By L.J. Ciccarelli
“Listen, this was a whole lot funnier when it was hypothetical,” says Diana.
Mara checks the backpack one more time as Diana drones on and on about consequences, mistakes, Mara’s lack of impulse control, and blah blah blah – keys, glitter, penknife, crowbar – before shutting her car off.
“You can stay here,” Mara reminds her friend as she steps out into the cool night air. The light from the streetlamp illuminates her deep exhale in a puff of smoke. “I have my ‘Diana Wussed Out Playlist’ that I can queue up for you while you sit in the car.”
The wind whistles, high-pitched and trembling like Diana’s scream when she watches a scary movie. Mara leans back into the car to press the dog button on the dash’s screen, chuckling when the display lights up with an animated dog and the words, “Don’t worry! My owner will be back soon!” with the car’s temp just below it. She installed it the same day she got her dog, Pennywise, who is in the back seat of the car looking at her.
Diana’s eyes harden, glaring at the CGI dog like it’s done her a disservice. She leans forward and turns it and the stereo off before Mara can start playing “Afraid of Everything” by Milo Greene.
“That’s an unnecessary playlist gumming up your account,” Diana grumbles in discontent, half her sentence muffled when Mara shuts the driver’s door. Mara smirks down at the asphalt Diana gets out of the car to continue the argument, preaching about de-escalating situations and taking deep breaths. “You made it in 2017. It’s probably wildly outdated anyhow.”
“I added five new songs last week. It’s fifteen hours long.”
“I don’t care,” Diana snaps, her tone implying that she kinda does. “I’m only stating all the things that you should’ve already thought of.”
“Wren screwed me over, Ana,” Mara reminds her, yanking on the backdoor handle to free her red and white mutt. It obeys with a squeak that sounds more like a shriek than anything else, and the noise plus the dark look on her friend’s face make Diana flinch. “He literally ruined everything so spectacularly that there’s no salvaging any of it.” She puts more force behind the close, slamming it hard enough to rattle the door that’s hanging on with duct tape and prayer.
“I know,” Diana placates. She lets her sentence trail off because even she knows that there’s no real way to defend Wren. The pair spent their whole friendship defending him, and there’s nothing left in the tank.
Mara takes another deep sigh. “You really can stay here, jokes aside. I’m not about to force you to do anything you don’t wanna.”
“Oh, I want to,” Diana responds, her round face turning as red as her hair in anger. Her freckles always stand out when she gets embarrassed (which is often) or angry (less common yet treasured all the same), and it never fails to make Mara smile. “There’s a lot of things I’d like to do to him, but I’m very small and very anxious, so I don’t do them.”
This rage is what they bonded over in elementary school. The only difference between the two is Mara’s impulsivity. It’s why Diana’s on an honor roll and Mara practically owns the corner desk in ISS.
“Still,” Mara says. “There’s no shame in not wanting to commit a felony.”
“I feel like you’re lying to me.”
“Nothing’s expected of you,” Mara says. “You wanna be lookout? It’s why I brought Penny, but it’s up to you. You’ll still be an accomplice, but it’s better than being my partner.”
“I have a feeling that nothing’s worse than being your partner.”
“Can’t argue with that. Nothing is worse,” she agrees. “I think it’s something that takes a lot of effort for not a lot of payoff.”
Diana gives her a rare, deadpan look. “I was kidding.”
“I’m not. And I’m not really in the mood for a pep-talk. Come on,” she urges gently, looking down at her dog when he listens to the command as if she’d been talking to him. “Wren always parks in the same spot.”
[…]
Mara gazes at the parked Plymouth Fury the way an artist gazes at a blank canvas. The body is polished black, the exhaust and accents shining chrome that flicker in the low light. Behind the tinted windows, the seats are bright red, buffed, cleaned at least every other week.
“Just think of the freedom, the potential,” Mara whispers.
Diana stares at Mara, “I feel like you’ve been planning this.”
Mara doesn’t look away from the car, but she flinches like her friend’s voice shook her from a reverie. “Hm?”
