Chapter Text
Almost as soon as Holly exited the Fords complex on the way back to her hotel, she had already put in her two weeks of notice for resigning from Alabaster. Two weeks marked the gap between her and her new life beginning in earnest, but already she felt the ripples of it. Her talk with Abby regarding the finer details of the transition from one career to another had gone smoothly, if long-windedly. The pair, now free to enjoy each other’s company, split off into tangents whenever an entertaining idea arose, and their simple talk lasted longer than expected as a result. Chief among the issues to iron out had been the sheer distance between Holly’s apartment out on the east coast and the complex, situated squarely in the heart of the midwest. While Abby assured Holly that plenty of her new line of work would benefit from still living in the city, close to the people the sheep was trying to reach, there were also plenty of things which required Holly to be able to work with Abby in person.
At first, the ewe had offered Holly a quaint, older home the ewe happened to own on the edge of town as a potential place for Holly to stay whenever she needed to stay in the area for business. Holly agreed that solved the issue of where to stay, but not the issue of how to get there, a process she knew would quickly grow to be both time-consuming and frighteningly expensive over so many trips there and back. To that end, the pair left Abby’s office to pay a quick visit to the Imagining Wing in search of any good ideas for dealing with the situation. By the time they had left, they determined that while Holly spent her last two weeks at Alabaster, the wolpertingers would remain hard at work designing and constructing a corridor which could reach all the way from the Fords complex to an otherwise mundane closet door in Holly’s apartment. Holly decided not to bring up the slightly uncomfortable parallels between that arrangement and her experience alone in the Scratch Wing, and instead reminded Abby that she did not actually own that space, being beholden to her landlord. In turn, Abby assured her that anybody as cynical as Holly’s landlord would have no chance of being able to open the door in a way which made the passageway appear. When desired for the door to lead to a closet, it would surely comply. When Holly finally agreed to the plan, the Inventory went abuzz with activity from the girls, who quickly took to referring to the new project in development as the ‘Holly-way,’ and the pair continued their talk on their own.
When Holly finally stepped back out of the front doors of the complex late in the afternoon, descending the short set of stairs into the gravel yard once again, she found no fanfare in response to her reappearance. As she trotted across the yard back towards the front gates, she wondered if the relative quiet of the afternoon surprised her or not. She could only expect that the cars driven in by the others would all be gone by now, with how much earlier the four left the complex that day. With them, or at the very least with Faye, most of the fans spectating the event would have also left early. What she found unusual, though, was the lack of the vast majority of the news presence that had been there that morning. Apparently, when it became clear that none of the four celebrity guests had won the grand prize, all but a few straggling reporters quickly grew uninterested in continuing to report on the story. When she finally reached the gate and stepped out into the mundane world once again, she found herself thankful to have so few reporters to speak with this time around, especially after having such a busy day already. She took little time to answer questions, mostly continuing to walk down the sidewalk towards her hotel while flanked by a few microphones. Holly took the opportunity to confirm that she had, in fact, won the grand prize of the contest, and provided the reason that Abby determined she would enjoy it more than the other four. She chose not to elaborate any further, though, to not step on the toes of any of the others’ explanations.
While the reporters showed little interest in addressing the elephant in the room with her, as soon as Holly’s phone had contact with wifi again she found it assailed with texts from her friends, all curious to know about what had happened to her that day. As well, they brimmed with curiosity over what could have possibly happened to the other four women to leave them exiting the complex in such bizarre states. Still, Holly held strong to the ultimatum delivered by Bridgette in the Packing Room, not wanting to divulge any information that may accidentally breach the uneasy agreement among the group. As much as they wanted to know more about the inner workings of the complex, the deer insisted that she couldn’t say a word on the matter until the others had already spoken out on the matter of what happened to them.
Despite this, her friends continued to pry. Eventually, she relented to their energy by agreeing to divulge some exclusive details about the inside of the Fords complex the next time they could all meet up together. Given the friend group had already worked out a major meetup just two weeks ago to celebrate Holly finding the final Golden Ticket, she knew the agreement would buy her some much-needed time as her friends awaited openings in their busy schedules. Knowing the others, she doubted it would take them long to figure out their own stories for what had happened inside of the complex and let those loose to the public, and she would tell her friends nothing more than that. To compensate, though, she also assured herself that anything not related to the four’s removal from the tour would be fair game to discuss, however hard it may be for them to believe the wondrous sights Abby had shown them.
