Song Choice: Bury A Friend—Cover by Ant Mas

"But we can't just leave," says Kai. Finn slumps in front of his car. It's a minivan, beige-gold, with a fender dented and the tires covered in an inch of mud. "What about Mr. Jackson—"

"He has a lot to worry about." Finn sighs. Chip is standing away from them, staring up at the gazebo ceiling. Its crisscrossed plywood slats send sunlight slithering across Chip's skin with every passing cloud. "Texting that we're following a criminal into—jeez, Starlight City." He shakes his head, flopping greasy curls into his face. "Starlight City. Can't we wait? Figure out a plan?"

Kai shrugs, itching at the collar of his borrowed shirt. One of Finn's, a mesh jersey that's been too small for Finn for years. It drapes to Kai's thighs. Chip's eyes slide over the small boy for only a second and then go back to the ceiling. Vines with purple flowers whisper between the slats in the wind. It's mesmerizing. Finn snaps his fingers.

"Dreamer, hey. Earth to Chip?"

But Chip's mind is far from the flowers. He's angry. Angry Max tried to apologize. Angry because he knows it was all a trap. Angry because it still hurts.

"Chip!"

He snaps his head up, pulling his phone out of his back pocket. "Sorry. Yeah, I talked to my aunt." As in, he left her a note. "Tell your parents everything in Silver Dollar reminds you of Monet, and you have to get away. Tell them you lied to her dad." He hates how many sentences have left his mouth, the cadence of them strange, stumbling. "They'll be mad. But it's either that or we let Max go."

Finn grumbles about the police and then shakes his head. "Get in. I got parents who'll be home in five minutes."

Kai reaches up on tiptoes and plucks a flower from the vines and presses it into Chip's open palm. Chip's jaw twitches open, but he doesn't say a word. He only turns over the silky petals and pinches the folds in response. So soft in his hands. Kai plucks another flower and tucks it behind Finn's ear. He has to stretch every limb to do it.

"Well," Finn says, as he throws open the driver side door. He turns the key and the engine whistles to a thrum. "Do you want me to back out or not?"

"No." Chip opens the back door and swallows at the stench. Something sour and something sordidly sweet. He slides into the seat closest to the smeared window and clips in his seatbelt.

Finn chuckles. This is the first time Chip's seen Finn smile at him, even the slightest grin, and he stiffens a little. "Sisters," he says. "Spilling milk and soda. There might be an old chicken nugget stuffed between the seats."

"I used to have a sister," Chip says, still running the petals through his fingertips. The velvety flower tears between them. His heart stops. The broken thing cupped in his hand disturbs him more than he would like to admit. The personable laughter dies on Finn's lips, and Chip cringes, knowing that like always, he mispoke. "Nevermind," he mumbles, to soft even for his ears. "How are yours?"

Finn is still staring at Chip, but he's grabbing a rubber band from the glove compartment and a handful of hairpins. He's still staring at Chip as Kai slides into the back seat beside Chip, shotgun unclaimed. And that nervous smile finally falters. Finn finishes his bun, flicks on the GPS, and reverses the car so quickly it hits the shed behind them. There's a crunch and a shout from both boys in the back, and Finn tosses a hand over his shoulder. "Delicate," he mutters, throwing the car into drive after a turn so sharp Kai is gripping Chip's arm.

And then they're off. Flying down the scraggly roads, the car shuddering and jolting, all respect for the speed limit thrown out the windows that Kai eagerly cranks open.

Finn brought a hundred bucks and a tote bag filled with canned food, bagged snacks, and several cans of pepper spray. There's always an abundance of pepper spray in the O'Leary household: a police officer father, four little girls, and a big brother who can throw a punch about as well as he can communicate with people. The solution, pepper spray.

Kai brought nothing. Not even a phone charger.

"My sisters are fine," answers Finn minutes later. "Not that they were happy I almost got killed the last time. Hate to do this to them again." His hands tighten around the wheel. "I just want to go home, put all this past us. I just--want everything to be the way it used to be."

"We'll be back," Kai says. His voice was always so full of confidence, was always so light. Full of the naivety and wonder so natural an opposite to Finn's gruff sourness. But now, it's softer. Shaky. "Don't worry about it?"

"Yeah," Finn says, puffing air so hard he jangles the fluffy dice hanging from the mirror. "I'm sure Chip has a plan."

