Welcome to Trainwrecks: Season 2 (2005-2006)! If you haven’t read Season 1, please start there! Trainwrecks is a free-to-read fiction serial that follows a group of six Seattle-adjacent friends from the year 2004 to the year 2015. Join Luna Cruz, Sebastian Velasquez, Dimitri and Victoria Hale, Duke Kingston, and Jasmine Nolan as they stumble their way from adolescence to adulthood, falling in love, making mistakes, overcoming their pasts, and staying together through it all.
For series introduction, character profiles, relationship charts, and general orientation, check out the Table of Contents!
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When the doorbell rang, Luna dropped her dog’s front paws—she’d been making her dance around the living room—and rushed to answer it. Victoria was coming over for the first time since her breakup with Duke, and Luna had her apologies, groveling, and reassurances of everlasting friendship all prepared. Never mind her own fight with Dimitri, today was all about Victoria! But when she opened the door, her tentative smile fell faster than a cartoon coyote that had been led off a cliff by a clever roadrunner.
In front of her was not the regal, put-together Victoria she knew, but a red-eyed, hollow-cheeked, runny-nosed, frizzy-haired copy, caught in mid-weep. “Lunaaaa,” she wailed, the very picture of despair.
Luna pulled her inside and into her arms. “Oh, sweetie!”
Victoria babbled incoherently over her shoulder. Luna made out “breakup” and “awful” and “worst person alive” and “terrible friend” before she concluded with a heart-wrenching, “I miss him so much!” and broke down bawling.
Luna’s mom had been drawn out of her bedroom by the commotion. She looked her panicked daughter in the eye and said, “You girls look like you could use some ice cream. I’m going to go get you some ice cream.” Then she shoved her curious husband back into the room, hissing at him in Spanish to give them some privacy.
Luna brought Victoria up to her bedroom and left her there while she grabbed an unopened box of tissues from the towel closet. When she returned, Victoria sat weeping on her bed with her skirt gathered around her like an old school Disney princess. All that was missing was a herd of sympathetic animals, gazing up at her with sad, loving eyes. Luna picked up her biggest stuffed hedgehog and crammed it into her arms. “Squeeze him. It’ll make you feel better.”
“No it—oh, he smells like lavender.” She accepted a few tissues and pressed them against her eyes. “I’m so embarrassed. I told myself I wasn’t going to fall apart, but then I saw your house and I was so happy but also just so, so sad that—”
Luna hugged her. “I’m sorry. I’ve been a real jerk.”
“You? I was the one who…” Another round of sobs cut her off, and Luna handed her even more tissues. Whereas Duke was lightning flashes on the horizon, a sign to everyone standing at a distance that a hurricane was raging elsewhere, Victoria was a deluge, a sorrow that could drown everything around it. Together they made one heck of a storm.
“It’s been awful,” Victoria said between stuttering breaths. “I hurt Duke and I hurt you and then I took it out on poor Dimitri—and he’s been gracious enough to not hold it against me, which just makes me feel worse.” Luna winced at the mention of Dimitri. “And I’ve been having nightmares about the Juilliard audition even though Ms. Deerhorn says I’m doing well.”
“Squeeze the hedgehog.”
She tightened her grip on the stuffed animal. “And all this time, I’ve been…” She sobbed. “I’ve wanted nothing more than to talk to Duke, because he always knows how to cheer me up and calm me down… but he won’t even look at me anymore…” Her voice went up in pitch until it was almost a squeak. “And I can’t blame him!”
Luna, who was empathetic to a fault, felt tears gathering in her own eyes. What a mess. What a terrible, heartbreaking mess.
“I just—I want to tell him how sorry I am, but how pathetic would that be?” Victoria reached for more tissues, tried to dab at her eyes, then gave up and buried her face in them.
“Apologizing would be a good place to start,” Luna said, picking at the edge of her sweatshirt. She’d certainly tried to apologize to Dimitri, then spent half the night staring at his texts, unable to sleep.
“I’m scared,” Victoria blubbered from behind the tissues. “What if he doesn’t accept my apology? What if he tells me to go to hell? I couldn’t—I couldn’t take that… not from him…” She took several more stuttering breaths. “I love him, Luna! I don’t know what to do!”
