Chapter Text
Amy Raudenfeld hasn't talked to Karma Ashcroft in 16 hours and 26 minutes and it feels like she's breaking into hives. In the entirety of their friendship this is the longest they've gone without speaking. The strangest part to Amy is that she's the one not talking. She has thirty-eight unanswered phone calls from Karma and roughly eighty texts – her phone buzzes on her nightstand – make that eighty-one texts. She wants to answer every single one. She wants to apologize for starting a fight about Liam, for acting weird, for not being the kind of friend she wishes she could be.
Instead she lets the calls go to voicemail and the texts eat up the memory on her phone. Everything has gotten so complicated since she gave in to Karma’s latest plan for world domination. In terms of crazy Karma schemes being fake lesbians in order to win homecoming queen is actually pretty mild. It requires no pyrotechnics or ethically questionable fake disabilities, which is a relief. But then again, none of those plans ever made her have to rethink her entire identity.
Before she'd lost her mind and kissed Karma in front of the entire student body of Hester, Amy had been convinced she was just too smart for the typical high school romance. She looked around at all of her idiot classmates doing stupid things to impress one another and thanked god she was above all of that. Now she knows she's just as much of an idiot as anyone else. Maybe even more of an idiot, because what kind of moron agrees to fake date her female best friend and then finds herself falling for her? That is beyond high school stupid. That is straight up romantic comedy stupid.
The worst part is that Amy desperately misses Karma, but can’t figure out how to be around her.
What she really needs is a little bit of space. She and Karma are so thoroughly integrated into each other’s lives that there is literally nowhere for Amy to go that doesn’t hold some sort of Karma related memory. Even the roof of the school has been compromised. Now if Amy so much as looks up during class she is reminded of Karma facing her fear of heights to make an apology sweet enough that she agreed to the whole fake dating business in the first place. But school pales in comparison to Amy's bedroom, where memories of Karma practically seep from the walls. It's overwhelming, and she wants nothing more than a moment where her world stops spinning and she can finally quit feeling like she's going to throw up. So when her mom calls up from downstairs that “Karma is here!” Amy panics and ducks into the one place she absolutely knows even Karma won’t think to look for her - Lauren’s room.
As it turns out, Lauren is also in Lauren’s room, lying on the bed doing her homework. She squeaks as Amy bursts in, shutting the door behind her, and is about to say something when she hears Karma calling from the hallway.
"Amy?"
Amy’s eyes go wide. She shakes her head at Lauren, silently pleading with her to just for once keep her mouth shut. Lauren’s lips curve into a mean smile. Amy drops to her knees abandoning all pride and begs.
“Please,” she whispers, “Just let me hide here for five minutes. I will do all of your chores for the next week.”
“Two weeks.” Lauren counters.
“Fine.” Amy agrees desperately just as there's a knock on the door.
Rolling her eyes, Lauren gets up and opens the door, nudging Amy behind it so that she's hidden in the space between the door and the wall.
“Hey,” says Karma, and Amy can make out the side of her face through the crack between the door and the frame, “Have you seen Amy?”
Karma’s hair curls gently around her shoulders. The skin of her cheek and her neck looks smooth and inviting. Amy wishes she could touch it. Then she reminds herself that she could be touching it, cupping Karma’s cheek in her hand and tangling her fingers in those curls, all she has to do is stop hiding and make up with her friend. But if she does that, if she lets herself fall back into Karma’s embrace, she knows that she will never, ever, want to let go. So Amy stays silent, holding her breath and listening to her heart thumping in her chest. It’s so loud she wonders if Karma can hear it though the door.
Thank god for Lauren, whose crossed arms Amy can also see through the crack at the edge of the door. Who stands there completely unimpressed, giving nothing away and says, “No. Why the fuck would I know where that dyke is? God, keep your gay drama to yourself.”
“Look, if you see her can you tell her that I’m looking for her?” Karma asks, an edge to her voice.
“What do I look like? A delivery service?” spits Lauren, and she shuts the door in Karma’s face.
Amy stays frozen against the wall. She hears Karma’s footsteps retreating down the stairs. When they disappear completely she finally allows herself to breathe. She slides her back down the wall until she’s sitting on the floor, hands on her bent knees.
Lauren hops back on her bed.
“Thank you.” Amy says.
Lauren doesn’t look up. “Whatever. Have fun doing my chores for three weeks.”
“It was two weeks!” Amy protests. Lauren just raises and eyebrow and smiles her tight little smile. “Fine,” Amy concedes, “Three weeks.”
Lauren goes back to doing her homework and Amy just sits rubbing her sweaty palms against her jeans. Something was going to have to be done about Karma, but not right now. Lauren doesn’t say anything else, which Amy is so grateful for she almost doesn’t mind the extra week of chores. She concentrates on breathing. In and out. After a few minutes she feels herself calm down. For the first time since Shane held her hand over his head and announced she and Karma were running for homecoming queens Amy feels like her head isn’t about to explode.
She gets up and opens Lauren’s door. As she closes it behind her, she looks back at Lauren, petite and perfect, laid out on the bed like a doll. Lauren keeps her eyes trained on her history book, ignoring Amy completely. Amy shuts the door.
Amy keeps avoiding Karma. It's still killing her that they're not talking, but Amy honestly doesn’t know what to say. Instead she hangs out with Shane. She’s starting to think she might actually like Shane. It’s his fault all of this stuff with Karma is happening, but at the same time he is easy to talk to and willing to help her. He takes her to a lesbian coffee house and tries to keep her from embarrassing herself too much.