“You said you came up with this plan – and calling this a ‘plan’ is giving you more credit than you deserve – earlier today.”
“So?”
“So…that,” her small hand comes up in Mara’s line of sight and takes on a circular motion, seemingly, “that look.”
“What look?”
“You’re all…determined. You look like you’re sure you wanna do this.”
Mara pauses, blinking at her for a moment. “Because I am sure.”
“But you’re you. You’re not sure of anything ever.” Diana gestures again, this time taking in Mara’s body language, her tone, the furrow of her brow. “That’s not impulsive, adrenaline-fueled excitement.” Her eyes widen. “Oh god, you’ve literally been dreaming about this, haven’t you?”
“We were friends with him for a long time. You can’t tell me you didn’t imagine trashing this goddamn car whenever he pissed you off.”
“I can tell you that!” Diana argues, stomping the asphalt.
“Really?” Mara waits and lets Diana frantically nod so hard her curls bounce around and she has to tame them back from her face. “Not even once?”
“No. I’m not a violent little cretin like you.”
“Sounds boring,” Mara quips back, dumping her pack at her feet. “You should let the intrusive thoughts win every now and then.”
Pennywise starts to wag his swishy tail back and forth, a low whine working its way up from his throat. Mara spares him a glance. He stares intently at her hands whenever they disappear into the bag. He even leans down to give them a sniff every other item or so, snorting like he’s offended when he doesn’t sense anything edible.
“I don’t have any treats for you, clown man,” she tells him with exaggerated sympathy, “but I do have a various assortment of sharp and blunt tools. It’s always nice to be well-rounded.”
Pennywise chuffs, affronted, but sits obediently next to the growing pile.
It’s colder than it should be tonight, windier, and it’s clear that Diana didn’t dress warm enough. She shivers the longer she stands there on the cracked, unkempt sidewalk, occasionally shuffling a step or so away from the car like she’s afraid it’s going to come to life and mow her down into the pavement.
Mara stands with a small groan, dusting the chunks of asphalt off her destroyed jeans. “I need a brick,” she says, clapping her hands together on the last word in a way that makes Diana jump a little.
“You don’t,” she protests, pointing to the pile that will do more damage than a brick. There’s a damn crowbar, what the hell could a brick do that a crowbar couldn’t?
“Or maybe a rock.” Mara carries on like she didn’t hear her, trotting off to where the sidewalk breaks out into a small, wooded area with her dog beside her. Pennsylvania’s just like that – small town to farms to woods you could get lost in – and Diana thinks it’s giving Mara too much freedom with her vandalism.
“What for?” she calls out, clapping a hand over her own mouth a second later when she hears how loud she was in an attempt to reach Mara’s ears. People die on backroads like this, especially when they’re being loud and doing illegal things. She tries her voice out again, quieter this time yet still carrying, “Mar?”
Mara hadn’t even gone into those woods with her phone flashlight on, and Diana can’t fathom how she’s willing to traipse around like that. She’s also the person to get behind the wheel without checking where to park on maps, or ducks outside without her phone or her wallet or her house keys. It’s absurd. She’s absurd.
The longer Diana stands alone without even Pennywise as company, the more and more likely she is to dart back to the sanctuary of Mara’s car a dirt road and a block away. Wren lives behind the super-rich Clocktower neighborhood, and Mara’s car looked comically out of place parked there with all the cars that are, you know, not falling apart.
“Marianna!” she shouts for a final time, convincing herself that she’ll leave if she doesn’t get an answer in the next ten seconds. (It’s a flat out lie, there’s no way she’d ever leave Mara alone despite how capable she may be. It’s the principle…but let a girl dream of a lack of codependency.)
The full name, at least, seems to be enough to pull Mara’s attention. “Uncalled for!” she shouts back, not yet in view, but Diana can see some rustling shrubbery that she hopes to God will take the shape of her small friend dressed in all black and not, like, a Skinwalker. Do they have those in Pennsylvania? Probably. “I haven’t done anything to deserve that.”
“But you’re about to,” Diana grumbles. “You also ditched me here.”
