All That's Left Behind - ronance

chapter 7

Robin has woken up next to girls before. Sometimes more than one at a time. Once, in a pile of them—but that’s just a really really drunk in college thing and she hadn’t actually had sex with any of them so she doesn’t really count that.

Things Robin has never done include waking up next to a girl she hasn’t hooked up with.

She wakes up slowly. Touch comes to her first: warmth pressed up against her, under her arm. The freedom of no pants. Sound comes right after—silence, someone else’s breathing. She peels open her eyes and everything’s golden and syrupy. Sunlight slants in through the window and the girl curled up at her side smells better than anything Robin’s ever smelled before. Nancy. Robin mouths the name to herself. She likes it better than Barb.

Nancy wakes up like she usually does: fast and hard, slamming into consciousness like she’s slamming into a brick wall. She sits up, rubs her eyes. “What time is it?” Her voice is thick.

Robin’s still wearing her watch. “Nine,” she says.

Nancy blinks her blue, blue eyes. Then she’s sliding out of bed, yanking her hair back into a ponytail, straightening her clothes, moving too fast as usual. “We should get going,” she says, and that’s when Robin remembers that there are more important things than them.

Day twenty-two, she thinks with a sinking feeling.

“Let’s go,” Nancy calls.

She’d made Robin forget about Max. It’s foreign and weird, because Max, Max, Max has been white noise in the back of Robin's head for the last twenty-two days and this morning, this day, there was complete silence. She’d forgotten. Nobody has ever been more important than Max before, not even Steve, not even herself, not for a second. Nancy—she wasn’t now, but it was a shift and Robin's a little shaken.

She's marveling it as she yanks on her now-dry clothes and follows Nancy out of the house.

The sun’s shining, everything’s still golden, but something terrible is curling around Robin’s heart. Maybe it’s always been there.

*****

Robin kills the biter with a little more enthusiasm than is necessary. She is stomping its skull to smithereens when Nancy’s dry voice breaks the trance.

“Robin,” she says. “Rob.”

It’s the first time she’s ever said her real name, and there’s something about the way she does, the way it rolls off her tongue, that makes her stop.

“I think it’s dead,” she tells Robin. Right now, in this moment, Robin hates her.

“Thanks, sweetheart,”she says, with a bite of malice, and something flickers in Nancy's face.

Robin stomps again for good measure. Max, Max, Max.

*****

Robin’s hair is so long it’s getting in her eyes.

It’s annoying. She finds a pair of scissors in the glove compartment and stands in front of the car’s window peering at her reflection while Nancy’s in the gas station bathroom. She starts cutting. Poorly. If Max were here she’d laugh. When they were little, it was their mother that cut their hair. She probably doesn’t remember that, but Robin does. She remembers being herded into a chair into their tiny kitchen while their mother took a pair of nail scissors to her usually unkempt mop of hair. She remembers watching her mum unfurl Max’s long red hair and delicately trim the ends while her little sister squirmed and complained. She remembers doing it for each other later on, after she turned away from them, after she died.