Chapter Text
At least the drive there was peaceful.
Carson liked staring out the window while people drove him around. He much preferred it to driving himself, because he wasn’t really the type of person he’d trust behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. That thing could kill somebody, and that’d be on his conscience for the rest of his life. No thank you. Much better to have other people act as a chauffeur. That wouldn’t be an option for much longer, he thought to himself.
This time, there were two cars. One of them was his dad's, who was trailing behind them on I-35 North in a 2010 Honda Fit. That was the car that Carson learned to drive in, and he had some nostalgia for it. The car he was in, however, was a fairly new Chevy Malibu in clean, pristine white. The previous owner basically had no miles on it, and he was pretty satisfied with it. His mom was driving at the moment, and would take the car back with his dad after they were done unpacking.
Carson was 22 years old and grew up in Des Moines, Iowa. Des Moines was one of those places that kind of postures as a real city, but it’s not, not if you took a closer look at its pathetic skyline and its endless sprawl. You needed a car to get around, which was bad for Carson’s situation, but there was no real way around it. The bus stops there were more of a suggestion than any indicator of some form of transit. There simply was nothing to do. It was the type of place where someone at a bar would see an out-of-state driver’s license when they ID’d someone, and they’d say “well, what’re you doing here?”
As Carson continued to stare out the window, he thought about why he kept doing this rather than striking up a conversation with his mom. There was nothing to talk about, he figured. The situation at hand is simple: he was starting college, he was going to have a tearful goodbye with his mother, and then that would be that. He wondered how much of the tears that he was set to cry would be forced.
It was the moment that the car began to get off the highway onto Exit 111A-B, set for Nevada (pronounced ne-VEY-duh, not like the state ne-VAH-duh, which was why nobody born in Iowa can pronounce the name of the state right) and Ames, that Carson realized the worst part of living in Iowa. It wasn’t having no friends, it wasn’t having no activities, it wasn’t the people, it wasn’t the car dependency, it wasn’t the total lack of culture, whatever that meant. No, the thing that was the real issue had been staring him in the face the entire time.
It was the fucking corn.
He could never stand the sight of it, and so much of Iowa’s culture was based around pride about, of all things, corn. Even thinking about thinking about it made his skin crawl, as all the little holes in the corn-cob would kind of psychically touch him. He would imagine the texture of it going across him like a steamroller. It was hell, and he hadn’t even bothered to think about it until now. But getting off the highway, away from these endless stretches of cornfields, caused him to feel genuine relief.
Every state in the Midwest said they had the best corn. If Carson was the type of person to feel any pride about his home, he would probably say something about how Iowa has the real best corn. But he wasn’t that type of person, and he couldn’t imagine ever being that type of person. The fact that he was wearing a Cyclones hoodie was more out of necessity than anything, because he figured that school pride was the emotion he should feel in this situation.
There wasn’t anything worth noting about the actual experience of moving, other than two things. First off, when his dad walked out, leaving the new Chevrolet and the keys in his hands, the last thing he said was “...and cut your hair, ya fuckin’ hippie”, and then Carson cried a little bit before he could actually get started unloading the boxes. He was confused, more than anything. It was like he could never live up to his dad’s standards. He felt like a disappointment just because of some hair he hadn’t cut in a while.
Second off, while Carson unpacked his belongings into his single dorm, he listened to Car Seat Headrest’s song portrait of the artist as a young fag off of the album 3 on repeat, which was a fairly strange song to listen to at a major transition point in your life. It’s a bit too somber, and Carson would never actually consider himself to be a furry, which is what Will was singing about. But he liked the melody, and it was a good earworm.
When I was a kid going into elementary school
Right before I went into elementary school
I was afraid of everything
Carson was a computer science major, so he already started a bit socially stifled. Strangely enough, he wound up getting along really well with one of the undergraduate TAs for COMS 1270, Intro to Programming. He was already fairly gifted at programming, so he would overachieve on purpose on his assignments to try and win the favor of professors. It worked for him in high school, at least, so it might as well work now.
The person that stood out to him the most was someone named Leah. She was fairly short, had dirty blonde hair, and had a kind of nasally voice that really filled up the room. The two of them talked really consistently in lab; Leah was a year ahead of Carson at the time.
These lab conversations were not really worth noting, much like the facts about Carson’s move. It’s a bit difficult to come up with all the details when you’re looking at it all from this lens. The thing they ended up talking the most about, though, was The Amazing Digital Circus, a YouTube show that Leah liked. The most interesting part about those conversations was that Carson didn’t actually care about the show at all, and thought it was kind of middling at best. It’s just that he really liked the way that Leah talked about it, with this intense passion and care. He kind of wished that he could make himself care that much about anything in the world.