The day following, she finally returned home to the city, and the series of exhausting flights provided even less fanfare than yesterday for her return to the world at large. She bounced from airport to airport in long slogs of flight, each punctuated by a flurry of activity as she shuffled herself and her luggage from one flight to the next. When she settled back into her apartment that evening, the thought of returning to work the next morning already pressed in her head. That Monday, she settled back into the last two weeks of her old routine. The end of May quietly drifted into the beginning of June, as if trying to go unnoticed. Holly made the most of the time, feeling around the edges of her usual routine and experimenting with pushing what she felt comfortable with. Nothing too dramatic followed, as she still wanted to keep her departure from Alabaster as smooth as possible, but as she readied herself for bed the evening before her last day at the company, the doe dared to allow herself to set her morning alarm a bit later than usual.
While she appreciated the bit of extra sleep that morning, her little experiment barely affected the doe’s morning routine in practice. Most noticeably, she left herself with too little time to make a simple breakfast for herself before leaving. Normally, a disturbance like that would leave the doe worried about its knock-on effects throughout the rest of the day. She assured herself that, as usual, most of her energy needs had already been covered by her morning cup of coffee, which she now adorned with one of the Fords’ biscotti straws she had bought on the first night of the contest. Instead, she used what little time she left herself before her commute to consider her outfit for the day. Her friends often noticed a subconscious tendency for the deer to dress in desaturated hue during the winter, only for the color to return to her wardrobe each spring. As she dug her way further back through her clothes, though, Holly noted the worrying trend that year of the muted colors having stuck around despite the brighter weather. In response, she made the conscious decision to welcome the coming summer with a particular hot pink top.
As she walked down her street, Holly also noticed the opportunity in front of her as she passed by her familiar corner store, and she peeled off from her usual route to drop in and find something to give her a bit more energy for the morning. She walked an aisle, pondering what might be best to get for herself, but ultimately decided not to give herself too much time to overthink the simple decision. The broad selection offered by the humble shop would normally paralyze her as she reasoned out a choice, but she forced herself to simply pick the first thing that caught her interest and trot away with it. While she always preferred a warm meal to start the day, she counted it as a fair trade for the extra rest.
With her impromptu breakfast in hand, she emerged from the aisle and strolled over to the counter. If she wasn’t already familiar with the store, that alone may have been a struggle. A number of racks, tabletop shelves, and stickers almost perfectly camouflaged the register with the rest of the shop, leaving only a narrow space for Holly to hand her pre-packaged snack over to to the attendant on the other side. The attendant, a diminutive mare with short, chestnut hair, glanced up at the doe several times as she rang up Holly’s purchase, apparently conflicted over something.
As she handed it back, the mare finally found it in herself to speak up. “Say, aren’t you the one they kept putting on the news for a while, there?”
The sudden question took Holly by surprise. She struggled to remember the last time she had gotten a genuine question while standing at the register like this. “About the Fords’ contest? That was me, yeah,” she nodded.
“I knew I had to be recognizing you from somewhere,” the clerk responded, clearly satisfied by how she connected the dots.
“Well, that’s probably just because I stop by here so much, you know?” Holly remarked. “It’s funny, I even picked up the last Golden Ticket from the shelf over there.” She gestured in the direction of the store’s modest candy section, its selection from Fords’ Fantastic Fooderies stood out brightly, now no longer picked barren by Ticket Hunters.
“Oh, lucky me,” she remarked in turn, a smirk growing on her face, “I stocked the grand prize and didn’t even get to find out about it until a month after everyone already stopped caring.”
“Ah, don’t worry about it. I’m sure you’ll get it next time,” Holly chuckled, as their banter died down Holly left the shop, grins now on both of their faces.
Returning to the sidewalk, Holly redoubled her pace as she made her way down to the subway station. She could only take her morning so laxly and still expect to catch the right train downtown, so she took now as an opportunity to make sure she still arrived at work on time. The doe practically jogged through the station and managed to shuffle in through the door before they slid shut and set the train on its way. She sat down as she took a moment to catch her breath. While she did, a pair of men occupied nearby handholds, a boar and opossum. The possum sported a baseball cap adorned with a stylized hammerhead shark logo, a local baseball icon Holly immediately recognized from how inescapable it appeared across the city.
