Chapter 19
Maru returns to the festival clearing in a daze. She’s stiff with green slime that is now frozen to her. The residual effects of being compelled through the forest still twist in her gut, a slightly nauseous feeling. She contemplates how to get home without being seen. She thinks the best way would be to skirt around the north side and slip through Ry’s farm. But that involves going through Ry’s farm, the last place she wants to be found. She’s not even sure if she would be able to find her way through it, the landscape had been so altered from the abandoned lot she’d known as a child. But if she went through town, everyone would see her...
Just as she’s entering the clearing there is a loud crack followed be several screams, the sound of thrashing in water. Everyone condensing in a circle.
Someone yelling “stay back!” And Maru forgetting herself and rushing forward with everyone else, not realizing that this would be the perfect distraction to help her get away.
There’s further commotion, a splash, gasps, and then a silence like everyone holding their breath. A splutter for air. More commotion.
Harvey saying “let me through,” and Maru arriving at the edge of the crowd and trying to weave through it as gracefully as the stiff slime would let her, thinking if Harvey is needed she must be too.
“Maru, where have you been?” Her mom seeing her through the crowd, worried, as if she’d thought Maru had fallen into the ice. “What’s all over you?”
Maru just shakes her head, going on tip toes to see over Jodi and Kent’s heads what’s going on.
Pam is on the ground – pale, half wet half frozen, slightly blue – with Harvey’s coat around her as he as kneels beside her. Alex is standing but also half wet half frozen, with Shane wrapping his coat around him and Haley, expression worried, rubbing her hands quickly up and down his shivering arms. Lewis running back and forward frantically, Marnie calmly pulling out the emergency blankets he had stored precisely for this and forgotten in his frazzled panic. Ry takes one of the blankets from Marnie, says something to Harvey that Maru can’t hear before helping him get Pam up, wrapped tightly in a blanket, and begin guiding her towards town. The crowd parts for them. Shane pulls Alex after them, though the younger man seems to be trying to laugh it off. Haley shoves him from behind.
Penny stands in the crowd, blank faced.
The crowd starts to mutter more intensely. Everyone begins to back away from the small ice fishing hole where Pam had fallen in, as if it might claim them as well.
Maru stiffly walks towards the edge of the clearing, trying to get away from her mom and her questions. She looks around for Penny but can’t see her anywhere.
“Were you in the mines or something?” Sebastian asks, appearing to her out of the crowd. His pace slows dramatically to keep time with her slow progress.
“No, I wasn’t in the mines.” Maru mutters, feeling trapped in her stiffness.
“Then why are you covered in slime? And look like you’ve just seen a ghost?”
“Never mind. I have to get to the clinic. How did Pam fall in?”
“Drunken slip. You hurt?” He asks, displaying a frown that Maru knows is his expression of worry.
“What?” She asks, taken aback by the question and the concern.
He doesn’t say anything, just gives her a look.
She shakes her head, “Harvey needs me at the clinic. I have to help Pam.”
“Wow, didn’t know you were in to fighting monsters.” Abbi says as she joins them.
“I wasn’t fighting monsters.” Maru grits.
“Maru, what happened?”
“Nothing!”
Sebastian glares at her, Abbi says “uhh, nice try,” motioning again to Maru’s slime.
“I don’t know, okay? I don’t know happened.” She’s painfully aware of the crowd around her, which is luckily preoccupied with talking about what had just happened on the ice, but she can feel the occasional glance at her disheveled appearance... She lowers her voice, “one minute I’m looking at the ice sculptures next thing I know I’m in the middle of the woods being attacked by a little gelatinous blob.”
Sebastian and Abbi exchange a look.
“Please,” Maru pleads, “just let me get to the clinic. Harvey needs me.”
“Okay... but don’t think you’re off the hook for explaining.” Seb concedes, his frown deepening in further worry.
Maru scowls and pushes herself through the stiffness to trudge along faster.
It takes much longer than she would like to make it through town. A lot of people give her quizzical looks, but she tries to maintain her focus on the goal of making it to the clinic and ignore them. She can just pretend it was a weird lab experiment gone wrong, they’d all heard that before...
In the clinic waiting room is a nervous looking Shane, pacing up and down. Haley perched delicately on the edge of one of the seats, face unreadable, and Ry leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. The door seems to slam behind Maru in announcement of her presence. All eyes turn to her.
Shane only pauses a moment before returning to his pacing, Haley remains impassive. Ry gives her an up and down look, clearly noticing the slime. Fuck Maru thinks, she knows I was in the secret woods with her.
Ry looks like she’s about to say something but before she can Alex, followed by Harvey, come in through the back.
Alex gives Shane the thumbs up. “All good, right doc?”
