnaturally, so despairingly, Adora’s bleeding only opal blue and gold.

Mara stays true to the silence that Adora leaves as soon as she’s run out of breath. Then, “So, I take it that switching homerooms did not make things easier for either of you.”

“I wish!” Adora’s words echo off the trivial canyon below them, “Whenever I see Catra at school, she just looks at me like- like she wishes I was dead! At first, things on Friday were a little easier because we no longer had to sit through first period in the same room together, and then I saw her at lunch, just sitting by herself, and glaring at me.”

The school cafeteria has been nothing if not a battlefield since senior year started with her and Catra finding tables on the opposite side of the room. After a summer of standing her ground, Adora knows it’s not fighting on that battlefield that will prove to be the most difficult- but knowing she’s not what Catra’s fighting for anymore. It adds insult to injury that Catra spends the entirety of each and every lunch period since the first day of school staring at Bow (Glimmer’s taken to with freshmen because Catra is not the only bride Adora burnt down) like he’s her undeserving understudy and stabbing her spork every so often into her lunch tray.

If it’s a sign that on Friday, Catra got up 25 minutes before the bell rang to dump her food in the trashcan and shove Adora’s shoulder as she stormed out, then it’s one Adora cannot decipher without giving life to her hope springing terminal.

“Oh?” Mara makes a noise of interest. “What happened to her new crew?”

“Her 'new crew' is all older than her. They’re college dropouts who, I dunno, want to do professional theatre? They work at that one near the mall, the one with the weird name for a theatre-” 

“The Disco?” finishes Mara. 

Adora fixes the hat on her head, “I don’t know how Catra fell into an improv group, but it’s exactly the kind of thing she would make fun of me for.”

“Because I thought you can’t act to save your life, Adora,” the other rider laughs and so does her horse, “That’s what makes for such a perfect joke.”

“I can’t act, thanks for the reminder that six years of after school lessons and theatre camp were a complete and total waste.” Adora flatlines, coming to rest down on Kitty’s neck.

Whatever she thinks she saw in me because I was born in Hollywood, whatever she thought could be the face on makeup products and on the covers of magazines, was obviously just another mirage. I’m just thirteen walking mirages disguised as a person, actually.

“Okay, so, if switching homerooms didn’t help, then you’re going to have to find a way to move on through the school year. You’ve got eight months until you can leave for L.A,” Mara picks up the string where Adora dropped it so unceremoniously.

“Oh, great,” huffs Adora, “Eight months of getting guilty trippy letters from my ex-legal guardian and trying to figure out how to spend time with Bow since he’s dating Glimmer and she refuses to talk to either of us!”

Eight months of being reminded of how much I love and want Catra just to be too scared to call her on the brand-new phone Razz bought me, of hating myself because I would've sworn on my life that she would call when we went back to school. Eight more months of avoiding her in the hallway and living with staring a hole in my head everyday like I’m the bad guy… because I am definitely not the hero of this movie, that’s for sure. That person died halfway in.

“Maybe I sound like a dumb, angsty teenager who just- just doesn’t know anything, but this stuff with Catra…” Adora yanks herself upright just to feel the life leave her body, “I thought if maybe she didn’t have to see me, we could just get on with our lives. And that seemed justified because I thought Catra had moved on with her life!” 

Catra broke up with Adora. Adora stayed right there in the same mental space, right where she was when Catra broke up with her for months on end because by doing so she could delay the ending, the one where she had to live without Catra, was coming. Adora was determined to walk in the same shoe until it broke, determined to move through the motions of the day despite being stuck in that rear view pool of opal blue, fiery red, and tainted gold.

Catra on the other hand, did not stay put. It took her five whole seconds for Catra to leave Adora holding all their love in the parking lot. Her rebounds were new adventures that for sure were ones for the book. Adora had no choice but to peel herself off the stained purple of the pavement and keep living. As tempting as it was to continue laying there, bleeding out there, Adora couldn’t stay around bearing witness for a love that died too young when the subject of her love was out living a life where she had moved on. 

And she couldn't make it easier by making Catra the villain, but not for lack of trying. Adora had tried to hate Catra. She tried to and almost came close when she caught sight of Catra's first replacement of her. This new Adora had briefly been the just then graduated assistant manager of Hollywood Horde. A grand dame that had waltzed off the roaring 20’s black-and-white movie screen scene, she sure as hell made a beautiful fool next to Catra. 

Yet not foolish enough to stay. Scorpia’s egress after falling for Perfuma proved, at least, that despite chopping off her curls and pocketing bad makeup tips from Double Trouble, Catra spent the summer as the stubborn brat Adora’d fallen in love with. Double Trouble was the next batter up to try to break that stubborn streak, the next Adora, but either they had taken one too many swings and hit one too many misses- or leaving Catra to die in a burning building was that much more entertaining.

Both replacements rubbed the same sharpened point in: Catra was never Adora’s to lose, not in her promises, not in their plans, not in wherever this sadistic string of fate tried to lead her up just to trip her.

Catra wanted me to want her. She tolerated everything else about me, that I was a people pleaser, she tolerated that I was under the thumb of the Wicked Witch, she tolerated the time it was taking for me to stand up to her. But I couldn’t stand one more minute of being the person she had to be patient for and now it’s too late for her to know how much I wanted her, want her, too.

The truth is that Adora stole that kiss from Catra that night because she was so sick and tired of being tolerated. She wanted, just once, to taste what it was like to be loved for who she was without condition or recompense. She wanted to give that rush in return, she wanted for Catra to be the one she gave it to. And though her greatest love of all time is for sure over now, Adora is still tired of waiting in the doorways of those she thinks are older and wiser, watching and waiting and listening, hoping and wanting for the clues in darkened rooms to light up and tell her how to behave so that by the end of the day she is loved and wanted in return. She’s tired of trying so desperately not to cause any harm only to lose everything in trying to pacify everyone. 

“A friend to all is a friend to none.” Razz relayed that perplexing piece of wisdom to her when Adora broke down in the living room after finding out about The Disco’s scorching fate. She must’ve been quoting someone. Quote or no quote, Razz and all her sibylline guidance were outlining Adora’s original sin of object permanence. By giving Catra the same energy she gave her legal guardian, by trying to walk on that tightrope of being her girlfriend and Bow and Glimmer’s best friends, she had doomed them all.

Maybe that’s why I keep having that dream. Because I’m a tightly wound, somewhat insensitive, extremely selfish self-preservationist trying to live in a moment frozen in time and this is the universe’s way of trying to get me to adapt, because hey, I’m a natural at that. Or this is the universe's way of showing me love is a hoax and because I bought the ticket, I have to take the ride.

“I love it out here,” Mara starts. Adora has yet to elaborate on her last pointed point about Catra. She would rather wallow in self-pity and spend no effort to speed up a pain that promises to stick around forever and evermore. “I love how old and weird and beautiful it is. I love the folklore about this town. I could’ve picked anywhere in the entire country, Adora, but I picked… here.”

“I know,” Adora turns her head out the infinity that exists behind the great divide off the cliffside. In the background behind them and the horses, she hears the almost imperceptible bend of the trees as the wind blows through, sending a shower of whispers from the creatures and the plants, the sprites and the spirits to leave goosebumps under the sweat of Adora’s shirt. A chill shakes her body in spite of the heat. Adora fears turning around; she knows what she’ll see, and she knows what they’ll be leading her back to.

“When you were twelve years old and Razz asked me to watch you and Catra, I didn’t think anything of telling you about the stories I’d heard about this place. You were so interested and almost calmed by them, I didn’t know what they would come to mean to you,” sighs Mara and Adora sits up in her saddle a little straighter. 

Wait, is Mara apologizing? Wait, what does Mara have to apologize for?

“Mara, are you trying to tell me it’s maladaptive to try and mold my story with Catra to one from the mythology about this town?” a half-formed laugh slips from Adora’s lips, “Because I uh, I kind of figured that out on my own.” 

“And I didn’t doubt you would,” Mara shakes her head, “But of all the stories you picked, I understand why you gravitated to James and Betty. I understand what makes you feel like her, really, I do. But I can’t help but blame myself because I’m sure it didn’t help anything when I gave you her cardigan and showed you the J + B inscribed on Razz’s willow tree.”

“If it makes you feel any better, these days I feel more like Augustine,” Adora forces a laugh. It doesn't stick the landing.

“In a way, I made it seem like the only interesting things that could happen to you were in those tall tales. But Adora, here’s what you have to remember about James and Betty, about all the stories really and about folklore in general,” That none of it is real? That it’s Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy for depressed people who watch too many movies? That some really creative gift shop owner found an old cardigan in some abandoned trunk of personal things and took a pocket knife to an innocent willow tree?  “We pass those stories down, as human beings, to understand something about ourselves, about our greater purpose here on this planet.” 

In the wake of these words, the wind bends the forest closer, as if it is listening to what Mara has to say.

“You took the stories I told you and made them so much more. You made them real, and not just by playing pretend with Catra when you were little and acting out Dorothea turning down her boyfriend’s proposal or Este being murdered- which was super dark, by the way- but by honoring the people who the stories are about.” Mara smiles gently before turning away from the cliffside for the first time in this conversation, “Adora, you’re not a character in one of these stories. You’re not someone who’s going to disappear even if you don’t leave. You get a say in what happens to you. You get to pick what path you follow because there are more doors open than Razz’s front one.”

“I-I-” stutters Adora, fumbling for a response. Deeper and deeper Mara’s words sink into the place in Adora’s chest that holds a small vacancy sign, “I just thought Catra and I would be able to figure this out. You and Hope figured it out, so… why couldn’t we?”

A friend to all is a friend to none.

Laughing as she shakes her head, Mara replies, “Hope and I are the worst example of people who made it work. You didn’t see the part of our relationship where everything was so messy and we even reenacted some of this town’s worst stories, you just know the couple that’s been together for ten years, Adora. But it was worth it, you know, waiting for Hope to come around. Because she did eventually come around for the long haul.”

“And if Catra doesn’t come around? If Catra doesn’t come back?” Adora can barely bring herself to say the words out loud. Because can there really be a light glowing like a lantern at the end of this tunnel? Can there really be happiness to be found beyond this history?

“Then you graduate and go to the west coast- if that is still what you want. You pick another path and start your own story. Razz and I will always be here if you need us. But other than that, it’s yours to write, Adora, even if this is a pretty rough first chapter.” 

Adora’s fingers tighten around the rope of Kitty’s reins. Every day that passed in August was a day where Adora asked herself if leaving was something beyond the right thing to do, something she genuinely wanted. Everything she’d ever known she’d be turning her back on, the new and the old, Bow and Glimmer and Catra, and there was always the beckoning void of fear that spoke in shadows and promised her she was doomed to fail.

I do want to go to L.A. It’ll be time to, anyway. Catra will probably go to New York if we don’t ever end up talking again. I don’t think my life, wherever it will be, will be as fun or full without her. But maybe one day we will talk, and I’ll tell her that. We’ll come back to this town when we’re old and gray and laugh as we finally bury the hatchet on this unaccomplished love. Maybe she’ll forgive me when we’re both as ancient as Razz, too old to care and wise enough not to trust each other ever again.

“Thanks Mara,” Adora says after a stretch of silence, “For letting me talk.”

“Of course, Adora. You just have to keep on with the show, as Dorothea’s great love would tell us. You’re smarter than you give yourself credit for,” Mara shoots her another knowing grin.

Releasing her grip on the reins, Adora mirrors the action, “I definitely know more than people give me credit for.”

“That’s the spirit!” Mara shouts with genuine joy, “Who ever said anything about the naivete of youth? You might even know more than I did at your age, Adora.”

“Yeah, well I know I know one more thing than you,” Adora readies herself in Kitty’s saddle.

 “Oh yeah? What?” Mara lifts an eyebrow,

Lifting up Kitty’s reins just to bring them back down and give her a good-natured kick, Adora yells back as the horse takes off for the forest, “That you’re going to give me my horse back, because I am so winning the race back to Razz’s!”

~

“Ow! Mermista, stop yanking!”

“Well, maybe I wouldn’t have to yank on your hair Adora, if you just sat still and kept your chin back!” 

For a night designated for lowkey, quiescent festivities thrown to celebrate Adora’s latest milestone of unpacking the last of her boxes that came with her to Razz’s cabin, Adora is beginning to wonder why they were ever bothered calling it a party in the first place. 

Okay, yeah, the word party sounded nice at first, it even rang pretty in her ears the way a fluttering of little bells might, when she and Bow were throwing the idea around a week ago. But now, as Adora does her best to take the sight of the room in full while Mermista tugs and wrenches on her hair like a tussle of marionette strings, she realizes this party is less a celebration of adolescent independence and more the depressing, awkward variety of estranged family members at a relative’s, distant at best, wake. 

There’s no keg, no wealthy lavish house of out-of-town parents to be trashed and demolished, no couples shoving their tongues down each other's throats in restricted bedrooms as music shakes the very foundation and someone downstairs vomits on a priceless genealogical heirloom. And no, Adora is in no state to be attending a typical teenage rager, although her shimmer and shine grant her a fair share of invites on the regular, but she is beginning to question the merits of calling this a party when it’s lacking in so many of the defining elements she knows characterize the social lives of her classmates. 

Don’t you need more than five people, including yourself, to consider a get together at least a soiree? 

Serves me right for trying to catch up on “rest” in French class.

“Adora, if you move your head one more time, I’m giving up, and you can like, French braid your own hair.” Comes the irritated warning from above, where Mermista sits in one of Razz’s garage sale chairs, puppeteering Adora’s bangs with willful malice. Adora has been inhaling her aroma of sunscreen and ocean salt, wondering what could have possibly possessed her to sit down and submit her hair to this type of torture, for the past ten arduous minutes. 

Steeling her body with a deep breath, Adora forces out a reply, “Mermista, I’m sitting as still as I can.” Which admittedly, is nowhere near statuesque, but is still impressive in its own right given that Adora has not had her hair braided by hands that were not hers (or Catra’s) since she was seven years old and the sense memory is not kind in the slightest.

“Hey,” the part time lifeguard digs her fingers into Adora’s skull, “this was your idea.”

