Chapter 1: This Fixes Everything

October 7, 2013

Blood pounded in Chloe's temples. The shaking, sniveling rich kid at the bathroom sink was the last obstacle between herself and freedom. The only good Arcadia Bay was the one that was behind her, and Nathan Prescott's cash could help make that happen.

"I can tell everybody Nathan Prescott is a punk-ass who begs like a little girl and talks to himself—"

Nathan whirled on her with a gun in his hand, and every last bit of confidence, brio, and grit Chloe possessed vanished in an instant.

"You don't know who the fuck I am," Nathan said, "or who you're messing around with!"

"Where'd you get that?" Chloe asked, unable to keep the tremble out of her voice. The fear and rage coming off of Nathan had and an actual smell to it, like if cheap after-shave could spoil like mayonnaise. "What are you doing? Come on, put that down!"

Nathan advanced on her and put the gun to her gut. The situation had escalated so quickly that Chloe was too shocked to even try to push him away.

"Don't ever tell me what to do! I am so sick of people trying to control me!"

Chloe's mind scrambled after the control she had over the situation not a moment earlier. "You are going to get in hella more trouble for this than drugs—"

"Nobody would ever even miss your punk ass, would they?"

Her brain went on the fritz, hopping from higher unanswered questions to lower base emotions, trying to latch onto something, anything that could get her out of this. Her arms, independent from her thoughts, summoned strength to try to push him away

"Get that gun away f—"

A click, ordinary in any other surrounding, was amplified by the acoustics of the bathroom. A brief flash of light was accompanied by the sound of a small, whirring rotor.

Nathan spun around and the gun went off. At Nathan's mental competency hearing a month later in Portland, Chloe testified under oath that she did not know whether or not the act was intentional.

The bullet tore through the upper chest of a girl Chloe didn't recognize, pushing her against the bathroom wall, before finding its home in the plaster behind her. A spatter of blood stretched out behind her as she dropped the Polaroid camera she was holding. The girl absently put her left hand to the entry wound that was rapidly ruining her pink shirt and gray hoodie.

Nathan dropped the gun and put his hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and steadily tearing from shock. Chloe looked from him to the still-standing girl at the bathroom wall. This moment afforded Chloe a shock of recognition. The bangs covering her rather prominent forehead were different, but she instantly recalled the girl's blue eyes and freckles from a halcyon past before her life turned to shit.

"Max?"

Max Caulfield looked from the blood seeping between the fingers of her left hand to Chloe.

"Hey, Chloe," she said, before sliding to the floor, leaving a painterly streak of blood on the wall.

Chloe's legs moved for her. Her hand reached into her jacket for her phone of its own free will. Her fingers dialed 911. Her mouth summoned paramedics. But her mind was alight with two words warped into one, their six letters infinite: ohshitohshitohshitohshitohshit…

Her free hand pressed down on Max's entry wound, and Chloe was only aware that she was yelling at emergency service on her phone when Max raised her right, non-bloody hand to Chloe's cheek, silencing her. Chloe's eyes went from Max's blood to Max's face.

She was smiling.

The smile was no less sweet than if her teeth had not been pink from the blood rushing into her mouth. And her eyes. Those blue, rapidly dimming eyes held triumph, as though she had duped the Grim Reaper into maneuvering himself into checkmate. If Chloe didn't know any better (and Chloe had her days where she had to admit she didn't), she would have sworn it was the look of a girl in love.

But that smile slackened. Those eyes rolled back. That hand fell to the bathroom floor with a limp thud.

The shooting of a young woman by the scion of a town's wealthiest family will invariably send said town into a flurry of activity. The shooting of Max Caulfield by Nathan Prescott in Arcadia Bay was no different. A string of events occurred in the wake of that shooting, some great and some small. But they all changed Arcadia Bay forever.

At 2:05 PM that day, a Monday, after paramedics had left the scene, Nathan Prescott was marched through the front doors of Blackwell Academy in handcuffs, accompanied by arresting officer Detective Armand DiCicco, and two uniformed officers who attempted to stem the tide of students and faculty (and one reporter from the Arcadia Bay Beacon) from crowding the scene. In the encroaching chaos surrounding Nathan Prescott's perp walk, no one had noticed that the school's photography teacher, Mark Jefferson, had made his way to the parking lot.

At 3:32 PM, after finger-printing, mug shots, and the confiscation of contraband by the officers on duty, Nathan Joshua Prescott, with his attorney present, confessed to the shooting of Maxine Caulfield and the attempted murder of Chloe Elizabeth Price. The latter charge was aided by a photograph from Caulfield's Polaroid camera (which did not break upon impact with the bathroom floor) that depicted Prescott holding a gun to the stomach of the clearly distressed Price. In exchange for leniency, Prescott also confessed to the accidental death of one Rachel Dawn Amber, age 18, missing since April of that year. Nathan provided the location of Amber's corpse, as well as the location of a place he called "The Dark Room," where he alleged that he conducted acts of unlawful imprisonment and sexual assault under the tutelage of Mark Jefferson, age 46.

