Chapter Three: Plans II

Chip Hardwell.  Chip's parents didn't have any real reasons for picking the name,  no Confederate generals or coffee brand, not even a baby-naming book. They just loved how it sounded, short and perky, loved that name almost as much as they loved their tall and stoic son.

10:13, October 8th, Chip stares down at his cell phone with his head in his hands and his shoulders hunched forward. He's slouched in his favorite rolly chair, the one with the missing wheel and the seat stuffed with goose feathers. Percy's sitting up on his rolltop desk, her head lowered and her hand squeezing his shoulder. All she can see of him is a blonde head, all he can see of her is her ruffly purple sweater.

"You did what you had to, Chip. I'm so sorry I never noticed." Her voice lowers, her green eyes cloudy now in the flickering light of the attic room. She's about to cry. A stranger could never tell, because she's trained herself to hide her emotions with a short laugh and a smile,  but Chip can. He can tell because when he lifts his head, red creeps up her cheeks, all the way to her eyelids, brow. He can tell by the way her shoulders begin to quiver.

"Not your fault," murmurs Chip, glancing back down at his phone screensaver. It's a picture of the three of them, dolled up for tenth-grade homecoming, back when Percy was pretending to date Chip. They're standing in front of the school's all-glass exterior, and each panel splashes back a starry night at the camera. Percy, always smiling, sits atop Chip's shoulders, piggyback style. Her hair runs down her neck in perfect curls, her eyelids smoky dark with makeup and her lips lacquered to a red sheen. Emerald dress with a jeweled belt. She looks like a movie star, this fifteen-year-old making bunny ears behind Chip's head.

Chip is grinning—he never smiles, not with his teeth—at the lens, hair swept sideways in a ponytail that coils down his neck in waves like liquid gold. His sleeves are rolled up to reveal leather cuffs. Nine of them on each arm, count 'em, black, studded, spiked. He'd left his thrift store Oxfords that bought him admission to the dance in one of the urinals, and now he's wearing his favorite combat boots that lace to the knees. Max is standing beside him, suit sleeves tied around his waist, chocolate-brown hair flopped down in front of his face, tie making him look young and dignified. He's making a 'crazy' gesture by his left temple, his finger a loop of motion, and his right-hand squeezes Chip's hip.

It's almost been a year.

Chip wants to go back. He wants to burrow into the photo and stay that almost-smiling kid forever. Before Max got his powers. Before Max hurt him.

"But there are signs, you know?" Percy says, legs swinging. Her bare feet whoosh over the arm of Chip's chair, missing his shoulder by half an inch. "You were bruised all the time and Max got weird and twitchy. His dad is crazy! Those are signs! I just..."

"S'alright." He flips his phone over so he can't stare at Max's sweet smile. When he lifts his head to look into Percy's eyes, he blinks several times, as if he's staring into the sun. "I'm okay." He even grins. "I promise."

"He hit you!" She throws herself off his desk and paces around his barren room. His room now is just a bed, desk and guitar equipment he keeps under tarps. When Percy was little, she couldn't stay after dark because she thought the tarped-cover stereo system was a monster, perched in the corner. "Chip, you're amazing, just everything you've been through. I'm so so sorry, I—"

"I'm good, Persephone." Chip doesn't like to talk, and Percy might as well have been born to do the opposite. He doesn't know when he started to call her by her full name when she got too talky, just knows it's something he caught her parents doing ("Percy! PERSEPHONE! I just want to hear myself think!"). And it has an immediate effect on her, every time. Her face goes all red and she starts to fidget with her hands, glance sideways, twist up the hem of her shirt in her fingers or stuff her hands in her pockets. She starts to smile nervously, all fake demure. Perfect girls aren't supposed to talk so much, to fill up so much space with their thoughts. They're supposed to shrink. She quiets, but the silence is strange and uncomfortable. Chip sighs. "I mean, no, I guess I'm not all okay."

Percy turns around, her hands balled together under her chest. "I know you don't want to talk, but..." She wants an emotion-fest, like in the sitcoms, Chip figures. She wants him to crack him open and pull out each feeling, hold it in his hands, analyze it. As if he was one of her favorite books, to be teased apart and interrogated bit by bit for meaning.

Chip shakes his head, staring down at the scuff marks his boots made on the floor. The cuffs fall down to his elbow, exposing dark knots around his wrist, green and yellow fingerprints on the inside of his forearm.

Chip doesn't want to cry. He wants to sit down on his bed, close his fingers around the neck of his guitar, and escape. A tear rolls down his cheek and he swats it so hard a pink stain tints his face. "I—" he starts, and then he stops, counting the white marks he's left on the chestnut floorboards.

"Yeah?" Percy's voice is tender, and Chip swallows audibly. Her father is a therapist.

