complexfemalecharacter | (no subject)

Four days in and it's still all pretty fucked.

Maeve is used to having her own place, somewhere she can go to when she needs to escape the rest of the world, which happens a lot more often than she would admit to out loud. The caravan wasn't much, but it was hers and she'd been able to keep it clean and decorate it the way she wanted. No one else made any noise, she could play whatever music she liked, and maybe her neighbours fought too much, but she'd take Cynthia over a bunch of kids any day.

Right now she's just trying to spend as little time there as possible. They're looking into getting her into school, even though it's close to the end of the year. Maeve wants to get back, she needs to get back, because there's no way in hell she's losing three months and having to spend a whole extra year trying to get her diploma so she can do something more. This should be her last bloody year, she's meant to be graduating, but now time has gotten all fucked up along with dimensions and it's like she's back a year.

But she's not back in school yet and so now, in the middle of the day, she's just out. She's got a shitty and too sweet iced coffee in one hand and she's wearing some clothes one of the workers at the Home had given to her, but the jeans are too big and the shirt is too tight, so she's standing in front of a thrift shop, looking at the offerings through the window.

Tugging at the waist of the jeans, pulling them up higher only for them to slide down and settle on her hips again, Maeve figures it's her best bet. Not like she can afford anything else right now anyway.

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"Sounds exactly like me and Danny," she says, grinning, picking up a pair of hoop earrings still on their backing card from a fancy place in town and holding them up next to her face, looking at Maeve with a raised eyebrow. "I can never get a straight answer out of him, but I'm pretty sure that, back home, he exclusively dated athletic girls with shiny ponytails called Ashley."

Maeve nods in response to the earrings, then makes a face at what Alex says next. "Yikes," she says, as if Jackson hadn't been exactly the same. At least it seems like it's worked out for Alex, when it definitely hadn't for Maeve and Jackson. Not because he'd been an ass about it, but because she hadn't been able to handle someone wanting to be with her that much.

It had all just felt like too much pressure to be someone she's not.

"I mean. Yale. There's a tonne of that kind of girl. All playing fucking field hockey." She keeps the earrings, grabs another pair that were similar. "Do you want to go and get a coffee after this? There's a good place about three doors down."

"Yale," she echoes, almost wistfully. That's a place she never imagined she would ever get to go, across the ocean, in another country entirely. Of course, she never imagined she would go to university at home either, never figured she would be able to afford it. The last thing in the world she had wanted was to turn into her mother, but it wasn't like she'd had a lot of options without money.

"Yeah, okay," she agrees. "I think I'm done in here. This place is great."

"Yeah. It was...a lot," says Alex. She picks up the things that she's going to buy, plus a silk tie that she thinks Darlington would like and carries them to the register. "I've been trying to decide whether I want to apply for college here or not."

"Do you know what you'd want to study?" Maeve asks, following Alex to the register. "Sometimes it feels like there's a thousand things you could do."

She means it feels like there's a thousand things she could do and she has no idea where she would even begin. It's not like she's good with people like Otis is. Her interests aren't the sorts of things that lead to good careers.

"I was an Art major at Yale,"says Alex, setting down the things on the counter. "I can draw. But I don't know if I'd go back to that. I..don't know if I'd go back to any of it, honestly. Maybe I'd be better sticking with what I'm good at."

"I'm the wrong person for advice," Maeve says, the words coming unexpectedly. "Mostly I'm just trying not to become my mother."

She's in no danger of that, anyone who knows her even a little knows she isn't going to end up like Erin, but the fear remains. It'd been the reason she'd dyed her hair dark again, after all, trying to be as different from her mum as possible. It was stupid, she realizes. Her hair doesn't make her like Erin. It doesn't make her unlike her either.

"Aren't we all?" says Alex, who's about as far away from Mira and all of her floaty layers and crystals and good fucking intentions as she could be. "I think that's what we're all doing, all the time."

The cashier gives her her total and Alex pays in notes caged from the jar where she keeps her tips on her dresser in the apartment.

"Maybe," she agrees, although she thinks if she'd had a good mother, someone who had actually been reliable, not an addict, maybe the prospect of being like her wouldn't be so horrible. That's too much to say, though, so instead Maeve just waits her turn, then pays for her own finds, pleased to discover it's all really affordable.

"Can't believe they just give us money here," she comments when it's all done.

"I know, right?" says Alex, raising both her eyebrows. "We're paying rent on two apartments, and Danny's going to school. It's ridiculous." She thinks of all the scrimping and saving she'd done, of walking the night Hellie died until her feet were rubbed bloody because she couldn't afford the bus. Everything's different here.

"Coffee?"

Everything really is different here. And yet it's the same, too. Maeve still doesn't have anyone she trusts, no one she believes would actually be there for her if she really needed them. That isn't ever likely to change, though.

"Coffee sounds great," she says as she slings her bag over her arm, wondering how long she can disappear from the Home before they start calling her. She doesn't have school yet and she's not sure when they'll let her start. This is better than just wandering around.

"My treat," says Alex, as they step out of the store and into the sun again. "Call it a welcome to the neighbourhood present." She flashes a smile. "What I wish someone had done for me when I wound up somewhere really fucking weird out of nowhere."