“No, it wasn’t- you’re the one who offered! How- how is this my fault- OW!”

“Adora,” ‘party’ guest number two- pirate aficionado, born sailor, and voted by their graduating class of 1998 Most Likely to be Convicted of Second-Degree Arson Sea Hawk- begins. Adora’s eyes roll out of the back of her head where Mermista pulled them out of their sockets and she can see that he’s standing on the opposite side of the living room, twirling his pride-and-joy: his mustache. In his other hand he holds a series of tapes as he stands over Adora’s childhood stereo of chipped pastel pink and beat-up silver. 

Adora brought the mixtapes down a few hours earlier to keep her company while she vacuumed and dusted. Razz never minded the music (as much as she claimed Loo-Kee wanted Adora to turn off that racket and play some Dolly Parton, and yeah, sometimes Adora threw Loo-kee a bone) and Adora preferred, after the nights she’d been repeating, not to be in the company of her own thoughts. Every single mixtape Sea Hawk holds in his hands now and flips through was made by Catra’s own hands, from the afternoons she spent glued to her radio in her second-floor bedroom, waiting for the songs she sometimes called in to play so she could record them for Adora. 

It took every intact bone in Adora’s body not to spend the time she was getting ready for the party playing back the mental image of Catra’s scene stealing smirk as she sits on her bedroom floor with Melog curled up on her lap on Adora’s one screen of her mind’s eye, but no matter what paths Adora forced her thoughts down the click! of the tape moving to the next track always sounded like Catra’s thumb hitting the record button before the first few notes.

“I keep trying to rewind this tape,” Sea Hawk brings up a cassette the color of coal matched only by the Sharpie in on the white label that reads ‘FOREVER IS THE SWEETEST CON’ in messy handwriting. The title was a teasing jab, an inside joke; Catra made Adora the mixtape after they stayed up through the 31st night they shared together as girlfriends marathoning the set of old Westerns Adora had found on marked down half price at the church’s rummage sale. Those tales of cowboys and bandits, lovers and grifters were all cheese, hold the cracker, and Catra’s commentary of the melodramatic, overly stylized love stories had Adora in tears, “But the player keeps pausing, right in the middle, too. Isn’t that quite strange?”

Adora attempts to speak against the strained muscles of her neck, “Yeah, uh- it does that. Sorry.” 

“Oh, no need to apologize, my dear friend and party host, perhaps we can sing one of the songs from this mixtape. I’ll start-”

“Ugh, why did you invite him again?” Mermista whispers in Adora’s ear. With every word she folds another section of hair the way a madwoman might lay the plans of her philandering lover’s demise.

“Or, if certain girlfriends are opposed to being wooed by the luscious melodies that even the sirens of these mighty seas envy, perhaps we can watch a movie instead?” suggests Sea Hawk, setting the consecrated tapes back to their place on the coffee table. The sight warms Adora’s heart as if it were a lit match held steady under the empty space in the lower left corner of her chest. 

The wannabe swashbuckler then gestures across the tapes and the two boxes of pizza, one cheese and one pepperoni, delivered right before the start of the French braid gamble by a harrowed, pale faced looking delivering boy not prepped for a trek in the woods. To meet his gesture on the other side of wicker and glass are Bow and Glimmer, knee-deep in the running water of a difficult conversation. At least from what Adora can catch glimpses of with a range of hearing heaved this way and that. The two of them are no more bothered to give Sea Hawk an answer than they are letting Adora in on their clandestine conversation.  

“Uh, no thanks,” Bow rips his head away to say in reply before the awkward pause left in the wake of Sea Hawk’s question becomes a permanent fixture, “We can- we can do that later. Right, Adora?”

“We can do- agh! Whatever- whatever you guys want- Mermista!”

“Calm down, I’m literally almost done. Here, hand me that scrunchie over there.” the other girl beckons. Adora groans at the impending friction and reaches out with her leg to hook the electric blue one sitting aimlessly amongst the newly cleaned carpet fibers onto her big toe. 

She has a couple of theories as to how the pop of color ended up on her floor when her own nightstand was littered with the boring beige of hair ties that matched her hair in dullness. It’s definitely not what she thought she’d be picking up and throwing into an openmouthed garbage intermittent with red cups and paper plates and pieces of her own failed expectations come the night’s end.

“Are you sure Glimmer’s okay with you using one of her scrunchies for my braid? I mean, I know she has like ten of them, but shouldn’t we at least ask?” Adora tells Mermista. She never looks up as she speaks, instead watching the rhythm in which Bow and Glimmer go back and forth.

“Yeah, this isn’t Glimmer’s, Adora.” 

“Oh, um-” Adora swallows. What is she supposed to do with that? “Then are you okay then, with using one of your scrunchies?” 

Mermista makes a noise that falls flat against the sound of elastic snapping into place, “I’m stealing one of Sea Hawk’s scrunchies for your braid, okay? He just loses them anyway, everywhere, all of the time . It’s like a weird Hansel and Gretel trail, except instead of breadcrumbs or gingerbread crumbs or whatever, it’s another dumb hair trend.”

“I’ll have you know, my deepest blue sea, that scrunchies are one of the only hair products I can use that do not damage my most important asset.” Mermista’s boyfriend scoffs in riposte as he flourishes his finger toward his hair. His puppy-mouthed pout reminds Adora of a kid on the playground after being swindled out of his place on the best swing.

“Is- is that true?” asks Adora.

“Yeah, in Sea Hawk’s world. Where nothing makes sense and people sing sea shanties all the time.”

“And what do you mean, trend, Mermista? Even if scrunchies were to die an unjust death tomorrow in the public’s fashion eye, I guarantee that these babies will be back!” Flying right past Mermista’s point, Sea Hawk’s arm stops mid-swing where gravity has brought down his sleeve and exposed a cavalry of scrunchies that would make Glimmer’s stock look amateurish. He lets out a half-hearted laugh when Adora and Mermista only blink up at him, “Give or take, fifteen...twenty years?”

“Ugh,” Mermista drops Adora’s finished French braid on the back of her neck. “I’m gonna go get a soda from your fridge.”

Crap, had Adora forgotten to put those out? And did Razz ever end up buying the cases of Coca-Cola and purple Fanta Adora had to sneak money into the elderly woman’s purse for because she insisted with a broom to Adora’s shoulder that “ Mara, you need to stay here and keep cleaning. I can run to the market to pick up the things Adora needs… Do you know where my glasses are, Mara? I gave them to Loo-kee for safe keeping. Ah, the old bastard has my car keys, too. Why do I give anything to Loo-kee? He’s so bad at losing things, especially important ones.”

Oh, so yeah. Razz never did end up buying the soda.    

With another sigh that begets her on-brand melodrama, Mermista gets out of the garage sale chair and turns toward the kitchen, diligent enough not to make eye contact with her boyfriend lest she strike a match on his over eagerness, quick enough to outrun his long-legged strides in their harmonized break from the living room. Adora is left alone sitting crossed legged on the floor, running absent minded fingers over the scrunchie now wrapped tautly in its voltaic color on her split ends. She hopes this pretend infatuation with Mermista’s handiwork makes for a convincing red herring. Her past failings sure shine an incandescent glow on the fact that Adora has always been a sorry excuse for an actor, so this is a roll of weighted dice.

“- were you thinking, Glimmer? Are you sure she's ready for something like this?” Adora hears Bow hiss and is grateful, for more than the obvious reasons, that Mermista and Sea Hawk took the noise-level of their bickering to another part of the house. This is what Adora is listening for. This is why she sat at Mermista’s feet; just for the inconspicuous position it would give her five feet from Glimmer and Bow’s hushed argument.

“I think… is different,” Glimmer’s voice is a far cry from Bow’s in her gentle tone and quieter decibel. Words fly out of her mouth but never make it out of their coupled orbit. Adora turns her head to where her braid has found itself on her shoulder, “Last night… asked for my help, Bow. She’s never done that before. Like ever!”

Adora exhales. It escapes her why her two best friends are whispering to one another the way parents of a five year old might do as they try to hammer out the best way to tell their child their dog ran away to live with his wife and no, you can’t meet his wife or visit your dog on his honeymoon when the dog that met an unlucky fate in the middle of the street is really Glimmer’s aunt and their tempestuous aunt-niece relationship. Context might help- but it’s twenty minutes too late to ask Sea Hawk to stop chewing his pizza so loudly and to ask Mermista to stop telling Sea Hawk to stop chewing his pizza so loudly.

“Don’t you think she might be tricking us?” Bow, his eyes wide to add a certain comedy to his seriousness, asks Glimmer.

Glimmer rolls her eyes despite the good-natured smile on her face, “C’mon Bow, we’re not that dumb to fall for something like this.”

Something like what? Adora holds the words on her tongue. She wants to ask, she’s dying to ask, because she’s dying to know when has Aunt Casta ever tricked Glimmer and since when has Bow not trusted the woman who may love him more than she loves her own niece? Here on the floor feigning interest in her lifeless hair, Adora is all but lifeless herself; faded deeply enough into the background to become one of Razz’s tenants of the spirit realm. Adora, unable to reach across the veil, keeps the question in her mouth and her eyes on her new braid. 

We just made up. If Glimmer doesn’t want me involved in family affairs, I can understand that. And I can be patient with her. 

Up until Glimmer’s Honda Accord pulled up into the gravel drive outside the cabin, Adora had remained in suspense of whether the other girl would take her olive-branch invitation and show face tonight. It’d been seven days since they’d last spoken a word to each other and approaching thirteen days since Adora broke the news that she wasn’t interested in applying to NYU, or Penn state, or any of the colleges Glimmer and Bow were decking out their resumes for, that instead she was cashing in all of her childhood dreams and heading for the west coast in hopes of unearthing closure in unearthing her past- or unearthing herself. Earning the silent treatment from one of her best friend’s was just the insult Adora wanted to add to the injury of Catra’s never-ending wells of contempt. 

Bow stayed at Adora’s side, where he anchored his flag by backing up Adora in her fight with Glimmer ( “We can’t make Adora go anywhere she doesn’t want to, Glimmer.” “Want to? Adora only wants to go to L.A. because she obviously still has a thing for Catra, and instead of moving on and growing up like the rest of us, she’s just running away. She’s throwing us away!”) but wondered as her senior year continued to nosedive, how long she could keep his friendship before she fell under the weight of his expectations, too? She’s rusty wheels with a shine beyond saving snapping and falling off; she’s fast times and bright lights spiraling as they crash into the ground. One by one they turn away, one by one they go. There’s no one Adora cannot cast into exile by standing her ground, by making her wants known.

It’s going to be lonely under California’s sun with no one to watch her reflect its light every which way.

Or, that is what Adora thought before Glimmer turned the knob of the cabin’s front door and let herself in as Bow helped Adora hang up a holiday set of twinkling lights around the living room, her entrance bringing back Razz’s augury back to the forefront of Adora’s mind.

“When the time comes to follow the lights, you’re going to follow them, aren’t you?”

Yet Glimmer did not come with the rush of gold that lit up the floorboards and carpets to lead Adora right into the terror in the nightfall and the unloved places of the unknown, but a plate of Aunt Casta’s brownies and an apology just as out of left field.

“Adora, it was wrong of me to get so angry about you not wanting to go to college with us. You should get to choose wherever you want to go. I’d be a terrible friend if I tried to control your life!” Where at first her words were spoken with humility, Glimmer was choking on a stream of tears and snot by the last sentence.

Adora took the tinier girl into her arms and without a second thought returned the force of Glimmer’s squeeze. The warmth of someone's affectionate touch brought some relief to the chill freezing Adora in place, in time. “Glimmer, it’s okay. You don’t need to cry. It’s really okay, I’m- I’m not mad. I understand that what I wanted messed with your plan. If I had been more delicate when we talked about it and not so defensive, maybe I wouldn’t have hurt your feelings. And you were right, about the stuff with Catra.”

Glimmer sucked up her snot, saying behind a closed fist, “That doesn’t mean what I said was okay. Or that I meant it. But if it’s okay with you, I still want to be your friend, Adora.”

“Of course, Glimmer!” Adora couldn’t help but laugh a little bit back to life. Glimmer didn’t even have to ask; Adora would’ve taken her friend back in the span of the heartbeat she lacked. It would never be too late to come back.

Throwing his arms around Adora and Glimmer to join their hug, Bow added, “Aww, the Best Friend Squad is back in action! And hey Glimmer, maybe we can revise your plan. You and I could think about applying out west. One of my brothers is at UCLA, and he loves it. Plus, your dad will proooooobably pay for any school you get into.” Bow stretched the word out to ice out any of Glimmer’s anticipatory ire. Left eyebrow lifted, Glimmer laughed and nodded along.

Glimmer and Bow were quick to rescind that particular conversation to another day, for another story. As Adora untangled her limbs from the embrace to go and find wherever Razz was hiding the paper cups from Loo-kee’s nefarious twin, Eek-ool, she watched out of the corner of her eyes as Bow took his girlfriend aside, cracking a smile that stole the show away from his potshot attempt at humor. 

“So uh, what made you decide to apologize? I know it wasn’t anything I said to bring you around, ‘cause that was just making you more upset.”

Adora shoved her laugh back down her throat.

“I was persuaded by an… uncanny inspiration. Actually, I should probably tell you about it. It’s uh, it’s pretty important.”

Had they known that Adora knew they were speaking about her? Had they been aware that Adora was aware of their presence like the way the ash in Razz’s fireplace can feel the fire burning above it, can feel the fire becoming it? They kept speaking as if Adora wasn’t in the room- hence why she wondered if she was just another ghost anchored to this inverse reality and this really was a wake, her wake- in tones that were smoke signals to the fact whatever mystery affliction Aunt Casta was suffering from was one that for some reason, Adora couldn’t know?

Maybe it wouldn’t eat at her to have found herself an outcast again if this was a party party and not four people paying their respects to someone on her deathbed. Maybe if Sea Hawk had gotten the stereo working (you had to hit it just right) before he scurried after Mermista. Maybe if Mermista hadn’t excused herself in an effort to get away from Sea Hawk. Maybe if their late graduated friends were still around to ask if there would be salad offered alongside the pizza or hog all the paper towels to mop up a grease stain they’d left on the loveseat or tinker with the stereo, so it didn’t have to be whacked into next week to work but without a doubt, explode.