At 6:01 PM, Detective DiCicco and Nathan Prescott, accompanied by a forensics team that had come down from Eugene, arrived at the American Rust Junkyard on the outskirts of Arcadia Bay where, in accordance with Prescott's statements that afternoon, they found the remains of Rachel Amber. DiCicco informed Amber's parents, Lucinda and Donovan, in person at 7:22. At 8:38, Lucinda Amber took it upon herself to call Chloe Price and inform her of the tragic event. They were on the phone for three hours.

At 9:05 PM, SWAT team members converged on a barn in the woods some miles outside Arcadia Bay. After finding the entrance passage and using the door code provided by Nathan Prescott in his statement to police, they found it abandoned, but stocked with canned goods and equipped with an amateur photography studio. They also found red binders full of photographs of clearly drugged young women posed in a provocative and suggestive manner. A member of the team, Sergeant George Naffit, stated at Prescott's mental competency hearing the following month that "I've been to murder scenes that didn't make me as sick as those pictures did." Among the victims whose photographs the binders contained were the now deceased Rachel Amber, as well as one Kate Beverly Marsh, age 18, who had gained some level of local notoriety in recent days due to a video that had gone viral.

At 7:00 AM the following morning, the website for the Arcadia Bay Beacon updated to coincide with print copies hitting stands. The shooting of Max Caulfield, and the discovery of both Rachel Amber's corpse and The Dark Room made the front page. When reached for comment, Sean Prescott (the head of the Prescott Foundation, CEO of Prescott Development, and donor to Blackwell Academy) had his PR department issue a statement that included both support for his son, and faith in a justice system that would see the truth come to light. Behind closed doors, however, Prescott began the slow and quiet process of moving the liquid assets of Prescott Development out of Arcadia Bay.

At 2:04 PM, after delivering her statement to the ABPD, Kate Marsh was stirred from her attempt at a nap by a knock at her dorm room door. She answered to find Victoria Chase standing in the hallway, her hands folded in front of her. Her eyes were ringed and set deep into her skull, as though she hadn't been sleeping. She refused to make eye contact. Kate, clearly seeing that Victoria was troubled, placed her hand on Victoria's arm and asked what the matter was. It was at this point that Victoria's eyes finally met Kate's, and she promptly burst into tears, saying "I am so sorry," before Kate ushered her into her dorm room. It was there that Victoria confessed to posting the video of Kate at a Vortex Club party. Upon finding out about The Dark Room, and the actions taken there by both her best friend and the man she had strong feelings for, she had come to the conclusion that Kate had not, in fact, been drunk, but had instead been drugged and taken advantage of. And had she known, she wouldn't have posted the video and would have done something to help her. But following this train of thought, she realized that even if Kate had not been drugged, she should have done those things anyway. "I don't want to be the kind of person that makes me," Victoria told Kate before a fresh round of sobbing. The two talked for some time.

At 3:43 PM, bail for Nathan Prescott was set at one-point-five million dollars. Said bail was posted almost immediately, via a check from the Prescott Foundation.

At 12:11 PM the next day, a Washington Highway Patrol officer attempted to pull over a truck that had been reported stolen. Upon hearing sirens, the truck sped up, leading the officer on a high speed chase, which lasted roughly five minutes before the truck rolled after a reckless turn. The officer apprehended the truck thief (dazed, but still alive), and found him to be Mark Jefferson, who was wanted down in Oregon in connection with a murder and a string of sexual assaults. Grand theft auto (as well as possession of an unregistered firearm, as a search of the truck revealed) was just more to add to the pile.

At 1:59 PM, Sean Prescott's legal team met in a conference room at Pan Estates in the woods at the edge of Arcadia Bay. It was agreed upon that the team would enter an insanity plea on behalf of Nathan Prescott. Doctor William J. Denton (known in publishing and syndicated radio circles as "Dr. Bill") was set to testify for the defense.

The funeral was on Friday.

Chloe drove to the cemetery by herself, dressed in a suit that she had assembled piecemeal from thrift store visits over a period of months. Every once in a while, she set some money aside to maintain it: a crisply ironed black button-up shirt, black trousers with creases so well-defined they could saw through old cheese, a black blazer. And the cool thing was, they went with her favorite pair of boots. The top of her brain didn't know why she had collected this suit, but the bottom did: if the worst came to pass, this is the suit she wanted to be buried in.

She just didn't know she had to bury someone while wearing it.

The closest friends of the deceased showed up, which in this case, meant just about everyone in town under the age of twenty. There were some that Chloe knew face to face: Justin Williams, for one, the skater kid that was trying his damnedest to hide the thing he had for her, and Kate Marsh for another, whom she'd known since they were kids growing up in The Bay, before her whack-job religious parents moved her out of town. There were some she knew by reputation, as Rachel had told her months ago that one could always spot Victoria Chase both by the upturned nose, trying to detect the scent of her own shit which, paradoxically, did not stink, and by the two drones following her. And there was one person she'd met just the other day: a dweeby-cute kid named Warren Graham, whom she had bumped into at the gas station a couple of blocks away from her house, when she took a break from long crying jags in her bedroom to buy cigarettes.