Penny lopes out first, nudging against Diana’s legs in an attempt for attention that Diana’s just a bit too distressed to give.
Mara doesn’t answer her at first, but she comes back into the light clutching the faithful rock that’s so big she can’t even wrap her fingers all the way around it. When she’s close enough for Diana to make out her dark eyes and wild, wavy hair that only ever looks good messy, she’s unsurprised to see an unamused, raised brow.
“Well,” Mara says. “I didn’t go to Narnia.”
Diana doesn’t realize she’s pouting until Mara procures a sharpie from her jacket pocket, using the capped end to tap at Diana’s chin like she’s trying to lift that half of Diana’s face from its slight frown. “Enough of that. You know I wouldn’t have left you here.”
Mara’s got the red sharpie cap trapped in her teeth before Diana can come up with a reply beyond her blush. She silently watches Mara’s freckled brow furrow as she scribbles something on the smoothest side.
“How’s my handwriting?” she asks around the cap when she’s finished, showing off the part of the rock where she’s scrawled the word ‘SNITCH.’
“Just as bad as usual.” Mara’s handwriting had always been terrible. Diana can remember elementary school when Mara had to go to after-school remediation to work on her letters. She thinks too fast, Diana knows – her brain has always moved faster than everything else around her, including her hands.
“Think it’s too subtle?” asks Mara.
Diana looks at the strange seriousness on her friend’s face, her eyes that are so grey they might as well be black in the dark, and genuinely can’t tell if there’s any sarcasm there. “No…” she answers carefully, like she’s afraid she’s on the butt-end of a joke that she’s too slow to clock. “I think it’s pretty forthright.”
“Good,” Mara chirps, and that’s the only warning Diana gets before she winds her arm back and proceeds to send the rock flying through the air and right through the driver’s side window.
Diana can only watch in shock, clapping her hands over her ears to try and muffle the intense, frightening shattering sound. She still feels the low hum of it as she watches the tinted glass spray inward and onto the plush, red leather. She thought that was going to be the worst part of the entire act, so it gets pretty horrible when Mara deftly slides into that same glass-covered seat through the chipped, destroyed window. Diana would’ve been a bit impressed by her friend’s dexterity (especially coming from the girl who perpetually refers to herself as an indoor cat) if she weren’t so horrified at the prospect of all that glass digging into her friend’s skin.
“Mar!” she cries, her hands held over her mouth because she can’t believe what she’s seeing.
“What?” Mara asks back, sounding confused. She leans down to fidget with some unseen thing on the dashboard before unlocking the door from the inside and getting out the old-fashioned way. “He put a silent alarm in there. I had to break it before it sent him a text.”
Diana gestures helplessly to the open door, then remembers herself. She darts forward to start dusting glass off Mara’s coat, her pants, spinning her friend around like an inanimate object to search for more sharp material or blood. “Couldn’t you have just…popped the latch from the outside and opened it? And maybe, like, brushed some of the glass away?”
“I wanted to be fast!”
Diana can’t help but gawk as Mara shoves her away gently, tired of being coddled. It’s not something she’s used to, Diana guesses, despite how long they’ve been close.
Mara’s knife is out a second or so later, the blade sliding free from the handle with a little snick. Diana flinches once, then again when Mara turns back to the car and starts to drag the sharp tip through that perfect black wrap. If she thought the broken glass was a bad sound, there’s no way she could’ve prepared herself for the metal-on-metal shriek. It’s like the car is screaming in agony.
Mara wraps around the car in a full circle, making sure each door has received a slice before throwing it open. She leans a hip against the hood, testing the sharpness of her knife after its trip around the exterior of the Plymouth. “Wanna do the glitter?” she asks, gesturing to the colorful vials that, up until now, looked out of place with the crowbar and knife and hammer. “It’s, like, the least damaging thing I planned on doing.”