Adora wasn’t the only one squirming in her skin in the intolerable absence her old friends had left behind.

“Okay, yeah, this is weird.” declared Mermista after they each helped themselves to a slice of the pizza Adora shelled out several weeks’ worth of tip money for and then spent the next full minute in godawful moratorium as they chewed in a silence where no one understood the innateness of one another.

Sea Hawk didn’t wait for her to elaborate, adding, “Oh, am I not the only one missing the conviviality of our recently departed crew members? I must say, it’s just not the same without Perfuma.”

“Or Scorpia and Entrapta,” Bow chimed in. 

“I wonder how they’re all doing,” Glimmer said, placing her paper plate down on the coffee table, having taken only a single bite, “Perfuma and Scorpia’s semester must’ve started already. Do you think they’re enjoying it?”

“Actually, Perfuma called me the other day,” Mermista shrugged as she leaned further back into the garage sale chair, “she said she’s doing fine, but Scorpia’s having a hard time adjusting, you know, being so far away from her moms. Neither of them has exactly spent much time away from this town, if you know what I mean.”

“They’re probably still having more fun than we are,” were the words that slipped out and muttered under Adora’s breath.

“Mm-hmm”

And then again, maybe it’s not that Scorpia and Entrapta and Perfuma’s names are missing from the guest list. The lack of music’s not to blame, neither the subpar cheese pizza. Adora has been learning in these forty minutes that now sits behind them that it is next to impossible to be present at this party, suspended in the conversations and riffing of her closest friends, when she feels so deeply like an open wound. Her exposed nerves brace against the air she’s exposed to and she’s still bleeding out opal blue and fiery red, as if the golden string she tore off with her teeth and used as stitches on point of entry never came close to being closed. Truth be told it’s been so hard to be anywhere these days when her fate is haunting her nightmares and she’s died in a secret a million little times, and she knows what she wants is out there somewhere not wanting her.

Adora balls up her t-shirt in one hand right where the piece of clothing meets the tip of her sternum. The coated film on fabric that meets her hands reminds Adora of her choice to put Catra’s Eagles t-shirt back on for the party. After spending the late morning riding, racing, and failing in all her efforts to beat Mara back to the barn, Adora cleaned off the dirt and grime and sweat with a quick shower. Her riding clothes from earlier in the day were a non-starter. Catra’s t-shirt had never made it to rest in her laundry basket. At least this way Adora was not pretending she wasn’t stuck, however out of order the stages her grief is crawling through are. 

“What are the chances this doesn’t work, Glimmer?” Bow is saying back in the present where his hushed whisper ricochets around the room and pierces Adora’s body with enough ease to prove she’s as translucent as a shimmering sheet of white whipping in the wind. They do know they’re supposed to be being sneaky, right? “You guys have a plan B, right?”  

“We went over everything that could go wrong last night. I’m telling you Bow, there isn’t any scenario that we haven’t prepared for, I swear. Cross my heart and hope to die. You’ll see that when she gets to the party-”

Adora’s braid falls to her shoulder, “Wait, your aunt is coming to my party?”

“Glimmer!”

Right on the money, Sea Hawk and Mermista exit the kitchen and set foot in the den like cued sitcom characters who understand unfailingly their role in the show. The answer, the defense that hangs on the tip of Glimmer’s tongue, is washed away to the current of time. She offers a pacifying shrug instead. Bow continues to gape in his girlfriend’s direction. 

“So, you know you’re out of soda, Adora?” Mermista starts sans the mayhem of a live audience’s applause and laughter. “I rooted around in your fridge for like ten minutes but all I found were somebody’s car keys.”

The smack! of Adora’s hand meeting her forehead echoes throughout the room.

“‘Tis not a total loss, my friends and loyal crew mates. I present to you from a surprisingly easy to get into liquor cabinet- I’m telling you zero locks or anything and that’s no lie- an unopened bottle of the finest Merlot you can drink without an ID. Ta dah!” Sea Hawk practically bursts into songs of the sea as he whisks his stolen treasure out from behind his back. 

Oh shit.

Adora blanches at the sight of the bottle of wine. It’s faded label taunts and mocks her in this open room; how could she have been so stupid as to forget Razz was not of the suburban breed of parents that believed in locking up their alcohol? The woman was nothing if the farthest thing from it! Isn’t that why Adora came to her front porch of all places to wind up sequestered?

“Uh, we can’t drink that!” she shouts, springing up from her folded legs and makes an agile swipe for the wine. Sea Hawk steps back into Mermista to keep his prize out of Adora’s reaching grasp right before she can close her fingers around it. And no, the tsk-tsk sound he’s making with the corner of his mouth does not heal Adora’s wounded pride or put her at ease for a single second.

“Adora, if you’re concerned my system can’t handle a few sips of vino, I’ll have to remind you all of the glorious time I drank thirteen liters of beer during my keg stand at Octavia’s summer bash-”

“Mmm, that’s a lie,” Mermista intervenes as Adora lands a hit with her elbow on Sea Hawk’s stomach, sending the bottle straight out of his fingers and into Adora’s waiting ones. Happy to have caught the damn thing before Sea Hawk could become absolutely splashed out on the bottle, she lets out a relieved sigh. This is just what she needs. This is the farthest thing from what she wants. “You had two shots of watered-down vodka before you threw up on my shoes and then you passed out in the back of Rogelio’s truck, like right on top of where he was making out with Kyle. Those were my jellies, Sea Hawk!”

“Well, they were easy enough to hose off, right my dearest?”

“Yeesh,” Bow mutters. He and Glimmer are still secretive inhabitants of the carpet. Both stare with wide eyes at the scene unfolding before them, Glimmer’s eyebrows flying up to kiss her hairline as Adora hugs the wine to her chest and falls back down without grace into the garage sale chair that minutes previously was Mermista’s claimed seat.

Wow, it was a mistake to invite two other couples to my “party.” They’re clumping together, leaving me by myself at my own house, just to argue with each other. How do they expect me to take their advice about moving on from Catra seriously when they all argue every time they hit one little snag in their relationships?

Adora’s head sinks further backwards. A voice in her head joins her in these pitiable trenches, reminding her with a certain unforgettable snark: They may be talking out of their asses but hey, you can’t say they aren’t trying. You stopped calling and expected me to call you literally all of summer and even once we got back to school. No wonder you can’t stop dreaming about me- you’re too cowardly of what I might say you won't even give me closure.

Mermista must be right about Sea Hawk’s history of alcohol intolerance ( Mermista’s always right when it comes to Sea Hawk, unfortunately) because one look at the bottle proves he can’t at this moment in time discern what makes an unopened bottle of wine different from an opened one. This was opened- by the hands that hold it now. Adora was almost a natural at popping the cork after a lifetime of watching bottle after bottle be sipped away in her own kitchen. Catra, enchanted by the sight under streetlight, stood above her whistling doubts about how for all of Adora’s rule breaking that night, she was a predetermined lightweight. As Adora’s fingers trace the perlite material, she can hear the echoes of that era bygone play out against her current mise en scéne.

“Why don’t we find out?”

“I take it all back!” Catra had shouted when Adora pressed her lips to the bottle and swung her head back in one motion, “You’re awesome! You’re fucking amazing! And totally insane- give me some of that, Adora!”

Adora sighs as her head meets the back of the chair. That fate spelling night she’d become a hopeful bandit from those movies she and Catra would devour weeks later, finding liberation in taking what didn’t belong to her. Turning her back on the extortionate, glittering gown laid on that bed to match that evening’s 1920’s attire, Adora chose to forgo the event in its entirety- the makeup, the dress, the charade propped up by everyone’s reflections and shadows around her- and instead, grabbed the phone off the wall. She let the ringing on the other line be the only sound in the empty house she’d been left alone to. 

After hearing Catra’s agreement through the speaker, Adora then took the last bobby pin keeping her Daisy Buchanan hairstyle together and in the spirit of thinking absolutely nothing through, picked the lock on her legal guardian’s ambrosic motherlode. The dowager’s fondness for wine was age old news; Adora hoped taking the cheapest looking bottle from the back row of the cabinet stash would throw her off the scent as she double checked the lock on the cabinet.   

“If this is all in my head, Catra,” Adora had breathed against Catra’s lips not more than an hour after her first, but far from last, crime. Her greed was turning every inch of her to gold and there was no will left in her to stop her. If Catra thought her weak for her indulgence nowadays, Catra would be right. Adora wanted more- more of this rush, more of this drug, more of this contact high that came from her best friend’s hands and kiss, “You have to tell me now.”

Sunken so far down in the waters of her own selfish desires, Adora could’ve sworn in the moment (if she had not known what she does know now) that Catra reached in and read her mind when she closed the distance again. 

“It’s not. I swear to fucking God, this is not just in your head, Adora.”

That is what Adora believed when the two of them stumbled out of the car crying and laughing as if they were the last two people on Earth. It was this solipsism that had brought them back down to size in the end; without that air of self-centeredness the night upon recall appeared more like the hoax all those nights really were. But tripping on broken cobblestone, Catra was what Adora knew- better than anything and better than anyone- stripping out her beloved cardigan when she saw a shiver run down Catra’s back. 

“I have something else that might warm us up,” Adora responded when Catra put up her usual childish protest, claiming Adora was going to be the one who froze to death. Laughing to herself, Adora never took her eyes off Catra as she opened the backdoor of the car and brandished the bottle of rosé- its rosé, Adora hasn't the faintest clue how Sea Hawk thought it was Merlot- she holds in her hands now. 

Blush pink were their mouths as the night began winding down, but tipsy is as far down the hole Catra and Adora ever reached. The shocking bitterness that touched her tongue when she first put the glass to her lips, as foreign and delightful beyond its aftershock as it was, was not the stolen taste that left Adora shaken in her core, wanting more than her fair share. 

Wanting, wanting, wanting- forevermore.

Her legal guardian discovered the missing bottle no more than seven weeks after Adora stashed it in the back seat of her Daytona. From this discovery, the dots connected like pieces falling into place- Catra sneaking out the night of prom when her stepdad had made quite the show of grounding her and invited the entire neighborhood to come, Adora never showing up to take the crown she hadn’t earned, the Ladies Luncheon member who’d been driving to pick up more flapper headbands and spotted their getaway car- and the Wicked Witch had all the evidence to prove Catra and Adora had rendezvoused.

I could’ve gotten Catra hurt, or so, so much worse. Shows what I know about chasing things I can never have, when wanting would have been enough. Why was it never enough?

Glimmer’s voice wrecks Adora’s train of thought, “Sea Hawk, it probably belongs to Madame Razz. You can’t just go around taking her stuff without permission, and besides, if my dad finds out we were drinking-”

“We’re not going to be drinking.” Adora stands up. 

“Not even a little spin the bottle?” asks Sea Hawk. Glimmer and Mermista’s expressions of disgust mirror each other as Bow’s eyebrows lift up, betraying his curiosity.

“No, and definitely not, ” letting out a sigh of exasperation, Adora turns in the kitchen’s direction, “This isn’t Razz’s. I took it before- before I left home and came here. The whole investigation bombshell happened so fast, and I knew I had to pack light if I wanted to be gone by the time the cops showed up, but I dunno, I just…” Adora falters as she stares down at the bottle. She knows that one day, she’ll get to sip rosé in the safety of her chosen family, when it’s legal and from a newly purchased score, but that will be for a day of celebration. Despite all her efforts to throw together a memorable evening, Adora can see that’s a mark she clearly missed. There’s nothing to celebrate, nothing to toast to. Not tonight. Adora is without a reason of explanation to give her friends. “I just needed to take this, even if I’m never going to drink from it ag- never mind. I thought I could hide away in the cupboard with Razz’s cocktail set forever and forget about it until someone went rifling through it!”

“I just thought it would make a nice addition to our karaoke session, is that a crime?” Sea Hawk’s puppy-mouthed pout makes a comeback as he splays out on the couch Bow and Glimmer have their backs pressed against.

“It would certainly make you sound better.” Mermista says with a sneer. Sea Hawk throws his hand over his heart, and the resounding Whack! overlaps with a snicker from Bow. There out the window flies his earlier curiosity.

“If you guys want to set up the karaoke machine, I really don’t mind. Mara lent it to us for the night, so I guess it’s better not to let it go to waste,” Adora tells the three of them, setting a foot down between the den and the kitchen, “I’m just going to go put this back before anyone does something they’re just going to regret-” 

She’s stopped by a knock on the door. The words are still waiting in her throat as it comes again: knock, knock, knock, knock, a quiet rapping against the wooden barrier that begins softly and grows with confidence. Adora spins around on her heel with her hollow heart jumping upwards and pounding against the roof of her mouth. 

Her shadow spins around the room with her, passing over the door like a dirty ruse, a flick of the wrist that casts illusions just like the tricks of light Adora’s been chasing, been chased by, this past summer. Everywhere the shadows have tailed Adora, taking one shape and one shape only despite such a twisted variety of forms to choose from, the ghost of the love she died with and not for. In line at the grocery store, walking to through her old neighborhood past the bus stop, sitting at the kitchen table in the cortege of the sunbeams spilling in through the window and still leaving her cold as her fingers twitch, her eyes trained on the brand new phone bolted into the fading wallpaper, her mind cursing the voice on the other line that would refuse like the stubborn brat she is to answer- no answer, no closure, no nothing, not ever. To think Adora blew off Glimmer and Bow for the third time in a row just in case there might be a phone call.

But that was back when she was living for the hope of it all.

Adora forces her eyes shut and when they flutter open again, the shadow is gone as if it was never there, and so is the hope. The twinkle of the Christmas lights cast Adora’s shadow behind her where it belongs, and the mystery of the person at the door is the only one that remains.

Razz didn’t call and order another pizza even though she was in the room with me when I dialed the number? Oh, Razz, you’re the one who threw the phone book at me.

Or… 

“When the time comes to follow the lights, you’re going to follow them, aren’t you?”

“Uh, did you guys invite someone else?” Adora’s mouth is drier than cotton as she points a finger at the door.