Leah was the type of person to describe herself as “kind of like Pomni, but a little bit more chill”, whatever that meant. Carson couldn’t parse it out, and the sentence itself sounded really stupid to him. He wasn’t really the type to compare himself to cartoon characters.
Leah had a friend named Doug, who was an English major, which was weird because Iowa State isn’t particularly known for its English program. Doug was kind of a trenchant guy, despite being really good with words. He seemed like he was destined for some kind of office job doing fuck-all, which he basically admitted to, because he wasn’t under the delusion that his degree was employable or worthwhile. He just knew that he was having a good time doing it. He liked cracking stupid jokes and was overwhelmingly cheery, and had a kind of scruffy beard that made it look like he didn’t take himself too seriously. He was definitely gay, but he didn’t want to think about that yet.
The three of them got close fairly quickly. Leah had a Discord server where she collected friends of hers; it was called the EXTRA VIRGIN GAMER SERVER or something like that. Carson got invited fairly quickly, even while he was still technically Leah’s student.
There were plenty of other people there, of course. It’s just that only three of them ended up mattering.
Leah and Carson ended up moving in together as a matter of convenience once Carson became a sophomore, since they both wanted to leave the formal dorm environment. They ended up heading to University Village Apartments, which was technically still university-owned but easy enough to get around from. You didn’t need a car to get to class or something stupid like that, since it was “on-campus”, kind of.
It was a lot of banal conversation from there. Usual roommate talk. “Can you do the dishes”, “Hey check out this cool rock I found”, “Hey wait fuck I forgot to pay rent”. Leah was a habitual weed smoker, which Carson wasn’t a huge fan of, since he had asthma, but he was willing to put up with a lot of things to have a roommate who he didn’t hate. After all, his last roommates were really awful to him.
Carson walked into his apartment, and Leah was sitting on the couch watching some Twitch streamer that Carson wasn’t able to identify. “Hey, loser”, Leah said to Carson, as if it was the most normal greeting in the world.
“Hey, moron”, Carson replied.
“How was class? I figure 311 is kicking your ass still?”
“It’s really not great! Like, fuck, I don’t know if I’m even gonna stay in this major at this rate?”
“Yeah, yeah, but the circumstances, or whatever. I know the story.”
“Nah, they’re fine. It’s just me.”
“Uh huh. You wanna go to this?”, Leah said. She pulled up a flier from an Instagram post on her phone. It was a pretty shit image, but it at least wasn’t AI-generated like a lot of the others she’d pulled up in the past. IOWA STATE YEAR END RAVE 2026. We’re throwing one of the biggest parties to end the year and you don’t want to miss it! Date, time, and location dropping soon. Spots will be limited. RSVP now to get on the waitlist and be the first to know when it drops.
“I don’t know, that’s usually more your scene? I just work here”, Carson replied.
“You know, since we started living together, I don’t think you’ve ever gone to something I suggested?”
“I go to the Cinemark with you! I like movies and stuff! But fucking-”, Carson said, as he cut himself off to do a gesture where he threw his hands in a circle. “-it just seems like a LOT.” His facial expression was uncomfortably panicked.
“What, did your parents tell you that college parties are for losers and that you should focus?”
Carson thought back, and remembered that they did, in fact, say that. “No.”
“Well, at least this one’s actually in Ames. I don’t have to drive out to Des Moines to go to this one. God, this place is so lame.”
“Yeah, I bet raves are suuuuper popular with a bunch of stuffy engineering students.”
“I didn’t want to go here, you know? I had another offer lined up out of here, it just- didn’t work. Money and all. So now I’m stuck going to Des Moines for all the things I care about, and Des Moines isn’t even a real city-”
“Hey.”
“You know it’s not. And my BEST FRIEND doesn’t even want to go to these things with me.”
“Hey, it’s not like that.”
Leah made a harumph and crossed her arms. The Twitch stream on the TV looked like it was getting a decent Balatro run going.
“I’m just anxious, is all”, Carson said. “Cut me some slack.”
“It’ll be fine. It might be a little loud, but it’s a college event, so it’s going to be at least a little lame. Just for you.”
“Aw, for me? Ugh, y’know what, fine.”
Leah emitted a half-hearted yaaaaaay. “Doug should be there too, so you won’t be alone in your little loser squadron.”
“Right, just lemme know when it is. Oh yeah, right. I’m not leaving for the summer.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, no, I just figured it would be a good idea to stay out here. Figure out how to do things on my own.”
“You know I’m not leaving either, right?”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“Neither is he.”
“Ah.”
“Juuuust the three of us…”
“Shut up?”
That night, after committing to something he clearly didn’t want to do, Carson had a dream.