Chloe took her spot between her mother Joyce (who'd spent the last four days hovering near her at a safe distance to accommodate any need she might have) and her stepfather David (who'd made just one shitty face when he found out that Chloe was wearing a suit to the funeral instead of a dress, but other than that, had shown a sympathy and sweetness that she was shocked to find he was capable of). The pastor, who Chloe took a small portion of time away from being heartbroken to note resembled that guy from Curb Your Enthusiasm, began his eulogy.

His words entered one of Chloe's ears, and the mangled corpses of said words exited the other. She didn't give a single shit about what the pastor had to say when the God he represented saw fit to make the day so fucking sunny. Chloe had never given much thought to whether God existed or not, but she would now conjure Him from whole cloth just to pick a fight. I want fog, you asshole! I want rain, I want locusts, I want some sign that your almighty ass is sorry for killing my friend!

And with that, almost on cue, a single drop of rain fell on Chloe's boot. She looked up. No other rain came. Lesser events in the course of history made believers out of many, but those many were not Chloe Price. If anything, that solitary blot of precipitation just made her angrier.

That's it?

And with that, the levees Chloe had so painstakingly erected within herself to avoid showing weakness in public burst. Her face reddened and the love, anger, and grief flowed from her: from her mouth in an almost silent hiss, from her eyes in scalding tears, from her very essence. David put his arm around her shoulders. Joyce held her hand.

Chloe was the last to leave the cemetery. She stood before the gravestone in silence. She scanned her memory and found she hadn't spoken a word all day. Even the friends she had at the funeral knew to avoid her on this, of all days. And in a way, she was glad. Chloe was capable of, and prided herself on her ability to, talk a mile of shit. But Friday, October 11th, 2013 was the day she fell silent. To Chloe, there was no greater sign of respect or love than that her words should fail her.

She spared the words on the gravestone one more glance before leaving the cemetery.

RACHEL DAWN AMBER
1995-2013
Dear Friend and Beloved Daughter

Chloe stood in a hospital room and looked down at the comatose form of Max Caulfield. She was hooked up to a heart rate monitor, she was being fed intravenously, she had that… that plastic tube thing in her nose.

She made her way from the funeral, directly to the hospital. This had been her fifth visit in as many days, and on this day she bumped into two blandly attractive people in their forties on their way out of Max's room. As hugs were exchanged, it amused Chloe somewhat that in spite of the general punk rock fuck-offishness she had adopted in the past five years, and in spite of their insistence that she do so, she could never bring herself to refer to these two as "Ryan and Vanessa." She could be the reincarnation of a bloody-minded Viking princess, and they'd still be "Mister and Missus Caulfield."

She pulled up a cheaply made and poorly padded wooden chair, and sat to ponder the girl before her. Her face held affection, yes, but a trace of confusion as well, and a more than detectable trace at that. The thought on Chloe Price's mind was singular and clear:

What does this mean?

Since Monday afternoon, Chloe had conducted a fierce and uncompromising moral inventory, and found that several of the things she took to be evident truths about herself had been proven wrong by the simple act of Max taking a picture and getting shot for her trouble.

On Monday morning, Chloe knew that no one gave a shit about her. Max got shot, and now David and Joyce had formed a loving cocoon around her.

On Monday morning, Chloe would have stopped at nothing to find out what happened to Rachel. Max got shot, and now she knew, as horrible as that truth had been.

On Monday morning, Chloe knew that everyone and everything she had liked or loved in this world would leave her. Her father and Rachel had been the most notable examples. Hell, even her cat Bongo when she was fourteen. Now? Her life had been saved, a few more years added to her clock by the one person she had ever known to leave… and then come back.

She couldn't go on the way she had been. That much was clear. She couldn't, and still maintain the illusion that she was honest with herself. Chloe Price had, not just a new lease on life, but a new lease on a better life.

So… why didn't she feel any better? Why did the anger she had cultivated for so long not wither away and die, but instead crouch on the rear of her brain, waiting?

In that talk with Warren at the gas station, as Chloe smoked near the ice machine and he watched her do so, he said that Max wasn't a jump-in-front-of-a-bullet kind of girl. Chloe hadn't seen her in five years, so she had to rely on Warren's word that she hemmed and hawed over every little thing, from the photos for that son-of-a-bitch Jefferson's class, to what movie she wanted to watch at a given moment. "It was like she went into that bathroom one person, and came out a completely different one," Warren had said. "It just goes to show."

It certainly did.

The Second Coming of Max Caulfield had been a miracle, admitted to and sanctified by a girl who didn't believe in them. The time and place that Max had chosen to reappear in her life had been so right that it bordered on the suspicious.

Look of affectionate puzzlement still firmly in place, she leaned over and took Max's hand in her own. She was looking out the window when the comatose Max's hand squeezed Chloe's fingers and her eyes fluttered beneath her eyelids.

Of course, Chloe thought. This is Arcadia Bay. Miracles happen all the time here. You mean you didn't know?