The train shifted suddenly into motion, and they chatted on. “Catch any of the game, yesterday?” The boar started.
The opossum shrugged in response. “Was barely worth it, the Blues have been collapsing the last few weeks, anyways. It wasn’t really much of a game.” Only half paying attention before, the mention of Azure’s team quickly grasped Holly’s attention.
A pensive sort of nod from the boar followed. “It’s the last thing you’d expect, with how strong they opened this year.”
“They’re still barely using their good starting pitcher, for whatever reason. The rest just aren’t performing like she does.”
He shifted some as he thought. “What, did she manage to get herself hurt that bad during that little publicity thing she went and did last month?”
“How would I know? They say everyone’s been real tight-lipped about it,” another dismissive shrug.
Holly decided to take the opportunity during a momentary pause to interject out of curiosity. “Has she said anything about it, do you know?”
The pair took a surprised second to register that Holly was speaking to them before the opossum finally responded to her. “She said, what, ‘a prank gone wrong’ ? Whatever that means,” he noted.
The boar nodded. “Right? What kinda pranks change the color of your fur like that, anyways?”
Holly tactfully kept her lips shut from there on. Keeping her silence on the truth about what had happened to Azure, she at least took the opportunity to note what the fox’s public explanation was for her condition, to be able to tell her friends later. Instead, Holly silently supposed that might be why she hadn’t heard of much activity from Azure’s fan base since the day of the tour. If her ordeal had really led to such a decline in Bakersfield’s performance and Azure’s accomplishments since, the fact that her fans now had much less to brag about became unsurprising to Holly.
Holly’s last day at Alabaster passed by mercifully quickly. With the knowledge that any work left unfinished after today would go unfinished in her absence, her higher-ups chose not to issue her any new projects that couldn’t be finished by the end of the day. For a sizable portion of the morning, Holly stripped what few personal effects she adorned her cubicle with, scarce enough to fit into her bag and not have to lug around with her in a box on the commute home. Afterwards she took her usual lunch break and said farewell to the familiar diner she had made an almost daily visit to over the last few years. Later, she strolled back through the Alabaster lobby, and wondered about how her coworkers would take her departure from the company. Then, as if summoned by her thought, the sight of her squirrel coworker dashed across the lobby.
“Hold the door, please!” They called out, and Holly obliged. After taking a moment to catch their breath, they nodded at Holly. “Thanks for that.”
“Of course, Flint,” Holly nodded back. In the last couple of weeks, she finally found herself making an effort to internalize the names of her closer coworkers, if only to remember them by. The grin on their face showed her that her efforts had been worthwhile.
“Say, Holly, I’ve been meaning to ask,” Flint continued, “what was it like there? You know, basically being in a video with Faye. Still waiting on her putting out her perspective from it, so I figured I’d ask.”
The doe shrugged. “I barely even noticed it, most of the time. She was more focused on talking to you all than to me, I guess.”
“Makes sense. I mean, a lot of people are acting like the sky’s falling that Faye didn’t win, but from everything you told me about it? Why would she even want that? She already has her career figured out. You’re probably the only one out of the bunch who that’s an upgrade for, no offense.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Holly waved off their concern. “But yeah, that’s what Abby told me. I guess they would’ve liked it more if she won and turned the prize over to me, or something? Maybe it wouldn’t have made much of a difference, I don’t know.”
“Well, one thing I do know,” Flint said, “is how cute it is that you’re already on a first-name basis with your new boss. You two sure hit it off quick while you were there, huh?”
Holly opened her mouth to answer, but the ring of the elevator opening up to their floor interrupted her. The two shuffled out and went their separate ways, and Holly supposed that the squirrel’s thought had been a decent point to end on. She thought to herself about the nature of her new partnership with Abby, far from a conventional boss and employee relationship, and supposed that explaining that going forward would have to be one of the first orders of business in her new position.
When Holly returned to her desk, she found her coffee, one of the few things left on her desk, empty. Anticipating the usual afternoon slump of energy, she let her few remaining tasks wait a bit longer and walked over to the break room for a refill. There, she found the room just as constricting as normal, though now with the added discomfort of the June heat leaving the space oppressively warm despite the best efforts of the straining air conditioning. Inside, the imposing figure of her badger coworker already crowded up most of the room as he refilled his own coffee from the communal pot.
“Afternoon, Gavin,” Holly said, and her sudden greeting made him jump in surprise.