Sea Hawk shakes his head and Mermista, too cool to care about this turn of events, simply shrugs. Bow’s tone is taut as he all but shouts, “Maybe it’s Glimmer’s aunt!”

“Or maybe it’s that grade schooler that’s been stalking Glimmer. What’s her name again? Frosty?”

“I thought that was the snowman. It’s only the beginning of September, Mermista.”

“You should get it, Adora!” Glimmer yells without a second thought to Bow’s comment, or Mermista’s clever aim or Sea Hawk’s clear miss. Adora rotates her gaze and her confusion evenly between the four of them. One has his hands over his eyes, muttering something beyond Adora’s grasp, the other has hers balled up in her shirt. One stands twirling the ends of his pride and joy, the other next to him pulling back another spawned scrunch back and in its owner’s direction, “Uh- because, you know, it’s your party and all! By the way, her name is Frosta, and she’s a freshman this year. I didn’t invite her because again, it’s Adora’s party . ”

“Glimmer, please tell me you hear yourself.”

“Hush, Bow!”

“Um, okay.” Adora blinks. Whatever occurred in that conversation eludes Adora’s grasp, standing out as a shattered portrait of the whole picture, and it dawns on her their intrepid staring will probably not let up if she doesn’t answer the door. Speaking of- how long has it been since the last knock came and rang through her head? Setting the bottle of rosé down on the coffee table, Adora lets her feet sink into the carpet with each slow and excruciating step. No other knock follows up as she walks. No one behind her makes a sound or breathes or breaks into shanty or snaps a scrunchie. 

It’s a march towards something- because something is behind this door, Adora knows by the way Glimmer’s eyes follow her every move, she knows because Razz’s words reverberate like a prophecy throughout her own soul- and Adora is unable to repress the violent shiver that runs up and down her arms. Goosebumps travel the way up to her folded sleeves. Her stomach sinks deeper and deeper, half-digested pizza mixing with bile Adora can taste already. 

“When the time comes to follow the lights, you’re going to follow them, aren’t you?”

Adora’s clothes are not soaking wet with sea water; she’s dry to the bone. Her feet are not decorated with clumps of damp sand, just the tickle of carpet fibers. She is not a shrine of ice nor in the direct danger of shadows, but the volcanic heat that comes with the territory of her usual neurosis. But if she sees those golden lights on the other side of the door, where is that lurking darkness that it shines through? What waits for her with her name like a curse in their mouth?

This is not the funeral march she’s walked every night for the past night in a perennial pilgrimage following the golden lights. It’s different. This is something else, something more, isn’t it? Adora can feel the leak from under her shirt, over the scabs colored opal blue and fiery red, that unforgiving gold bleeding from her phantom wound. She’s bleeding again like she never stopped.

Throwing one more confused look over her shoulder in Glimmer’s direction, Adora flicks on the switch to the porchlight before her hand comes, shaking, to the doorknob. Glimmer sends her the warmest smile Adora’s maybe ever seen. Definitely the kindest and most forgiving she’s been on the receiving end of in at least three weeks. One more time Adora can hear herself whisper in the back of her head like the skipped beat on a broken record, “Are you sure? Are you prepared to face and to follow whatever’s behind this door?” 

I am. The thought tolls like a bell ringing; it rises up like a ghost from its grave.

One more inhale, one more exhale. That is all it takes. Adora turns the handle, unable to hear anything but her heartbeat drumming on the concert halls inside of her ears. When was the last time she heard such a lovely, such a pained sound? How has she existed for the longest time without it?

The door opens with a creak and Adora knows. Adora knows because underneath her feet the floorboards erupt in the flutter of a maddening light show, one of brilliant gold and glitter as it flows out onto the porch, where it led her that first day these forest spirits showed themselves to her. Adora knows because there is a tightness around her pinky finger light that of a knot, leaving a fiery red like friction from a string wrapped tightly in the moments of a quiet “I promise .” Adora knows although her opal blue eyes cannot believe the sight before her for one single second.

“Catra.”

Soft porch light makes this a scene one straight out of a film. One that was never made. Standing in front of her, Catra smiles that soft smile as she wraps her arms around her cardigan- Betty’s cardigan. Two priceless wonders Adora thought she’d lost to the casual cruelty of time passing by. 

But no, Catra’s here. Catra’s come back.

“Hey, Adora.”

Chapter Text

Catra has dreamed, in futility, in fury, in vain, about this moment before her. Her curled fists rapping against the wooden paneling- the sight of which leaves a salty sweet taste in her mouth reminiscent of childhood adventures long lost, and the feel of her bare feet bruising under the weight of the porch, Adora’s laughter floating like the dust they were kicking up as they dart down the steps and make a break for the trees, carefree shouts “Not it!” echoing through this rodeo of wilderness- Catra keeps Adora in the first passenger car of her train of thought to insure her will to see this through. Her stomach is an empire collapsing, having survived more than nine hours locked in a will-they-won’t-they panic attack on nothing but bits of bacon and one measly cup of coffee. Betty’s cardigan keeps the heat of her body entrapped and close to her skin. Like a solar flare, she’s on fire, a headstrong flame burning out here in the dark where the night sky is untouched by air pollution, praying don’t put me out, please don’t put me out.

Nothing happens once Catra brings her fist back down to her side. 30 seconds inch by. Then a minute. Then at least another two, maybe three. Catra grinds the back of her molars. Her fingers uncurl and curl back inwards. Grunting, she shifts her weight from one foot to the other, determined if nothing not to stay in one spot even if the rotting taupe of this door frame is the only sight she’ll be privy too for the rest of her fucking life. A nervous habit from years of being a target; better to be a moving target than one that sat still if you were doomed to be one anyway. 

Another minute passes and Catra tolerates it with her teeth digging into the death of her tongue.

“Any day now, Adora and co.” she says to an audience that isn’t there, that hasn’t bothered to honor her time and patience by coming to the show. Catra’s nail taps the surface of her skateboard; her mode of transportation leans against her leg in case this pending interaction flies south for a permanent winter, and she will need to make a quick getaway. Now, nothing could actually be more pathetic than the idea of skating home by herself carrying this end of the endings on her shoulders, surrounded by the mocking night, with the slamming of the door still ringing forever in her ears. 

But it might be what Catra deserves, though.

Ugh, did Glimmer come through or not? What, did she turn on me at the last second, too? Was last night just one big con to sucker me out of my deepest darkest secrets so she can run back to Bow and Adora with enough dirt to bury me six feet under?

Catra’s head falls back. Impatience crawls up her throat and down her arms, kissing each nerve with an itch she can’t scratch away. Nine hours Catra’s spent today with time and space in abundance- more than she could ever hope to wish for, Jesus Christ- to prepare for this plan’s hundred potential fallouts and in these final dwindling minutes the worst-case scenario comes clean in her mind.

What if Glimmer couldn’t get the stick out of her ass long enough to apologize to Adora? What if there’s no one behind this door to tell Adora to open up? Oh God, is fucking Sea Hawk gonna come to the door?

Is anyone?

As the fifth minute starts in a crawl, passing Catra by like a ship in the night signaling a pitiful S.O.S. signal, and Catra’s finger’s dig into the grip tape of her skateboard, nails skating against the resulting friction. Why again, had she trucked herself out here- to the middle of nowhere? What had she been chasing with such embarrassing desperation that could not withstand the separation from Saturday night to Monday morning? She could’ve easily withstood the barreling waves of the weekend knowing where to find Adora come the 8:15 A.M. bell, standing at her locker inattentive to everything that wasn’t her whistled rendition of the main theme from Peter Pan and her triple checked Honors Biology homework. Would’ve given her back the double-edged sword that had time coating one blade, space marking the other, cut both ways but hey- Catra could’ve blocked out the next two days for some extra practice with this whole ‘goodness’ stunt.

Was there ever any reason not to have chosen that path in the first place, hoping to bide Adora’s time in the purgatory before the first period they didn’t share anymore and approach her with a mixtape chock full of apologies and something akin to closure? Hell, Catra could’ve given this big rom-com speech to her in the lunchroom and probably moved the last man standing on Adora’s homeland whom Catra is never not offending it seems, Bow, to messy, unashamed tears.

This was Glimmer’s stupid idea. Sweep Adora off of her feet, do something like they would in the movies. Do what James would do.

Catra’s eyes come to a close. There’s a simmering heat she recognizes, one that burns to the brim with salt and stings like acid rain. She’s losing the will to wait any longer faster than she’s losing her split-second, once-in-a-blue-moon bravery to do the right fucking thing.  

“James was a world class idiot,” Catra hisses to herself, swallowing that heat back to the burning pit that her stomach has become. 

James was a world class idiot- and Adora must have better friends than the likes of Inez’s clique because the only single door that’s opened for Catra as long as she’s stood aimless on this porch is the one wherein the call to turn around beckons like a bullhorn. The force of some invisible string is what keeps Catra in the gravity of Razz’s porch- but all Catra wants is to make a break for it, to break that string and skateboard out of this nostalgic hellhole, and to live for the hope Adora will at least hear her out and think her word vomit over during Mr. Dessner’s lecture about the godless green light of forgiveness at the end of Daisy’s dock.

Sorry, Adora. Looks like I can’t do this after all. See you Monday, I guess, or see you never.

Disappointment sets in, a tiny ripple in a never-ending ocean as far as the eye can see, and Catra’s mouth falls back into its set line of defense. To turn away is to have her heart ripped out by this invisible force keeping her in place, to have her pinky finger torn clean off by the pressure from this invisible string, to give up on a momentary fervor and a bravery she stumbled into by accident knowing it might not find her by chance again when the start of next week rolls its head around. Perhaps it is for that reason that the universe, sensing the resistance forming in the tug of her left fist and knowing the hundred-to-one odds Catra will find it deep, deep within her to apologize again, that right as Catra’s skateboard is seven seconds from slipping out her fingertips and hitting the porch beneath her feet, impetus beyond the unknown flicker the porch light on. With it, Catra’s hope flickers back to life, too.

Breath catching in a rush up her throat, Catra’s heart is a snapping rubber band against her aching sternum. She brings her left pinky to meet her palm as the doorknob begins to turn. Time freezes where it halts to a chaotic stop, holding its breath the way Catra holds her. The door opens and then there is no more need to dream in restless sleep or wasted shifts woolgathering about what this moment will bleed to be- because it is here. Right here, right now. As if it’s right where she left it dying all those summer nights ago.

“Catra.”

Adora exhales her name the way someone might exhale a prayer. 

Catra shifts, her shoulders rolling forward slightly, and she fights off the unrepentant urge to retreat into the deepest depths of herself with a simple tug on Betty’s shoulder, bringing the garment up. Adora is slack jawed, those opal blue irises of hers washed out by her pupils dilating and taking in this porch lighted sight. Whatever else Adora might have to say to Catra- to spit and curse and cry in her direction- is lost in whatever current has swept her off her feet. Catra’s still trying to figure out if said current is one that bends in her favor.

“Hey, Adora.” Catra’s voice breaks. Gone is any irritation, any annoyance or self-defensive anger evaporates, taking the salt of the salt water with it. There’s just a softness. A homecoming. If seeing Adora standing before her with her shields down and her sword thrown somewhere behind her is the most honeysuckle Catra will get to taste, she thinks she’s okay with that. Because this is better than the highest point of any of her dreams- to see Adora, to be this close once again and be able to memorize the look on her face knowing she has no intention to leave scratches down her expression or trail this portrait with tears. 

For Catra, this is enough. Being this close is and was always enough. She can die a happy death now. Who needs the rest of these hopeless days when she holds so close this deathless hope?

~ 

“What- what are you doing here?” asks Adora. Adora’s head buzzes with a frequency only the crackling small bug zapper adorning the door’s archway can emulate. Like a moth to the flame, she’s drawn to the light illuminating the porch, the star under its spotlight, and expects any second now for the opprobrious shock to come and to burn like a taser in the back. Adora waits- lets the pressure of her held breath press against her skull- but the shock never comes. She stands there in the wake of her own question feeling tipsy. The bottle of rose, she knows, is on the coffee table thirty steps behind her sitting unperturbed.

Catra’s mouth opens and comes to a quick close. “I-I-'' she stutters for a second while Adora waits for the worst of words to leave her, the “I found someone new,” better yet translated to “I found another better version of you for me.” That’s what Catra’s going to tell her? Right? Why else on Earth would she be here of all places? Were there none of their shared holy places left to defile save the ground she stands on now?

It clicks in Adora’s head then. Her mind rewinds to not more than five minutes ago to the battle of whispers between her best friends. Lacking context and substituting her own, Adora assumed they were speaking of Glimmer’s aunt and jumped to the conclusion family problems were family matters, and Adora wasn’t welcome in either. In fact, what it seemed was so far from the truth; Glimmer had planned this , and Adora knows that because the proof is behind her in the bystanders boring their eyes into the back of her head. No, Bow and Glimmer were not keeping a conjugated secret within the family circle, rather divorced parents battling over custody. They were talking about Catra, weren’t they? Because Adora’s impending death has brought the two of them together, hasn’t it?

Adora is a want torn in two, a paper Valentine’s Day heart marked with two different addresses ripped down the middle. She needs to turn her head and hope the confusion on her face will deliver the nonverbal question What is going on here? Did you do this or am I the butt of some casually cruel joke? but more than the ocean wants to smooth over the shore, Adora wants to stay facing Catra before she evaporates in front of her the same way that split, burnt, and spurned version of her always does after she always drops Adora’s hand. Adora wants to have this last image of her inscribed forever before Catra is lost to the arms of another; this will be her life raft to cling to when she’s stranded back in those unforgiving seas, this image will be her last glimpse of relief as she relives her dream in search of some epiphany, with only twenty minutes left to sleep. She’ll still wake frozen on the inside unable to hear the beating of her own broken heart. Their last goodbye has come sooner than Adora could’ve ever planned for and it’s here in Adora’s doorway.

Oh, so that’s it then? Glimmer found out you’re dating someone new and she, what? So kindly convinced you to tell me yourself? Did she just think the news would finally kill me if I didn’t hear it from you?