He was going down a glass elevator. There was some video-game HUD in the upper left corner of his vision that he couldn’t make out. The air was so humid that it could be cut with a knife.
The elevator landed on a room, after a bit. It had various broken walls, but it was a solid yellow room with a unified light source. There was no ceiling. Behind the walls was an endless, suffocating blue void, cubes and lights flashing on and off.
In the room, there was a rabbit, and there was a frog.
The two of them were sawing a piece of wood in tandem, along a table that didn’t make sense. The wood reasonably shouldn’t have balanced on it, as it was just kind of a log, but that wasn’t important, because Carson was dreaming. They didn’t seem to be making any headway on actually getting the plank cut.
The two of them looked at Carson with wide eyes. The rabbit did “the eye thing”, whatever that meant, and the frog looked at him with an empty expression. Their faces signaled to Carson that he was seeing something that he shouldn’t be seeing. But then they shrugged and returned to working on sawing the wood in half, to no avail.
It wasn’t wood, really. It was more an imitation of wood, like what you’d think wood was if you forgot what things in the real world looked like, like if you’d been outside it for a little bit too long.
The elevator continued descending, as if it was going to hit another room.
It was then that Carson realized that he was the rabbit, or at least he was now. He was sawing the wood in half. It was always him, and he’d always been here, in this room, sawing the wood, looking at the frog, at her. Looking at her. He was looking at her.
She looked at him with those open eyes, as if she’d seen a ghost, and he fell to my knees. He couldn’t bear the reality of it anymore, and he stared at his hands, those stupid giant yellow hands of his. He curled into a ball and started sobbing as the frog offered him her hand, or whatever frog hands are called.
Then he woke up, and started inconsolably weeping.
Annoyingly, the rave actually was in Des Moines. Because of course it was. It was impossible to have anything interesting in a place like Ames. The rave ended up being explicitly university-sponsored, but the club that ran it didn’t have the ability to get something like that vetted on campus. So they ended up at PLATFORM, a venue in Des Moines that was dedicated to an “immersive house music experience”.
Before heading out, Carson tried out a kind of slutty outfit in the mirror, with leather pants and stuff that he had lying around. He stared at himself, and just went “yeah, no” about immediately. It looked like he was withering away, like he could turn to dust with the slightest breeze. Something was horribly off about him, like the mirror itself wasn’t working.
He turned around and remembered to smile. Stay in character, Carson. Stay in character.
...Where had he heard that one before?
The rave in question was really early for rave standards, at about 6 PM, but thankfully it was on a weekend, so Carson, Leah, and Doug didn’t have to bother skipping classes to attend. Usually, events like this had some kind of entry fee or cover, but this was a benefit rave; you just had to bring some clothes to give away, or food, or something.
Reasonably, that should have set off a red flag in Leah’s mind when signing up, as well as the fact that she had to RSVP. Likely not a very cool thing to attend. But it was Iowa, so you kind of took what you could get.
For ages, she’d been thinking about how she’d get out of here, making up intricate and complex plans for how to escape it all. But that wasn’t important yet.
The venue itself was attached to an apartment building, and the main stage had a giant disco ball hovering over the whole place. Thankfully, it had a metal chain anchoring it to the ceiling instead of some kind of thin wire, so Carson wasn’t afraid of the obvious potential catastrophe where it came crashing down to the floor. He thought about sudden catastrophes like that a lot.
There was a DJ on the stage who clearly did not know how to handle a vibe like this, and nobody actually knew how to dance. Carson ended up doing something that vaguely resembled the Greg Heffley shuffle, where he just shifted left, and shifted right. To riddim, in a Des Moines nightclub, that was being rented by the university as an 18+ event because of course it had to be 18+ and not 21+, even though it was mostly for seniors, but that wasn’t important because the ISU AfterDark club couldn’t actually secure alcohol, because it was a club, because it was being rented by the university, because it was lame.
Half of the event was built to posture around the idea of it being a rave at all. There was a table for making kandi bracelets, and Leah decided to make a few because there really wasn’t anything better to do. Doug just kind of sat in the corner until Leah dipped from the dancing to make bracelets.
The two of them sat quietly, not really talking to each other, as Doug repeatedly kept having the beads fall off. He just made some designs without any letters. One was purple-green, one was red-yellow-white, and one was a few different shades of blue, all in a cycle. Leah ended up making both a bracelet that said “I <3 MY GF”, which was interesting because Carson thought she was straight, and also because she didn’t have a girlfriend. She also made one that said “RAGATHA”, for whatever that’s worth, and Carson just kind of wondered why she cared so much about that kind of thing.