“Take it easy tonight and make sure to keep warm.”
“I’ll make sure he does.” Shane says, “that’s enough heroics for one day.” He wraps his arm around Alex’s shoulder. “Let’s get you home.”
Haley’s mouth opens as if she has something to add, but she closes it again. The two men leave without glancing at their two other companions. Haley can’t hide her dislike this time, face turning in to a vivid scowl. Ry snorts.
“Maru, what are you doing here?” Harvey asks, pushing his glasses up on his face.
“Um,” she gulps, “my job? Do you need help?” She feels as stupid as she sounds. She thinks she hears Ry say “come on, I’ll buy you a drink” to Haley as she starts moving towards the door. She desperately avoids eye contact.
“Thank you but everything’s taken care of. I’ll be here to observe Pam for the night, shouldn’t be too taxing.”
“So, Pam’s alright?” Maru asks, keeping her eyes glued on Harvey’s face and not daring to look at Ry as she walks passed her. She hears the door open, Haley beginning to say something, and then it closes, swallowing any insight to their conversation. She is simultaneously relieved and heartbroken that Ry isn’t lingering to question her.
Harvey looks her up and down and hesitantly adds “Yes, she’s fine... Maru, what happened to you?"
She can feel tears forcing themselves forward, "nothing. I'm fine."
Harvey takes a worried step towards her, "you look like you've been crawling around in the mines, do you need me to take a look at you?"
"No, uhm..." The tears were coming, "I'm, uh fine." She gulps and starts walking quickly to the back of the clinic. She has to go through the back door to avoid Ry. "Funny story, tell you later." And she practically runs out, leaving a stunned Harvey behind her.
When she gets back from the shower she’s surprised to see Penny sitting on her bed.
“I let myself in, sorry.”
Maru shrugs, deciding now that she won't bring up Pam unless Penny makes it clear that's something on the table to talk about, and looks for her comb. “You okay?”
“Heh,” Penny’s unamused laugh, ringing her hands together. “Can I stay here awhile?”
“Sure. As long as you need.”
In silence, Penny starts undoing and redoing her hair as Maru goes about her routine of getting ready for bed. After the clinic she’d sneaked into her room and tossed off her slime covered clothes, gotten most of it off of her face and out of her hair, before facing her parents. She’d actively lied to them, telling them she was fine, that nothing had happened. She’d done a lot of lying by omission lately, but never so outright. Her mom hadn’t seemed to believe her but her dad bought it. They’d gone down to the saloon together, saying they hoped to see her there. She feels lucky that Seb wasn’t home, that she doesn’t have to face him yet. Now she sits beside Penny on her bed.
“You wanna watch a movie?” Maru asks, folding her legs under her.
Penny stands up suddenly, long red hair swinging loose, “let’s go to the saloon.”
“What? Really?”
“Yeah, come on.”
“I just put my pyjamas on.” Maru says hesitantly. The last place she wants to be is the saloon. She tries not to think about why.
“I’ll find you something.” Penny says, going through her closet. Maru just watches from her seat. This is never the relationship they had, whatever this “girly” thing was. Choosing clothes for each other. Dressing up to go out. She doesn’t know how to act.
Penny throws something at her. Maru, not really seeing any alternative, puts it on. She becomes aware of getting changed in front of Penny like she hadn’t been moments ago, though Penny is still riffling through her closet and not paying attention.
“Can I borrow this?” Penny asks, holding up a cute top Maru hadn’t worn since being in the city.
“You can have it, I don’t wear it.” Maru says, because it’s true. Penny makes a face, that’s more private than for Maru, that tells her she thinks it’s about money. She doesn’t add anything, not wanting to make it worse, and Penny puts the shirt on anyway. Maru averts her eyes.
“Hair down?” Penny asks, adjusting the top in mirror, her long red hair falling straight down her back.
“It looks good.” And it’s true.
“Do you have makeup?”
“I don’t really think my stuff will be your shade...”
Penny turns to scowl at her, “I meant for you.”
“I don’t need it.”
“It’s for fun, come on, I’ll do it.”
So she makes Maru sit down for her. She pulls out the blush, the mascara, the brow pencil. It’s nothing extravagant and Maru sits patiently but this isn’t her thing. She’d followed through the motions the last couple years in the city, but since she’d been home she hadn’t bothered and realizes now that she hadn’t missed it. Penny finishes by borrowing Maru’s lip gloss for herself.
Puckering her lips in the mirror she says, “ready?”
“Am I?”
She grins, in a way Maru hadn’t seen in some time, “yes. Let’s go.”
Ry buys Haley a drink and sets it down before taking a seat beside her.