“I just wanted to- '' Catra tries again and Adora hopes against all hope Catra does not hear the way her breath hitches a permanent stop in her throat. Out in the limbo of her peripheral vision, she sees Catra break into a beaming smile- cruelty beyond cruelty, what a trick up her sleeve- and the hole where her heart should be in her chest grows a little bit bigger, “Wait a second. Adora, are you... wearing my shirt?”

Adora’s eyes drop down to her own torso. Fuck, she thinks. Above her, the bug zapper crackles with a surge of white-hot energy having lured and caught some poor unsuspecting victim. “Uh-” Adora tries to reply, no explanation that does not reek of desperation anywhere on her tongue, when she looks from her exhumed t-shirt and back to its owner like she’s trying to a passing glance of herself in a mirror and finds a matching reflection, “Are you... wearing my cardigan?”

Betty’s cardigan, to be more specific. The apotheosis of this town’s infamy and the crux of Adora’s every disenchantment. Catra is wearing Betty’s cardigan and she’s standing on her porch. Adora’s throwing a party -if however abysmally. At some point or another she spoke to Glimmer and they’re both aware, like everyone around her is aware with a certain sour annoyance they expend no effort to hide, how voracious past versions of Adora have been for filling after filling of this town’s folklore. This is… straight out of Betty and James’ story.

The bug zapper lets out a SNAP-CRACK of fatal electricity above them.

~ 

“Are you… wearing my cardigan?” 

Catra’s boiling cauldron of a stomach drains and drops the deflated organ down a death drop to her feet. Yeah, okay, duh- she knew Adora was going to ask that question, or at least, eventually Catra figured Adora would bring up the fact that Catra adorned Betty’s cardigan up after stealing the precious heirloom away and shoving it under her bed every day so at night she could wear it like a petulant child scared of the dark and coaxed into believing the garment would function as armor for everything and anything waiting in the shadows that she was afraid of. If all else failed, if Catra dropped this ball made of glass to the ground and it shattered brilliantly upon impact, then Betty’s cardigan was less armor this time around and more a ‘Break in Case of Fire’ plan B. Or so that was the airtight strategy. 

Glimmer’s advice, said through pops of strawberry Hubba Bubba, was to apologize first , explain her grand gesture of fashion second.

“Adora’s a total movie buff, right?” Glimmer asked this rhetorical question as Catra blew a bubble big enough to encompass her mouth and nose, her head and feet on the same plane of the shag carpet beneath her. She nodded and the movement caused the bubble to pop and the residue to come down in a parachute over her face. The bloated pink balloon lasted thirteen seconds tops- no wonder they stopped making this crap. “Then she knows a total rom-com move when she sees one. But the most important thing is, you can’t make any other small talk, not even about the cardigan. Got that? Knowing you guys' small talk will turn into flirting and flirting will go straight to her head and you’ll start thinking you’re all that again and stop thinking you have to apologize to Adora.”

Catra corralled the bubble gum back into her mouth. “Shit, Sparkles. Wish your goodness lessons were as sweet as your secret candy stash. You know you’re a terrible teacher, right?”

Terrible enough to miss that the conversation- the first real one she would have with Adora that wasn’t the throwing knives of their half-witted, recycled insults of desperation across the tables in the mall food court in months - would jump straight to why Catra shouldered the cardigan in the first place. As to how they got here, skipping over the step where Catra apologized before she talked about Betty’s terrible taste in sweaters, is definitely not going to Catra’s head or making her feel like she’s all that and the cat’s hat. Why is Adora wearing her t-shirt?

Catra thought, and maybe still thinks as she stands here, that shirt was lost in their great divide forever. Breakups happen all the time, and all of those break ups leave broken pieces behind, some more precious than others. And it’s not like Adora and Catra- next door neighbors, caretakers with similar nefarious agendas, childhood best friends, cloak-and-dagger girlfriends- hadn’t been losing pieces of clothing at each other’s houses the entire time they’d known each other. The floor of Adora’s bedroom (and then later at some point during junior high, the left side of her bed) was a home Catra could not return to- and not just because Adora moved out and into Razz’s cabin. Almost every weekend from the time Catra and Adora were seven years old was dedicated to sleepovers; the only Fridays that were spent missing each other’s company were when one, or both of them, ended up in trouble with their resident Captain Hook and Wicked Witch of the West. Clothes were switched, clothes were lent and exchanged and handed down. Clothes were lost.

Catra just didn’t know that those lost clothes were kept. Her Eagles t-shirt was one that Catra tossed her way after Adora spilled her mom’s mole all over the button-up she was still wearing from riding with Mara. Adora had stripped out of the button-up once they were in Catra’s room and out of habit Catra averted her eyes elsewhere- to the posters on her walls, to her cat stalking the windowsill, to her guitar strewn about in the corner- rubbing her arms up and down in a poor distraction from the incorporeal, unshakable feeling of grit and grime sticking her skin like wet sand. They were together together, or the best approximation of what together together was when theirs was an illicit relationship was based in iniquity and walking a thin line between thrilling and endangering; Catra shouldn’t have to worry she was going to barf up her mom’s dinner because the guilt of catching a glimpse of her best friend in her bra turned Catra’s stomach to a hellscape of fire and brimstone. 

What really had chased that frothing fret away in its entirety was the way Adora folded herself against Catra once they were tucked in her bed, as she draped her arms over her and giggled, taking too much delight in kissing the back of Catra’s neck as if it was a bite of forbidden fruit. Catra felt the imprint of the vinyl band logo through her own surrogate pajama tank top as Adora did so. No stepdad in the house (he was off doing something shady, what that was they’ll never really know). No mom either (she preferred those days to run at night when her husband was off being shady). No door cracked open five inches to keep her and Adora worlds apart. Just them and their voices in a normal volume, talking about what to wear to the Spring Fling tomorrow.

Adora left Catra’s bed and went back to her house of cracked doors and locked windows to change into that crimson dress accented with gold that every then and now she wore to church when she wanted to see the congregation blanch at the sight of her shoulders. They called it off the day after that. Catra called it off.

Under the porchlight Catra’s tongue ties itself into a noose trying to form words. Adora is standing in front of her, in Catra’s own fucking t-shirt , after she reduced a lifetime of photographs and notes passed in Church and class and half-finished lyrics to ash in her bathroom trashcan, and all she can think while that stupid bug light above them buzzes is, Adora kept this even though I broke up with her literally a day later. Why didn’t I just hear her out during that stupid fucking fight? Why did I pick it in the first place?

If Adora wearing her shirt is any indication, then Glimmer was right. Catra almost doesn’t hate admitting that if what she was right about is that Adora is still in love with her. Alone it’s enough to get Catra high on this one single victory, because fuck if she doesn’t love Adora more than fucking anything in this entire callous and unrelenting universe. But if Adora wearing Catra’s shirt is any indication- it’s that she shouldn’t be. How could Adora love Catra after everything she said and after every strike she made to kill only makes Catra hate herself? It is in that simmering self-hatred, in those motherland pits of hells that Catra, she swings from the fences, and forgotten is Glimmer’s first crucial step like a pop of bubblegum. 

“Hmm, I asked you first,” Catra says, her voice slickened in the oil of snark and self-defense. Outside her body she’s sure her smirk is no less venomous. “It’s not like you to run out of clean laundry the day you’re throwing some big party. You forget to break out the champagne to fill up the pool, too?” 

Not a single one of the words uttered out of the comfortable place of self-deception was “I’m sorry.” Not. A. Single. One. Only once the sound waves of her own cruelty ricochet back to Catra’s ears can she comprehend the way Adora’s face falls. Only then it hits her why Adora’s hand comes back to the door handle. Catra can see it plain as day- the hurt on Adora’s face twisting her expression into one of pain and betrayal, the extinction of hope as color drains from her usual flush and Catra swindles her last chance. They’ve been here before, that day in the parking lot. Catra knows already how this is destined to end.

I’m such a fucking idiot.

Glimmer was right. The small talk went to her head. And Catra went willingly with it.

~ 

Adora is back on the concrete that breathes in the heat of the day and exhales the coolness of the night. She’s back bleeding opal blue and fiery red, her knuckles on a shaking dagger oxidizing the color of gold dug deep into where her chest meets her stomach. She’s projecting those memories onto a demolished film scene, tatters of a once intact canvas and she can’t get up because she loves Catra, but obviously not enough to move on and do the right thing by letting her go. The dagger stays and Catra does not. Catra didn’t stay because Adora didn’t ask her to, fight for her, too. 

Wow. Wow. Adora is no less than famous in this two-bit town for misreading the situation, for forgetting and having to relearn what her surroundings entail, but none more does she feel like a fool than right now at her own door. Half a minute ago she would’ve said this was Betty and James’ is story, this is a tale that ends with an apology, a reconnection, Adora’s going to get her one hundredth chance and she won’t break the branches she steps on this time- but she’s been a fool once to open the door and a fool twice to believe this could be anything more than another half-baked attempt by her ex-best friend to try and get her claws under Adora’s skin. Here Adora was thinking that version of Catra died in the fire.

But no, Adora is not Betty. She’s not even Augustine waiting by the phone for a call that will never come, a neglectful reason she’ll be expected to bandage her heart with and take with a smile on her face so James can hang up just in time to leave for Betty’s party. 

“Adora, you’re not a character in one of these stories.”

Mara wasn’t wrong about that, was she? Mara wasn’t wrong about anything. Characters in stories, their arcs having landing places and chapters that finish. But this is never going to end, is it? Because this is just a game of cat and mouse to Catra, that’s as obvious as the weapon she’s formed out of her smirk, toying with Adora like she’s going to ever tell her she’s doing better and or like she’s ever going to tell her why she bothered showing up at all. This is not a story but a merry-go-round, a repeat of a repeat; no matter how many times the skyline changes or how close the horizon seems, Adora always ends up right back where she left it with Catra.

So, if this night is just wasted potential, another rotation on this perpetual ride, a rerun of all their close calls, then standing here is nothing more than a waste, too. Adora was fine enough with the wanting for a phone call; that want, as tormenting and wicked and never ending as it was, Adora realizes now was enough for her. At least waiting by the phone in the kitchen like she was some adrift debutante sitting in some nameless airport bar put her in a place where Adora was shielded from the rocks Catra threw in abundance, the ones they were supposed to make diamond rings out of, the ones Adora picked up and slung right back. And now Catra’s gone and ruined that along with everything else by showing up here.

Fate didn’t lead me to the door to rekindle some lost spark. It just lured me into another trap, and I was stupid enough to walk right into it.

Adora moves to draw the door inwards and to a close, saying with a dejected sigh that mirrors the wreck of her heartbreak, “Okay, you know what, if you’re just gonna be rude, Catra-”

“Adora, wait!” Catra's hand comes to the door before it can close on her, her palm swatting the wooden surface as her tone changes from day to night. Panic and urgency are the dyads burning in her split irises and Adora finds herself faltering. She’s seen this look on Catra before. It’s not the casually cruel one that tosses broken bottles in her path just for fun. “Adora, I’m sorry! I’m sorry- for everything, okay?”

~ 

Catra won’t lie and say her apology comes to her naturally. Quite the opposite, almost, but that’s no leap of faith to believe. She’s chewing glass as she spits the sharpened words out and into the open, somehow continuing to talk despite the run of cuts left stinging up and down her tongue- but seeing Adora actually start to close the door on her coaxes this necessary evil out of her. Everything else about her and Glimmer’s masterplan has fallen apart without grace; there is no vessel coming to save Catra from this wrecked and sinking one. And watching Adora step backwards into the foyer behind her to leave her with a goodbye that would last forever? Well, that’s the last straw that forces Catra’s stubborn hand. There’s no choice now but to throw out the script she’d memorized and rehearsed a hundred times over and blindly trust in the hope that she’d land on her feet.

“I’m sorry- for everything, okay?” Catra says in a fast, near guttural desperation. She doesn’t care for a second about the way her voice breaks or how it sounds like any second she’ll fall to pieces and won’t get back up. By the disappointment on Adora’s face there’s nothing left to lose by making this the fucking messiest apology anyone’s ever had the joy to witness, “So please, just listen! I’m not exactly going pro when it comes to saying sorry, you know that Adora, but I am trying, I promise. I wouldn’t be here in your doorway if I didn’t mean everything I’m saying.”

For once, Adora doesn’t answer. If she’s without one, that’s a first and breaking news to Catra, and she keeps it locked behind the confines of her usually loose lips. Her hand comes to the door.

Catra swallows, fist shaking next to her. Every bone in her body quakes as if any second now her soul will be making a hasty exit out of her pathetic excuse of a body. How she treads forward on this road not taken is a mystery if she’s ever seen one. “I just- I’m sorry about the Spring Fling, about not showing up and not calling you back. That was stupid, it was all stupid , and I should’ve just heard you out and listened to what you had to say. I’m sorry that I couldn’t just grow up and tell D.T. and their idiot posse to leave you the fuck alone. I’m sorry I ditched you for them in the first place. I’m so sorry for acting like some stuck up bully and ruining your summer with Glimmer and Bow. I was so jealous and- and angry, and I couldn’t just tell you that because then I would have to tell you I was wrong and look how fucking bad I am at it, Adora.” 

As the words leave her in a wither, Catra just about collapses to the Welcome Home mat that marks the invisible barrier she cannot cross beneath her feet. A wraithlike veil, it mocks her, saying “ So you think you could come back here to this place you once called home. Unfortunately for you, we’ve changed the password.”

“Catra, that wasn’t-” Adora begins, forcing her gaze down to the infinite space of the great divide between them, but Catra charges once again like if she can just throw her shoulder at this concrete wall that is this empty space, it will move, it will budge, it will come crumbling down and then all her exhaustive efforts will have amounted to more than just this feeling of exhaustion. Total Adora move, really. 