He took a second to collect himself as he turned around, gazing downwards to lock eyes with Holly. “Oh. Perez. They’re saying you finally managed to escape. When do the two weeks end?”
“Today, actually,” she grinned.
“Well, congrats to you on that,” Gavin continued. “It sounds like you got yourself some sweet deal out of, uh, wherever it is you’re moving on to, now.”
“It’s a friendlier place, working closer to home,” Holly explained, understating the extent of just how much ‘closer,’ “it’s nice!”
“Well, wouldn’t that be the life?” He shrugged, but then thought about something more deeply for a second. “You know, Perez, I feel like I’m noticing something, but I’m not sure if it’s right or not.”
Holly’s head cocked to the side slightly. “Something like what?”
“Like the fact that you’re normally more tired by this time,” he thought aloud.
“Maybe. I guess I’m just getting a change of pace, right? Trying out a new thing or two, since things are already changing for me.”
“Yeah, I get that,” he said, though as he shuffled tightly around Holly she wasn’t sure that he entirely understood. “Anyways, you enjoy those greener pastures for me, you hear?”
Holly nodded and let him carry on. After taking another minute in the break room to fill up her coffee, she felt surprisingly relieved to return to the main office floor again. Halfway back to her desk, the familiar chill of stern eyes on Holly’s back stopped her in place. Turning around, her boss walked the deer’s way, apparently having stopped something she was doing specifically to approach Holly.
The skunk passed by Holly and stopped, allowing an almost dramatic pause for a beat. “Don’t you have something to do right now, Perez?”
“Nothing that isn’t small enough to be finished before the end of the day,” Holly responded, still on the defensive with her boss.
“ Right ,” she huffed in response, “you got offered some shiny new job from that contest you won, didn’t you. Just how’d you manage that? If anyone could weasel something out of Fords, I’d have guessed Leclerc could do it first.”
“I guess her negotiation style wasn’t what Fords was looking for,” the doe shrugged.
“Or you pulled off some trick that let you outmaneuver her. I’m not sure if that says more about you or Fords,” she remarked.
Holly grinned. “Who knows? Maybe it says the most about Missus Leclerc. Should I get back to my desk while I let you think about it?”
“Alright, don’t get too cute on your last day,” her boss said, her gaze sharpening. Holly simply nodded again and returned to what little work awaited her.
When she finished that work as well, only a short wait stood between her and leaving Alabaster behind. The doe rose from her desk again, taking the opportunity to stretch her legs and make her way over to the water cooler. She didn’t feel thirsty, but hoped to run into someone else there to have something to preoccupy herself with for a minute. Her plan immediately rewarded her, then, with the sight of her kangaroo coworker getting a quick drink on her own.
“Afternoon, Holly,” the kangaroo said, and Holly waved back. “How’ve things been?”
“Business as usual, aside from clearing out the cubicle,” Holly responded. “What about you, Matilda? Is your garden coming along well?”
Matilda paused in surprise, though Holly couldn’t tell if it was remembering her name or remembering her home garden that had been responsible for it. “Yeah, it is. You should’ve seen it last month, though, when a lot of it was really in bloom.”
“Do you have any pictures of it from then, at least?”
“Probably, but we both know how you-know-who feels about the threat of us losing a single minute of productivity looking through our phones, so,” Matilda waved her free hand dismissively.
“Yeah, I think I know, by now,” Holly chuckled. “Still, when you’re able to, okay?” The kangaroo nodded, and Holly strolled back to her cubicle again, leaving it to Matilda to realize that the doe had come and gone without getting a drink for herself.
Following her old routine again, it felt like no time at all when Holly found herself sitting down in her apartment on her worn couch. She tried to take a moment to soak in the feeling of being truly left to her own devices for the first time in a while. However, she quickly found that it felt mostly the same as usual, so abandoned that idea just as easily. Instead, she recalled her incredible business over the last month leaving her with no opportunity to keep up with the Ticket Hunter community, post-contest. Curiosity gripped her, even though she expected to find the forum left entirely desolate in the absence of any tickets left to hunt for, but she found herself checking on the website anyways. There, a small contingent of hunters still populated it actively, though most of their community had long since abandoned them. Some of them stuck together out of actually growing closer to their fellow hunters through the ordeal, which pleased Holly to find, but most of the remaining members of the forum concerned themselves with continued discussion of the great mystery that is Fords’ Fantastic Fooderies.