“Thank you,” Haley says, noticing that it’s the same cocktail she’d had the first night she’d met Ry though she hadn’t specified that that’s what she wanted. Had Emily done this, or did Ry remember?
The saloon is already busy with everyone from the festival. The tone is somber after the incident with Pam, but that’s already beginning to melt away in the warmth and collective tipsiness.
“I can’t believe Alex just left me.” Haley pouts, not because she wants to but because she’s not sure what else to say. She doesn’t feel awkward around Ry but she does feel awkward being in the saloon. She can feel eyes on her still. Most of the villagers had already come and said hi to her since she’d been back, which she knew she didn’t deserve given her history of bitchiness. It didn’t feel good.
Ry grins and shrugs as she takes a sip of her beer, “he’s in love.” Haley can’t hide her wince. Ry notices, “you don’t like them.”
It’s a statement, and how could Haley fight that? “No...” She admits. Ry nods but doesn’t say anything. The silence forces Haley into nervously explaining herself, “Shane’s just so... I don’t know, he was like the town fuck up for years. He’s so much like Alex’s piece of shit dad. It’s hard not to see that and think, like, what are you doing? Alex has so much potential but he’s always throwing it away. He shouldn’t still be stuck here. He’s so self sabotaging.”
“No he’s not.” Ry cuts her off, and there’s an edge in her voice that tells Haley she’s waded out to dangerous territory.
“You don’t know him like I do,” Haley says defensively, and fully aware of it, fully knowing that she could barely say she knew him anymore.
“You’re right.” Ry admits, making Haley feel more guilty, “I don’t have a history with him. What little I do know of him is that he’s happy. But I do know Shane. And I trust Shane.”
“It’s not fair to ask me to do the same when I’ve seen nothing but the worst.” Haley states.
“Not asking you to.” Ry says into her beer. The tone is passive aggressive like nothing she’s heard from Ry in the past. She doesn’t like the sound of it.
Haley, never one to enjoy being on the defensive, flips it around, “you seem awfully out of sorts tonight. Or is this the usual you and the farmer I met the other night was your hot cousin?”
She laughs a little harder than Haley expected. Recovering herself she says, “sorry, you never met Finn did you?”
“No, I don’t believe I did.”
“He was at the farm before me, and I believe the consensus is he is decidedly not hot. Anyway, I’m sorry for being rough on you. It’s been a weird day.”
“It’s okay.” Haley concedes quietly.
After that the conversation becomes lighter. Leah and Elliott join them and Haley finds she’s surprisingly able to stomach the conversation between them. Elliott’s funnier than she remembered and Leah, she begrudgingly admits, is pretty smart and actually acknowledges Haley’s own contributions to the conversation with more interest than she would expect. It gets easier with every drink.
Though seeming to be actively trying to be in a good mood Ry is hard for Haley to get a read on. For the most part she’s flirtatious and charming. She’s obviously someone who leans more towards silence, but Haley can see she’s occasionally bordering on brooding, absorbed in her own head, only to snap out of it and go and grab everyone another round of drinks.
She notices her observing something with an analytical look at one point and Haley follows her gaze. Maru isn’t looking at them. She’s looking at Penny who’s sitting across from her. She looks like someone who’s trying not to seem completely miserable and failing.
Haley had never really given Maru much thought. She was some younger nerd kid who was of no consequence to her life. Now she was grown and Haley does notice there is a certain loveliness to her. But she’s only noticing because of Ry.
“Are you friends with her?” Haley asks.
Ry seems startled, “who?”
“Maru.”
“Oh. I guess. Kinda friends with everyone in a place like this, right?”
Haley senses she’s being brushed off which intrigues her further but she doesn’t push the matter and it is completely erased from her mind when she feels an unexpected tingle of jealousy when Leah comes back from getting a drink and sits too close on Ry’s other side.
Maru orders her and Penny their fourth round of drinks, maintaining a level of focus on the task that is by no means required.
“You’re not covered in slime anymore.” Ry says, appearing beside her and leaning against the bar. This is exactly what she was afraid of happening. Her face burns. She tries to laugh it off and looks straight ahead. Ry seems to be waiting for her to respond but she has nothing to say for herself.
“That stuff can be tough to get off. I had it all over me in the mine one time, I almost died.” She laughs like it’s funny, but there’s something different in it, almost like it’s a nervous laugh.
Maru gives her a shocked look. Because of the laugh or because of the almost death?
“When was that?”
Ry shrugs, “awhile ago.” She isn’t acting like her usual self, not that Maru’s any authority. She can’t stop hearing the frustration in Ry’s voice from when she’d been speaking to the wizard earlier. How she’d sounded like she was on the very edge of her patience. Was her inconsistent tone – going from direct and questioning to aloof – connected, or was it only because she suspected Maru of following her again?
