They're so close to the end. The end of the madness and the depression. The end of their sejour in France. The end of the program. Mack and Alex dug their claws into the cursed dirt of the French Alps, earning every inch, every heartbroken step they took towards the end. No one gives them an award for silently slowly dying until the very final minute. The past four weeks consisted of this pattern: Alex or Mack tells Heming to fuck off without explaining why to Eli. Heming fails to fuck off. He lingers like he’s wanted, like nothing happened. Through a sadder, more empathetic lens, he lingers like he’s afraid to be alone. Alex knows this. She also knows Mack breaks further every time Heming opens his mouth, pretending that everything is normal, everything is fine, great even. Except, nothing is great. Every day, Alex faces the friend she betrayed. She faces Mack, who hasn’t looked at her the same since she told him what happened. She faces herself in the mirror, wondering when she stopped looking like herself. They’re so close to the end. 

On their second to last weekend in Grenoble, the program mandates that the students take a group exclusion to the quaint town of Annecy, France, just a bit off the border of both Switzerland and Italy. Set for Saturday, the students receive an email from Miranda, their program director, on Friday afternoon with grave news, the kind of news Alex should’ve expected at this point. Of course, there was a mass stabbing in Annecy the day before they were meant to go. On a playground at nine a.m., four babies and three elderly adults were stabbed. Alex feels nothing but numbed. Thank god, she thinks, for everything she’s seen and experienced, allowing her to entirely disassociate from the reality of humanity’s most evil deeds. The group will still be going to Annecy the following morning; the email was just a mere notification of the terribleness that occurred. 

Their bus arrives at around 11 in the morning, and the beauty of the small village is overwhelming. Snow white swans glide through crystal clear water, the mountains creating a cascade of green behind them. Annecy is deemed as La Petite Venise des Alpes or The Small Venice of the Alps, named after canals reminiscent of Venice, Italy, that infiltrate the pastel-colored collection buildings in the vielle ville. Annecy is, without a doubt, the most beautiful place she’s ever seen in her life. Athens, Zürich, Paris, Santorini, London, Vienna, Genoa– nowhere she has been held a candle to the cobblestone streets of Annecy. The sun warms her skin on the early June day, the first thing she’s felt in weeks. 

Eli, Mack, and Alex follow along as the class undergoes a walking tour, all in French, of course, attempting to pick up the language they know, racing at a million words per minute, it seems. Heming lingers; Mack grows cold; Alex watches Mack and feels that all too familiar pit of anxiety, dread, and depression gnawing at her empty stomach. Since It Happened, she hasn’t been able to eat. Not really in a sustainable way, at least. After the tour concludes, Heming pipes up, addressing their once-foursome friends. He has a place they could all go for lunch, he says, including himself in the plans by being the one to make them. Mack gives Alex a knowing look. Alex swallows that pit working its way up her throat. 

She refuses to remember the lunch, dissociating her way through fondue and bread, keeping her head low and voice even lower; everything hurts too much. Afterward, she knew this for sure; she and Mack sat on the concrete edge of the lake’s beach, arguing over whether the ducks floating in the pond were male or female based on the colors and patterns of their feathers. There’s an element of playful normalcy to their conversation as if the things they know about each other never happened, and they’re once again just two people who maybe, in another life, lived under different circumstances, could’ve felt something that resembled romance. She pictured what it would be like in this other life. A life where she’d broken up with Jones in the winter when she realized she couldn’t love him the way he should be loved. A life where she took Mack back to the Airbnb that night at the Mako Discotheque, saving him from what happened in this life. A life where no one was stabbed or shot or burned, a life where no one was raped or assaulted. A simple life with simple feelings and simple consequences for those feelings. This is what Alex’s mind looks like for these final weeks in France: ruminating and rewriting. She understands Jay Gatsby’s obsession with recreating what never could’ve been. 

Rain begins to fall as she tucks herself away further and further into her mind. First slowly, then all at once: torrential downpours soaking her with freezing water all the way to her bones. Walking, running, sprinting to cover, they pass the playground barricaded off with yellow police tape, flowers surmounted like grief on the benches where children had once sat, counting petals on daisies. At that moment, it hits her. This has all become too much. The violence, the heartbreak, the triggering dance she’s been forced into by Heming. Her savior complex, her grief, her loss of hope. In Annecy, France, rain blurs the silhouette of the mountains which was once so clear to her, and she sees out of her own eyes the blurriness that’s infiltrated each facet of her life, slowly but surely. She sees that she’s been gaslighting herself out of her own pain, that all these things– the murders, the assaults, and the heartbreak, are things to be genuinely pained over. Before anything, she’s a woman. As a woman, she’s mercilessly trained herself to sidestep melodramatic accusations and expressions of emotions that could be deemed as bravado. Who she is has lived by the notion that a woman cannot react but only overreact. Now, rain soaking her clothes until there’s no one left but her bare self, she sees the way to relief. 

***

The apartment is hot when she arrives to speak to Eli. No AC in France, of course, just as everywhere else in Europe. Grenoble, though, is considered one of the greenest, eco-friendly cities in the EU, even winning an award for the Green Capital of Europe in 2022. Everything about “living like a local” fits the bill: no food waste ever, avoid running water for longer than six minutes (as was mandated by Pascale at home), and do laundry only every two weeks. Alex could already feel the chilling rush of air conditioning and ice in her water once she returned back to the United States in just over a week. 

“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Eli greets her at the door of his host family’s second-floor apartment. Even at first glance, Eli already watches the scarlet bloom from her cheeks to her neck, almost as if he can see the lump in her throat growing more demanding by the second.

Taking a seat, Alex considers the weight of what she’s about to do. Honesty is considered the best policy, but when do those lines blur? When does telling the truth become selfish? Removing the weight from her shoulders and putting it on someone else’s? I need to tell someone. I need help. I’m not strong enough to do this on my own. Because it’s true, Alex did the best she could for as long as she could; she’d worn her walking shoes down to the sole, leaving nothing left to support her. 

“There’re a few things I haven’t told you about. About Mack. And Heming. And why everything has gone so wrong,” she exhales, her voice breaking on the final word. Eli can barely hear her broken whisper. And then the truth comes out: what Heming told her he did to Mack, the look on Mack’s face when she told him, Heming’s plaguing of their group, how badly the murder truly hurt her, the last straw in Annecy. It all comes out of Alex’s level voice, with no emotions after the audible breaking of her voice when she began. She watched herself from above, floating above her body as she gazed at her skinny arms and graying face. What a day. 

Saying it all aloud is the true final straw. Eli takes it as it comes, holding her while she cries, cursing Heming, sympathizing with Mack. After all, a predator almost always strikes more than once. Eli knows it, and when he hears Alex’s words, he feels nothing short of affirmed. What happened between Eli and Heming wasn’t right, nor was it okay– it only took a repeat offense for Eli to see that if he’d stepped forward, he could’ve saved Mack. But no one could save Mack. Not Alex, not Eli. Not their host parents or the program directors. This was the way the world turned, Alex now understood. People break, and someone must be there to catch the fall. Alex caught Mack, Eli caught Alex. She wonders who caught Jones after he fell off the face of the world they created together.