Predictably, the transformation the other four guests had undergone by the time they left the complex bewildered anyone viewing the day from an outsider’s perspective. As such, the familiar conspiracies about the company reared their head to explain the inexplicable course the day had taken. They combined, reworked, and remixed their usual ideas in inventive, new ways in order to satisfy their curiosity to know what really happened inside the walls of the complex just two weeks ago. Holly, for just a moment, considered stringing along a hint or two about her experience to satisfy the community, but when she saw just how many messages awaited her in the wake of winning the grand prize, she reconsidered. Quietly, she decided to simply leave the forum behind her.
Where the Ticket Hunters and Blues fans wavered in their activity following the contest, Holly’s ventures onto her timelines showed that one community refused to back down. With nearly the same frequency as at the height of the ticket hunt, Faye’s fan base continued its feverish posting. Now, however, they found no targets to direct their aggression towards. In fact, as Holly suspected, there had been little to no activity from Faye whatsoever in the last two weeks. The doe knew that it was only a matter of time before Faye’s voice finally returned to normal and her flow of content resumed. For all of her fans, however, apparently left in the dark about the rabbit’s disappearance from the media, their desperation rose until Holly saw them panicking over the ‘emergency situation.’ They poured over the most recent posts from their idol, pleading and asking about Faye’s whereabouts and when they could expect her next video. At times, their desperation even turned them against each other, as if that would help bring the rabbit back any sooner. Ultimately, Holly breathed a sigh of relief at their ire, at least, no longer being directed at her recently.
She scrolled further, about to entertain the thought of spending more of the evening relaxing and catching up on the day’s news, when a scheduled reminder rang out from her phone resting on her coffee table. Holly scrambled over to it, nearly falling off of the couch as she swiped it off the table to investigate. When she checked her phone, though, the stabbing feeling in her chest, which had disappeared almost entirely over the course of the last weeks, suddenly returned in full force as she read her reminder. Somehow, she had allowed herself to completely forget about a unique situation she found herself in a couple of weeks ago. Having been promised a larger salary working with Abby than at Alabaster, one of the first things Holly did when returning home was to increase the monthly support she had pledged to Bridgette’s channel through another site. In doing so, she sailed up the tiers of supporters for Grazing with Grazeland. At first she initially thought it would simply lead to a more prominent spot in the list of supporters at the end of each episode of the bear’s show. Later, though, she learned that some of the highest-tier rewards included, among other things, personal Q&A time with Bridgette herself.
Holly had increased her pledges to a number of creators she supported, after returning home from the contest. She had given Bridgette the most, of course, out of a lingering feeling of responsibility for what had happened to her that day. Despite this, she knew that her online presence was detached from any personal details about herself, so even if Bridgette saw, she wouldn’t know that it was meant to serve as any kind of vague apology from Holly. Still, Holly feared what might come of them meeting up again so soon. Not one to make herself any more suspicious, however, she discreetly worked through the process of organizing her ‘first meeting’ with Bridgette. Now, nearly at the scheduled time she agreed to those weeks ago, Holly realized that she had no more ways to keep her secret support going.
She scrambled to make herself presentable in the few minutes before the video call. Making her hair as neat as she could manage, Holly realized that she hadn’t thought of anything in particular to say to Bridgette when the time came. Her thoughts raced, and she tried to think up something as she quickly set up her laptop to be able to see her sitting on the couch. The final minute felt like ten as she waited for the time to arrive, and when the video call finally began, it did so precisely on time. Once the video loaded in, the familiar sight of Bridgette greeted Holly again, still sporting her iconic hat, but now in a warm orange shirt as opposed to the muted green she wore to Fords’. She sat at a simple, black desk, and though the program automatically blurred the environment around her, Holly made out the vague impression of what must have been the bear’s bedroom in the edges of the frame. The bear grinned in a way that looked familiar to her videos, but Holly had rarely seen in person on that day.
“Hey, so,” she began, and then suddenly registered who she was speaking to. The grin quickly vanished from her mouth as she gave Holly a look somewhere between surprised and offended. “Perez? You’re in the Q&A tier?”
“Uh, yeah, sorry,” Holly forced out. “I didn’t really know how to say it, before now.”
Bridgette groaned in response, rubbing at her temples. “Look, thanks for the money, Perez, but really? Haven’t you and Fords done enough to me, already?”
