with madness comes the light.

Billie sat with little grace. She placed her heels on the edge on the bench, hugging her knees to her chest. Her eyes glued to her hand as she picked the rubber fraying from her boots, worn by time. The woman seemed so childlike with her posture as she sat, a habit she never seemed to break. Her mother was never around to tell her to keep her feet off the furniture. Shrugging, her knees tilted in as her shoulders lifted to her ears compacting herself for a second. “Sometimes.” She found the small talk settling funny in her stomach.

“I walk around a lot. Don’t really think about where I’m going.” Billie never drove. She avoided cars and buses when she could. She preferred to be on foot. She missed that about Crescent Harbor when she was gone, how accessible walking places was. “Sometimes I end up here.” Billie wondered if it made sense. Most of the time she avoided speaking at all, worrying her words didn’t reflect the thoughts in her head. “You?”

“Hey..” She spoke in the pause. “I’m sorry.” Her chin rested on her knee as her hand picked at her shoe faster now. Pressing her lips together her eyes didn’t dare peak over towards the woman beside her. “What I did to you was fucked up..”

.

The roaring of the waves settled between them like static and the butterflies-- or bees; honestly, they felt more like bees-- in her stomach took flight to the sound. Perry didn’t have any reason to trust Billie, any reason to trust anyone in Crescent Harbor, and she felt uneasy as the other girl sat down. Her eyes trailed to the lighthouse again-- a place that used to be home but now lived as abandoned as it looked. It was Billie’s question that settled down around her, thick like the fog that lapped at the rocks in the water and she wondered if Billie had forgotten-- or perhaps she’d simply never known-- that the girl who had been so easy to pin blame on had grown up here. 

She opened her mouth to answer just as Billie began speaking again. She was thankful for half a second for the interruption because she wasn’t really sure what she’d been planning on saying. It was the apology that startled her, knocked her off-kilter, had her hands tightening on the edges of her sketchbook. She was transported to a principal’s office, to the accusations of teachers while she cried and desperately tried to defend herself, only to realize she had lost before she’d ever even sat down. She’d been the weird girl, after all. It hadn’t mattered that she’d written an essay that had won her a scholarship to the private school. It hadn’t mattered that she’d had A’s in all of her other classes. The memory was so violently real in that moment that for a long stretch of time, Perry didn’t speak.

Instead, she slowly closed her sketchbook and set it on the bench beside her, pulling her knees up to her chest and resting her chin on them-- mirroring the girl beside her. “I grew up here,” she said, answering the first question while ignoring the last bit, eyes lingering on the lighthouse. “And sometimes I come sit here and I draw or I paint or I just sit. But I haven’t gone back inside. Not since I left.” Not since her grandfather died.

The silence caught and hung again and Perry tightened her arms around herself, hugging her knees to her chest even tighter. “I don't know, maybe I'm trying to say clinging to pieces of the past does nothing. We were kids, right? Does your apology change anything? Would my forgiveness?”

1. What’s your biggest fear?

answered.

4. Last thing that made you cry?

answered.

10. When did you have your first real relationship? How did it go?

19. Have you ever sent a sexually explicit text?

5. What do you usually wear to bed?

Underwear and an oversized shirt.

7. What is your biggest relationship flaw? Has this flaw destroyed relationships for you before?

Perry is pretty self-conscious. Despite all the work she’s done on herself since leaving Crescent Harbor, she feels like she will always be a little bit unsure about everything and everyone. She’s been burned too many times, by too many different people, to fully trust in anyone. So lack of faith, maybe? In herself and in others. It’s probably destroyed relationships before in the sense that they ended before they could really begin. But she can’t think of any specifically.

8. How do you behave around people you like?

1. What’s your biggest fear?

Perry has always felt like the weird girl, the odd one out. She fears that she’ll never really understand people. Or maybe just that people will never really understand her. It’s very lonely and she fears being well and truly alone forever. She watched it happen with her grandfather, closed off from the world until the day he died. She is terrified of that fate.

2. What’s the most used app on your phone?

Probably Instagram. It’s mostly just pictures of her artwork or short videos she’s made. It’s her little corner of the internet where she’s collected one or two little weirdos who seem to, if not understand her, then at the very least, appreciate her and her work.