Now Luna started crying, swiping at her cheeks with the backs of her hands so Victoria could have all the tissues. She felt sorry for her friends. Even though he’d never said as much, she could tell by how hurt Duke was that he’d loved Victoria, too. She’d filled every corner of his big, dumb heart with light, and then she’d made him feel so small, and Luna didn’t know if he’d ever recover, if he could find it in himself to forgive her. And if there was one thing she was starting to learn, it was how much it sucked to not be forgiven. She tried to get ahold of herself. Victoria had come to her for comfort. She was supposed to be comforting her, darn it!
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish I had an easy answer, but… I think you’re just going to have to give Duke his space.”
Victoria sobbed. “I don’t want space. I want him.”
“I know.” Luna patted her hand, then remembered that repetitive physical contact bothered Victoria and pulled her hand back. “But if you try and force it, he’s just going to get angrier. He needs time to calm down, time to decide whether his feelings for you are… bigger than what you said to him.” She was preaching to herself, too. Give Dimitri his space. He’d come around. He always did.
Victoria wiped her eyes and nose. “God, I’m so stupid…”
“Don’t say that.”
“He was only trying to make me feel better,” she said. “I was so stressed about my audition, and he… he made a joke about how if I didn’t get in, then at least I’d get to keep all of you… and I snapped at him, and then I kept snapping at him.” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t blame him if he never forgave me. If I lose him forever, it’d be nothing less than deserved.”
Luna plucked a few more tissues from the box and used them to wipe Victoria’s tears. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she said. “You know that since you guys broke up, Duke has never once said anything bad about you? And trust me, plenty of people have said some pretty bad things about you, present company included.”
“Has…” Victoria swallowed. “Has he said anything about me at all?”
She shook her head. “Not a word.” Duke was a tough guy, after all. Whatever he was feeling about Victoria, he kept it under lock and key. “But I think the fact that he hasn’t badmouthed you is a good thing. He may be hurt and not ready to forgive you, but he doesn’t hate you, and that’s not nothing.”
Victoria blew her nose daintily. “Right. He doesn’t hate me. That’s… better than the alternative.” She added her tissue to the mountain she’d stacked beside her. “I can work with that.”
“And remember, you don’t have to work alone.” Luna struck a triumphant pose, though she felt anything but. “Jasmine and I are here to help in any way we can!” Her shoulders sagged. “At least, until you move to New York.”
“If I could get Duke talking to me again before I leave… that would be enough.”
“Setting the bar as low as possible. I like it.”
Victoria wiped her cheek with the heel of her palm. “There’s something else. I… I’m taking medication again,” she said, “for the ADHD.” She looked down at her hands. “I was taking it before, when I lived in London. I flew into a rage at school and my friends couldn’t handle me anymore, so they dropped me, which of course only made me angrier.” She sniffled. “Once I’d stabilized, I promised myself I would never let things get that bad again… but then I couldn’t see how bad it was until I lost Duke. You were all so patient with me. More patient than you should have been.”
“That’s what friends do,” Luna said, reaching for her hand.
Victoria shook her head. “Just because my brain doesn’t work like others doesn’t mean I can heap abuse on the people who love me.” She wiped away another round of fresh tears. “It’s only been a few weeks, but I do feel like everything’s become easier to bear. I hope… that I can be nicer to you all.” She managed a tremulous smile. “So that we can make some good memories before I go.”
Luna started blubbering again and pulled Victoria into a hug, which was how her mother found them a few minutes later, embracing and wailing like someone had died. She set a plastic bag on the bed and handed them spoons. “There are five pints in there,” she warned them. “Decide what you’re going to eat and freeze the rest.”
Luna spent the rest of the afternoon catching Victoria up on her dates with Patrick, her quinceañera preparations, and Jasmine and Sebastian’s dramatic rescue of a classmate from her abusive boyfriend. She left out her arguments with Dimitri, the previous night’s included. Victoria had her own stuff to worry about. Luna wouldn’t add to it by crying about how she’d potentially ruined one of the most important relationships in her life.
Author’s Note: Can confirm that one does go through many pints of ice cream after a breakup.
I also want to know the details of Luna's dates with Patrick!
The girls are back together but UGHHHH the pain in both of them over their respective broken relationships!! Luna going through it with Dimitri huuuuuuuuurts 😭
Fingers crossed Duketoria will at least be on speaking terms before NY...