Guess Catra shouldn’t be surprised there; for months, she envisioned their places would be switched, that it would be her at the door and Adora would be the one about to fall to her knees. But that was a premature fantasy born out of bitterness and immaturity, along with a litany of other symptoms of her own self-hatred. To kill Adora by spiting her wishes for forgiveness would be to take herself down along with her. And maybe that was what Catra wanted, when she was fading away on her bedroom floor ignoring smoke alarms and Melog’s meowing. Maybe that’s what might’ve been if the month of August had been kinder. If Catra’s the one one word away from falling to her knees, it means she’s here out of a genuine desire to do the right thing. Maybe there’s hope for her after all, certainly more hope than for this sorry state of an apology.  It’s not like Catra’s had much practice beyond the trial runs at the gauche kitchen of Holiday House. But Catra keeps hoping that if she keeps talking, it will not be a grave she digs but the attention of a lighthouse in the distance she catches, one that can save her damaged battleship from sinking too far below these hostile waves.

“Save whatever excuse you’re about to make for me, Adora. I promise it isn’t worth it. You and I both know that I’ve done a lot of bad things and hurt a lot of people this past summer and that there isn’t any excuse for my behavior, but the worst thing that I ever did, Adora,” Catra swallows the words as they bubble in her throat, her gaze split between Adora’s blue eyes washed opal in the porch light and her grip on the doorknob whitening. The fire and fury of her tone dwindles down to an ember, “was what I did to you.”

There. I said. I finally fucking said it! Catra lets out a growl that regresses into a sigh. I did the thing I swore I would never do and now I’ve given the only person ever worth doing it for the power to murder me. 

When Adora doesn’t reply, when the opal shimmer of her eyes drops back to the ground, Catra is left alone with the realization that she is willing to let Adora do her absolute worst. Catra was never supposed to have made it this far anyway; she was supposed to trip over her words by shifting the blame- it’s what she’s an expert in and hey, maybe she should go to college after all having found something she’s a natural at enough to major in- and she only survived not doing so by the skin of her teeth. She was supposed to utter three words on their lonesome, not the speech of a desperate person prosecuted into a corner on the stand and confessing to manslaughter. She was supposed to stand humble, not humiliated. She was supposed to walk away after having the door slammed in her face. 

Guess this is proof you can always change your destiny.  So much for my dear old stepdad’s predetermination, some are destined only for destruction bullshit. Thanks for nothing, Pops.

Now Catra waits on the edge of the exile she knows without a doubt she’s going to have to walk right back into. Adora’s sustained quiet is not the sign Catra wanted to be given; it could go either way at this point, love slips beyond Catra’s reach all the same. Before she can give Adora some satisfaction to take with her when they go their separate ways by telling Catra she can go fuck herself or take a nice vacation to hell, Catra shrugs off Betty’s cardigan. 

This was the broken piece of their breakup Catra kept out of a strain of pathological selfishness. Despite knowing what weight it carried for Adora and what it meant to her, Catra hid it away because it was the leftover crumb of their feast she couldn’t bear to give up. Every night she wrapped herself in the knitted wool and the smell of the barn buried deep within the fibers, Catra pretended it was Adora wrapping her up, just like she did the night she mistook the tepid spring air of April to be the cause of Catra’s shivers and warmed her up by kissing her with lips the color of dark pink roses as they danced around in flickering streetlights, sipping away their time together like they sipped that pillaged bottle of wine. She’ll miss laying down with that warmth when she goes to sleep. She’ll miss the way the cardigan rocked her to sleep as if Adora was still there in her bed, arms tossed around and kissing the back of her neck.

Catra was- is- pathetic. And so fucking selfish . It’s a chicken and egg clusterfuck, really, and Catra’s not proud of it as she balls up Betty’s cardigan to hand it over to its rightful owner. She just wishes she hadn’t taken those weekends Adora gave her so freely and so fearlessly for granted. She just wishes she had known better when she had the chance.

“That’s all I wanted to say.” Catra extends the cardigan like a folded white flag, speaking around a lump in her throat and blinking back the simmer that’s returned to the crests of her eyelids. “You can- you can have this back. It’s yours, anyway. Have a good night, Adora.” Pathetic. Selfish. And now soulless, saying goodbye to her like she’s just some stranger. I guess that’s what we are now. “Looks like a fun party.”

As the words leave her mouth in the shape of a dying wish, Catra can see the hurried scurry of Adora’s party guests, all her “stupid” friends, away from the foyer that leads to the door, save but one. Her resident Inez of This Story is looking at her with an accomplice’s sympathy in her eyes, a quiet ‘I thought this would work’ Catra takes in stride. Yeah, she’s going back into exile, but she did her one good thing, right? She gave Adora the closure she deserved, the chance to smooth out the wrinkles in her story this spiteful situation left, and now Catra can walk back towards her estranged hometown with her head held high despite the tears in her eyes.

Time is of the essence if Catra wants to beat her own water works, so she shoves Betty’s bunched up cardigan into Adora’s hands. It’s a little careless, but the hand on this kitchen timer is coming back around and the heat stinging her eyes is starting to boil over, and as a result Catra doesn’t check to make sure Adora has a grip on the thing before trying to turn around. There’s no need to. She needs- wait, fuck, what does she need? Right, to grab her skateboard and walk like a normal person down the gravel path because there’s no need to heap another helping of embarrassment onto her established embarrassment. She doesn’t need the cardigan anymore, she’s going to have to get used to not wanting it anymore, it’s time to go now, Catra knows.  

Adora’s fingers come to a close around hers. “Catra?” her voice barely breaks that of a whisper. The sound leaves a shattering of cracks all over Catra’s bruised and battered soul.

“Yeah?” Catra is already turned around, wiping tears from her eyes from the back of her hand as she still answers, because she’s the kind of glutton who can’t leave Adora hanging. Not anymore at least.

The soft fabric of the cardigan falls away as Adora slides her palm over Catra’s, intertwining their fingers. Fatal is her touch against Catra’s skin in its reverence and tenderness and it takes everything in her not to collapse onto the ground for good this time. Funny how Catra didn’t realize how deep her withdrawal could be until she is knee-deep in another fix. Her knees wobble, her fingers shake against Adora’s, and a sob escapes her throat. Catra can’t do this. She can’t do this and expect to survive it.

“Catra, please,” Adora all but begs with hope Catra is fluent in- it’s a second language at this point, one Adora has taught her how to speak, “Take my hand.”

~ 

It has never been too late for Catra to come back to Adora’s side.

With a blinding flash of clarity this is the truth that reveals itself to Adora as they stand in this flickering motion picture, cast in a bad light by the porch’s uneven glow. It is the electricity that then shocks her heart back to life, it is the glorious sunrise after the longest night meeting the first bud of spring that breaks beneath the wildest winter, it is the knowledge that has lived all this time and refused to die: they would be here, the Fates would lead them back to one another, and Catra would come back to Adora because they were simply… meant to. This is where the skipping record is lifted up by gentle and sympathetic fingers and placed back down on an unencumbered path. This is where the merry-go-round comes spinning to a stop, this is the part of the chaotic, nausea-inducing ride where they get to get off.

“I’ll never say sorry to anyone, ever!” is what Catra once yelled while she ran down a church corridor and her words echoed off the scopic architecture as she traveled further away from the potluck where Adora had been invited to eat with Lonnie and away from her advice to apologize after jealousy drove Catra into stabbing the other girl with her plastic spork. That was the ironclad creed Catra lived and died for, and never had Adora gotten more than a token, a plastic arcade ring held hostage in a see-through sphere, acknowledging that maybe her best friend pushed too far. 

And yet here Catra was, swearing her bad behavior was a symptom of an identity crisis only the heat of summer could produce and promising that she would try in the weeks that would follow as the temperatures dipped. Catra was trying in spite of her insistence that self-improvement was a conman’s ruse and that she’d fallen so far behind already, effort was a waste of her finite potential. 

Catra has- a lot to apologize for, that much is true. Each and every grievance she asks forgiveness for is one that has brought Adora to the foot of her bed, reeling from heart stopping waves of heart, lips curled over her teeth as tries to keep her sobbing to minimum, no longer able to hide her anguish or feelings of betrayal in the absence of anyone's suspecting she must continue to perform the grand “I’m fine” lie for. But for Adora, it’s not what Catra says or the specific sins she seeks repentance of, but the fact that she’s here to begin with. Adora hadn’t spent those wayward afternoons in the cabin’s attic doing everything in her power to keep her sadness from leaking out of her because Catra had dumped her. No, she had pressed the quilt Razz lent her to her eyes and her nose the way a widow dotted her eyes with a handkerchief, wondering what happened to her friend, what happened to that little girl the compass needle in her heart always pointed back to? Where was that girl who nestled her head so sweetly into Adora’s shoulder seconds before Adora suggested she apologize to Lonnie? And was it Adora’s fault that the girl died at the hands of this new one, armed with black lipstick and new age sensual politics?

Somewhere in the middle of Catra’s speech Adora catches sight of the fiery red of her headband sitting like a crown on her head of short, wispy curls. 

Adora is still in the midst of comprehending what is happening in front of her when Catra’s apology barrel rolls to its end and leaves them stranded in a sound comparable only to TV static. She can’t say what she thinks without scaring Catra back into the weeds. She can’t say, I knew you’d come back to me, deep, deep down, I knew it. All that Adora can do is stand tall within it. Here she and Catra are tall again. Here, they can finally be whole. In this resurrection, in this realization becoming clearer like frost on her skin melting that this pain and grief would not be for evermore, thank God, Catra stripping the cardigan from her bare shoulders is a near miss as Adora’s brain presses this image to memory. Catra’s Levi’s scrape the wood of the porch and then Betty’s cardigan is in Adora’s hand, the feel of it peculiar compared to this sight in front of her. Adora lets the piece of clothing fall to the floor.

Yeah, I don’t care about that.  In truth there’s only one thing she can’t bear to be without when this conversation finds its end.

It’s a bait and switch, a bona fide work of art Adora wouldn’t count herself capable of in any other situation, taking Catra’s hand when she only intends to give the cardigan back. Adora doesn’t blink at the notion that this is cheating for a prize she’s no longer in the running for. Because what a mythical thing it was, a confession from her best friend spoken without even a single hint of sarcasm, but it is all Adora needs to return back to her homeland. She is the sole inhibitor now of the singular want that Catra will turn around and face her. Tendrils of gleaming, twinkling gold travel down Adora’s arm like vines of ivy, wrapping around her pinky before interlacing hers with Catra’s. Threads once severed by teeth and golden blade begin mending. Adora intertwines their fingers. Fate has them tied together once more; it will not let them become another whim of forgotten folklore. 

“Catra, please,” that want that has permeated her to the point that it has become her bleeds into Adora’s plea, “Take my hand.”

Take my hand. Don’t drop it this time around. Ask me to stay.

“It’s okay,” Adora whispers, a sniffle in her nose that matches the one that leaves Catra.

Come back to me. Come back to me and stay. I’ll stay if you do, I’ll stay as long as you want me to, and I’ll wait even longer. 

When Adora squeezes Catra’s hand- once, twice, three times like those nights passed in the backseat of her Daytona when they couldn’t say what those three squeezes meant- that’s when Catra makes an almost reluctant turn back towards the door. She doesn’t lift up her face; instead, Catra keeps the back of her hand against her eyes, a faint blush peeking out beneath her cheeks. Overgrown bangs spill over her forehead casting a protective shadow over the tears Adora can hear but can’t see.

Two paths light up before Adora, both in part tempting, neither easy. One: she can act on the near suffocating instinct to pull Catra in and suffocate her with a hug and whatever physical pressure that has built up in Adora’s system with no outlet, to kiss her forehead and cheek and wipe her tears away, but Catra’s in a delicate state Adora would recognize even if she hadn’t spent her summer melting away in it. Two: Adora can make this reconciliation a private one by stepping out onto the porch and shutting the door on curious and intrusive, if not well-meaning, eyes. 

The porch creaks under Adora’s step and the door comes to a close with a soft click. 

“Hey,” she says. Catra bats her eyelashes open, relief washing over once tense features, and Adora knows she made the right decision, “Let’s get out of here.”

Catra coughs around her answer but she follows as Adora picks up the fallen cardigan with one hand and strays from the doorway, pulling them both around the house. “Uh, okay. Where- where are we going?” 

“Away. From the others, at least. I was thinking Razz’s garden in the back, the one near the willow tree. Right where the lakes come to the rocks and there’s that little cove?” She’s barefoot, risking splinters and stickers, but she does not and cannot care, not with the tips of Catra’s fingers digging into her palm. The front porch bends backwards around the cabin, and they descend, one foot after the other, down the steps of the back one. No need for such a rush, but still, Adora moves in the hope and in the faith that Catra will follow behind her.

“The one where we spent four hours trying to clean up your haircut after you gave yourself bangs?” Catra laughs. Proving Adora’s faith to be a good one, she’s quick to keep up with Adora’s hurried pace, never falling a step behind. Adora appreciates that the other girl’s innate nimbleness makes it so Catra’s not running those beat up Levi’s into her heels; she hasn’t forgotten how much that hurt. Adora leads them between a rivet in the bushes and down the darkness of a dirt path, the cardigan swinging in the dust left behind them. The crashing of the waves smoothing over a plateau of rocks and boulders meets Adora’s open ears and the quiet soothing sound pulls hers in with a gravity of its own. 

“I only gave myself bangs because you dared me to. Those were your safety scissors in case you forgot.” Adora shoots back with a swift little look over shoulder. Catra sticks her tongue out as Adora makes a careful hop over stranded twigs and dead foliage in their path. Looks like the clumsy nimbleness of that freed her from a lifetime of pageant schemes hasn’t failed her just yet.

“Yeah, but I didn’t think you were actually crazy enough to go through with it! I thought the Wicked Witch was gonna kill me after you narced on us.” Catra’s voice echoes out over the water of the Lakes that meets them. Adora’s feet come skidding to an abrupt sun caked sand, the back of Catra’s sneakers meet her heels without warning. She lets out a grunt she can’t help despite the expression of instantaneous regret on Catra’s face. 

“Sorry,” the other girl mouths, then speaks with a shake in her voice, “I- I really shouldn’t bring… any of that up.”

“It’s okay.” Adora, tying her cardigan around her waist to match the flannel that hangs from Catra’s, presses her lips together to keep from elaborating. Really, she knows herself; she knows that if she doesn’t think this next part through then she’ll blurt out something impressively stupid and they will have to backtrack on their progress- again. The Lakes will evaporate, and the rocks will erode, and they’ll be back in that parking lot that was the setting of one kind of ending. 