He doesn’t succeed. The whole endeavor is a disaster with Amy basically assaulting poor unsuspecting lesbians and acting like an overly aggressive frat boy in a movie. Still, he stays and he tries to cheer her up. He helps her make an online dating profile and is genuinely excited when the girl who messages her is, in fact, super cute. He even volunteers to stay and debrief the date with her, lounging around her room until she gets home. It’s the kind of thing Karma would do, which sends a flash of pain through Amy’s body. Even though Shane is being really really great she still misses Karma so much it physically hurts.
Amy goes on the date. The girl is as cute as her picture. Like when she spent time with Oliver, Amy doesn’t want to stab her eyes out. They talk about school and make jokes that they both laugh at. It’s actually going well until Amy launches herself at the girl’s lips and then runs away.
Luckily for Amy her date is not only cute and funny, she is also really understanding. They talk about Karma, which doesn’t alleviate any of Amy’s fears but at least makes her feel less alone.
When she gets home Shane is still there, sitting on her bed paging though her diary. Something in her heart clenches a little. For all his flip comments about only being in this for the drama, he is still there in her room as he promised. She decides she definitely likes Shane. He's excited as he asks how the date went. When Amy tells him she doesn’t want to go out with any more girls or guys, he just responds with, “I guess we know what that makes you.”
“We do?” she asks, suddenly afraid he’s going to label her a hopeless case or something and just walk out.
“You’re a Karmasexual.” he says with a smile. It’s definitely one kind of answer, but not one that solves any of her problems.
Amy collapses face first onto her bed. She wishes this day was over. She wishes she could just go back to when things made sense. Shane is telling her to talk to Karma.
“Tell her how you feel!”
It’s easy for him to say it. He's not the one risking anything.
“She’s been my best friend since Kindergarten.” Amy says and she feels the tears pricking at her eyes, “If I tell her we will just drift apart until one day we’ll meet in line at the grocery store and say polite hellos and pretend we didn’t once know everything there was to know about each other.”
“I’ve seen you two together,” Shane says, “She’s always kissing you or holding your hand. It’s pretty clear she loves you.”
He’s right. For a minute Amy lets herself believe that all of the kissing and touching means the same thing to Karma that it does to her. Then she remembers Karma’s face as she sang on stage during the Occupy Hester protest. How she smiled when she saw Amy, and how she positively glowed when she looked at Liam. No matter how much Karma loves her, it’s not the same. Amy doesn’t make Karma glow like that and she knows it. Still, she listens to Shane as he tries to convince her that Karma might feel something for her. Everybody likes a happy ending, and he is no exception. It would be fairy tale perfect if it turned out that Karma was hiding her true feelings all along as well, but nothing else in Amy’s life has ever been a fairy tale. She’s not inclined to think this thing with Karma will end well at all.
“You’ll never figure this out by hiding from her.” Shane tells her.
He’s right again. She watches him as he glides out of her room, confident and poised. Amy wishes she could be like that. She wonders if that confidence is real or if he’s just really good at faking it. Or maybe he faked it until it became real. That’s the thought still bouncing around her head when she finally picks up the phone and answers Karma’s 76th call.
“Karma? Hey…”
It’s a good talk. Karma apologizes first, followed by Amy. Karma swears to be a better friend and to play all of her songs for Amy before anyone else. When Amy asks about Liam Karma is uncharacteristically silent. It doesn’t really get Amy’s hopes up, but it doesn’t diminish them either. They promise they’ll see each other at school the next day and right before they hang up Karma says, “I love you. You know that, right?”
“I know.” says Amy, even though she still doesn’t feel like she knows anything.
Much later, Amy finds herself puttering around the kitchen, idly opening the refrigerator and poking through its contents. She doesn’t see anything she wants so she settles for a glass of orange juice. She’s still there, leaning against the kitchen counter, sipping from her glass, when Lauren comes in. She looks flushed and her clothes are rumpled. Amy can see Tommy’s truck pulling out of the driveway.
Bruce, Amy’s soon to be step-father, comes down the stairs.
“Hey honey, did you have fun at Lisbeth’s?” he asks.
“Yeah it was great,” Lauren chirps, regaining her composure in an instant, “I think Lisbeth is really starting to get the hang of algebraic equations.”
He hums approvingly, “Well with your help I’m sure she’ll get it in no time.”
“Thanks Daddy.” Lauren says sweetly. He grabs the newspaper he left on the coffee table and heads back upstairs.
Amy feels herself staring at Lauren. At her still slightly red cheeks, her baby doll dress, her ramrod straight back.
“What?” Lauren snaps, and Amy almost drops her glass, startled.
“Nothing!” she says, then, as an afterthought, “You’re a really good liar.”
It isn’t accusatory, and Lauren seems to recognize that because she doesn’t bite back or pick a fight. She just says, “I have to be,” and waltzes up the stairs.
Amy watches her go. It hits her how little she knows about Lauren. She has the facts; mother died when she was thirteen, above average student, image and popularity obsessed, hateful little she beast... Amy is convinced that as soon as their parents are married Lauren will become her mom’s favorite daughter. Unlike Amy, Lauren is pretty and perfect. She cares about clothes and presentation. All of the things Farrah wishes Amy could be, Lauren already is. Amy really does hate her, but there is a small part of her that admires Lauren as well. Admires her toughness. As pretty as Lauren is, she also seems to be made of steel. While Amy feels like she is crumbling, Lauren just soldiers on.
She finishes her juice and leaves the glass in the sink. Tomorrow she will see Karma and she won't crumble. Maybe she’ll even tell Karma the truth.