Chapter Text
Bellatine
The girl’s name is Sarah and Bellatine is sweating out of her skin trying to talk to her.
It is a hot day in late spring, school is almost out for the year, summer vacation is so close you can practically taste it. Bellatine is a little more focused on imagining the taste of Sarah’s lips. Sarah, the same age as her and yet seemingly far more accomplished, far more beautiful, far more…everything. They had never really spoken to each other before, Sarah running with the more popular kids and Bellatine largely relegated to hanging with the mere mortals of school. Bellatine has never once minded-cliques and various forms of school drama largely mean nothing to her, they slide off of her like water off a duck’s back-but right now it makes her feel like there was some kind of invisible chasm between herself and Sarah.
“Yeah,” Sarah says. “We don’t have any big trips planned for this summer, but my mom wants to take my sister and I on a trip to Paris in a few years. It’s a big goal of hers.”
“Wow, a summer in Paris!” Bellatine says. “Sounds awesome!”
“Do your parents travel with that puppet show of theirs?”
Sarah’s question sounds very genuine, not a hint of malice that Bellatine could detect, but it still makes her want to flinch. Bellatine is a teenager now. Her family having a famous puppet theater was not the instant ticket to popularity it had been when she was nine. Her refusal to acknowledge various forms of teenage drama is likely the only thing that had kept her from being mocked as the “weird puppet girl” for a few years now.
“Uh,” Bellatine licks her lips. “They used to, but they settled down after- after I was born. I think they did a show in France once or twice. My mom always said that the French loved The Drowning Fool because they have good taste.”
“Ooh la la,” Sarah giggles. But Bellatine barely hears her. All she hears is her own pause, echoing in her ears.
After- after I was born.
Bellatine had just barely stopped herself from saying after us kids were born. Or worse, after my older brother was born.
Sarah likely didn’t care at all about her little pause. But to Bellatine, that little pause is a whole world of silence. Isaac, in her home and her life one day, and just gone the next. He was not dead (as far as she knew right now…) but sometimes it felt like he really was. Mira hardly ever talked about him. Dad had long since stopped insisting that Isaac would be back, just like all moody teenagers who run away eventually come back. What had once been Isaac’s presence had simply settled into silence. Oh, if he knew this, he would hate that. Isaac never wanted to be silent.
What would Isaac do if he was here right now?
Bellatine doesn’t know where the thought came from, but she briefly thinks it is her brother’s influence trying to speak to her from wherever he is right now.
Bellatine finds herself smiling brightly at Sarah, trying to steer the conversation in another direction. Talking about how beautiful and wonderful the theater was. Hamming it up, painting a picture of pure elegance.
“And there are many little hideaways in the theater, for couples who maybe want to sneak a few kisses here and there during the shows,” she finishes, accentuating her statement with what she hoped was a flirtatious little gleam in her eye.
Is she really doing this? Flirting with Sarah of all people? What? How? Why? Had Isaac’s mad delinquent influence somehow psychically corrupted her across some impossibly great distance? Because this definitely isn’t normal Bellatine talking, this is-
Relax, Tiny. She practically hears his voice in her head. Look. She’s digging this.
Three weeks later, after one of the very last days of the school year, Bellatine invites a bunch of people in her class- anyone who wants to come , she says-to a free end-of-school year puppet show at her family’s theater. The Yagas used to do stuff like this, back in elementary school, but the event had taken a blow when the siblings started complaining that celebratory puppet shows were for babies, and its death knell had been when Isaac left. But for some reason Bellatine had decides they should give it one more go, and her parents had agreed with shrugs, Dad giving her a hesitant and fond smile.
The Drowning Fool doesn’t feel like it used to. There are a few reasons for that. Bellatine’s obsession with hiding her Emberings is one-she’d hid them during the elementary school shows, but it just feels different now, after the incident with the deer. The movements of the puppets are stiffer, more awkward. Bellatine almost feels like they are dragging their feet, or the Fool has a tinge of sadness to his little eyes. They want Isaac to be here. She knows it.
The third reason the show is different is because afterwards, while everyone goes outside the theater and enjoys snacks offered courtesy of the Yagas, Bellatine finds herself in Sarah’s arms in the darkness of the empty theater, Sarah’s lips hesitant on her skin. It is wonderful. Bellatine hears the applause of an imaginary audience in her head after they part, Isaac clapping loudest of all.