3. Strangest thing you’ve done while drunk/high?

In college, she got high with a few friends and somehow, they got to talking about how to tell whether eggs were still fresh or if they’d gone bad. Someone googled-- or maybe just said?-- if you put them in water and they float, they’re still good. So, they took out a carton of eggs (literally bought that day) and floated each and every one in a different bowl or cup to see if they were fresh. They also forgot to put them back in the carton in the fridge, so they woke up the next morning to 12 eggs in various dishes filled with water throughout the kitchen.

4. Last thing that made you cry?

-

Billie teetered awkwardly on her feet as the woman settled from the fright. She pressed her lips together in the silence. The silence felt like it dragged on - like the world taunting her by making time move slower. She should have left as soon as she saw Perry. Not saying hi would have made it weirder though, right? Her mind filled with regret and possibilities, before they were cut off by the soft sound of Perry’s voice. Her eyes traced from the other woman’s face to the sketchbook in her lap. Billie never understood why people had been so mean to Perry, not that she herself didn’t add to the pain. She was beautiful in the same way a flower petal was - soft, discreet. Billie noticed her then, but coasting by in school would have proven harder if she befriended her. “No, um..” She shifted awkwardly again, unsure of how to proceed.

After all of this time, Billie never apologized for what she’d done. She could chalk it up to distance, never seeing the other woman, but she wondered if she’d been given the chance in the past if she would have taken it. “Could I sit?” Billie hummed lightly, gesturing to the space on the bench beside the woman. She half expected the other woman to say no. Rightfully so.

.

Perry thought maybe she understood the deer that stood in the middle of the road paralyzed in fear as headlights came barreling towards them. A moment could feel like eternity when you didn’t know what came next. This was largely the same: Perry unable to speak, to keep her brows from furrowing-- a clear sign of her confusion. What happened between them was ancient history and yet, it still made her flush with shame and embarrassment when she thought about it.

Even now, the tips of her ears felt warm beneath Billie’s gaze and she slid her eyes to the waves as they crashed against the shore. Unfolding her legs from beneath her, she finally turned back and offered a small shrug. “Um. Yeah. Sure.” Despite the roar of the waves, it felt eerily quiet now and Perry pulled the sweater she was wearing tighter around herself. Was she supposed to say something? Did she even want to? 

The answer was probably no and definitely no but Perry had never been good with silence. It was far too loud. “Do you--” She squinted, eyes finding the water again as she pursed her lips. It was a casual question as much as it was a suspicious one. “Do you come out here a lot?”

who : @perryfrye​

where : Chinook Point

Sometimes Billie enjoyed an aimless walk blasting music into her ears, where her thoughts could clear. Often when she ventured out on a walk like this, she ended up somewhere unplanned. She walked everywhere, seeing she never got her driver’s license or had even driven a car. Her long legs lead her to the edge of her neighborhood where the lighthouse resided. Some Bright Eyes song chimed in her ears.

Billie’s eyes traced the figure sitting on the bench. Perry Frye had always been someone she avoided, ducking out of places and cutting corners to refrain from bumping into. She reminded Billie of every lie she told, every bad decision she made. None of it was Perry’s fault. Perhaps what she had done to the other woman was one of the worst things she had ever done. At time time, Billie rationalized pinning the stolen test answers on Perry as something she needed to do for survival. Expulsion sat on the other side of being caught for Billie. Perry would at worst be sent to detention.

“Hi.” Billie hummed, head turning from the girl to gaze out on the water. She probably seemed like a deadbeat to Perry. Fair enough. She would just be added to the list of people in this town that had been burned by Billie Davis.

.

The lighthouse loomed before her-- teasing, beckoning-- and Perry felt like a coward. She hadn’t gone back inside-- not since her grandfather died. But she couldn’t deny that part of her that felt drawn here still. The last remaining tether to the place should have died with him, but here it remained, calling to her like the ghosts from her past.

So she sat, legs folded up underneath her, sketchbook open in her lap. She drew the scene, the way the fog nipped at the base of the lighthouse, the way the waves broke over the jagged rocks along the shore. It looked the same and yet. It felt so entirely different. Like it and its past and ghosts and love belonged to someone else entirely. 

Perry hadn’t heard the footsteps. She nearly jumped out of her own skin when the greeting sounded from beside her, hand flying to her throat as her heart slammed against her ribcage. “Jesus,” she panted, eyes settling on the person the word belonged to. 

