Chapter 65

[The following chapter contains strong language. Reader caution is advised.]

Saturday 22nd January 2000

Remember that time about a year ago, when Russell joined Bao, Zahid and me at McDonalds? When Kayleigh showed up and Zahid had one of his explosive outbursts?

Well, uhm…can we consider Russell and me meeting at KFC a totally different thing, and not me really not having much idea where else would be a good place to hang out?

Besides… you can’t argue with fried chicken, right?

Sorry, sorry… I was fretting before I somehow managed to invite Russell to at least air things out, and then I was fretting before we met up… and I’m fretting writing this all down.

I wish I could say it started off alright, but Russell seemed like he didn’t want to be there and I managed to spill out the contents of my wallet all over the floor when attempting to pay for our order. By the time I sat down with the food, I was already regretting having arranged this. My fortunes seemed terrible.

“I know you’re going to try and put on the guilty act with me,” Russell started before I could even apologise for the wait, “and it’s not going to make a difference.”

“If you’ve already made your mind up, why did you agree to come here…?” I asked him while sliding my straw into my drink.

“So you actually listen to me,” he grimaced. “I want you to hear me out and get the picture.”

“Okay…”

A few fries to start me off, while hoping beyond all hope this wasn’t going to hurt too much.

“All the time we’ve been friends, you’ve been kinda weird. Sometimes you’d be all needy and then other times you’d get moody over stupid things. And it’s like… it always had to be what you wanted. If you don’t want to do something, we don’t do it.”

He paused there, opening up his popcorn chicken and popping a couple in his mouth.

“That’s not true…” I told him after swallowing down a mouthful.

“Mhmm!” he nodded right back at me in disagreement as he chewed.

“I did things you wanted, too-”

“Sure, but you couldn’t just do it, you’d always be grumpy…”

I can’t say that he was wrong, because I can’t be certain that I didn’t ever act that way, but I don’t really remember being like that. If anything, in the moment, I readily took him at his word, slumping back a little in my chair.

“I mean…”

“It’s not like I didn’t want to do the things you wanted to, but… you made me feel bad for wanting to do things. Like I was twisting your arm. Like I was the one in the wrong. And… look, I don’t hate you and I enjoyed hanging out with you most of the time, but-”

“It’s fine.”

That “but” was clearly leading to more underlining of how terrible a friend I’ve been to him, and I’d already heard plenty.

“I don’t believe you…” he remarked, narrowing his eyes at me a little. “You’re gonna go away beating yourself up and… This is why I didn’t want to do this. It’s not like you worry about me anymore, so I thought we could just go our separate ways-”

“Why were you my friend all this time if you didn’t want to be?” I asked bitterly. You’ve never seen someone open up a bucket of KFC as sullenly as I did then.

“Whoa, Alex, I’ve been wondering the exact same thing about you,” he snapped back. “Cos ever since you got into all this… you-know-what stuff…” he muttered under his breath to be safe, “it feels like you haven’t wanted to spend any time with me. I figured you were just making do with me and now you had people you liked more.”

“No… it’s just… it’s different with them, I guess…”

I inspected the piece of chicken in my hand, one bite less than whole, as though I could find the words I needed somewhere in the crisp fried skin.

“I never hated being with you, even if I could be… me, sometimes… but I sort of click with the others… I never wanted to stop hanging out with you, but it just…”

“Hey boys,” came the unmistakable voice of my sister, plonking herself down in the chair next to me and promptly grabbing a piece of chicken from the bucket.

“I thought you said nobody else was going to come?” Russell asked me with accusing eyes.

“No, I thought that too…”

I turned to Lucy, to see her happily munching on a drumstick, the briefcase that now seemed to be inseparable from her placed on the table.

“Wanna explain what you’re doing here?”

She raised her forefinger while she chewed, revolving it idly until she swallowed.

“Err, Paige,” she bluffed unconvincingly. “Meeting Paige here. Plus I overheard you telling Mum that you were coming here.”

“Okay, can you wait somewhere else, then? Russell and I are trying-”

“To hang out more, yeah, I figured,” she cut me off, and then flashed Russell an unimpressed look. “He’s joined at the hip to his new buddies, am I right?”

“Lucy, come on…” he groaned back at her.

