#never thought led zeppelin would be the vibe to send allie off with but yk

[bcketts]

TASK 09. GOODBYE ALLIE!

thank you.

it's bittersweet waking up the next morning. she doesn't bring much with her, most of her stuff is still at georgetown, but she remembers thinking of when she first arrived at gallagher; how scared she was, how much she wanted to leave. she looks back at the fortress and pretty much thinks the same things, and by the time the hour-long car ride to washington d.c. is done, gallagher already feels a bit like a dream. the only thing that makes it seem real at all is jack's old watch, heavy on her wrist and clunky. it's already got a few scratches from where she keeps banging it on things, throwing her hands up in the air or about, whacking it on doors and windows. but it's a sturdy thing.

dazed and confused.

they're all allowed to pick up their things, which have been packed haphazardly into boxes for them by residential life, but allie gets two boxes. there's not much she can do with them but decide to ship them home, so she takes an uber to the post office with two boxes of things, not caring enough to go through what's inside, but mostly scared that she might start bawling. it's a weird thing, getting her phone back, and she doesn't expect it to be so dang heavy! she also thought she'd have missed a lot more text messages, but she supposes that she traveled with all her best friends, so how could they have texted her? she gets chipotle in town with a few of her friends before heading to the airport, and it feels nice to sit with the other members of the club and do something normal, just for a little while.

bring it on home.

getting home is the hard part, because she hasn't seen her parents in months and she's worried they hate her, but the second she sees them near the baggage claim, tears spring to her eyes and she's running at them full-force into a big bear hug. they smell the same. she loves her mom's perfume and her family's detergent and the way her dad laughs with his belly. but it's obvious that there's something missing, they can all tell, and the presence of their daughter just hammers home the absence of their son. the group hug feels awkward with just three people, like she's not sure where to put her hands without jeremy around, and her parents keep finding themselves saying "you two" or referring to allie as a plural when she's really just one, a half of a whole.

that’s the way.

"i'm sorry about that phone call, while i was at school," allie says.

"that's alright, you were under a lot of stress."

"no, dad, i meant it. i don't believe the same things any more." and she expects to get yelled at, to get chewed out, but he just looks at her and nods and there's a moment of prolonged silence between them.

"sometimes, i'm not so sure myself. but what else is there?" and that makes allie very quiet, and she thinks she understands why her dad clings so hard to the things he believes in, and it's the exact same reasons why she can't keep clinging to them any longer.

over the hills and far away.

what allie doesn't do: visit her brother's grave and mope around her sad house. what she does do: says forget about it and takes off to the hamptons.

she gets one perfect week. that's what she keeps calling it – her perfect week. where she goes to visit levi in his home in the hamptons, flinging herself into his arms and covering him with tiny kisses just because she can. it's a whirlwind of a week where she gets very sunburnt, laughs all the time, and forgets for a while what it's like to be arkansas allie. she misses gallagher allie sometimes, and she wonders if she'll ever figure out how to be the perfect balance between the two, but right now, she's happy to spend many hours feeling someone else entirely: and that someone is rich! or at least as rich as levi madden is! and that someone has a lot of sex and spends a lot of time laughing and even though she's getting a college degree from an ivy league that could make her a whole lot of money someday, allie thinks that maybe being a trophy wife wouldn't be so bad. she loves the way he smiles, or the way he smiles at her, and she tries not to count the amount of times he does it like each one might be the last and she's got to save every single one of them.

she cries her eyes out when they say goodbye at the airport because she knows it's for real this time, and the thanks him for all the ways he made her feel sane, made her feel like herself again when personhood seemed like an impossible label to reclaim. but she also knows that despite all their pretending, that he's from a different world than she is. "don't let yourself be alone," she says, "just because you won't have a normal person life doesn't mean you shouldn't have people." because most of all, she's terrified that one day levi will be forty-something and he'll look like jack, packing his bags up with no one to go home to. "okay? and please write. you promised. or, i guess you could text me, if you want to be all twenty-first century about it." and she kisses him one last time but she's so caught up in her head about it being the last time that she can't really enjoy it, not properly.

what is and never should be.

allie goes home sunkissed and smiling, because it's sad but it's the final goodbye in the weirdest chapter of her life thus far. and then, summer resumes like normal. she's going to church on sundays with her parents, working the food drive and the bake sale, and facetiming imogen, marlowe, or luce, or...whoever will pick up the phone at any chance she can get.

on the fourth week, she develops a urinary tract infection. this is because she hates to go to the bathroom and she's always holding it, because she knows to get to the toilet, she's going to have to walk by jeremy's room and remember that he's not inside, and wonder what it looks like. so, she makes herself sick, from holding it all in. but it's sort of a wakeup call, a way too obvious metaphor – almost like it was created by a really uncreative writer. she's got to face things eventually.

since i’ve been loving you.

allie can't even open the door to jeremy's room at first, mainly because her parents have plopped his big box of stuff right in front of the door. everything else is exactly how he left it. there's gum wrappers in the trash can, socks strewn across the floor. she checks under the bed and that's how she knows her parents haven't been there – there's still that box of dirty magazines, which atty used to make fun of jeremy for having. "you do know there's the internet, right?" but jeremy was into it for the aesthetic, there was something so much more authentic to jerking off to something on print rather than pixelated. and atty would say it was pretentious. conversations like this used to make allie want to die, and they still do, because she kicks the box back and whispers, "euch." and his weed is still in the sock drawer, which is a remarkably boring place to have put it. he never used to smoke or do anything until he went to college, but allie blames atty's influence. a while ago, allie would've been a good sister and thrown it out, in case her parents ever did catch him for all the weird stuff hidden in different drawers, but instead, she puts one of his led zeppelin records on and lights up, but she has to facetime milena to figure out how to use the grinder, so perhaps it's not as poetic as it sounds.

and then she goes through the box of stuff from his dorm. there's a lot of pictures of imogen, of course, and that makes her heart hurt, because she can literally see where he used to keep them on his walls, the holes of old push pins. his violin, his skateboard, all the things he used to do to keep himself occupied. allie never knew someone so busy and so lazy at the same time. she sighs, lays down on his bed and looks up at the ceiling, knowing every crack and line by heart. it aches, everywhere, but she has to get up to skip stairway to heaven, since that's just too dang ironic.

ramble on.

allie visits his grave on the last day of summer, but it's nothing like his room. she goes with her parents and allie's a sympathetic crier, so when her mom cries, she cries too, but she can't help but think that this isn't where jeremy is. with all the dead people. he's in his room, with all the things that made him himself, or he's at georgetown, laughing with her and her friends in an amnesty international meeting. he's still around, in a way. he's just not here.

bring it on back.

it's the first time that she's ever traveled from pointsett to washington, d.c. alone, but by now it's late august and she's feeling alright, almost excited for the fresh start – to see steph, hudson, and matt again, to start dreaming again how they'll save the world. because it's always more exciting to conspire with friends than alone. but of course, thoughts of gallagher academy linger in the back of her mind, and as she moves to get her bag, she whacks the clunky watch on her wrist on the overhead compartment. she shakes her wrist out, but she smiles as she wheels her suitcase down the aisles and head to hail an uber, grateful for the small reminder that she's not alone, and that it wasn't a dream.