Diana, in true Diana fashion, hesitates as Mara picks up where she left off. There’s something strange about watching her friend with that knife, watching her cut up the custom red leather with just the barest hint of a smirk on her face. It’s scary, but she’s not scared of Mara…she’s scared for Mara. She has half a mind to say no to the glitter, but then she remembers the absolute devastation at the beginning of this month, the way Mara’s life crumbled in just the span of a few hours after Wren’s meeting with the superintendent. Diana’s known Mara for over a decade, and she thinks that’s the only time she’s seen Mara cry.
Mara’s her person. And Wren hurt her person.
It takes two whole vials dumped over the backseats, the passenger, and the dash before Diana finally admits that “This is actually pretty cathartic.”
She gets all the memories while she’s in the car, thinking back on all the times the three of them went out and about in Downingtown after school. Mara was always the one to convince them to go out, that the new film showing at the Movie Tavern was more important than homework. And Wren had always been the one to volunteer to drive, just so he could show off his refurbished Fury. Those times are certainly gone for good now, but Diana isn’t as jaded as Mara to admit that she won’t miss them.
Mara takes a hammer to both of the circular headlights and the rearview mirrors, making the car and Diana in the car sway with the force behind each swing. “See? I told you: sometimes it’s nice to let those intrusive thoughts win.”
She shoves the hammer into her black belt, moving a step or two away before kneeling on the sidewalk as Diana extracts herself from the backseat, dusting silver and gold glitter off her shins and knees. Diana wonders if Mara’s taking a breather. She comes back up to her full height with the crowbar. Diana can’t for the life of her get over just how imposing Mara looks in that moment. She’s by no means tall or muscular, actually the opposite, but she’s spent her whole life making the people around her feel like they’re looking up at her. Diana feels that way now even though she’s never, ever felt the need to cower in her friend’s burning gaze.
“I saved the best for last,” Mara reports with an evil gleam in her eye, standing in front of the hood with both hands on the dark, slightly rusted metal. She puts her right foot back two steps, twisting her shoulders and swinging the crowbar through the air like she’s a baseball player taking some practice swings. Her eyes never leave the windshield, staring at it like her coach told her to keep her eye on the ball.
Only Diana notices the flash from a camera. It has her whirling on the spot, the sudden light so out of place in the rapidly encroaching darkness. It’s like an alarm cutting through the fast-moving, action-y part of a dream that’ll have you jolting awake if it was allowed to continue. It makes her gasp, and she’s halfway through convincing herself it was a possessed lamppost until she sees it again, its origin somewhere off the road and in the woods on her right.
Diana feels…off. Something’s not right about it, and not just because it implies that someone’s spotted them committing what is very much defined as a felony. Why are they off in the woods, why have they been watching for so long, and why did they happen to have a camera on them in the late evening? This is Downingtown and it’s cloudy, so it’s not as if it’s an artsy passerby on their way back from some sunset shots.
“Mar,” she calls, not wanting to take her eyes off from whatever that flash is – because god forbid it moves when she looks away – but she’s forced to when Mara acts like she didn’t hear her. “Mara!”
Thankfully, Mara has the presence of mind to read her tone this time around. Diana’s always frightened, sure, but there’s a difference between her typical amount of apprehension and the amount she injects into Mara’s name.
“What?” Mara is there in a flash, stepping around the broken headlight to stand by Diana. Diana feels the heat of her, but it’s not enough to get her to relax.
“Hey, what is it?” Mara tries again, her tone softer and more like the girl Diana knows is buried beneath all the denim and kohl eyeliner and resting bitch faces.
Diana looks over, finding Mara’s freckled brow furrowed in worry and confusion. She’s got the crowbar in her right hand still, and Diana hates that she feels just a bit safer for it. “I think I saw a camera flash,” she admits in a whisper, feeling a bit foolish and stupid now that she’s said it out loud.
And she’s half-expecting Mara to tell her as much, which is why she lets out a tiny gasp of shock when Mara tucks Diana behind her, shielding her.
“Where from?” she asks over her shoulder, spinning that dangerous metal in her hand as if she’s testing which grip feels the most comfortable. There’s a light clinking sound whenever it presses against the backs of her rings. “They took pictures of you?”
