Benny Harvey RIP, Miss Ya Big Man, Gone But Not Forgotten

“You know, hope is the best weapon we have against uncertainty and despair.”

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Okay the title I can explain. I was going to call this Manhattan Skyline or some shit, and that got me thinking of the A-ha song of the same name, THEN the Limmy’s Show sketch based around that song and the Benny Harvey RIP bit afterward (btw my headcanon is that the metalhead in the A-ha shirt IS Benny Harvey) and that’s where the title comes from.

Anyway this little vignette takes place some time after Rachel Martinez’s kidnapping and follows two of her bandmates Hannah Lopez and Melanie Huang as they deal with the fallout from her disappearance, trying to hang onto hope despite everything. It sucks but what can ya do?

Benny Harvey RIP, Miss Ya Big Man, Gone But Not Forgotten

After ascending several flights of stairs until she was out of breath, Mel found Hannah on the roof of her apartment building, perched on the edge, staring out at the skyline with her arms wrapped around her slender frame, shivering from the cold. Well, at first she assumed Hannah was shivering, judging from the way her shoulders trembled, but she hadn’t even considered that she might have been crying.

Cautiously, she approached Hannah to sit down beside her, her calves dangling precariously off the edge of the roof. Glancing over at Hannah to gauge her reaction, Mel reached out carefully to touch her arm. “You okay?” she asked, quietly.

Hannah turned quickly to face her with an expression of disbelief, as if she hadn’t been expecting anybody to come after her, and Mel quickly realised her suspicions had been correct; her face was streaked with tears, her makeup smudged all around her eyes, and it seemed as if she was far from done weeping. With a heavy, trembling sigh, Hannah looked back down at her feet.

“Yeah,” she lied. “All good here. Just fine and fuckin’ dandy.”

“Babe, you don’t have to bullshit me, I know what’s up,” replied Mel, half-jokingly, as she reached for her cigarettes and lighter and held the pack out toward her friend. “You want one?”

Immediately, Hannah plucked a cigarette from the pack, holding it anxiously between her slender fingers, until Mel beckoned her closer to light it. She took a long, deep drag, held it for a moment, then blew the smoke out into the cold February air, watching it swirl and dissipate among the gathering clouds.

“I feel like it’s my fault,” admitted Hannah, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

“How do you mean?” Mel asked as she lit her own cigarette.

With a heavy sigh, Hannah turned to face Mel fully, her peachy-pink hair whipping about in the wind. She hadn’t touched up her roots in a long time. “I shouldn’t have left Rachel behind in the van,” she sniffled. “If I’d just stayed with her, maybe none of this would have happened, maybe she’d still be here, I—”

“Hannah, babe, come on,” said Mel as she reached out again for Hannah’s shoulder. “It’s nobody’s fault. None of us saw this coming. Whoever took her, that’s who we’ve gotta blame.”

Folding her legs up to her chest and resting her chin on her knees, Hannah let out another heavy sigh. “You know, people keep telling me ‘no news is good news’,” she said, “but I just can’t handle being stuck here not knowing where she is, what’s happened to her, if she’s even alive… fuck.” She turned away for a moment to wipe her face, smudging her eyeliner again.

Mel fucking hated seeing her friend like this. Sure, she didn’t have the same bond with her that Rachel did, but since that fateful day after the last show in Connecticut they’d grown much closer than ever, at least whenever Mel had the time to hang out between shifts helping out at her parents’ convenience store. The fallout from Rachel’s disappearance was hard on everyone, not at least of all her parents, but Hannah had taken it the hardest seeing as she’d been the last person to see Rachel alive. Whether Hannah already had a decent support network or not, Mel wanted to be there for her; not out of obligation, not to replace Rachel, not with the expectation of anything in return, but simply because they were friends. She pulled her trenchcoat tighter around her, shielding herself from the cold.

“Any luck with the cops?” Mel asked, then immediately regretted that question as Hannah turned to face her, incredulously.

She let out a short, bitter laugh. “Sure, if you count being told to go fuck myself for ‘wasting police time’ as progress,” Hannah replied, before taking another long drag on her cigarette. “Like, you really think the NYpendejos wouldn’t be stalling if Rachel was a straight white Christian girl at an Ivy League college? It’s almost like… they’re hoping she’s dead. So she can be just another statistic – swept aside, brushed off as something inevitable, and they can go right back to railroading Black and brown kids to Rikers just in time for the gentrifiers to move in.”

Fuck, Mel knew that feeling all too well. Among all the places in her neighborhood she grew up watching turn into offices and overpriced cocktail bars, she was at least lucky that Huang’s Convenience wasn’t one of them. It broke her heart to watch her mama and baba worrying that their store could be next.

She wanted so badly to believe that the Big Apple wasn’t rotten to the core.

“I just wish I knew what to do,” Hannah sighed beside her.

Carefully, Mel shifted herself closer to Hannah, slipped an arm out of the sleeve of her coat, and draped half of it over Hannah’s shoulder, surrounding her with familiar warmth and comfort. “Hey,” she began. “If I know Rachel as well as you do, I know she’s strong, smart, and resourceful as hell. I’ve got a feeling she’s still in Connecticut, and she’s figuring out a way to get out and find her way back home to us… to you.” Slowly, Hannah lifted her head and turned to face Mel, blinking back tears with an expression of mild curiosity.

“You think so?” she whispered.

“I hope so,” said Mel with a slight chuckle. “You know, hope is the best weapon we have against uncertainty and despair. And like my nǎinai always says, we never really lose the people we love. Not physically, anyway. No matter how far away they are, we always carry them with us in our hearts, and chances are they’re braving the storm to come back to us, safe and sound.”

For a moment, Hannah was silent, never taking her eyes off of Mel’s face, before she let out a quiet laugh. “You know, when we were in high school, Rachel broke the captain of the football team’s nose ‘cause he wouldn’t stop calling me a (T-slur i’m not writing it out lmao),” she smiled. “I bet she could whoop Poseidon’s ass without even breaking a sweat.”

“Speaking of Poseidon, it looks like it’s gonna rain,” said Mel, nodding towards the dark clouds gathering in the distance on the other side of the East River. “You wanna come back inside? It’s freezing out here anyway.”

With a quiet nod, Hannah swung her long legs off of the edge of the roof and onto solid ground, standing up to her full height, turning her back on the faint Manhattan skyline. Mel followed her up, slipping her other arm from her coat to drape it fully over Hannah’s shoulders, and together they headed for the door toward the stairwell. Turning back for a moment, Mel took one last long look at the horizon, at the dim shapes of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, of that whole other world within the same state, and all she could think was that while the rich flourished over in Manhattan and the poor floundered here in Brooklyn, at least she and Hannah and Cat had each other to lean on. Most days, that was just enough to keep her from falling headlong into despair, and she hoped it would be enough for Hannah too.

“Mel?” Hannah’s voice pulled Mel from her thoughts. “You okay?”

Mel turned back towards Hannah with a blink. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she smiled, reaching out for Hannah’s hand to take it in her own. “Just thinking.”

Then she followed Hannah back inside, shutting the door on Manhattan.