Holly sank back into the couch slightly, the feelings of anticipation from before being thoroughly rewarded. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, well, I don’t even know! I don’t know what funny little plan you two have going on,” she continued, “but can you leave me out of it?”
“I’m not doing this for Abby’s sake, it’s just me!” Holly insisted.
“Yeah, sure,” Bridgette said, rolling her eyes, “just like you two have just happened to have gone totally quiet after everything, like you aren’t planning whatever your next move is supposed to be, together.”
“Wait, what? I thought that you wanted us to keep quiet about everything that happened back there, didn’t you? Weren’t we doing the right thing?”
Bridgette huffed. “And how would you even know that, huh? I don’t exactly remember seeing you or Fords around when I was talking about it with the other four.”
“We heard you all talking from her office,” Holly admitted. “And that probably sounds bad, but since we heard what you wanted out of the others, both me and Abby decided that it would be best if we also respected what you wanted, you know?”
Bridgette, in turn, leaned back in her seat, apparently taken aback. Silence filled the call between the pair and left Holly to wonder what exactly she had said that the bear hadn’t been expecting to hear. Bridgette tapped one of her claws against her desk and finally spoke up again. “Well, okay. I’ve got some good news for you on that front, then. Not long ago I got a message from Huffie. She said that she trashed all of the stuff that could’ve been, you know, compromising from what she filmed that day. So now that the video evidence is out of the way, all we have to do is keep our mouths shut and nobody on the outside ever has to find out what happened to us.” She paused for a beat before adding, “minus you, of course.”
Holly felt a pang of guilt at the targeted final comment, but still willed herself to stop retreating back and instead lean a bit forwards again to get a better view of the bear’s video. “You talked to Faye? When’d you do that?”
“It was a few days ago, now. Did she not tell you or anything?” Bridgette shrugged. “Eh, whatever. What’s important now is that neither of you have anything else from that day you’re holding onto without the rest of us knowing, right?”
Holly held up her hands innocently. “Not us, I don’t think so. I mean, I know that there’s nothing that I could have taken myself. I left my phone in my purse by the door that whole day, remember?”
Bridgette nodded as she thought. “You did do that, didn’t you? Alright, well, then all there is left to do is hope that you’re right about Fords’ character, then,” Bridgette continued. “Has she ever told you anything about what she sent to me, after all of that?”
“You mean where? Like what happened in the Menagerie Wing?”
The bear shot her a weary look. “No, Perez, I mean what she sent me.”
“She didn’t, no, but that’s mostly because we haven’t really been able to talk that much since I got back,” Holly noted.
“It was a box full of chocolate chip cookies,” Bridgette stated simply, her eyes breaking from her camera to gaze off at something in the distance. “Which had a little icing message spread across them, one or two per cookie.” She leaned to the side and fumbled around with something off-camera. Shortly later she finally returned to the center of the frame with one of the cookies in tow. Small, richly golden and speckled with chocolate chips, the cookie also possessed a thin piping of purple icing in the shape of the letter ‘D.’ “Do you know what it said in full, when I finally managed to lay all of them out in order on my counter, Perez?”
“I don’t, no,” the doe shrugged, trying to figure out where a message like that could possibly go.
Bridgette set the cookie aside again, and continued to look over where she kept them as she read “‘Don’t mean to diminish, but we wanted to help you finish.’ Now isn’t that just adding insult to injury, huh?”
“Do you mean that they made that batch out of the dough you made?” Holly asked, struggling to stop herself from smiling as she put the pieces together in her mind. “Well, that seems genuine enough, at least to me. It’s their way of saying that they didn’t want your last memory of that batch to be negative, you know? Turning it into something you can enjoy.”
Bridgette raised a brow at her before sighing. “Well, I’m not sure what I expected. That’s kind of your thing , isn’t it? You just always have to give Fords the benefit of the doubt, you just always have to take everything she says at face value.”
“ Well ,” Holly said, gripping at her side again, “she told me that she would try to help all of you out after what happened, and she followed through on that, didn’t she? No one got seriously hurt in the end or anything. She can act oddly, yeah, but she always means what she says, what else would I think about her?”
