Tegmark didn't need to move her head to see who had spoken. She looked over to the side. Through the beanie the girl wore, she could see a small portion of red hair sticking out (she cut her hair, it's not long enough anymore), streaming across the side of her face. She tucked it away when she noticed Tegmark looking, but by then, it was too late. "Hey," she said lowly. "Didn't think . . . you'd come around here again. You come to see me, or was this for another reason?"

Beverly chuckled nervously. Her hands came out of her pockets to move them around, fidgeting as she slowly approached. Tegmark flinched when she tried to reach out, and Beverly didn't blame her. The rift was strong, Felix could tell. There was no doubt about that.

"Can I sit down?" she asked, pointing to the open space next to Tegmark.

Tegmark looked at it a moment, then back to Beverly. Her numb face could make out only a slight smile through all the frigid air and falling snow. "Only if you're worthy of standing me for more than a few minutes."

"Oh. Um. . . . Okay, I guess." Beverly clambered up the fort, and wiped away the snow which conflicted with her seating arrangement. Then she sat. It was awkward being in such close proximity of her ex that Tegmark nigh jumped from the edge and ran back home, but she stayed. Pauline could wait to release her anger as soon as Beverly was done here.

"Well?"

"Oh, yeah. Um. . . . I'm sorry."

Tegmark raised an eyebrow. "About what?"

"The thing that happened at school. I heard . . . on the news, y'know how they talk about the victims and some of the people who were there firsthand? Well, I got to see you. You were the one on his list, Harvey's, the who sent that letter."

"Yeah, I was," she said, except it wasn't her voice speaking, it was an automatic thing. She hadn't known anything about what happened with Gordy (because after his operation was finished, his family wanted nothing to do with her, and prevented him from doing anything with her by constant monitoring) or any of the other kids, but she did know that she was offered an interview. She didn't view it, refused to look back on it in the last few weeks, or even speak on it, because sitting there with the muzzle stuck in her face and the fear crawling up her spine wasn't something she liked to think about, or even remember happening.

"I'm sorry I had you write it. If it weren't for that, he wouldn't have . . . y'know. . . ."

Tegmark shrugged. "He would have come after me anyways. Frazier didn't treat him like garbage over some school newspaper and now look where. . . ." She paused. Was that a tear? No, it couldn't have been. Wipe it away, quickly! "Look where that got him."

"You're alive, though," Beverly mentioned. "That's lucky."

Tegmark looked at her with a sidelong glance. "And you would consider that lucky?"

"Yeah, of course," she said, but her voice was less confident now. "I don't want you to die."

Tegmark scoffed. She held her hands to her mouth, trying to heal herself from the cold which ailed her uncovered hands. She should have brought some gloves, she thought as she rubbed them together, fully conscious that Beverly was unabashedly staring at her. "You sounded like you did the last time we talked."

"Oh, I'm sorry, Jenny, I didn't mean for it to seem like that." Beverly reached out with her hand to clutch Tegmark's, but she took it away, holding it close to her chest. The stoic eyes she gave the redhead deterred her from reaching further. She sighed. "Look, it was a bad time for all of us, okay? I was really, really mad at the time. And I had a reason to be."

"No, you didn't," Tegmark denied, swinging her legs. She focused on their sluggish, lethargic motion. Keep moving them, and you'll never have to think about the way she's looking at you, she told herself, but of course, her voice was weak and fickle in her head, no longer loud and confident since that fateful day.

"You were yelling at me," Beverly said.

She slowly got up from the edge, started walking towards the slide and leaned against the yellow plastic that comprised of the child's plaything. Tegmark craned her head backward in order to see her. It was awkward, the way her head leaned back. Soon after this, she felt uncomfortable, and followed her, rubbing her hands together and proceeding to blow on them repeatedly as she leaned against the orange metal of the railing. "Okay?" she asked.

Beverly shook her head. This time, she was the one who had this pent-up frustration, not Tegmark. Tegmark felt numb and cold after being here in the winter atmosphere, soaking in the innate melancholy the weather and the covered streets emanated. But Beverly was on fire. Her eyes sparked with flames, her cheeks flared with spots of red, and her hands weren't stiff and frozen yet. It was hard not to melt in front of her.

