Beach Day

1: Play Some Tiny Stills

"I mean, I'm not stoked to see them again, even if it's objectively going to be fine." Tiff frowns into the phone, speaking gently because she's still in the convenience store. "Denny, I didn't want to be here in the first place."

"Yeah, but you're already there," Denny reminds her, as she has been during the whole conversation.

"I know. I'm just..."

"Scared?"

"Yeah." She pauses, holding a can of corn she has no intention of buying, eyes cast toward the corner of the room. Mold spiders along the polystyrene. She wants a sample, but she isn't going to get one. "But... That doesn't matter, I guess. I should think of everything I've ever done, right? I should think of what I am. It's going to be fine. I can handle anything, right?"

"That's one way to put it."

"Shut up, Denny."

"Love you, too." She pauses. Tinny voices from outside a window come through on the other end— whooping, loud conversation, rubber wheels on asphalt. Denny must be at work already, waiting in her car while she finishes this conversation. (Something in Tiff's chest twists: guilt. Goddammit.) "Family is complicated. Like I said before you left— call me if it gets to be too much. Or tell your aunt. Or something. Don't just suffer in silence until you explode."

"Yeah, whatever." It's a good and rational idea, Tiff knows. She just doesn't want the mortification of having to implement it. "I don't know why I agreed to this."

"Because Drew asked you to come with him?"

"I guess."

"And because you care about him."

"Yeah, I fucking guess so." She returns the can to the shelf. "I'll let you go, Denny. Good luck at work."

"Bye, Tiff. Stay safe."

"I'm absolutely not going to do that."

The call disconnects. Tiff can imagine Denny rolling her eyes, ducking her head to get out of the car, acting like this is the kind of conversation you have before work on a normal day. Yeah, right. It's completely normal to take a call from a teenager who latched onto you for no good reason after you helped her kill a wizard under the high school, and it's perfectly normal for that call to be one where she's trying so hard to be normal and not freak out about maybe having to see her parents after two and a half years of not being home.

It isn't weird that one of Tiff's best friends is a twenty-three year old janitor who works at the high school she used to go to. When you're constantly running around to save the world and put restless spirits back to bed, you make friends with a variety of people, werewolf janitors and middle-aged chosen ones included.

Whether she could count someone like Mr. Mathew or Arnold Everhart as a friend is, at best, up for debate. She hasn't heard from Mr. Mathew in months (unless texts from Percy count), and she thinks Arnold might hate her for reasons everyone is aware of, nobody is saying, and the distance of life post-graduation isn't numbing.

Is it indicative of a larger problem, she wonders, that she can't think of herself as anything more than a nuisance? Is it her nervousness about the situation at hand bleeding into other aspects of her life and perception of the self?

No. It's simply the truth that everyone wants her gone forever. That's fine. She's looking at corn in a convenience store. That heals all her personal neuroticisms every single time.

Tiff tucks her phone into her back pocket and moves the bottles of two-for-four soda to her hands instead of the crook of her arm. Condensation gathers on the smooth plastic. It's rare that she finds something peach-flavored at a gas station and rarer still that she remembers to buy it for her aunt. Esther is out at the car now, pumping gas and keeping an eye on Kepler. Tiff assures herself that her aunt is probably as big a mess as she is right now, that it's okay to feel like this— even though it isn't. It's going to be fine. She shouldn't be terrified. She wipes the sweat from the plastic bottle.