The next year, when they read Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night for school, Bellatine finds herself in the girl’s bathroom after English class, buzzing with some kind of barely restrained anxiety attack. She can’t stop hearing her own voice reading Viola’s lines.
In Twelfth Night, two siblings are separated after a shipwreck, each believing the other to possibly be dead. Viola, the sister, assumes the identity of a man to survive. Bellatine had been okay with reading it at first, the Shakespearean English the only thing bothering her about it, but then Viola had started talking about grief and loss while not knowing that her brother was actually alive and searching for her in the streets of a foreign land the whole time.
Bellatine, raised by thespians, finds herself picturing a stage production of Twelfth Night -with puppets, of course. The two sibling puppets call out each other’s names and chase each other around an elaborate stage set, each frequently coming close to finding the other, but being stopped at the last second by some kind of comedic diversion. The audience laughs and laughs.
The audience laughs and they applaud while sister chases after brother and brother calls out for sister and random puppets enter as distractions and soon there’s a whole mob of puppets running around the stage. The two sibling puppets never get any closer to finding each other in that scene and the audience chuckles good naturedly as the curtain falls.
Bellatine doesn’t know how much time she spends in the bathroom and she doesn’t want to know. Her hands feel weird and she can’t tell if it's from the adrenaline of an anxiety attack or an Embering that wants to come to the surface at the mere thought of puppets. She spends lunch in the library, wanting to be somewhere quiet.
Isaac
Isaac doesn’t think of time like normal people do anymore. Years drifting through the U.S will do that to you. Time stretches and shifts to fit your needs, not the needs of a job or school year or anything else. Days are sometimes as languid as Hubcap napping in the summer sun, or frantic and desperate, hunger clawing at your ribs and pain growing behind your eyes.
Isaac is slightly luckier than most hobos in the fact that when he gets an inconsolable internal buzz in his head, he can just turn into someone else and make it go away. Most of the other folks only buzz like he does when they need drugs or alcohol or psych meds.
So he has turned into someone else now, doing his regular song and dance, turning into a friendly middle aged woman with a cute pink dress and a massive pair of sunglasses. Her outfit was a smart move on her part, the sun in Arizona is not for the weak.
Isaac is lapping up the chuckles and applause of the small crowd, when a new scattering of laughter catches his ear. This laughter isn’t the entertained kind of his current audience, it’s the wildly gleeful laughter of someone who has just heard a good joke, the sound flying through the air like a bird.
He looks and sees a small cluster of teenage girls, all dressed in slight variations of the same school uniform and wearing backpacks. They’ve clearly just gotten out of school, and are wildly entertained by each other’s presence.
Tiny is their age now, he realizes.
It’s-shit, what day is it now, a Tuesday? He can’t keep track anymore. Has she just gotten out of school herself, walking home with her friends? Does she have friends? Does she like school? Does she dress in a uniform, or is she experimenting with her style in the time honored right of all teenagers?
He suddenly finds himself filled with a wild sort of want, and before he knows what he’s doing, he points at the girls and calls them over. They approach him hesitantly, their eyes wide. He picks one at random-a short girl with long dark hair, and mimics her. She watches him, more surprised than entertained. Why is she not entertained? He is nailing her! Her walk, her talk, the miniscule movements of her eyes and face. The crowd is eating it up, why isn’t she?
The girl and her friends are some of the last to leave, sweat coating their faces a little from the insufferable heat.
“Cool show,” one of the girls offers. The girl he’d mimicked nods. She gives him a crumpled one dollar bill out of her backpack. The look in her eyes…she looks intrigued by him, but doesn’t seem to feel much else. Some of the other girls are looking at him like, like…
Like they pity him.
He realizes, too late, after they walk away, that the girl he’d chosen to mimic had looked the most like Tiny out of all the girls in the group.
Well, looks like it’s time to tell Benji that it’s time to leave this city in Arizona. Where the hell are they, anyway? All the cities in this state are starting to blur in his head. Whatever, it doesn’t matter where he is, only that he will be leaving now. This place was great, but he will not be coming back.