She had to keep up the frozen facade, though. It had been a couple months since the breakup but it still hurt, like salt in a fresh wound. You can't turn your back on a year-long relationship when it was the only thing which kept you going. She hadn't been able to focus on moving on when Harvey had rampaged through the school no more than a month afterwards. Besides, she was Jennifer Tegmark, and Tegmarks never backed down so easily, especially her father.

"It just hurt," Beverly simply replied. Her hands drew up to her barren forehead, rubbing the sides of it with her warm palms. "And . . . I don't know, you kind of deserved to be left alone like that, you never did anything else than belittle us, both Gordon and I." She paused, exhaling loudly. "But that doesn't mean I want you to die. You mean something to me. I kept your stuff when I left. I look at it from time to time. I glance at our screenshots. You mean a lot to me, so it wouldn't be okay if you died because of something I was technically apart of, right?"

"No," she said, defeated.

As she stood amid the floating snowflakes, it was clear to her that Beverly was still beautiful, even if she looked exhausted and tired from all of her lies and arguing. Tegmark remembered the golden days of their relationship, the great days which gave them loving memories, but they were blotted out soon with the black ink of Tegmark's dissension, the argument the two of them had when she got into her SUV and drove away with her family, out of Wisconsin and into Ohio, right on the edge of Lake Erie, screaming bloody murder straight through her limbic system just like Tegmark'd done.

And Beverly was loveable, she didn't deserve that. Tegmark had been . . . cruel. She realized it far before Beverly'd left, finding herself feeling guilty for the ways she treated her, hating herself for it, but she never felt as though she could come into contact with her revelations with others, especially her girlfriend. She couldn't apologize. It was almost out of her comprehension, the thought of saying sorry for something you'd done wrong because she was always right. Or at least believed she was, told herself she was.

Clearly, she wasn't right.

"I wish I could just die," Tegmark admitted.

Beverly's face morphed into a film of aghast trepidation. "You what?"

"I wish all of this" -- she gestured around her -- "would just go away, y'know? It's wack, staying in this shitty place when my mom is a whore and my dad is so laid back that he doesn't bring her into the station himself for beating his child. Gordy and I tried running away. Failed. He ratted me out. And ever since then, it's been a fucking shitstorm at school. There's the people who wanna blame me, because I'm the only one left to blame. And the thing is: I don't really blame them! I'm the only stupid one left in that damn place, it's like an actual hell back there when there's hella people staring at you right through the sides of their vision." Tears began streaming down her face. They'd freeze in the below-freezing temperature, but she let them go anyways.

Beverly didn't move.

Tegmark kept crying. "I don't wanna hurt you."

"You already did."

"Again! I mean again, I don't wanna hurt you again."

Beverly pursed her lips. Then, relieving her face of its stoic farce and revealing her hidden emotions, she came forward and wrapped her arms around Tegmark's neck. She didn't say anything to comfort Tegmark, just in the way that Jenny never comforted Beverly when she needed it, and it was . . . cathartic, knowing that this injustice was caused by her own faults and qualms with the world. Had taken it out on everything except herself through these years, only coming to her senses to admonish her mistakes and redo the things she said she'd stop doing soon afterwards to relieve herself of self-loathing. It was difficult to stand here and cry into someone's shoulder, to let yourself become so weak that you released your anger and sadness and unbidden emotions through your actions instead of your words.

But she stood there, and she cried, and by the time Beverly had pushed away from the sniffling blonde to look her in the eyes, her somber smile nearly imploded Tegmark's heart. "Are you sorry?" she asked softly.

click

Felix blinked. The metal walls were back. Her tanned arms weren't pale. Her hair didn't flop over her shoulders anymore, it was cut short near them. Her hands no longer clutched the device; it sat on the floor. The picture of Beverly's smiling face in the snow, her glasses sliding down her nose, her lips curled into a deeply affectionate grin, stared up at her. The sardonic contrast made Felix wish she was back there in the snow, relishing the adoration which the two of them shared. She was stuck here, though, no longer living vicariously through the life of another.

Felix stretched her arms, getting used to the feeling again. It was odd, comparing the length of Tegmark's short arms and her slightly longer ones, because it set off her whole equilibrium, just in the way that her legs didn't feel as though they were hers anymore. She collected the device into her hands, contemplating whether another dive would be worth it.

"You're awake."