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It happens again and again. While she blinks, shock blanket wrapped around her shoulders. While she huddles in the office, shaking, breathless (the police aren't here, the police will never be here, fucking useless as always). In bed at night, staring at her phone, Chloe's texts bleeding blue scattershot.
Kate in motion, always in motion. Arms windmilling, hair streaming around her head. Mouth open, silent, a ragged red howl caught a million phones, she saw Victoria and her bitches raise theirs high and Max wanted to cuttheirfuckingthroats putherfingersinthem makethemcry makethemrot.
She blinks. Kate falls. She blinks. Kate rises.
Kate rises, blood seeping off the concrete and back into her limbs, red wings flapping. Kate, alien monster, alien mother, ascending, descending, birthing shattered alien babies in the rain. Kate with her organs settling back into her body and spilling out again, breaking apart and fitting back together.
She'd seen Kate out of the corner of her eye, in the window, pacing on the rooftop when Max sat stupidly at her desk. Except she hadn't really seen her, she was sure she imagining things, it didn't even make sense how she could see Kate out of that window when the angle from Mr. Jefferson's room to the girls' dorm had been all wrong, she was clear across the campus--
And yet, and yet, Max had seen Kate. She's still seeing Kate. See Kate fly, see Kate die, shove the split open pieces back together like you're shoving your shit into a backpack bursting at the seams, weighed down with far too much.
Kate makes red snow angels on the concrete and then she flaps back up, back to safety. Max makes her do this, rewinds her like you do when you get a topless scene of your favorite actress, the perfect money shot, perfect photo.
She hadn't taken a picture. She'd been too busy stopping time, too busy bleeding as she staggered up the stairs, bleeding a nightmare period except it comes from her nose this time. Kicking the door open and Kate had waiting for her, organs fluttering out of her back like wings, the pieces of her body gathered roughly into the shape of the girl.
It had taken another firm tug to get her completely back together before time snapped back into place--she wonders what it would have been like if she hadn't been able to do it, if Kate had just suddenly burst into pieces across the roof in front of everybody else, intestine hissing like snakes to wrap around Max's ankles.
Max can still see Kate's intestines in the shine of blood dripping from her own nostrils, falling, falling, falling. Porcelain photography, a blown-apart girl smeared across the bowl, somewhere between assembly and disassembly.
The toilet seat is ruined, worse than any period. They'll think someone died in there, they'll think it was a miscarriage--or an abortion, maybe, like Dana's. If Max could pay somebody to stick something up inside her and suck Kate out through her cunt, she would.
Instead, Kate looks back through the mirror. A ghost, hair a mess, battered, bloodied, violated. The concrete had fucked her open worse than the Vortex Club ever could, a death spiral of crimson tears on display. Thorn-split petals of a rose, a pussy, opening wide to let in the husband she'd tried to stay pure for.
Max put her back together, she thinks. She can't remember. There may or may not be a shrine for Kate on the campus, there may or may not be a dark stain that poor Samuel has to scrub off the concrete. Kate could be in a hospital somewhere, drugged out of her mind, or rotting in the morgue as her parents prepare to haul her back home.
It doesn't matter. She's still always falling, always flying, bleeding into Max as Max bleeds into her. Max is the ugly god that tosses her down and raises her up again, crumpling time in her fists like a shitty photo, taking it again and again, trying to get it just right.
Looking down from above as Kate falls, two angels with their wings clipped. Although Max can still feel her wings beating, the wheeze of lungs pulled out of her back, the blood eagle execution method Chloe found so gross and cool when they were kids. She breathes and they flap, helpless, tortured, frantic.
She flaps and she causes a hurricane, like any butterfly. She flaps, she flies, she falls, she carries Kate up and drops her again just to see what happens. The sound of a girl's body smashing open like a party favor sounds remarkably like a shutter clicking when you think about it.
There's blood on Max's sneakers. Blood on her sneakers and brains on her face, Kate's thoughts glistening on her cheeks like tears. She can shower until her skin pulls off and it'll never go away, Kate will never leave her. There's some comfort in that, especially considering how the rest of the world seems to be constantly spinning apart around her.
In contrast, Kate's plummet is almost familiar, a steady tick like a hand crawling up or down the clock. If she could, maybe Max would've found herself rewinding and raising her over and over again, loosing herself in the steady splat, splat, splat of a beating heart, ejected from the ribcage.
Kate's spine had gleamed so sharp, so pale, like her stricken face. Between her and Chloe, Max has a better idea of what another girl would look like with her insides pulled out then she knows what another girl would look like completely naked.
Maybe that's why she makes Chloe pull over, speeding back from Blackwell the night after. Clawing at her with angry, ferocious fingers, demanding to be shown how it works, biting at her wrists and throat and belly and thighs with the hunger all angels must feel when they touch humanity for the first time.
Chloe laughs and walks her through it, but her hands tremble the first time they slip between Max's thighs, eyes wild as a startled deer's. Eyes wild as a rabbit trapped in its cage and Max kisses her for as long as she can stand, pictures herself reaching into the rabbit's cage and slipping it out, wringing its neck.
How cruel of Kate, to brand herself behind Max's eyes like this. How vicious in her revenge, to brand them all red like this, to burn her suffering into Blackwell's very stones. How bright she'd burned, rising above them all, portrait of the girl as smashed-open cosmos, mouth a black hole desperate to swallow the world.
And Max swallows Chloe just as desperately, scratching trembling lines down her hips. Pretends she doesn't hear Chloe gasp Rachel's name, hand clapped over her own mouth, trembling like a bird in a storm.
Max doesn't begrudge her for it. She closes her eyes, and behind them she sees a galaxy's worth of girls, short blonde hair and long golden hair and bloodied brown hair and electric blue hair, all stitched together, arms and legs spinning like a fragmented deity as they fall and rise and fall again.
She comes to the idea of them all hitting the ground, breaking apart, indistinguishable, unnameable, beautiful. Their mingled red raining over her, covering her face, and when it clots her eyes shut she sees nothing at all.