“I get it, though! I’ve been out of town for months and Paige is probably pissed,” she shrugged, taking a few of my fries (my heart sank just a little at that). “But she’ll get over it. I’ve got enough room in my life for over 7,000 friends!”

She proceeded to shove the fries in her mouth while Russell, understandably, raised an eyebrow at her. He looked to me; I gave him a light shrug to signal that I had no idea how to get her to leave us alone.

“Anyway… what were you saying before…?” he asked me.

After a few tense seconds of me trying to wrack my brain…

“I think I was gonna say… like… something about hanging out with you and then with them…”

(Yes, clearly I remembered what we’d discussed afterwards, but in the moment, Lucy’s interruption had cut through my train of thought so cleanly that I could barely even recover the lost part, let alone attach it back on.)

“Yeah, just try to balance your time more, Alex, god,” Lucy whined dramatically.

“I don’t want you to do it out of… y’know… obligation,” Russell reasoned (after a brief struggle to find that last word). “And if you really wanted to spend time with me, you would’ve made more of an effort…”

“Yeah, Alex, you must hate him if you didn’t even spend, like, one afternoon with him,” my sister spoke with her mouth full.

“I’m not saying he hates me,” my sort-of-friend clarified. “But if he’s-”

“Jeez, Russell, make your mind up, are you two friends or not?”

“Lucy-” I tried, in typical vain, to stop her from poking her nose into our business. Surprisingly, though, it wasn’t her but him who cut me off.

“It looks like we’re not, since we haven’t even hung out together in a year.”

“So why are you two having lunch together?”

She gasped.

“Is this a secret gay hook-up?”

“No!” he and I both insisted at once.

“Do you just love KFC that much?” was her next guess, while grabbing a couple of pieces of popcorn chicken.

“I asked him if we could meet up so I could…” I trailed off, trying to find the right words again. “So I could try to make up for lost time… cos I do feel bad about not really being there…”

“But that’s just guilt,” Russell told me. “If you really cared, you would’ve tried to hang out with me more…”

“Why’s this all on me?” I asked, getting a little frustrated now. “You could’ve reached out to me, too. I know you did once or twice when I already had plans, but then you stopped.”

“That’s still more times than you did,” he countered, “so I thought you didn’t want to hang out anymore…”

“Damn, Russy-Wussy, I didn’t think you were such a big quitter,” Lucy teased him, throwing a fry at him.

“Hey, it’s not like he proved me wrong!” he pointed out urgently. “He could’ve called me any time-”

“Sounds like you would’ve just ignored me if I did…” I noted lowly. It would be wrong to say that I felt absolved of my guilt at that point, but it certainly seemed that we both had a part to play in this.

“Well… I mean, I dunno…” Russell mumbled, actually taken aback by that. Lucy, perhaps feeling the need to lighten the mood, began drumming out a rhythm on the briefcase.

And then, much to my dismay – or perhaps that word undersells the impact it had on me – Melody pulled up the chair next to Russell and sat herself in it.

“Room for one more? Don’t worry, I won’t be here for long,” she purred, leaning her scythe against the table, already sporting her Painter-like clothing.

Lucy scowled at her and slid the briefcase towards herself, moving it to her lap.

“Aaah!” Russell howled all the while, leaping to his feet. Nobody else in the restaurant seemed to notice.

“Don’t panic, Russell. I’m strictly here on business,” she addressed him while gazing right at me.

“And she’s making it so nobody notices her, and I guess us now too,” I added, “so let’s just hear her out and then she can leave.”

Apparently not convinced by that, Russell looked around the place and registered that nobody had noticed him yell and stand up. The entire atmosphere around us was utterly unchanged. That was enough for him to uneasily return to his seat.

“I hate all this weird stuff…” he whimpered.

“Firstly, I’d like to say that I’m very interested in the contents of that briefcase, whatever it contains,” she informed Lucy, finally shifting her line of sight away from me.

“Same!” Lucy chirped brightly. “Problem is, there’s only one briefcase, and Dom gave it to me to keep, sooooo…”

“Theft it is,” Melody smirked confidently.

“I’ll wear my Contact suit every day, just for you!” my sister grinned back as though Melody was posing a fun challenge rather than a threat. “How’s Adam’s place? Have you been cleaning it properly? Looked like you tidied the whole building away when we came to visit.”