"It's not—" Chip binks several times. "I'm not pathetic."

"No," she agrees, her bubbly voice gone smooth. She sounds like Chip's mother, all soft, whispery sounds. "You're not."

He sucks in a breath. His chest puffs up, and his fingers curl in his pockets. This is how he steels himself. "After he promised he'd kill me, he kept me around. Near the end, he started to...unravel." Unravel. It described Max to an uncomfortable degree. Max was made up of so many layers twined so tightly. The boy terrified of his father, the boy desperate to keep the world under his control, the boy who fell asleep with 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' pressed to his heart, the boy who felt all dirty inside, like he was a monster.

"Yeah?" Percy keeps her voice low, as if loud noises will spook him into silence.

Near the end, Max stopped being the friendly little politician in the making. He started becoming something different, something scared, something violent.  But Chip can't say that. Or he won't.

"It's complicated," Chip finishes. He's peering up at her through locks of gold-blonde hair, looking small and innocent in a way only she and Max will ever see. With his eyes big and round, hands shaking. His shoulders slumped.

Complicated.

That Chip, even pressed to the bedroom wall under Max's fingertips, expected Max to change back into the person he used to be. That in moments of weakness, Max would confess how much he hated the person he had become. That Chip needed him. He needed the Yang to his yin, the bright to his dark, his voice, his other half. It doesn't matter if your heart threatens to kill you or leaves you with a sleeve full of bruises, you can't live without your heart.

Chip sinks his teeth into his lower lip. How could he think this?

Why does he still believe this?

Why does he still feel like he's missing something so important?

He's supposed to be relieved, right? As long as Max is gone, he can no longer hurt Chip. Good riddance, Max.

Chip's chest is collapsing in on itself. At least, that's how he rationalizes the pain that twists and tugs his heart.

"You scare me sometimes," Percy whispers, "when you're so quiet like this."

Chip's lips wobble at the edges, so he pulls them into a smirk. This is the closest he'll ever come to giving a sad smile. It makes him look smug, like he's laughing at you. Made Percy's dad want to punch him in the mouth. Only Percy and Max will ever know this is the expression Chip makes when he's trying not to cry. "As opposed to when I'm what? Talking?"

"Chip." Percy reaches for his hand, but Chip stuffs them in his back pockets. Max always knew how to console him: silence. His quiet company while Chip sobbed or lay gasping in the throes of a panic attack. Percy could never do that. She smothers people in her love, her pretty voice.

She backs up against his desk. "Well, I'll stay here tonight, huh? I don't want to leave you alone." Her phone buzzes, and she almost doesn't answer, not until Chip nods that he doesn't mind.

"Monet—Oh, hello, Mr. Jackson! How's the Journal? And Monet?"

Percy's smiling, as if her girlfriend's dad is standing in front of her. And then all the blood drains from her face and that smile morphs into a short, horrible, squeak. She collapses on to Chip's bed, her slim, soft hands beginning to tremble.

"I-I'll be there as soon as I can. Thank you for calling."

The call ends and she lets the phone slide into the downy black sheets. She stares it for a second, and her eyes are red-rimmed.

"Monet's dad," she tells him. She hurls herself to her feet, racing past him and down the steps. Chip edges after her, wincing at the creak of floorboards beneath his feet. He hates loud noises. "Monet's in the ICU and Max—ImsorryChip—got away from her."

He stops at the edge of the stairs. Monet Jackson's pretty okay as far as he's concerned. He knows her mostly as that willowy girl both of his friends are doe-eyed for, and partially as the superhero who ripped him out of Max's hands when Max had finally snapped. Not the sharpest tool in the shed or anything, and her speeches suck, but she's all kindness, bravery. And she saved his life, so he has to like her.

Still. Monet is Percy's special friend, so if she's really on her deathbed, that's who she'll want at her side. Not the quiet blonde boy she rescues from time to time. So, he walks back across the room and parks his butt in the rolly chair, spinning back to his roll-top desk.

Onyx is down, and Max is gone.

He opens up his pencil drawer and lays a crisp sheet of printer paper over the bed of eraser shavings. Gone? No, not gone.

Chip knows Max in a way no one else ever will. He carries the boy's hopes and fears inside of him; he can feel them beating beneath his ribs like a second heart. Does he want to know Max this way? No. Not particularly.

But he thinks he knows where the boy is headed. And he'll chase him down, he decides. Maybe when he faces Max, he'll hate him like he should, maybe he'll rip the shreds of his dignity out of "Masquerade's" dirty hands, and slug him. Then Chip'll haul him to jail, maybe. Chip hasn't thought that far.

He writes the destination over and over on the sheet of paper, over and over, circling it until he smears his hand black with ink and his pen snaps into glistening plastic shards.

Starlight City.