Polarity | 6: Promise

He was with Cameron, talking to him somewhere. The surroundings didn’t matter much. All he cared about was his infatuation with the handsome man by his side. A stranger approached and asked something. Without missing a beat, Max answered, glowing with confidence. As long as he had Cameron by his side, he felt he could do anything. His inhibitions were non-existent. He was happier than he’d been in years.
           That was when the rabbit showed up. It was as tall as Cameron, but its long pink ears made it seem ever taller. When he saw it looking around nearby, something in his gut told him that it was searching for them. The ridiculous appearance of Cameron’s creation didn’t soothe him in the slightest. Something about Bashful walking around in the real world mortified him.
           Before it caught sight of them, Max grabbed Cameron’s arm and pulled him along as he took off running. He found himself in a stairwell, zooming up it as fast as he could but it feeling like he was moving in slow motion. Cameron took off ahead of him. His head was spinning, filling with dread. The stairwell never ended. He could hear the patter of rabbit feet steadily approaching. One of Max’s worst fears was the sensation of being chased by someone�"or something in this case�"that he couldn’t outrun.
           When he jolted awake in a cold sweat, relief washed over him. He struggled to catch his breath. His covers were a mess, with him only half underneath them. The nightmare still fresh in his memory, Max reached down to the floor for his phone. He hadn’t plugged it in, so its battery was close to empty. The first thing he saw upon turning it on were the texts between himself and Cameron.
           “I want to meet you in person.”
           “Okay.”
           S**t.
           Max cringed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. His little experiment from last night came flooding back to him. Cameron sure had odd timing; his texts always seemed to come at either the perfect time or the worst time. It was almost like he knew exactly what Max was doing at any moment.
           He read over his friend’s texts once more with a better eye. It was somewhat dismaying to find that he hadn’t imagined Cameron’s confession. The rich writer actually had revealed that he was beginning to develop feelings for him. Max felt awkward about the whole thing. He’d agreed to meet Cameron in person, but found himself regretting it.
           Would it be rude to take it back now? Cameron hasn’t replied to the text. What does the silence mean? S**t, what if he’s on his way to Boston or something?
           Whatever the case, Max wasn’t ready to meet him. He figured that he’d better tell him now rather than let him do something reckless. That thought led Max to another: where did Cameron live? What were the odds of Omegle pairing him up with a random person within a hundred mile radius?
           Max took a deep breath to steady himself before writing Cameron a text. “I’m not ready to meet you yet,” he confessed, deciding to get straight to the point. “I’m sorry if I led you on. I was half-asleep when I said yes.”
           Cameron didn’t respond. He began a reply, but the ellipses bubble disappeared as though he’d decided against it.
           Before Max could start worrying about this, his phone started to ring in his hand. Stacey was calling him. He looked at the time: 7:30 in the morning. Deciding (and hoping) that Cameron would text him back soon enough, he sighed and answered her call. His voice was croaky from sleep as he began with, “Yep?”
           “Oh, sorry,” she said. “Did I wake you?”
           “No,” Max replied as he rubbed his eye with his free hand. “I woke up a minute ago on my own.”
           “Ah, okay. Listen.” She sounded excited about something. “You want to go out for breakfast with me at you-know-where?”
           Max hummed in fatigue. Stacey was talking about a nice little restaurant a few blocks away from her house. Though they’d gone to it together several times and even had their first date there, neither of them could ever remember what it was actually called.
           “What’s the occasion?” he asked her with suspicion in his dry voice.
           “Does there need to be an occasion?”
           “You wouldn’t sound so eager otherwise.”
           “You got me,” she confessed. “I have some good news. It doesn’t affect you at all, but I’m super excited, so I want to talk to someone.”
           “And you can’t come to my apartment, why?”
           “I’m hungry, and we haven’t been to that restaurant in ages.”
           “Fair enough.”
           “Besides, I am at your apartment.”
           Max narrowed his eyes. “What? Why?”
           “Uh, to pick you up, stupid. I’m standing outside your front door. Don’t leave me out here too long.”
           The artist sighed. “I’ll get dressed.”
           Before he knew it, he sitting across from Stacey in the restaurant. She snapped her fingers at him, causing him to snap from the trance he’d been lost in the entire way there.
           “Take off your coat,” she scolded lightly.
           He nodded a bit and did as she asked. They already had drinks, and Stacey sipped on hers as she eyed her ex like a hawk. They both knew he was out of it. He felt unrested, for one, but most of all his mind kept running back to Cameron. The writer hadn’t said so much as a word since he turned him down. Max didn’t know if he’d said the right thing. Was Cameron upset with him?
           “Hey. You okay?”
