Blonde-haired Chris pulls down the back door of the moving van and shuts it. He dusts off his hands by slapping them against one another--Whack! Whack! Whack!--and says, "Well, that's it. Chris is giving things a last onceover and then we'll be off."
"I know you won't miss this place, but I'm going to miss you guys," Francine says, standing in the parking lot behind Chris and Chris's apartment building, "But you'll be back, right? You've still got to clean."
"Nope! We don't have a security deposit. I'm not cleaning anything. Especially after all the bullshit we went through here. The landlord's lucky I don't burn the place down. He turned everything over to some management company. They don't seem to have a clue what's going on and wanted us to sign a new lease, so we thought it'd be a good time to just disappear."
"Well, I'm sure you'll like Lackwood. And I'm sure I'll bump into you sometime when I'm over there with Jake."
Brown-haired Chris comes down the outside wooden stairs in the back of the apartment building. "Free at last!" she yells, throwing her hands in the air when she reaches the bottom.
"Hey, thanks a lot for helping us out. I know it was a lot of work," blonde-haired Chris says, hugging Francine.
"No problem. You know me, nothing I like better to do than carry heavy boxes on my day off," Francine says, smiling and noticing the first few flakes of snow coming down.
"Ugh," brown-haired Chris sticks her hands in the pocket of her white jacket, "I won't miss the lake effect snow."
"Well, we owe you a beer," blonde-haired Chris says, starting to shiver in the cold.
"Several," Francine says, "You guys have a lot of stuff."
"I'll miss just bumping into you at Purgatory," brown-haired Chris says, "We'll be back though. No one makes a cappuccino like Lilith."
"You can buy me one of those too," Francine says, rubbing her tummy.
They hug and say bye and then the blonde-haired Chris gets into the moving van, and brown-haired Chris into her car and they drive away. Francine watches them disappear down the narrow driveway between the building and the bank next door and knows she might never see them again. People might have good intentions of staying in touch and getting together with old friends and acquaintances, but one road leads to another and people get caught up in their daily lives and the past and those who belonged to it drift further away until it all seems like a dream, or, in Chris and Chris's case living here, a nightmare. Most of what brought Francine and the Chrises together was proximity anyway. Pure happenstance. If they had moved a few blocks over, Francine might have never known they existed. Still, she hopes someday to see them again.
And get that cappuccino.
Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel.
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