“It’s wonderful, thank you. Very spacious. And yes, redecorated a bit, made it more me. I did find some things you left behind, but I understand you had to leave in a hurry…”

She dumped a carrier bag on the table, inside of which I could clearly see a couple of mobile phones along with a handful of other items.

“Ooooh, thanks!” Lucy beamed, snatching the bag. “Just gonna rummage through and make sure you haven’t planted a bomb or something!”

“Wipe your fingers clean first, at least…” I recommended while she moved around, placing the briefcase on her chair and sitting upon it for extra security while her hands would be busy.

“As for you,” Melody looked back to me, “I heard you were having this little meet-up and couldn’t help but stop by.”

“How did she find out?” Russell asked me in exasperation.

“I have eyes and ears everywhere,” she explained. “Including the school, naturally. Even something as inane as this doesn’t get past me.”

“Why are you acting like some kind of James Bond supervillain…?” he rounded on her. “You’re supposed to be the overachieving girl who likes mischief.”

“Thank you for defining who I’m supposed to be, Russell,” she scowled softly at him. “Don’t you think that it’s possible you could know somebody for six years and never recognise what they’re really like? After all, that seems to be the very reason you’re here…”

Her gaze found its way back to me now, a knowing expression on her face.

“No, don’t you pin this on me being… what I am,” I growled at her.

“How is it not? Granted, abandoning someone so readily is more like what your sister does, but that-”

“Shut up.”

“- sensitivity, that feeling that these new friends won’t hurt you like the old ones… the damage you leave in your wake…” she continued regardless.

“What are you talking about…?” Russell enquired, confused, looking between her and me.

“He’s a monster,” Lucy answered instead, like it was the most normal thing in the world, so much so that she didn’t even stop rummaging in the carrier bag.

His eyes settled on me, startled, maybe a little fearful.

“All the Painters are,” my sister carried on. “In fact, you’re the only person at this table who isn’t. Probably, I dunno, maybe you are?”

“No, he’s profusely normal,” Melody claimed callously.

And Russell’s eyes never left me, that stare searing through to my soul.

“You’re… you’re a monster…?”

“I’m not with her,” I assured him, “never with her. We’re-”

“You never told me…”

“I never knew. I didn’t know there was something wrong with me-”

“You have to shake off that mindset, Alex,” Melody declared. “Nothing’s wrong with you. That’s just what people like Russell think because they can’t understand.”

“Would you please shut up?” I pleaded her, temper flaring. “I’ve fucked up a friendship because I’m an idiot, how is that a good thing?”

“You choose whether it’s good or bad,” she shrugged. “But you’re going to keep destroying every relationship you have, so you can sulk about it and beat yourself up, or you can come with me and learn to be happy.”

“Or,” Lucy chimed in, “you can just do whatever the hell you want and not pretend Melody’s got all the answers.”

Seemingly content with the contents of the bag, she took a few more of my fries.

I got to my feet, bringing forth my Lokon sword.

“Leave us alone, Melody,” I snarled; she simply stood up in kind.

“Make me, Alex,” she chuckled back.

All of the tables and all the other people in the restaurant sunk into the floor, leaving only the four of us in a shifting environment. The walls accelerated away, expanding our new arena. I generated my Painter gear in a blast of pure blue, and Melody took that as a starting pistol: I found her lunging for me as soon as the explosion of colour dissipated, and blocked her imperfectly, struggling to take the force of her blow.

Russell scurried out of the way of our duel, while, as best as I could tell from my peripheral vision, Lucy simply took a calm stroll away from us.

“You never make things easy for yourself,” Melody told me, while taking one opportunistic strike at me with her scythe.

“I hold myself to a standard!” I shouted back, meeting that strike, and the next, and the next. “I want to be a good person!”

“Who defines what’s good and what’s not? People who don’t understand us? Who don’t even try to?”

She swept my legs out from beneath me with the shaft of her scythe, toppling me to the floor; I rolled away as she brought the blade down towards where my chest had been a second earlier.

“It’s not us versus them!”

I managed to blast myself upwards with my weapon, rolling in mid-air and landing down several feet away from her.

“We’re all people, that’s what matters!”

“Tell Russell that,” she smiled insidiously at me, slamming the base of her scythe into the ground and sending forth chains of white in an effort to bind me.

“He’s better off without me anyway!” I told her, stabbing my sword into the floor in kind and willing smaller blades to spring forth and intercept her chains.