           Max looked up at Stacey, startled by her voice. “Huh?” he asked without any social grace.
           This didn’t faze Stacey, who had long adjusted to his curtness. “You seem more detached from reality than usual.”
           The Aussie shook his head in an attempt to wake himself up, then ran a cold hand down his face. “I’m okay,” he insisted. “No worries. What did you want to tell me?”
           “You know how I’ve always wanted to be a hair stylist?”
           “Yeah?”
           “Well, someone finally accepted me!”
           To his own surprise, Max didn’t find Stacey’s gushing intolerable. “Oh. Uh, congrats!”
           “I start next Tuesday,” she said as she stirred her drink with her straw.
           “Why not Monday?”
           She shrugged. “Beats me, but I’m not complaining.”
           “I remember how you always used to beg to do s**t to my hair.”
           “Ugh, your hair still drives me mad. I just want to grab it and even it all out.”
           “Not gonna happen,” he taunted with a smirk.
           Stacey laughed and took another meek sip of her drink. There was a beat, then the tone of the conversation shifted. To further accent it, the woman conceded, “You know, I’ve missed you, Max.”
           Max didn’t say anything. Instead, he decided to let Stacey continue to talk. As she did, she stared at the ice cubes in her drink as if they had answers.
           “We don’t hang out as much as we used to. That sucks, because you’re my best friend. I know I’m annoying sometimes, and that I want what’s best for my friends a little bit too aggressively, but . . .” She blinked a few times, blinking back tears, and gave a dismissive wave of her hand. After another sip of her drink, she concluded, “Don’t take this the wrong way. I’m not asking for us to get back together or anything. I miss you, that’s all. I want to see you more often than I do now.”
           He was going to let her words to drop without comment, but then Cameron’s suggestion popped back into his head.
           “If you make them feel welcome . . . who knows�"you might even make someone’s day.”
           Stacey was already aware that he wasn’t going to reply. She took a deep breath through her nose and again used her straw to stir her drink. When she opened her mouth to change the subject, though, Max did as well.
           “I miss you, too,” he blurted.
           It was obvious from her expression he’d stunned her. She hadn’t expected Max to share her feelings; even if he did, she hadn’t expected him to admit it. “You do?”
           “Yeah,” he said. He was awkward about it, of course, since he’d never said anything like this before. Talking about his feelings wasn’t something he made a habit of, but he wanted to keep his promise to Cameron by making someone happy. “I know it, uh, might not seem like it, but . . . I do enjoy being friends with you, Stace. Despite all those, uh, ‘flaws’ that you pointed out. But you know, I say ‘flaws’ with quotation marks, because you seem to think they are, but I mean . . . they’re not, are they?”
           With a quizzical look on her face, Stacey cocked her head to the side. It looked like she didn’t want to say anything, lest she scare him out of talking. The truth, though, was that Max found himself struggling. He was pretty sure his rambling wasn’t coming across as anything other than ranting.
           “I mean, they’re . . . They’re what make you . . . well, you. Sure, you don’t know when to shut up sometimes, and you care way too much about what other people do, but . . . You do it because you care, and honestly, I . . . I mean I guess I kind of like that about you.”
           Stacey kept staring at him, which made him worried that he’d said all the wrong things. It wouldn’t surprise him if he’d made a total mess of it. He anticipated her getting up and leaving, perhaps not without splashing her drink on him. But then, it happened: Stacey smiled.
           “Well,” she said. “That was unexpected. Not unwelcome, but . . . a pleasant surprise. Are you sure you’re okay?”
           The relief that Max felt knowing that Stacey had taken his little speech well was monumental. “Better than that,” he told her with a smile of his own.
           I remember when I used to think she was the prettiest girl in Boston . . . Hell, who am I kidding? I still think that. What happened to us? He kept this question to himself, though he knew she was thinking it, too.
           After breakfast, Stacey drove him home. They agreed to meet again in a few days, then she left after telling him that she would call him tomorrow. The rest of the day of uneventful for Max. Cameron didn’t text him back. Stacey did, though.
           “Thanks for what you said there,” she wrote. “It meant a lot to me.”
           With a small smile, too anxious over Cameron to feel happy, he replied, “No worries, Stace.”
           The following day, the 2^nd, Max went back to the convenience store to use the ATM there. Having kept his promise to Cameron in mind, when Mr. Diefenbach greeted him, he returned the sentiment for once.
           “Max! Good to see you!”
           “Good to see you, too, Mr. Diefenbach.”
           Mr. Diefenbach also seemed surprised. “Having a good day?”
           “So far,” Max answered. Somewhat ironic to him was that he wasn’t; Cameron hadn’t responded and Stacey hadn’t called him like she’d said. Stress was one of the strongest emotions he felt at the moment, second only to anxiety. After taking out rent money to give to his landlord, he decided to ask Mr. Diefenbach, “Anyway, how are you?”
