Quietly, Mindy approached the door. Then she hesitated. For the past two months, there had been an unspoken understanding: she didn't need to knock when she came to visit Tim, because he was always there waiting for her help, and he couldn't come and get the door anyway. But now that didn't feel right, and she wasn't exactly sure why. His frantic sense of positivity had been deflated a little bit by Callie's harsh words, yes, and that was the last she had seen of him. The people from the mayor's office had come to pick him up that afternoon, and she assumed they must have brought him back at the end of the night.
Maybe it was just that he seemed so independent now, compared to the state he'd been left in at the start of November. He didn't need her help to perform the most basic tasks anymore - suddenly, he was arranging all these things on his own without her even needing to know about it. Maybe he didn't need her around at all. But she wasn't here for basic tasks. She thought it over one more time. And then she knocked.
"Come in", said the voice on the other side of the door. And it wasn't the voice with all that cheerfulness injected into it, either. She had always thought that sounded forced, although he always seemed to be as sincere about it as anyone could possibly be. Mindy shrugged and turned the key in the lock, then stepped into the living room.
She just about did a double-take when she saw Tim. He looked exactly as she had seen him many times before, but not at all in the past couple weeks. All of his ornaments, except for the ones that served as his magical sensory organs, were gone, and he was wearing nothing but his needles. It wasn't hard to guess where they all had gone: a large cardboard box sat on the floor beside him, and she could spot a few glimmers of red and gold peeking out from inside.
"So," Mindy started as she approached him, "how did it go last night?" She wouldn't have expected that to be a sensitive question for Tim. If anything, she had been assuming that she would find him brimming with ever more enthusiasm and would have to talk him down from his idea of staying this way. But the look on his cartoony face, and the deep sigh that escaped him before he started to speak, already told her that things had changed.
"It barely even went at all," Tim said sullenly. "I thought this would be my big break, that people would finally pay attention to what I was trying to do. But it was worse than any of the other places I went. Nobody even noticed I was there. Even though I was listed right there on the posters, people still just treated me like part of the furniture." His googly eyes were staring directly at the floor. "And now I've just run out of time... I've got to apologize to Callie. She was right. I mean, if people can't even listen to me on Christmas Day, what hope do I have of trying to stick it out afterward?"
This all seemed sort of obvious to Mindy, especially since it wasn't exactly the first time he'd had a letdown of an experience like this. But she wasn't going to go all "I told you so" on him right now. And with "I told you so" off the table, she couldn't think of the right words to offer instead. Right now, she figured his words had made it clear enough - he just wanted someone to listen to him.
"I just thought... I don't know, I guess I thought that all of this must have happened to me for a reason. Like I was chosen for this somehow. I mean, if we know now that magic is real, is it really that much harder to believe in destiny? I thought that maybe the world needed me - needed this to happen to me - so that I could do something for others."
He was surprised by how much he was willing to admit. But he kept going anyway. "Now that Christmas is over, though, it feels like it was all just completely pointless. Sure, I might be one of the lucky ones, with my appointment only being two weeks away. But so what? I'll just go back to being the same old boring human being that I was on Halloween morning. I thought I was learning something about myself, that this experience was gonna change me as a person. Now it's like nope, there was no lesson to be learned at all. And I thought this would finally be my opportunity to get to know some people in this stupid town. But now I'm realizing that when this is all over... I'm gonna be just as alone as I was before..."
Okay, Mindy thought to herself. This was the opposite of the problem she expected to be having. All that time spent worrying about his frenzied behavior and trying to convince him to take it down a notch, and now she needed to be the one to cheer him up? She didn't have the first idea how to talk someone out of a depressive funk like this. She wasn't sure that was the right thing to do anyway. She had nothing she could say to him that sounded right, reassuring or otherwise. But maybe she didn't need to.
Tim was definitely not expecting Mindy to step a little closer, then suddenly wrapped her arms around his awkwardly-shaped body and pulled him in for a hug. He hadn't been held like this - well, not on purpose - in a long time. Well before Halloween. It was as much of a response as he wanted to hear right now.