Really, the whole event struck Carson as kind of cringe. He figured that raves would be at least kind of cool or interesting, but this just felt like a bunch of sad losers dancing around while he dissociated, though he didn’t actually have the self-awareness at this point to know that he was dissociating at all. Hopefully, he would later.
But just this once, he decided to just let his body move the way he thought it would, because he figured that he wanted to posture as a cool guy. He wanted to be funny, likable, the type of person people would look at and think that he had his life together. He wanted, more than anything, to stay in character. So he headbanged and mimicked moshing while the worst visuals anyone had ever seen played in the background to generic house and riddim music.
For a brief moment, he actually had fun. Then he noticed Leah and Doug walking out, and he got concerned, so he left with them.
Leah tied her hair back with one of the ties she always kept on her arm, and then pulled a pipe out of the bag she hid outside, since the venue wasn’t the type of place that would allow smoking indoors. She walked around to the corner, past the edge of the apartment building, and lit it up while Doug breathed in.
Ah, nevermind. No reason to worry, he just-
“Hey, do you wanna take a hit?”, Leah asked.
“What? No. I have asthma”, Carson replied.
“It’s the pretty light stuff, I don’t think it’d mess with you too much.”
“I don’t-”
Doug told Leah not to pressure Carson if he wasn’t ready.
“Not ready? Not READY?”
“No, genuinely, I don’t want to like- force you to do anything”, Leah said.
“Gimme that”, Carson said. Stay in character. He took a giant hit off the pipe, lighting the dog-shit THC-A (or whatever it was) flower, because it was the kind that was somehow still way easier to get your hands on. Of course, Leah could always just go across the border to Illinois, given that she had a car. But this was the thing she was smoking at the moment. Maybe actually decent weed would have solved some of her problems, but probably not.
Anyway, Carson took a hit, and then immediately started hacking up a lung. “Oh shit-”, Leah replied, as she quickly grabbed a water bottle from her backpack and offered it to Carson. That wasn’t what he actually needed help with, though, and instead he grabbed the inhaler from his pocket and used it with a ferocity never before seen in a place like this before his cough cleared up.
One of the event organizers walked up to the three of them, and said something like “Hey, you can’t- this is a residential building, you can’t smoke that here. We’re gonna get banned-”, or something like that. Leah responded by taking another hit just to blow smoke in his face.
From that point on, Carson started developing a habit of smoking the worst weed possible.
A few weeks passed like that.
“So I really think that GLITCH just kind of completely messed up the release strategy here, and like, I’d never blame Goose for anything like that, because she already has enough to deal with, but I just feel like it ends up feeling like a cash grab. Like, you’re opening yourself up for spoilers, and the entire thing was already leaked on the internet, so it’s kind of a moot point, but it wouldn’t have been leaked if not for the theaters! And a shitty Cinemark like this would be JUST the place to do it, so maybe it was even this one. Who knows. But I can’t be the one who gets spoiled, so…”, Leah said as she walked into the movie theater by the T.J. Maxx on Buckeye Ave. Her car was pulled out front, since she drove Carson here because of the aforementioned distaste for driving.
It was June 4, 2026, and Leah and Carson were coming out to watch The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act in theaters. Carson was still kind of middling on the whole thing, and Doug never bothered to watch the show, so he wasn’t there. So it was just the two of them, walking into the theater. Carson didn’t bother to say anything, because he much preferred to listen to Leah talk rather than actually push back on anything, since he didn’t have much to say about the whole show in general.
That changed after the screening.
When Carson walked out of the theater, he looked shocked to his core, like he was suppressing anything even resembling an emotion. His face contorted like he was in physical pain, and his fist was curled into a ball. His nails were running into his own skin, as he tried to use the pain from the clenching to distract himself. Thankfully, the fist was in a jacket pocket, so that Leah wouldn’t notice. Stay in character.
Leah, on the other hand, looked particularly nonplussed. It was like she already knew everything that was going to happen from now on.
The two of them walked over to Leah’s car, and Carson got into the car kind of weirdly. He put his head in first, rather than stepping in from the side. It was one of those weird quirks that Carson just kind of had. It made him very creature-like.
Leah stared at her reflection in the car window, and took a good look at herself. She looked like the type of woman who was deeply insecure about her own identity, maybe. The facial expression could be filled in from there.
“Wow, that sucked-”, she started, before Carson slammed his head into the dashboard. “Woah, are you okay?”, she said.
“...he’s just like me…”, Carson said, as the tears started to flow down his face. They coalesced into a small puddle by his feet. His fist scrunched up further, leaving noticeable marks where fingernail met flesh.
Leah looked at Carson with a blank expression. Not one of lack of sympathy, but one of genuine intense confusion. “...I really fucking hope not.”