teenagerenegade | (no subject)

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maeve

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When he'd gotten the text from Maeve, asking him if he wanted to hang out, Charlie had texted her back with the fact that he'd be free in an hour or so and the name of a coffee shop that did awesome milkshakes, promising to meet her there.

It's a little over an hour later when he walks into the shop, scanning the tables. He got cuaght in a sudden, scudding shower, and his brown hair is damp and curling. He shakes himself off as he makes his way over to her.

"Hey," he says, grinning. "Sorry I'm late."

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"And most of them hate it," she says. "My mum always thought I'd never amount to much and figured me for working at the mall for the rest of my life, but I'm pretty sure I'd just drop dead of boredom."

"I don't think my mom really expected me to do anything," says Charlie, blushing faintly, aware of how that sounds. "She didn't, really. Sat on boards. Went to lunch a lot."

"I think you and I had very different upbringings," she says with a faint smirk, trying to look more amused by it than she usually feels. She doesn't resent Charlie's mother being able to do stuff like that any more than she ever has Aimee's. It isn't their fault.

She just sometimes wishes Erin hadn't been such a fuck up.

"I think I had a very different upbringing to a lot of people," says Charlie, his own smile faint, too. He doesn't think that Maeve's pissed with him about it, though. "My family had a psychiatrist on retainer. How normal could I be?"

"Jesus," she says with a rough sort of laugh. "My mum probably could have used that."

Not that she'd have ever taken advantage of it. Being an addict is a hell of a thing, Maeve knows that well, and that whole thing about needing to want to get better is true. But sometimes even wanting it doesn't mean it'll happen.

"My mom mostly took a lot of pills that she probably shouldn't have been taking with wine," says Charlie. "Maybe she could have done with talking more, too."

"Mine was more into heroin," Maeve says before she gives herself too long to think about it. It isn't something she talks about much. Not back home, not here, but even with the differences in their lives, she understands what Charlie is saying to her right now.

Addiction is addiction. It doesn't matter if someone is smoking crack or taking too much Xanax. It comes down to the same thing.

Charlie's jaw tightens. With the table between them, it's not easy to reach out to Maeve so, instead, he shifts one leg under the table, just nudging his foot against hers.

"Hopefully, they'll both figure it out," he says.

Maeve only shrugs and says, "Mine's been gone more or less since I was just a kid. So I'm not exactly holding out hope for anything from her."

She doesn't mention that Erin had come back. That she'd been clean for awhile, long enough just to get Maeve's hopes up again, crushing them when Isaac and his brother had found her stash. There's no point hoping for anything better from Erin. Not now.

"And you're here now, anyway," he says raising his milkshake in a little toast. "So you'll figure it out on your own. Sounds like you've got plenty of practise at that, anyway."

So has Charlie, really. Just in a slightly different way.

"I think I told you I used to sell papers to make extra cash," Maeve says, lifting her milkshake as well before she takes a sip. "I figure if whatever money I get from this place doesn't cover what I need, I can go back to that."

Especially once she's in college. She's sure there are plenty of students who would rather party than write a paper. She's also sure she can charge more for same day results.

"We can team up," says Charlie, leaning back in his chair and smirking at her. "You can write the papers and I'll churn out the fake IDs."

"They'll need me to write papers if you're giving them a way to get into bars underage," Maeve says with a rough, quiet laugh. "That's a pretty perfect business model."

Maybe she won't need the extra cash, but it's always good, knowing she has a useful skill, something people will pay her for.

"Like a license to print money," says Charlie with a bright grin. "Though I should probably try not to get kicked out here. I don't exactly have anything to fall back on."

"Don't get caught," she shoots back, grinning as well. "It's not that hard."

She knows it isn't always that easy and she's mostly just giving him a hard time. It sucks to be kicked out of school, she's been there herself, and although she'd gotten back in, she'd never felt quite like she was there again. It had felt kind of pointless. Like she was just biding her time.

"You're right," he says, thinking of everything he'd gotten up to at Barton before he ended up in Darrow. "It isn't."

He drains the last of his milkshake, giving the empty glass a disappointed look.

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