Adora’s feet keep traveling, so as to keep her from putting a foot in her mouth, taking her to where the waves meet the rocky shore and she stares down the water, waiting to see her reflection distorted by the bending and breaking of the water. Obsidian is the color of the water, a liquid form of the iridescent, onyx sky it mirrors. The lack of light means the tide does not show her herself, it merely laps against her ankles. Adora pauses for a few seconds hoping that if she just waits and listens to the bellowing of the willow tree branches that rustle a mere few feet away, the right thing to say will come to her in a fully formed sentence on her tongue. They can tease each other for the rest of the night, the blunt edges of their words drawing new blood from old wounds be damned, but Adora knows she has to somehow pave a way forward. The standing of her legal guardian and the fate of Catra’s step dad may be trespassable territory for Catra, but for Adora they are dormant landmines laced in a land beyond the trenches.

Shifting her eyes towards the heavens where an explosion of stars marries the ink black sky like holes poked into the paper lid of a jar buzzing with fireflies, Adora takes a deep breath in. She can hear Catra shuffle in the awkwardness behind her. The edge of the water is the one place Catra can’t follow; in the spirit of their days as latchkey wanderers, Adora embraced and braved the natural terrain without blinking an eye, but Catra has made this trek in sneakers. It’s funny, how the tables have turned, how when this cove used to be a safe haven to pass time away in stretched out summers, Catra would be the one with dirt under her toenails and holes in her socks left by the ragged rocks and the soft bark of the willow tree. 

Other kids went to stay with their grandparents. Half the kids in their class would go to sleep away camp. Not Catra and Adora. Three summers they spent out here in a row; Adora used to think that up until the last one slipped through her fingers, she would get to spend all her summers discovering hidden worlds in the vast, mysterious landscape around them. They used to come here and play hide-and-seek, practice for the games their lives would turn out to be. Adora closes her eyes and listens to the waves crash, leaving a sheen of freshwater for the air to chill every time they recede, and waits for Catra to start to count to twenty. She waits to open her eyes and find Catra gone, never to have been there to begin with.

This is how my dream starts. The lights, they lead me here and I dive off the willow tree’s rock headfirst when their path takes me into the water, and then the next second I’m drowning in an ocean I can’t tread in, and the lights have abandoned me again.

There’s a gentle Splash! Splash! next to her that forces Adora’s eyes open. When she turns her neck, Catra is standing broad shouldered beside her. The cuffs of her jeans are rolled up, one farther than the other, and Catra looks down as her Levi’s land on some carved stone behind her. Too much longer, and this silence will let them both down. 

Adora knows what she wants to say. Adora wants to say remember the summer when Mara taught us how to swim and how scared you were of the water? Remember when you fell off the rock and I dove in after you because I thought you were drowning but the water was too shallow, and I hit my head? Do you remember that terrible sunburn that I got that first week and how upset I was that the Wicked Witch spent an entire afternoon lecturing me about ruining my natural beauty and so you put half a bottle of sunscreen on my back every day after that for the rest of the summer, expect for the day I made you mad by saying I was a better swimmer than you, so you just wrote your name on my back with sunscreen so that when I burned that’s all you could see? I never told you how I thought that was you saying that I belonged to you, that I was yours and you were mine. Would you do that again, write your name on my back? I want you to, you know.

A breeze blows to the west, tickling the chimes of the willow tree leaves, and it’s Catra who swings from the fences and breaks the silence before Adora can even say, “Do you remember?”

“So,” she clears her throat, a passing glance of hesitance and fretfulness exchanged between them under the starry sky, “I heard you were still going to L.A. next summer.”

“Then you graduate and go to the west coast- if that is still what you want. You pick another path and start your own story.” Mara’s words come back to Adora, whispered by the swell of the tide against her feet, “ But other than that, it’s yours to write, Adora, even if this is a pretty rough first chapter.” 

Here at the edge of the Lakes, where a garden of wisteria trees grows out from the grief that is buried here and wild roses need no one watching to bloom, Adora feels- knows - she can follow her fears all the way down. She can hold her breath and swim towards the shimmering opalescent path the golden light leaves, she can ascend in a gentler sea. No drowning, no dripping, no dancing into a path fraught with the threat of dying. Just catching her breath, finally washed clean of this wretched civility, changed for the better and ready to march back onto shore and scream unhinged, her deepest desires: the sun of the west coast turning her natural beauty a hyper pop shade of pink, and Catra’s name written on her back in sunscreen.

“Yeah, I am,” Adora answers. She tries not to smile when Catra’s eyes betray her by meeting her own, “Do you still wanna come with?”

~ 

Catra just about falls on her ass back into the waiting water.

Did she just-

Did those words actually come out of her mouth-

Hold, on a second-

Did Adora just ask me to come to L.A. with her? Me, she just asked me? Whatthefuckishappening? Did she drag me all the way out here to the Lakes just to not say anything and then tell me I can have back in on her escape plan like she’s a getaway driver short?

The stars above are not in alignment for Catra’s favor- other than the gift they’ve just granted her in Adora’s ludicrous, dorky grin and eyes that dance with legitimate sincerity that again, almost sends Catra slipping backwards into the tide- so her words are no more untangled than her thoughts, “But what about- I thought- when you switched out of Antonoff’s homeroom, wasn’t that because you were mad at me?”

Adora winces in a way that wrenches Catra’s heart. An opal eyed gaze drifts back to the water. “I- I, ugh this is going to sound really stupid,” she mumbles under her breath before continuing, “I only did that because, I dunno, thought it would make things easier for you if you didn’t have to see me every morning. I thought you would be less angry with the world if you weren’t reminded I was in it.”

Wait, she did that for me? Does she not realize I showed up here because I can’t stand not to be reminded she’s in the world? I thought I made that pretty fucking clear…

“Adora, I was only angry at the world because you and I weren’t exactly on speaking terms anymore and because that was on me ,” Catra tells her, voice low and somewhat restrained, “I mean, yeah, there were a few other things-” Fuck, am I really about to bring up my deadweight stepdad and the Wicked Witch for the second time? “But it wasn’t you that was making me angry. Not all the time, at least.”

“So, there was stuff I did that made you upset?” Adora asks, droplets of lake water flying up as she kicks her right foot up, and Catra curls her toes into the sodden sand underneath her.

“Yeah, at first. But like I said, I was jealous of really stupid shit, like you hanging out with Sparkles and Rainbow all the time, but then you wouldn’t even tell them we were going out.” Catra’s toes sink into the sediment deeper.

“That stuff isn’t stupid, Catra,” Adora replies, “You had every reason to be impatient with me. I was just so scared to tell anyone-”

“Because it might get back to her?” Catra finishes, her answer ringing hollow in her own ears.

“I’ve never been good at keeping secrets or being disobedient, but that would have never been something you had to deal with if I had just stuck to the original plan.” Original plan, what is she talking about? Catra’s eyes chase Adora in confusion and she catches them right as Adora adds, “You never would have had to deal with her if I hadn’t been selfish and kissed you on Prom night. So I’m sorry- for everything that happened afterward. Because that stuff was my fault, Catra.”

With a soft and gentle cadence, the waves of the Lakes cease in their gravitational violence as they wash over their bare ankles and crash into the shore that waits behind them.

~ 

It’s not exactly the leave-a-burning-red-handprint-on-her-cheek slap in the face to hear Catra laugh at her, but nonetheless Adora scoffs, irritated at the noise and all it’s nearly forgotten melody. She is trying to apologize! To say sorry for the suffering she knows she has caused Catra this past summer, and even in the months and years before that; she knows that even if she isn’t the Atlas of this situation, bearing the global burden of sole responsibility, she’s still had a starring role in Catra’s continued misery. Adora knew by the look on Catra’s face when she slipped on her skateboard on the other side of Aurora Lane and both their worlds came crashing down onto searing concrete, the bones of their souls shattering, that she was by no means the hero of this story anymore.

The hero of this story died such a pitiful death a long time ago.

Adora tries to say as much over the sounds of Catra’s laughter that bounce and ping off every given surface like shapes of light, only to stutter over her strawman’s defense, “Catra, I’m serious! How- I don’t understand- why is me trying to take ownership of my mistakes so funny to you? Do you- don’t you want me to?”

“Adora,” Catra’s nose wrinkles in the same way that stole Adora’s heart for good, because she is the only other bandit to con Adora into believing in a forever and boy, has Adora paid for it many times over, as she snickers. Her jubilee only grows, and she throws her head back, laughing just like when she was a little kid, before turning to her with a gleaming smile, “You don’t have anything to be sorry for. I’m the one who should've listened to you that day after the Spring Fling Dance.”

That’s not what the scoreboard would show, Adora’s sure. She pictures the electronic one on the wall of the West student gymnasium, a buzzer sounding off the polished wooden floors every time a dotted red line was changed to a higher number. Her name hangs in blocky black letters where the home team’s would be. Catra’s hangs over the word VISITOR . In her head, Adora hears the shriek of a whistle from a distant referee, one that mimics the piercing of a police siren, and the clock on the electronic scoreboard stops but the numbers under HOME and VISITOR continue to go up and up and up.

The natural, near mercurial high of competition was a dysfunctional byproduct of being raised on a diet of mind games and conditional affection. There was always a catch, always a price to be paid, no matter what battle Adora picked. Even from behind bars her legal guardian was puppeteering Adora, trapping Adora in her unwinnable games that have been ripping her apart since she was a baby, limb by limb, love by love. The shadows blow their whistle and Adora comes running, ready, to lose everything and gain nothing in favor that will crumble in the palm of her hands, time and time and time again like some epic poem composed of a sad hero’s prose. 

What would this summer have looked like if Adora refused to let tragedies past burrow under her skin and define her? How would this story have played out if her name wasn’t opposite on a scoreboard to her best friend, just their heads opposite on the pillow, not so far as they stand apart now?

“I ratted us out.” It’s a simple sentence that tastes bitter in Adora’s mouth as she recycles Catra’s words from before. She thinks to the sharp whistle blow calling her foul as she was backed against the very liquor cabinet she broke into, the chill of the metal lock pressing into the back of her neck as she stuttered around for an explanation. Adora hears her sneaker scuff tile floor in this anamnestic kitchen her mind has constructed as a past version of herself, ever clumsy in her reasons and clumsier in her memories, chokes under pressure.

Catra’s tone is knowing. “Did you though?”

“Where were you that night, Adora?” the referee had demanded. 

Adora stood there gripping the T-shirt she was wearing as a dead giveaway. How unintentionally she had given signs of her relationship with Catra, how carelessly had she left the irresistible scent of blood for salivating predators to track down. She was no starry-eyed actress, that was for sure, but this was a test seventeen years in the making: had Adora, in her time dabbling delightedly in disobedience and deception, learned to lie like it came to her naturally?

“I was out driving. I didn’t want to go to the dance, so I didn’t. I wanted to clear my head and driving around by myself helps me do that.” 

“I know you were with someone, you wouldn’t have stolen from me otherwise. Who did you go to such foolish lengths to impress with your disobedience?” 

“No, I was alone, I swear! You can ask my friends, they were all at the dance that night, it really was just me-”

“You’re lying , Adora! You had your chance to come clean, but you’ve floundered it. Someone spotted you parked outside the woods with another person in the passenger seat- you were the Bishop’s daughter again, weren’t you? I’ve tolerated your companionship with her long enough- I’ve tolerated this phase long enough! You’re not to see each other again, do you understand?”

Though Adora had sunk to the waiting kitchen floor as the shadows dissipated and stormed off on to surmount more fatalities in this war they were waging, clinging to the fabric of Catra’s, no tears fell to honor her fear. Adora, made still as a statue in a cemetery, was trapped by the world ‘tolerate’ ricocheting off the plates and silverware she’d spent hours polishing to perfection in hopes of more. It was only when the clock on the wall struck a chord of seven did she lift herself and head to her room to change out of Catra’s t-shirt and into the red dress she bought with Glimmer at the mall only to shove in the farthest, most hidden part of her closet.

“You know,” Catra starts and Adora folds her arms, breathing through the last grimy dregs of such a painful recollection, “if there’s stuff you just can’t really talk about… with her, that’s okay you know.” Out of the corner of her eye Adora sees Catra’s fingers meet the tips of her bangs.

I think I’d rather just call it even between the two of us. We can barely get through a conversation about our guardians, and we used to tell each other everything. Are we ever going to get to have that again?

Adora finds the answer shining in the look on Catra’s face. One day they will. One day soon.

Sighing, she kicks up sediment as she flings her foot up through an oncoming wave, “It just felt like she won after she caught me literally red handed with the rosé, and then after she was arrested, there wasn’t any point in keeping score.” 

There wasn’t going to be a movie so why wait around for the happy ending?

“Adora, I swear, sometimes the more you say, the less I feel like I know. Why do we have to keep score?” Catra asks, whacking Adora with her bony elbow, “I mean, the end result is the same, right? Captain Hook gets eaten by alligators and the Wicked Witch gets melted with a bucket of water. They’re not around anymore to tell us what to do or how to feel about each other. We get to decide that stuff.”

And what have you decided? Adora wonders, the thought as brief as the flicker of the stars above, that burns out as bright as the faraway celestial bodies. You still haven’t said anything about coming with me to L.A.

“I thought you hated me.”   Catra says to the open waters in front of them. There’s a humor in her words, in the way she phrases such a self-deprecating sentence, as if she is that assured of the accuracy of her belief. It’s insulting, is what it is; to Adora, that’s the kind of joke that earns crickets in a packed auditorium. It’s a mutation of the wit Catra is famous for, libel of the treasured cleverness that makes her the wonder that she is.

The way the ocean smooths down the rocks that wait at the tide, Adora takes this opportunity to clear the slate, “Catra, I- I never hated you. Okay? Never, ever. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Opal blue eyes chase a mismatched stare. The corner of Catra’s lip quivers at the mention of their oldest promise. Cross my heart, hope to die. A stubborn vow made by even more stubborn seven-year-olds tying invisible knots around each other’s pinkies- knots that ache now, brought together by a magnetic push and pull not unlike the gravity that pulls the tide back to the shore, forever and evermore. Adora reaches out for Catra and what was severed reconnects, taking another step down the winding path towards healing. Their hands together bring the same relief as some groundbreaking epiphany, not a glimpse of what could be but a prophecy. If Catra really truly buys the complete and utter bullshit she’s selling, then Adora feels that it’s necessary to show her the receipt- to show her everything with no holds barred. 

