Title: "I Haven't Seen Barbados"
Author: monimala
Fandom: VM
Rating/Classification: NAC, angst, Mac gen. 700 words.
Disclaimer: Not my characters.
Summary: My contribution to the emerging post-"Not Pictured" Mac Angst genre. She's been handed the literature...
Mac doesn't take a dozen scalding hot showers. She doesn't scrub herself raw. She doesn't curl into a tight protective ball and ask herself why she didn't know Cassidy at all.
But she knows those are the things girls are supposed to do in situations like this. She's seen the movies. She's been handed the literature along with tepid cups of tea steeped in stale Styrofoam and told, "If you need to talk, I'm here," by a woman she'll never call.
She starts taking baths, the first one when she gets home from the police station. She soaks in the tub for hours, her hair floating around her in streaks of blue and brown and red. Until her mom knocks, pushes open the unlocked door, just to make sure there aren't arcs of blood on the tile.
She rubs lotion into her skin. Obsessively. Bath and Bodyworks cucumber melon. It's too sweet, too sharp, makes her hungry, and reminds her of how smooth Cassidy's body was against hers before he cried and hissed, "damn!" and rolled off of her.
She sleeps with her arms and legs splayed out, taking up her entire bed.
So there is no room for anything.
No room for memory.
She doesn't hide out. She goes to the Sac 'n' Pac for a bag of Funyons and a Big Gulp two days after everything. She wears flip-flops inside and doesn't pretend the freshman at the register is staring at her skeevy feet. She doesn't waste time with denial, pretending her sweet, awkward boyfriend wasn't really a psycho killer who raped Veronica, who left her alone and naked at the Neptune Grand.
She doesn't swear off men.
Just boys.
So when she's sitting on a park bench near Dog Beach at 2 AM, a week after Cassidy has been scraped off the sidewalk, a week after she's been wrapped in a rape blanket, and a man walks up…she doesn't flinch. She doesn't jump -- she'll never jump.
But she knows those are the things girls are supposed to do in situations like this.
Sheriff Lamb squints at her, like he's filing through all the victimized, vulnerable women he knows, and stops at M: Mackenzie, Cindy, a.k.a Mac. That girl. Not to be confused with Marlo Thomas.
"You shouldn't be here," he tells her, which isn't the most convincing argument in the world, so she stays where she is.
After a minute or two, maybe 10, he gestures for her to scoot over and sits down even when she doesn't. He watches her shake sand out of her sneakers. He watches her crumple up the wrapper of an In-and-Out burger -- her fourth today, diet be damned -- and toss it into the dark and doesn't call her on littering.
He doesn't say anything at all, actually.
Which is kind of nice because she's sick of people saying "I'm sorry," and Mom has no more room in the freezer for casseroles. She didn't know people did that for your boyfriend's suicide…for people who engineer bus crashes. Is there really an appropriate comfort food and corresponding piece of Pyrex for that?
Mrs. Sinclair -- her mother, her real mother, and that *so* isn't her biggest issue anymore -- sent a book of poems and Mac hasn't opened it. Hasn't read a line. Just like she hasn't choked down a single bite of tuna and noodles.
Instead, she filled out the last of her housing paperwork for Hearst. She ghosted an old hard drive, reconfigured a new one, and hacked into Neptune High's records to erase any reference to one Cassidy Casablancas.
She woke up every morning.
She kept moving.
She keeps moving.
She -- "Oh, God."
"Told you. You shouldn't be here." The words are a little smug. And he doesn't say he's sorry.
"That's so…not…helping." Except it kind of is.
Lamb holds her hair back for her as she heaves hamburger and bun and seven days into the sand. As her stomach turns inside out and she retches and retches and retches until she's empty.
And there is no room for anything.
No room for memory.
Just for hate.
And strength.
She wipes her mouth and breathes.
--end--
May 12, 2006.