Chip says nothing. He glances down at his acoustic guitar, the only thing he's brought from home he's allowed the boys to see. It's a scratched and faded from years of being played out in the rain and in the sun, carried on the back during hiking trips and hugged at night like a teddy bear. Old and battered, but still capable of making beautiful music in Chip's expert hands. He hoists it on his lap and runs his fingers over the chords in nervous motions, appreciating the twangier, softer sounds he left behind when he began to play electric. He pricks the strings, smiling.

"Maybe if you play," Kai whispers, "you'll think of a plan."And so Chip closes his fingers around the instrument's neck and falls away.

***

He doesn't.That is to say, Chip plays and plays and Finn wrenches the radio to full blast and Kai squeals in pain at the sound.
"Ow, ow! Guys! Stop!"

"And still no plan," Finn drawls, sopping the blood from his bottom lip with the back of his sleeve. Chip winces a little at Finn's hands off the wheel. No surprise that Finn leaves his wrist hovering like that, even when the blood is soaked up. No surprise that at the whiteness in Chip's face, the driver's lips tip into the tiniest smile.

"Hey, hey." Kai tosses back his hair. "They take time."

"We shouldn't be doing this. Why did I agree to this? We should be with Monet. We're awful friends, we're awful people, we need to go back." Finn's voice cracks, but Chip's still playing.

Out of habit, he's playing Bury a Friend. The song makes him think of Max; it seems like the kind of song Max would sing. Angsty. Scary, but in a preppy, radio-friendly way. Chip'd have crack dreams of running from Max with that song playing on blast, the music crawling from every corner of that blot-black dream city. 'Come here,' he'd hear, and instead of running from Max he'd be stumbling toward him, pulled by invisible strings.

Fragments of song fall out of his mouth like something swallowed down and choked up. "Drinking you down like I wanna drown...drinking you down like I wanna drown...drinking you down like I wanna drown....I'll be calm and collected...calm and collected....I thought I'd be dead by now...."

"...Fucking hate Billie Eilish!" Finn finishes his rant.

"I wanna end me." Chip says it. And then he repeats it. He closes his eyes and lets his fingers linger on the chords. Something about that lyric settes in the pit of his stomach. Something about that lyric brings  the image of Max shattering his mirror while Chip cowered helplessly in the corner. Something about that image, the possibilty for something terrible in his eyes, like big black coals. Something about his bloodied fists and the savage scream loosened from his lungs. Chip closes his eyes and repeats the phrase. Max would run to Starlight City, the unofficial capital of power-harvesting. He'd fly like a different kind of moth to a flame, one looking to burn.

"Stop it!" Finn shakes his head. "Look, I know you wanna get Max but what are we doing, this is a bad idea, we need to go home, we need to get the police, you need to tell them what you know, poor Monet--"

"This is what she wants!"

"I want to be there when she needs us!" But Finn still hasn't turned the car around. He only presses the accelerator. The world outside has curdled into a big blue blur, whipping past as fast as Chip's thoughts whip up inside him.

"This is being there when she needs us! She needs us to hunt down Max!"

"I wanna end me..."

"We're gonna get ourselves killed!"

Like a different kind of moth to a flame, a moth that wants to cook in the flames that consume the world. "I wanna end..."

"She's dying! And we're doing our stupid hijinks! Like it's all a joke! Like it's all an adventure! Like, like I hate this!"

"No, she's not going to die!" Kai slams his fist in the cupholder, startling Chip, who only hours before heard him admit that Monet was dying.

"And we need to go now, else he's gonna get away!"

"He's probably not even there! It's already too late! He could be anywhere. He's probably in Delaware, or China, or anywhere."

"I...wanna..." A flame. A big organization, a super-hating gang that would have him destroyed. What was it he worked for? The place with the name after the weird literary device? The only thing he'd told Percy about. Every-something. Chip closes his eyes and his hand slides into a chokehold around the guitar's neck. "I'm gonna bury a friend right now."

Finn brought supplies. Kai brought nothing. But Chip brought something between that, something deadly. He brought Max's rope and a knife.

"I wanna end him."

***
So this update is over a year late, oops. I'm going to aim for weekly updates but Sunday's my only real day I have free to write, so I can't exactly make promises, though I am gonna try. Tell me how you feel about this chapter, my long hiatus probably docked my Writing Skill XP a bit. I'm sorry guys and I love ya

x Dami