Like with any great creation, Nora succeeded for a brief period of time — three days to be exact. During those three days, Colin, Kayden, and Nathan gathered inside the van right before the crack of dawn and drove it to the town square to prepare for a day’s worth of heckling. The van took a toll from all the rocks and shoes thrown at it as the white paint would often start chipping away by mid-afternoon after several hours of the friends insulting citizens of Goldcrest and watching the crowd intensely react. The town hadn’t been so alive since D-Day occurred.
By the end of the first day, Kayden caved and started speaking through the microphone herself, making fun of friends that she once cared about just to watch the crowd continue to be morbidly captivated by what Nora had to say. Several people had left people that they wanted Nora to call out anonymously in the box attached to the back of the van, and Nathan happily read the notes out, making sure that everybody in the audience knew that one of the citizens in Goldcrest had sent it.
By the second day, the three friends were comfortable enough to let one of the people who stuck by their side throughout everything, Mandy, join them in the van. Mandy, unlike Kayden, didn’t need any encouragement to start shouting insults through the microphone. At one point, Mandy had put down the microphone, closed her eyes, and listened to the jeers of the crowd. “This is probably the most cathartic thing I’ve ever done.”
However, after the third day, the crowd tired out and there were only a few people still wandering about the town square, though they were mostly only there to go to city hall rather than stopping by solely to listen to Nora. With no crowd to listen to them, Nora’s efforts to incite a riot or force a reaction out of a nonexistent audience were futile and almost embarrassing as the friends took turns yelling out names and insults in hopes of attracting more attention. But by then, everybody figured out that Nora couldn’t have any power over the town if they didn’t listen to it so everybody went about their days, attempting to live their lives as normal even though, in the back of their minds, they knew that Nora was out there.
By the fifth day, Colin was so fed up that he had walked out of the van, not even caring that some people could see him leaving the van in broad daylight, and stormed over to Mac’s house to give him a piece of his mind. He knocked loudly on Mac’s door and rang the doorbell several times impatiently, and when Mac opened the door, Colin barged in, not even bothering to let him react.
“Colin, what are you doing here?” Mac sighed exasperatedly, closing the door and pressing his fingers against his forehead as he shut his eyes tiredly. “Are you going to lie to my face again?”
“What? No, I’m not. I never lied to you. What are you talking about?” Colin demanded, furrowing his brows together to help sell his point. Mac opened his mouth to protest but clamped it shut when he realized that both of them knew that Colin was lying. As Colin glanced around Mac’s house, he noted that there were some empty picture frames hung up on the miserably yellow wallpaper in the living room. “What happened to those pictures?”
“They were pictures of me and my girlfriend, you asshole. Remember those anonymous notes you left me about my break-up with her? We ended things right before Harmony’s eviction and I haven’t gotten a chance to put anything new in them since then,” informed Mac as he walked into the kitchen and began making himself a cup of tea. He paused with a teabag in hand and turned to face Colin, who had followed. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you all this. You’re just going to turn around and use it against me.”
“Me? I would never do such a thing.” As mentioned before, Colin would actually do such a thing; in fact, he did it so many times that lying about it was a knee-jerk reaction to being confronted about it.
Mac scoffed, soaking his tea bag into his warm mug of water. “Cut the shit, Colin. You’re not as good of a person as you think you are.”
Taking a seat down at the kitchen table, Colin picked up a plastic candy wrapping up from the “Like you can say anything. The last time I talked to you right before I cut you off, you told me that you just wanted to help an innocent person. I was the one who was trying to do the right thing. That’s all I’ve ever tried to do.”
“Well, I’ve always done what I thought was right too. Sorry that our morals don’t line up, and you’re a bitch about it.” Mac let out a huff of contempt as he sat down at the table across from Colin. He placed his cup of coffee down and dropped his head into his hands. “What am I saying? I hate the person I’m becoming.”
Unimpressed, Colin rolled his eyes. “I’m surprised you didn’t hate the person you were before all this happened.”
“I’m like this because of you, asshole!” Mac snapped, lifting his head up from his hands to show how much fury was written across his face. “I’m full of bitterness and anger and— and…”
The fight suddenly left Mac, like the flame leaving a candle in a simple puff of smoke. “You blame me, and I blame you. Do you see the problem here?”
“No, I’m the good guy, you’re the bad guy. It’s that simple.”
“God! You keep saying that like this situation is simple but it’s not. You guys handled this like kids but, c’mon, we’re all adults. Well, you’re 18, the minimum age for a resident here, but you have to recognize that you have some responsibility and that you’ve been acting like a total baby about this situation. You’re so immature. Grow up. Life isn’t that simple.” Mac sighed, looking up at the ceiling as if some heavenly authority could hear him and would help him out of the sticky situation. As Colin opened his mouth to protest and claim that he hadn’t been acting like a baby and that he was a responsible adult, he realized that Mac wasn’t completely wrong and clamped his mouth shut, uneager to dig himself deeper into his hole of shame.
“Plus, none of us are the good guys! There are no heroes in this story! This town was built on lies, and there’s no way that anything good could come out of this.”
Colin frowned deeply. “What do you mean?”
Mac pushed his cup of tea aside and laced his fingers together. “The other day, when that officer came to investigate, I overheard him talking into a walkie-talkie and saying that everything was going well in the town because we were all at each other’s throats. I was super confused because I thought that the point of these towns was to be peaceful so I did some research and found out that he was right.”
Glancing over to see if Colin was shocked by this news, Mac continued, “Terra Corporations has been purposely setting up neighborhoods to fail just so they give everybody a turn on Earth 102 by having them pay for it and then leave when everything turns to shit. They’ve been covering it up for years, but some conspiracy theory nuts on the outskirts of the internet pieced together some NDAs that people had to sign after leaving neighborhoods and some half-shredded documents.”
There was a beat of silence as Mac tried to gauge Colin’s reaction. Finally, Colin simply shrugged and replied, “Even if that’s true, don’t play the victim. You’re just as guilty as the rest of us,”
“Is that seriously all you got from this? God, I can’t believe you!” Mac covered his face with his hands in disbelief. “You know, when D-Day happened, that’s what I thought, but at this point, if I’m not the victim, what the hell am I? You and your friends have been attacking me and mine so much for the past few months, and you won’t stop. It’s been horrible waking up every day and wondering if you’ll leave me another awful anonymous message or yell some bullshit through that Nora thing.”
The rawness of Mac’s voice caught Colin off-guard but he composed himself quickly and maintained his act of indignance. “Well, it’s justified.”
As Mac shook his head, he scoffed, “I don’t think that entertainment at the expense of others is ever okay, but considering your weird and messed-up logic, I don’t think I can change your mind any time soon.”
“Honestly, if you’re not going to leave my friends and I alone, and you hate us so much, why don’t you just leave? I told you that this town is bad and made to tear us apart. If you just leave, we both never will have to see each other again. I’ll finally be left alone, and you’ll finally have to stop constantly thinking about me. It’s a win-win.”
Colin considered Mac’s suggestion for a moment. It made sense. It would be a perfect solution for the whole situation. However, something inside Colin’s heart led him to shake his head as a smile slowly spread across his face. “No, I’m not going to. I can’t leave. The chaos is the only thing that makes me feel alive. And even staying means tearing the town apart, I’ll do it because there’s nobody here who’s going to stop me from getting what I want.”