Emily hands Maru her and Penny’s drinks and Ry places her order, another round for the table.
“Sure, I’ll bring that over for you guys!” Emily says cheerfully.
Before she turns back to her table Ry gives Maru a long, searching look that freezes her. She becomes very aware of her body and beings to feel afraid that Ry’s noticing the makeup. That she’ll notice how she’s slightly more dressed up than usual. Remark on how Maru’s dressed like she’s still in the city.
She surprises her by asking “how’s Penny?”
“I don’t know. She hasn’t said anything about the accident.” She admits, feeling a pang of sadness for her friend. Would Penny ever open up about it? To anyone?
Ry nods slowly. “You’re a good friend,” she says softly.
Maru wants to blurt out the truth of what had happened earlier. That she had been magically compelled through the woods, that it hadn’t been her choice, she hadn’t even known about the secret woods! But the words remain cemented in her throat. Ry leaves, and she says nothing.
She returns to the table and gulps half her drink in one go before sitting down.
“Jeez, and you were getting mad at me for taking it too fast.” Penny laughs.
“I wasn’t getting mad.” She says plainly, taking her seat.
“Did something happen?”
“No.”
Penny rolls her eyes, “come on.”
“Nothing happened.”
“Really? Because I saw you talking to Ry and it looked like something was happening.”
“What did you see?” Maru asks before she can think better of it.
Penny smirks, “a lot of blushing.”
Maru shakes her head, “it’s way too dim in here for you to see that.”
“Fine, it’s a body language thing. It looked tense.”
Maru doesn’t say anything, her eyes becoming fixated on Ry across the room. She’s sitting closer to Haley than she had been earlier, laughing at something she said.
“Kay, don’t tell me.” Penny sighs and gets up, she downs her own drink in one go, and then excuses herself to the washroom.
Maru sinks deep into the booth, taking another large gulp of her drink, and tries not to look across the room anymore. What was she doing here? She shouldn’t have let Penny talk her in to it. She should have just asked Penny about her mom and then made them wallow and watch a movie. Maru knew these were selfish thoughts, but she hadn’t felt this sickeningly embarrassed about herself since she was a tween.
When Penny gets back from the bathroom and doesn’t sit across from her at the table but right beside her, so close their legs press together. Penny leans in and next thing she knows her half open mouth is half on Maru’s.
She tenses, “what are you doing?”
“Come on, Maru. I know you like it with girls.” Her breath hot on Maru’s cheek and smelling of sickly sweet alcohol. Maru can’t look at her. Her eyes are stuck on the other side of the room and begging a yoba she doesn’t believe in that Ry doesn’t look over and see her – not now.
“Yeah but you don’t.”
Ry’s putting her coat on. Haley’s putting her coat on. Why isn’t she looking at Maru? Has she ever seen Ry look sheepish before? The tinge in her cheeks must be the alcohol. The heat from the saloon. It’s not, it’s not...
Penny makes am hmmph sound of frustration and flops against the back of the booth. She’s pouting, “you’re no fun,” just as Ry’s slipping out the front door with Haley right behind.
Maru’s eyes sting. Maybe it’s the alcohol but suddenly she has to put her head down on the table. There’s a lump in her throat that takes almost as long to swallow as the blink away the stinging.
“I’m sorry.” She eventually gets out, maybe directed at Penny, maybe not.
“It’s okay.” Penny says, closing her eyes and leaning her head on Maru’s shoulder, “you’re my best friend.”
Ry is tall but Haley is taller in heels. When Ry backs her into the saloon’s wall she has to tilt her head down which she isn’t used to. Sometime around the third drink they’d both known they were going to kiss. Inside, sitting close and then closer, both their faces flushed from the weather, the drinking, and something else, knees brushing under the table, Haley causally touching Ry’s arm, her hair, her upper thigh and keeping it there. Ry looking at her slyly, an unspoken communication. She excuses herself from tipsy Marnie’s rambling.
Only Elliott seems to notice when Haley gets up almost immediately after. He smirks a little, but doesn’t say anything, which Haley appreciates. She follows her out, hand reaching, hovering above, then lightly touching the farmer’s lower back. Can she even feel it through her winter layers? There is an alcohol dizziness in Haley’s head. It is not unpleasant, it mixes with the desire and makes everything feel like heat. The cold of the weather outside only seems to amplify this effect, the need to get closer.
Ry tastes like the beer she was drinking. Her mouth is hot. Haley smiles into the kiss, slips her tongue into her mouth and pulls her closer.
“Take me to yours.” She says, when they break apart.