The black bear groaned, looking away from the camera as she tried to find the words. “Look, I’m gonna be painfully honest with you here, Perez. I don’t know what to think about that day, at this point. What happened back there should not be possible , period. And that includes what I know happened directly to me. All I want to know, right now, is what makes it so easy for you to just go along with everything Fords says. Magic, dreams, whatever it is that everything back there was supposed to be powered by. We know it doesn’t work that way, but you just accept it, act like it wasn’t completely blindsiding you, too, just like it was with the rest of us. I mean, who wouldn’t think that you’re in on it somehow, by the end of all of that? What gives? ”
Silence filled the air, allowing Bridgette’s question to hang, unanswered. Holly sat with the thought and tried to parse her own feelings about things, something she had been trying to do since arriving home from Fords’ to begin with. She glanced away from the screen, then back towards it. She shifted uncomfortably despite sitting on the single most comfortable part of her couch, and finally tried to answer the bear’s big question.
“If you’ll let me also be totally honest with you, too? It wasn’t easy at all, none of it. It wasn’t easy back there with Fords, and it wasn’t easy any day for, I don’t know, the last fifteen years, at least. When you spend your whole life being told again and again, shown again and again, that people can’t be like that. When all you know is that people who present themselves as altruistic or optimists are always doing it for themselves, in the end. When someone comes along and is actually like that, and actually gives you the chance to let go of that pressure and just, you know, be you for a bit? It’s not easy to let yourself believe, to not be afraid that you’re just going to be let down again. After all of that, I still don’t know if I’m quite there, yet.”
Bridgette’s eyes shut in deep thought as Holly continued to talk, by the time the doe finished, the bear leaned back in her chair as she mulled over Holly’s answer. As she did so, her expression gradually began to soften. A moment later, Bridgette’s eyes peeked open for a second or two, as if trying to study Holly’s expression some more. A long, quiet minute passed before the bear sighed again, this time sounding more mournful than frustrated, and nodded. “Alright, well, good job, Perez, you sure gave me plenty to think about before next time. Do you have anything else you wanted to tackle today, or something?”
“I don’t think so,” Holly shrugged. “If I can keep being honest? I got a bit blindsided by this whole thing.”
“Alright, then I think we’re good to call it here for now,” Bridgette continued before pausing again. “Actually, one more thing. I don’t know if you’re going to be getting this from any of the others, but,” she took a deep breath in anticipation, as if preparing for something painful, “I’m sorry about how I treated you back there, really. I think I was working off the wrong read about what you’re like, and you didn’t deserve to be on the other side of it.”
The sudden apology took Holly by surprise. Of all of the reactions she expected from Bridgette going into this meeting, such an earnest apology had in no way been among them. “Oh! Well, I’m sorry, then, if I gave off the wrong impression back there?”
Bridgette tried to stifle a chuckle, but failed. Unlike during the tour, her laughter somehow sounded a bit warmer. “Really? Are you always like this, Perez?”
Holly’s head tilted slightly in confusion. “What do you mean? Like what?”
“Never mind, don’t worry yourself about it.” Bridgette said, waving off the deer. “Look, I’ll just see you next month, alright?”
“Alright,” Holly nodded, and the call between them ended in a flash.
Holly closed her laptop and laid across her couch, trying to take some time to think about what Bridgette had said. A while later, she got up and paced her apartment slowly. More than anything, she wondered how much of what she herself had said might get through to Bridgette before next month’s meeting. She hoped the bear might approach their shared experience from a different angle the next they talked, but struggled to get her hopes up about it. No matter what, she assured herself that there were still plenty of months in the future for both of them to talk things through. Surely, she thought to herself, that if the two of them just had enough time to keep talking, they would figure out exactly what the other meant today.
For now, though, Holly returned to her simple bedroom. She gazed out the window at joggers and commuters on the street below, and wondered how many of them were like her or Bridgette. Tomorrow, the deer would wake up at whatever hour felt right to her and start working with Abby to ‘help keep her world magic.’ A month from now, she would be speaking directly to Bridgette again and learning how much of her brief plea would be internalized by the bear. Beyond that, into the months and years beyond, she now had no more plans waiting for her. The looming blocks of work days at Alabaster had once kept her both grounded and locked down in imagining her future. Now, those seemingly immovable plans dissolved away right in front of her. Her future lay ahead of her, uncertain, but for whatever reason not uncomfortable. She turned about in place and fell backwards into bed. For the second time in a long time, Holly didn’t feel too tired to do anything after work.