           With his regular toothless grin, Mr. Diefenbach answered, “Great, great. My granddaughter, she is having wedding soon.”
           “Oh, really?” Max’s surprise was genuine; it was news to him that Mr. Diefenbach had a daughter, let alone a granddaughter. Though, he supposed he could’ve guessed from how old the man looked. “Well, best of luck to them.”
           Mr. Diefenbach nodded. “So proud of her.”
           Max paid his landlord a visit and gave him the money. Then he returned to his apartment. Once inside, he draped his coat over the couch as usual and looked at his phone. Stacey still hadn’t even tried to call him. Cameron was also as unresponsive as ever. He sighed. Had he lost both of them somehow?
           “Stace,” he texted his ex, “you there?” He spent a few hours listening to music and working on Cameron’s request before looking at his phone again.
           She hasn’t even read it. I’ve been sending her texts all the day, and she hasn’t looked at any of them. Where is she? She’s not the type to leave her phone unattended. She checks it like clockwork. If she’s upset somehow, she would’ve at least left my texts on read as passive-aggression. It doesn’t make any sense . . .
           It was getting dark outside by the time his phone dinged. The sound startled him. Frantic, he looked at the screen.
           “How good are you at photo editing?” Cameron had asked him.
           Max blinked a few times. He disappears for two days, he thought, then comes back out of the blue asking me how good I am at photo editing?
           On the defensive, he replied, “Where were you?”
           The writer ignored the question. “I took some pictures in the dark and I need someone to salvage them. I couldn’t use flash, but they’re important.” He put spaces between the letters of “important” to stress the word.
           Max sighed in defeat. He wasn’t pleased, but at least Cameron was talking to him now. There was hope. “I can’t promise anything, but I can give it a shot.”
           “I’d appreciate it, thanks.”
           His phone dinged in his hand with a new notification: an e-mail. What struck Max as a tad odd was that the e-mail wasn’t from Cameron. At least, it didn’t say it was. Rather, it was from a foreign Outlook address.
           What the hell?
           He checked the e-mail on his laptop. There were three attachments, all dark photos. The subject line was “Pictures”. The body read, with a smiley face, “Here they are.”
           All right, that’s weird . . . Whatever.
           If Max tilted his screen somewhat, he could make out something a little different in each of picture. He couldn’t make out what, but the fact that there was contrast made him think that levelling the images could work.
           Ding: another text from Cameron. “Could you fix them in the order I sent them?”
           It was an odd request, but he expected nothing less from Cameron, so he decided to oblige. “Sure.” After downloading them, he opened each one at a time in Photoshop.
           “Tell me what you think each image is of so I can confirm. I need to know if they’re at all distinguishable.”
           The first image wasn’t so easy to fix. Since he wasn’t sure what he was trying to find, he couldn’t decide on what levelling setup to use. So, instead, he decided to grab the middle and rightmost input level pins, moving them all the way over to the left. The image lit up, highly contrasted but as clear as he was going to be able to get it. It was then that he saw the legs. The picture seemed to be of someone’s legs on a dark-ish bed sheet or something. Max wasn’t too sure.
           “Well, I can’t fix them, but . . . The first one is of legs?”
           “Yep!” confirmed Cameron.
           Despite his confusion, Max did the next image the same way. He raised a brow at this one, for what he saw almost looked like the exposed body of a woman. There were dark patches all over the image that seemed to be on her. The contrast made the brighter edges of them red. All of a sudden, Max felt nervous.
           Stab wounds, he thought to himself. Those are f*****g stab wounds. That’s blood.
           He couldn’t see the woman’s head in the image, but he knew in his gut that he was looking at a corpse. His heart was pounding in his chest. What the hell had Cameron sent him?
           “A woman?”
           “Yes, and?”
           “She’s . . . bleeding?”
           “Close enough! Do the last one now,” Cameron ordered with a winking emote.
           “What is this, Cameron?”
           “Do it and you’ll find out!”
           His breathing becoming faster and more labored, Max contrasted the last image. When he figured out what it was�"who it was�"he stared at his screen in terror. It was a face, the face of the woman from the prior images.
           “Well?” urged Cameron.
           Max tore his eyes from his screen and looked at his phone. It took him what felt like ages to pick it up in his shaky hands. Trembling, he typed his answer. He hoped that he was wrong, that Cameron would ask him what he was on about, but he knew that he wasn’t, and that he wouldn’t.
           “Stacey?”
           Cameron replied with a smiley face. “She really is the prettiest girl in Boston, isn't she?”