Page 92 of Fate Fiction

“I know it sounds made up but he wanted me. And to be honest I still have no fucking idea why he did. I won’t ever know because I’ll never ever see him again.” I laid down on the couch and focused on a small patch of scraped up paint on the opposite wall.

“This far surpasses anything in the ‘best friend’ handbook,” Andrea laughed a bit. “What do you need? Shots? A Twitter hate campaign against him? A hookup with someone more famous?”

“Want to help me clean out all my Thorndown shit?” I said, half joking.

She stood up and crossed the room to the shelf that had a few Thorndown figurines. She grabbed the eight-inch tall Sir Erwyn and held it up. “I’ll rip his plastic head off if you say the word.”

It only took about fifteen minutes to go through all of my merch and decide what to keep and what to donate. Andrea kept telling me I could get some decent money for some of my collection but I wanted it gone more than I wanted a few extra dollars after the awkward social dance that is selling someone something online.

The first item to go was that little figure of Sir Erwyn. I smashed it with a satisfying crunch in the alleyway behind my building. I felt like a mad woman breaking a toy into a million pieces, but it was cathartic, and frankly I didn’t care. Andrea watched in horror from a few feet away while Sir Erwyn was crushed into shards of plastic.

I’d never been excited to go to work after vacation.

It was eight in the morning, I had a commute to take and an office to get to and I was staring at my reflection deciding if I still looked as busted as I did yesterday. Returning to regular life and society after being up at camp was always a weird dance, even without the added baggage of this trip. Business casual trousers grazed over scraped and bug bitten calves, hiding the effects of a week long romp in the woods. Sleeves obscured sun tanned shoulders. Carefully applied concealer masked the bags underneath eyes from late nights spent on the dock. I spackled it on this morning to cover the lingering puffiness from my emotional breakdown. A rotting corpse needing to slough on makeup to create a sloppy painted on facade.

I felt hollow, the slightest bit of pressure could crack me open and moths and dust would fly out. I’d find the real me again, she was haunting this apartment looking for a better body to inhabit. I’d catch glimmers of her, lurking in the corners, glaring and shaking her head. “What have you become,” she’d whisper.

It had been seventy two hours. Time that would have passed without a second thought before. Three days was a blink. At the bookends of those days were two drastically different lives lived.

There was no defeat to accept, no true loss. In a way I’d lost long before I realized there was anything to lose. Whatever I was left with now was my own doing. My unraveling was the result of my childish, careless nature.

I mumbled a half-assed mantra to myself as I shut the door behind me and stepped onto the sidewalk.

Taking the T was a game of avoiding eye contact and anything going on around me. I wanted to fade into invisibility among the other commuters, doing nothing to attract attention of any sort. I’d keep my eyes glued to my phone until my stop was reached then swiftly exit in the sea of people all doing the same. I lived by an unspoken social contract: it’s early, everyone’s miserable, don’t take up space or sound.

I was engrossed in a paranormal podcast when something caught the corner of my eye. A terrible glimmer of familiarity. I flicked my gaze towards the poster, shiny and fresh having recently been hung up. Evan Fucking McLeod’s face was directly across from me on a poster promoting the app the show was on, “stream all episodes of Thorndown now!” I grimaced, and someone leaning on the pole next to it assumed I’d made the face at them. I quickly looked back down at my phone. Once they got off, I allowed myself another look.

I searched for pieces of the true Evan in the heavily stylized picture of Sir Erwyn. The train car jostled, sending commuters bumping into one another, but my gaze remained. A thick static overcame me, drowning out the podcast hosts that were speaking through my headphones. I had successfully avoided him on social media, unfollowing every single Thorndown adjacent account I followed, but the universe decided to serve him up to me on the Red Line. The poster wouldn’t stare back of course, and as I examined it I heard the announcement for my stop.

The spell broke and the noise of the train and my music resumed. In this universe I was just Dani with the HR job. Not the Dani who fell into a bizarre tryst with Evan McLeod.

No one on the train knew this part of my story. No one in my life except Andrea and Caroline knew. It would’ve been easier to write the whole thing off as a hallucination, a weird fanfiction come to life. For the rest of my life there’d be a piece of my story I could never fully shed, but I could at the very least try to act like it had never happened.

I stepped onto the platform and said a silent goodbye to the photo of Evan, his visage would still live on the train.

Sitcoms usually have a rule for how long it takes to get over someone. They have to keep the plot on track and it’s no fun to watch the main character wallow in sadness for too long. The sitcom writers wouldn’t know what to do with me, I’d broken their constructed rules. I was fully over Nick, which was a relationship I should have been mourning for much longer than a mere two weeks. The week-long affair I had with Evan on the other hand seemed like something that would lie dormant in my memory and reappear when least convenient, like his face on the train.

When things ended on a period it meant there was a finality. The sentence had ended, the story was over. Evan and I ended on a question mark perhaps, or an em dash or ellipses. There was no true closure. Any outsider could safely assume that the conversation we’d had left no opportunity for interpretation. He was entirely clear how he felt.

Still, there was a half second—where he lingered in the doorway—that I wondered if there was something that remained unsaid.

seventeen

. . .

Saturday, Early July

The need to write was taking over me like a symbiote.

I’d sworn off fanfiction, redirecting my evening habit of scrolling fic sites into scrolling Pinterest. I hadn’t managed to pick up a book yet, worried some line would inspire me to write a one-shot or add to a work in progress. Everything could circle back to Thorndown. Everything circled back to Evan.

The problem was, I found inspiration everywhere. In music. In the way the summer sun cast an amber glow on the trees on my street at dinnertime. I had nowhere to expel this energy. Somehow even my own writing decided to haunt me by way of dreams of the ghost of my past. This fanfiction I’d started writing years before would never ever leave my brain, even after I’d deleted it from my hard drive. I’d search for random lines I’d written like they were verbal needles in narrative haystacks. I missed the feeling I would get when words spilled out without a second thought. That high of knowing that every click of the keyboard was creating something that felt like magic.

Like Sir Erwyn in “Ice on the Turret,” I was haunted most nights by three ghosts. The ghost of Evan hurt and angry in the cabin, the ghost of Evan propped atop me on the beach, and oddly, the ghost of Sir Erwyn, who I’d get flashes of riding away on a horse.

How cinematic.

Distractions had been plentiful. Work was busy, Andrea and Caroline kept me occupied with patio drinks and wedding planning, but I’d lost the distraction of creation. My life had so easily slipped back into patterns. It had become comfortable again. I wasn’t someone wearing a Dani Grant costume, I felt like myself now. Saturdays were spent stepping into MokaMolé and a cheery barista saying, “iced mocha latte with oat milk?” at the sight of me.