“And everybody else? Should the whole world live without Alex Matthews in it?”

The chains curled up into spiked balls, which exploded. I brought up a wall of blue to keep myself safe, and my opponent escaped from view; panicked, I brought up another wall behind myself, only for the scythe’s blade to appear from my right and slice into my arm.

I cried out in agony, struggling to stay upright. With a thought, the two walls wrapped close around me to protect me, and then I urged Lokonessence to heal my arm as quickly as possible.

“You think so little of yourself, so badly of the damage you do, that you’d ostracise yourself from everybody? How is that right?”

The deep cut in my arm burst out neon blue blood, and the pain ceased, the wound healed.

“Why should I accept hurting other people just for my own sake?” I demanded of her, sending the shielding towards her and charging right after it. She struck through the construct and blocked my attack with barely a moment to spare.

“Why care about them?” she asked sharply. “If your very existence hurts them, then embrace it.”

The shattered remains of my shield zoomed towards her feet, forming into shackles that bound her ankles together, destabilising her. Another strong swing from me knocked her backwards, and to the floor.

“You’re a beautiful, chaotic dragon of a monster,” she continued on while using her scythe to slice through her bindings. “I don’t understand why you can’t accept that.”

“The thing about dragons is, they always get slayed,” I reminded her, and then ran my hand along the flat of my sword to generate a series of blue sparks that leapt from the blade to the ground, and then to Melody, zapping her and bouncing from one spot to another as she returned to her feet.

“Not when monsters rule the world,” my enemy spoke assuredly between hisses of pain.

I raised my sword to the ceiling, and the sparks grew in size, embracing Melody’s body and holding her in place.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the police?” I asked of her.

“Because I can teleport away whenever I like,” she replied.

“Fair point…”

(I’d forgotten that…)

“And that aside? You know this is beyond the police. This is you and your friends, and me and mine. They already had me once and I slipped right back out. That says everything you need to know.”

She chuckled to herself.

“Okay, I’ll leave you to it. You can give up on your friendship with Russell and pretend the same thing won’t end up happening with your new friends. Bury your head as deep into the sand as you like. I’ll wait however long it takes for you to come to your senses.”

In the blink of an eye, she vanished from within the blue electricity. The restaurant began returning to shape like a stretched rubber band released, walls zooming back into place and tables and eaters popping back up from the floor. I quickly dismissed my Painter clothing and sent away my sword, returning to our table before everything could fully reset; Russell sheepishly made his way back too, while Lucy whistled a random tune as she settled down again.

The world sprung to life like an invisible director had called “action!”.

“I’m never eating out with you again…” Russell sighed, exasperated.

“Awh, I was gonna ask if you wanted to go to Dominos next week…” I chuckled, and he couldn’t help but smile a little himself.

“I heard all that, with Melody,” he mentioned while grabbing some chicken. “You’re not… look, yeah, you hurt me, but you’re not some terrible person. I don’t hate you. I just felt like you used me as a stand-in friend…”

“No, we had tonnes of fun together,” I said with an earnest smile. “Maybe sometimes I got grumpy, but I liked being with you…”

“Get a room,” Lucy quipped, grabbing one of my chicken strips.

“Get your own!” I told her, moving my remaining food away from her and then focusing on Russell again. “Like Lucy said… me and the others… have issues, and maybe that’s why we all sort of fit together? We all have each other, somehow, I guess. It’s not that I never wanted to hang out with you, but it’s something special with them and we have all this crazy stuff going on in our lives and…”

“I understand. But if you wanna still be friends or whatever… we have to try and hang out now and again.”

“I know… I’ll try… I mean, I know you-”

“No, that… I’m up for that…” he nodded. “I’m actually kinda busy these days too. Went paintballing with my cousins last spring and met these really cool guys… and I’ve been hanging out with them a lot. There’s even this girl…”

He smiled fondly, the face of a smitten guy.

“Aaaah, look at that face!” I teased, glad for him. “Hey, you’ve found your own Painters!”

“Something like that,” he laughed a little. “Yeah, maybe we could try to meet once in a while. For old time’s sake.”

“Sounds good…”

I still can’t help but feel bad – can’t help but believe he was still ruffled by everything, by the way I’ve behaved with him – but at the very least, we came away with something of a resolution to the mess our friendship had become.