She shakes her head, red curls bouncing. “I…I-I don’t know, I just–”
A flash cuts her off, brighter this time like the person behind the lens has moved closer in the thicket of woods, and Diana whimpers, “Shit.”
“Don’t be scared,” Mara instructs, her eyes trained on the source of the flash, her voice so low that there’s no way whoever’s in the woods can hear. “Don’t let ‘em see that you’re scared.”
(Later, much later, Diana will wonder if those are the words Mara lives by day-to-day.)
Diana obeys, hiding her face in the back of Mara’s shoulder. She wonders if Mara only wants her to hide her face so she can’t be identified, like she’s standing in front of Diana because she wants to make absolutely sure that she’s the only one going down for this. Diana doesn’t know, can’t think beyond the fright, hoping to God this is some sick joke. Something Mara planned? A prank?
She dismisses that thought at once when she finds herself digging her hands into Mara’s sides, nails pressing into the thick fabric of her jacket and tugging. She feels how tense her friend is – that way she gets right before she’s about to drop someone to the hallway floor, so far gone in her decision that not even Diana can talk her out of it – can see even in the darkness that Mara’s gripping that crowbar tight enough for her busted, constantly bruised knuckles to bleed white.
“Wanna come out, you fuckin’ creep?” Mara shouts into the dark. She sounds fearless, Diana thinks, and if not for the slightest, smallest tremor on the last word, Diana would’ve been fooled too. “Or are you gonna hide in the dark behind your camera the whole night?”
Pennywise has caught onto the tension, and Diana looks over to see his hackles raised, his whole body tensed like Mara’s. He’s snarling, and Penny never snarls. Mara named him after a killer-clown/space-monster, but that’s only because his coat and his little smile matched said killer-clown to a T. Seeing him so distraught only makes this worse.
“Wren?” Mara calls seemingly out of nowhere. Diana wants to peek out, wants to see if Mara saw something to identify him, but she’s too afraid. “I bet it’s you, huh? You hang back and wait until you can rat me out, don’t you?” Somehow, Mara’s bitter chuckle is genuine and cutting enough for even Diana to feel the sting. “Fuckin’ snitch.”
One of her boots steps forward like she actually plans on confronting whoever’s out there herself. Of course, Diana thinks that’s Mara’s first instinct. God forbid they pack up and run from what could be either a murderer, a creep, or their very irate former friend. No, no, don’t be silly – Mara would rather die than run from a fight.
“Maramaramara! Don’t!” Diana fists her hands in that denim and yanks so hard that Mara has no choice but to turn around and meet her frantic stare. “Please don’t,” she all but begs, mouth opening and closing like a fish because all she can see is Mara sprinting into those woods and never coming back out. She’s been watching too many serial killer documentaries for sure (and she has Mara to thank for that, now that she thinks about it) but sue her. “Don’t leave me here. Don’t leave me–”
“Okay, okay – hey! Okay,” Mara’s saying, and Diana doesn’t even realize Mara’s cupped her flushed face until her thumb brushes across her cheekbone with one hard pass, the ring there pressed into the round of it. Grounding. All at once, she feels grounded. “Make for my car. Take my dog.” She shoves Diana lightly but firmly, just enough that Diana has to let her go but doesn’t stumble with the force of it.
She grabs Pennywise’s collar, tugging him in the direction they came from. She hesitates, looking back when she sees Mara kneeling to retrieve her bag without much sense of urgency. “Go,” Mara urges, glancing back towards the woods and banging the crowbar against the pavement just once almost warningly, as if to remind whoever’s there that she still has it in hand. “I’m right behind you.”
That’s not entirely true, Diana thinks, because she hears another telltale shattering sound that implies that Mara stayed back just to finish at least one thing she started. She wants to turn around, wants to see whatever remains of the windshield, but she’s too afraid she’ll see some stranger chasing after her.
Thankfully Mara’s running beside her a second later, her dog between them, grinning with glee.
“Enough of that. You know I wouldn’t have left you here,” she echoes a bit breathlessly, drifting just enough on the asphalt to shoulder-check Diana.