“I could never hate you,” Adora whispers over the crashing of the wave. Catra’s eyes widen and Adora continues until that fading expression of disbelief is etched out of existence, gaining confidence as she speaks, “I couldn’t even hate you when I thought you had every reason to hate me.”

Unlike the bits and pieces that escape her about the final act between her and her legal guardian that have come through this conversation like the figments slipped through between the changing of radio stations, Adora is unblushing, unstuttering, in her honesty this time around. Because if her hero complex guaranteed she could never actually be the hero of this story, then it followed that Catra had no reason to make herself out to be the villain, not in any version of this tale. Nothing could be made better by Catra thinking that.

But everything could be made better by what Catra does manage to say next.

“Have every reason to hate you- you think I hated you?” her smirk becomes a winning smile, shining like the stars dancing in her eyes, “You really still don’t get it, Adora?”

“Get what?” Adora glances down at their joined hands.

Whatever clues cannot be found in the sight are revealed in the gentle way the fingers of Catra’s other hand come to Adora’s chin, lifting her gaze up until Catra can look right into her eyes. It’s the most prolonged and blissful amount of eye contact they’ve had since Adora opened the door. Adora’s knees threaten to buckle under the weight of it all, the tenderness of it all. “Adora, I love you. I’ve always loved you, you dummy.”

Adora is- speechless. Breathless. She’s without a coherent response, without ground to stand on now that Catra’s shattered her rickety lifeboat of a foundation using only her smile. There’s nothing to doubt or to question; no, every single fear that Adora’s ever had that she could never be loved for who she truly was is washed away into some nameless, equally faithless current by the look of pure hope and happiness on Catra’s face. 

It’s enough. It is so much more than enough. It is the call that echoes back through the night, across the surface of the water and the floor of the forest, after Adora talks in her sleep and her whispers of wants spill out open windows. It is the flickering flame of candlelight waiting in the window and it is finally enough.  

“You love me?” 

Catra laughs and Adora, for all her issues with short term memory, does everything imaginable in her limited power to commit the sound to a permanent, untouchable place in her mind, “Is it like super cliche to say I’ve loved since I learned what love really is? ‘Cause if it is, I guess I’m saying it anyway,'' Catra trails off for a few beats of Adora’s heart before picking the string back up where she dropped it. Her hand leaves Adora’s chin and blazes a trail of heat up the curve of her jaw. Adora brings her palm to rest over the back of Catra’s hand as her eyelashes flutter close, “You really had no idea, did you?”

“I mean, I just,” Is this really happening? Is this moment really happening to me, is it really mine? “I just knew what I hoped for. Like, when you kissed me back, that night in the car.” Adora finds herself laughing, her forehead bumping Catra’s. Catra must be reading her mind, or her laughter is that contagious, because she starts chuckling too. 

Fate is the subject of their laughter, Adora knows. For all its unspecified cruelty and its determination to lead them on this treacherous and hellish journey before dropping them off on Heaven’s doorstep, it sure is funny. So selfishly had Adora wanted to believe that the determination with which Catra kissed her that night was indicative of the real deal. So desperately had Adora yearned for a love that was really something and that made her feel the way she did when she was just inches apart from Catra as they are now. How brutally wondrous and exquisite was it that now Adora could chase that hope without falling down the rabbit hole of her own toppling expectations.

Catra loved her. Catra loved her! No conditions, no balancing pedestal or tightrope… no tolerating anywhere in the fine print or footnotes. No more breaking her soul in two looking for Catra beside her, she’s right here. Adora is loved by Catra, and it is a shimmering beautiful love that radiates, not reflects, off the best and truest version of herself. 

“I love you, too.”

Opening her mouth just to close it again, Catra’s laughter squeaks as she says, “We are such idiots.”

As they stand here together, surrounded by these lush and unapologetic gardens of Babylon, the waves crashing in tandem against the bare, exposed ankles, Catra bringing her closer, Adora sees the lights that have brought her here begin to fade. Their work is finished, for now. Never in all their time taunting her have they ever led her astray, always guiding her back to this point. And if at some point Adora falls off the path again, trips over her feet and her words, she knows she can return to this place- this town and the beating heart of its folklore that’s rooted in dancing and dreaming and demise, this hidden paradise in the forest where you can find Razz’s cabin, this secret alcove where the Lakes meet a rocky shore. Here she will find the lights, glowing underwater and glittering on the forest floor for only her eyes to see, to lead Adora away from the sidewalk chalk promises on pavement where she’s cracked her bones and the shadows that follow trying to bait her with get-love-quick-schemes, and back into Catra’s arms where she belongs.

Catra closes the distance first this time. Her kiss is a pause, a hand pulling Adora out from beneath chilly, tormented waters, a promise of days in the sun to come by her side. Adora returns the sweetness in kind, her fingers brushing back beautiful bangs and smiling wide against Catra’s lips as Betty’s cardigan rustles in the wind, hitting the back of her thighs. There is no rush or urgency as there was in abundance that night in Adora’s Daytona. No looming threat of imminent danger waiting for the first sign of a slip up. No more cursing each other for deeds committed out of sadness and separation and the loss of summer love. 

Just this, just the two of them- forevermore.

Adora stays kissing Catra. Somewhere in the back of her mind, the red of the lights of the school gymnasium scoreboard goes dark, never to return and ruin this ever again, their blank scores resting in peace for the rest of eternity.

~ 

If you never bleed, you’re never going to grow.

This is the final lesson Catra learns as summer fades away into a moment in time and autumn stares her down, its own casually cruel curriculum certainly in store. Throughout her entire body, she feels the tired shake of growing pains the stress of the day has left her without the resources to ignore, and she keeps her head in the crook of Adora’s shoulder, their fingers intertwined as she draws an absentminded star over the joint of Adora’s thumb. Drunk on another after that kiss, Catra hopped onto the willow tree’s rock and Adora climbed up after, their wet bare feet leaving prints on the rust-colored mineral surface. 

They had settled here for the time being. Adora had even untied Betty’s cardigan from her waist and placed it over Catra’s shoulders- the exact same way the night of their first kiss. But that kiss was a stolen one, a risky gamble that had almost done them both in. Tonight, Catra had gone for another kind of kiss altogether, a nothing’s going to keep us apart anymore, not even my own dumbass kind, and to prove this point further, she opened up the left side of the cardigan and gestured with it, come here and I’ll keep us both warm. Adora slipped underneath and Catra breathed a sigh of relief, a sigh of peace.

With their feet dangling off of the rock and their backs leaning up against tree bark, Catra knows they won’t be making another appearance back at the party. At least not any time soon. Adora did ask if she wanted to join them-

“Do you want to stay? I’d really like it if you did, but only if it’s okay with you.”

“Of course, I’ll stay, Adora. What, I’m just gonna bolt after that kind of conversation? Trust me, there’s no place I’d rather be.”

-only in hindsight her question must have been focused not on whether Catra would stay and stick around for the party, but whether or not Catra was comfortable sitting in Adora’s company.

Well, duh . It’s not like Catra had spent the entire summer waiting for Adora to ask.

“You know, you never answered my question,” Adora begins then, after an indefinite passing of time, in a volume barely above a whisper.

Yawning, Catra asks, “Wait, what was your question?”

“Did you want to come to L.A. with me after we graduate?” Adora lifts her head to catch Catra’s eyes.

Catra cracks a smile. Staring at the neurotic anticipation written over Adora’s face like she’s an open book, she thinks back to the University pamphlets bragging about their flash and sparkle of their prestigious music programs sent to live out the rest of their days in her kitchen garbage can. She thinks of the mess of ink still there on her arms after scribbling about lyrics during her shift earlier today and even ventures to think she might return to finish the bridge and chorus that were giving her trouble earlier. Catra knows that Adora is leaving regardless, come the end of next spring. Catra knows that wherever she means to go, whatever path she means to discover, that she’s leaving their hometown, too. It will be time to- for both of them, really. Catra knows that saying no is equivalent to breaking her own heart, to leaving the warmest bed she’s ever known, cardigan and all. 

Catra also knows that the road not yet taken looks real good right now.

“You have no idea how badly I still want to come with you… I never actually stopped.”

The grin that breaks on Adora’s face is worth every ounce of discomfort that comes with the territory of vulnerability. Catra allows herself one pat (or an indulgent few) on the back as Adora leans back in to kiss her. She could get used to this. This trying thing and learning and growing- yeah, fair is fair and parts of it downright suck , but it’s better than the growing pains and the bleeding that becoming a better person begets. To be able to give love and to accept love without guilt, to undo a childhood of conditioning by coming back to this most natural of acts, there might be a sundae to top with a cherry after all. 

“Good,” Adora laughs and the air tickles Catra’s lips, “I never stopped wanting to go with you, either.”

When Adora kisses her again, Catra is there to meet her halfway.

Catra is aware, just as she’s aware of the off-key belted karaoke floating on the wind brought in behind them (Sea Hawk must be subjecting the others to a shanty versions of Elton John and other various number one hits of 1997, Catra thinks she could murder him just for singing Lovefool loud enough for her to hear him half a mile from the cabin and knows their choice to not go back until there’s nothing but uneaten pizza to return to was, without a doubt, the right call), that the growing pains are far from done yet. As they sit here talking about the summer they spent missing each other, the phone calls they waited for instead of making, the disappearances and detentions that broke their collective chains, Catra tries to reach a place of acceptance of that truth. Even if they do cement their plans and leave for the west coast after the final bell of senior year, there is a danger that lives within both of them by nature of who they are and what they are to each other. Real and true peace will have to wait; it cannot exist in a place that is abandoning its wildness and trading it in for the hoax of civility like this town so quickly is.

Catra’s never had the courage to face her convictions before. Not like this. Whatever short-lived bravery she thought would slip out of reach once she butchered her apology on her own chopping block is given a few more breaths of life when she realizes how little awkwardness hangs between her and Adora. The worry gnawing at the back of her throat all day that Adora and her would be back to square one, even farther from the bond they had that first day they met when they were seven? Scratch that fear off the list of one hundred and one. Because they’ve picked up their rapport as if they’ve never dropped it. They’ve gone from being enemies to friends and lovers once more. What lessons wait for them in the fall and beyond- well they can do just that, wait.

Right now belongs to the afterlife that is their stories, the laughter that rings in the air as Adora tells Catra about Razz’s continued mystical adventures and Mara’s teasing, the way Adora holds her head in her hand as Catra fills her in on her brief stint in Holiday House.

“Wait,” Adora’s eyes narrow, the corner of her mouth creeping up in that way that always snags Catra’s heart, “You actually spent the night with Glimmer? Like Glimmer Glimmer? Glimmer Bowery, who you once said could eat your farts? And you guys didn’t kill each other?”

“Yeah, but not for lack of trying,” Catra tells her, her skin brimming with the heat of old wounds. The insults that she and the Harkness heiress flung at each other in poor attempts to gain the upper hand seem so far away. Were they really words Catra shouted only to try and take back just yesterday? 

Huh. Feels like a lot longer.

“So, she helped you plan this?” Adora continues and Catra nods.

“Pretty much. Once she found out I still had your cardigan she remembered the party you invited her to and well, we both figured you deserved a grand gesture.” Catra replies. It’s nothing short of the truth.

“Like the one James gave Betty?” Adora asks with a smug knowingness that gleams in her opal eyes.

Catra pushes a scoff past her lips, “Yeah, yeah. Credit where credit is due, James did have some good ideas.” 

“Since when is cheating a good idea, Catra?” laughs Adora.

Catra can’t help the squeak that escapes her. Fuck, has she missed this. She’s missed this love and this humor, she’s missed everything about Adora, she’s missed being with her best friend. “Yeah, you’re right. James was a total fucking idiot, but I guess I’m not one to talk. Who gives up someone like Betty? Who gives up someone like you?”

“So,” Adora begins again after Catra swoops in one more time to kiss her because this is, after all, a grand fucking gesture of romance, “Now that you’ve lived out Betty and James’ story, is it your favorite?”

“Favorite what?” She knows she sounds like a complete and total dumbass, but Catra just can’t help it.

“You know, of all the ones Mara used to tell us. The ones about this town?” Adora explains. “When we were little, I remember your favorite was Este’s friends getting revenge for her, but you seem to have a soft spot for Betty and James.”

“Hmm,” is all Catra says. Her mouth bends upward in a smile. And here Adora thinks Catra is the one who never has once listened to anyone in her entire life, “You’re my favorite, Adora. No competition there.”

You’re the one who made those stories any fun to begin with. The fact that you could hope to have something better than those over told tales of deception and woe, the fact that you believed you would… It gave me hope, too.

Adora’s forehead comes to rest on hers and she squeezes one time, two times, three. “You’re mine too, Catra. You always were.”

~ 

Black like the ink that will write the rest of their pages is the color of the night sky as the next chapter begins underneath bleeding, shimmering starlight. It’s a chapter that will be dedicated to one of the greatest loves ever known, and though it will never be adapted to film and shown in motion capture light, it will be a marvelous one for the books. A new page is turning, filled with greater heights and sunshine, of falling apart and trying again. Opal blue and fiery red imagery will fill this golden text; it’s rough on the surface, but I urge you to look closer, deeper into the water and past the reflection of your own self in these stories you cling to. 

Do you see how they cling to you? How we become them? 

The short of this long story is the breadth of hope. Hope is the leaves of the willow tree that ruffle like feathers in the wind but hope that is etched onto the heart like a knife into tree bark is the kind that is promised survival. It exists, a living breathing thing by no means breakable by the same hand twice, written in the initials on the willow tree. Under the faded and famous J+B, there you can find newer and fresher markings in the auburn bark, there under the spotlight of the sun. 

C+A.

Passed down like folk songs, this is the kind of love that stories cannot do justice. 

This is love that endures, forever and evermore.