It was in these moments where she was forced to face the true ghosts of her past that she wondered why she’d stayed in Crescent Harbor. There was too much to remind her, too many things to threaten the work she’d done on herself. There was anger and hurt that had merely been swept under a rug or shoved into a corner of her mind she never intended to go again. It was harder, still, to ignore it when it was standing, flesh and bone, beside her. “Hi,” she echoed after a long moment, the word almost sounding like a question. She blinked at Billie for a few seconds longer, the old hurts settling in again as though they were new. “Did you... need something?”

Theo initially assumed that pregnancy cravings were not real. She’d never spent enough time around a pregnant person to know otherwise. She herself liked to believe that she had simply bloomed into the Bowman household as a young child. These doubts were quickly dismissed when she found that she was having weird cravings. The least worrying of them being ice cream. Normally she wasn’t an ice cream person at all. Growing up she’d absolutely avoided it, which made it being one the things she was craving now. 

She’d hardly looked up from her phone when she entered the shop. It wasn’t until a startlingly familiar voice called her back into reality. It seemed like they both realized at the same moment who exactly they were standing in front of. Theo watched as Perry’s eyes grazed her stomach then quickly averted back up to her face. “I’m…beautiful with an impeccable fashion sense? That would be true.” 

Outwardly she felt herself projecting herself in much the same way she did as a kid. Back when her and Perry were more than familiar strangers. It was a natural regression, and one that immediately made a pit open at the bottom of Theo’s stomach. Nearly a lifetime had passed since her and Perry had been close, but she still missed her. Time and distance had separated them- it made Perry’s absence easier to stomach. But now as she stood in front of her, it was impossible to forget they had once been so close. Theo smiled, nodding her head in agreement. Of all places. “Do you need recommendations?”

.

Ghosts were a subject in which Perry was intimately familiar. And that’s almost what this felt like-- some incorporeal part of her past reaching through the vale, both startlingly familiar and entirely new. She wasn’t sure what to do with that when the hurts still lingered. They had numbed in the way that only time could dull, but they were still there. This ghost, it seemed, Perry didn’t know what to do with.

A laugh, more out of social necessity rather than genuine amusement, escaped her, clanging around hollowly until she nodded her head. “And incredibly... round.” This time, her laugh felt a little less forced. 

She so desperately wanted this to be one of those situations where old friends just fell back into a rhythm as though no time had passed at all, but even as Theo’s question settled somewhere in the realm of possibility, Perry found she just couldn’t take the lifeboat offered to her. Too many obstacles stood between now and okay. And she hated that most of all. Because, looking at Theo, at the years that separated them that both felt so vast and like no time at all, she wanted nothing more than to have that friendship back. It tasted of youthful innocence in a way that no longer belonged to her. Her eyes trailed back to the display case full of ice cream before her eyes were back on Theo, her mouth curving into a smirk that didn’t quite reach her eyes. She could try, at least. For now. “I’ll hear them but I don’t promise I’ll take them into consideration.” 

It was cold outside, sure. But was that going to stop Perry from satisfying this craving even when she knew it ended in uncontrollable teeth chattering and the inability to get warm until she’d spent at least half an hour wrapped up inside a blanket burrito? Absolutely not. 

She stood off to the side, the display of every flavor-- too many flavors-- stretching out before her like a buffet. Cheesecake, butter pecan, mint chocolate chip, cookie dough... Decisions were not supposed to be this hard. 

And maybe it was that difficult choice that had her guard lowered, because she’d known this would happen one day. She’d known all her luck at avoiding those parts of her past would be spent eventually. It was a small town, after all. She hadn’t expected to be caught so off guard, however. When the bell jingled above the door, she barely glanced up from the rows of ice cream to say, “You can go on ahead, I might be here a while.” And then she turned to flash a sheepish smile in the direction of whoever had just walked in. It died on her lips in an instant as her eyes fell on Theo Bowman. Her gaze trailed lower to her stomach, round with child, and Perry felt all the air leave her lungs. There was so much between them, so many years to span the distance, to reach across the chasm of the strangers they had become. It was a strange medley of feelings: happy and sad and angry and hurt-- all of it dulled under the sleepiness of time long passed. 

Perry had never been graceful under pressure, and it seemed that now was no different. A few sounds that might have been the beginning of actual words left her mouth, though no actual sentiment could be found within them. She laughed nervously and shook her head. She had imagined running into Theo thousands of times, had rehearsed scripts in her head of what she’d say. She could remember none of it now. “Oh. Wow. Theo, you’re--” She had to force her eyes to return to a face she both knew so well and didn’t know at all. Her smile was tight, unsure. “Honestly, of all the places I thought this would happen, I gotta admit, this was not one of them.”