Chapter Text
Anne Boonchuy has never had particularly good luck.
Not with grades or inherent talent, comedic timing or wit, the smoothness and grace required to ace a conversation. She couldn’t make someone swoon or cry through words, couldn’t paint a picture someone could stare at for hours, couldn’t play a song on a guitar. Someone’d maybe chalk all that up to practice: you can’t do it because you haven’t tried. It’s all practice, practice, practice. Nothing to do with luck.
Anne cannot count the number of times she has practiced something, tried something, only for it to amount to nothing. She’s tried ice skating, rock climbing, playing piano, drawing, painting, crocheting, jewelry-making, hell, even dumpster diving with Sasha once, and nothing has ever stuck. Except for tennis, and who cares if you’re good at hitting a ball around? (Then again, who cares if you’re good at drawing? Or rock climbing? Or making friends? Or doing anything in your free time?)
Someone still might say it’s got nothing to do with luck, being good at something, but Anne would call bullshit. Marcy was born with the aptitude towards science and just learning in general, Sasha with the gift of effortless coercion and a tongue as smooth as an ice rink, and Anne with, what? Tennis, only after years and years of playing? Is that all she is? All she’s good for?
But that’s neither here nor there; that’s a can of worms she’s not going to open, because the conversation is about luck. And Anne, if she was born with any aptitude towards anything, was born with particularly unfavorable luck.
“Marcy, I’m going to kill you,” Sasha growled, her voice dripping with disgust and fury. “You stole my carrots.”
“I stole your carrots,” Marcy repeated cheerfully, appearing completely detached from the whirlwind of threatening emotion radiating off her blonde friend. Anyone else would’ve been scared still, terrified of the Queen of the Playground, but not Marcy. Never Marcy. “If you want them back, you’d better catch me!”
One of the earlier instances of her poor luck occurred on the battlefield of fourth grade: the blacktop.
“Marcy!” Sasha yelled, beginning her chase like a lion on the savannah against a hyena who stole her prey.
“Guys,” Anne called helplessly, like she always was in those days and the years that followed.
“Anne, tell Marcy ,” emphasizing the -cy with an irritated drawl, “to give me back my–”
A baby carrot, orange and fresh from the packaging, slaps against Sasha’s forehead with a slightly audible thunk.
The blonde stops as if stunned by a weapon. She slowly draws her eyes up, disbelieving. “You did not. Just hit me. With a carrot.”
A projectile aimed right between her eyes, an orange blur whizzed in the air.
“Ouch!” Sasha yelps as she’s struck by another one, reeling back as if she’s been shot. “Marcy,” she groaned and complained.
Anne frowned, wondering (not urgently) if she should get a teacher to stop the one-sided assault. She pondered, tapping a finger to her cheek as she weighed the consequences of incurring either Marcy or Sasha’s wrath while Sasha continued to yelp as Marcy pelted her with carrots. Who would be better to appease in this situation? Marcy would be disappointed if she got a teacher to come help, while Sasha would rather Anne herself go in to help than call a teacher to do it for her. Sasha was never keen on the interference of teachers in personal spats.
Last time, Anne ended up picking Sasha’s side, so she’s leaning towards helping Marcy throw as many carrots at Sasha as possible. She’s gotta keep it even, right? Help Marcy, then help Sasha, then help Marcy. Help the butcher kill the lamb then help the lamb’s mother escape the butcher. The cycle of appeasement, where both parties leave not succinctly as the victor or the loser, but some combination of both that lets Anne keep both of them in her life. A friend to all, that’s who she is.
“Marcy!” she calls with her hands in a cone shape around her mouth. “Come here.”
“Oh, thank God,” Sasha sighs presumptuously, her shoulders sagging.
Marcy jogs over, her face guilty. She looks at Anne like she’s expecting a lecture, but Anne just smiles as she takes the bag of carrots. “Sasha!”
“What?” she turns, her guard down.
Anne still looks back at the memory with a sort of puzzlement you experience when you have no idea how something happened, despite being there. All she remembers is throwing the carrot, aiming for the middle of Sasha’s forehead, and the next thing she knows Sasha is screaming on the ground.
Sitting in the principal’s office, she managed to piece together this: she threw the carrot. Instead of her forehead, it hit Sasha’s eye. Shocked and maimed by the attack she didn’t see coming, Sasha trips. Sasha twists her ankle as she falls. Boom, no more fun and games– Anne ends up as the sole perpetrator, not wanting to sell Marcy out for starting it. And that is one of the first stories of her abominable luck.
She would say the most current and recent story is the one that led to her now, sitting in the principal’s office much like that instance in fourth grade, waiting in awkward quiet for the principal to stop typing.
“Sorry ladies, one sec,” the woman says with a concentrated frown, obviously not pleased at the intrusion to her vital after-school work. “Just let me finish up.”
Anne considers which response would be the most appropriate: an “it’s all good” or saying nothing. She ends up letting the silence stretch on, thinking it another distraction to Principal Murphy’s precious work to speak. Sasha doesn’t say anything either, far too occupied by staring at her shoes to notice anything around her. Which isn’t really like her, Anne notices unhappily, as if anything that has occurred in the past couple days has been like Sasha Waybright.
The girl sighs, clenching her fists into her skirt. Who is even sitting next to her, now? Sasha never used to be this… outwardly combative? Sure, she’d never been the type for honest conversation, but outright running from it? That was weird. Sasha operated in the subtleties, resided in the delicate balance between telling you something and letting you figure it out for yourself. And the Sasha that Anne knew didn’t run, not from anything.
Anne just wanted to freaking tell her about a lead she found: a vase, sitting innocently in a museum display. And when she didn’t respond, well, how else was Anne supposed to talk to her? It just happened to be her crap luck that she somehow picked the worst possible day to have that conversation because apparently Sasha had the world’s most important cheerleading practice (as if she didn’t attend every single other one) and then, of course, their chase and subsequent fight brought them close enough to school grounds that a teacher noticed them. For all the schemes her and Marcy and Anne pulled, Anne really didn’t like getting in trouble with authority. The other two always seemed unbothered by it, like an accusing look or a stern lecture washed over them like light rain, but Anne always felt transparent under the stare of somebody older. Like they looked at her and they knew she didn’t know who she was or what she was doing.
She wasn’t really looking for clues at the time, when she found the vase.
She was bored, quite frankly. She missed Amphibia and the Plantars like an amputated limb, but that was nothing new. Sasha hadn’t responded to her message yet (not that she ended up doing so) so she was desperate for a distraction from the unresolved tension ruminating in her mind. Go to the museum or the tennis court or the pool or something, her parents said when they noticed her wandering around the house like a ghost with nothing to haunt. So she did.
Staring hard at the vase, at the inscription that looked miraculously similar to Amphibian text, a lightbulb went off in her head. She went home that day with renewed determination and optimism, telling her parents it went well and being honest about it.
Hesitating in the doorway, she opened her mouth for a moment before closing it again. She doesn’t know if it’s out of gullibility or some other weakness of hers, but for the first time in a while, she wanted to break down and just tell her parents everything.
She knows she shouldn’t tell them. Why would they believe her? She’s not sure she’d even believe herself. And Sasha didn’t tell her parents, Sasha always had better ideas about things, so why should Anne?
But there’s a part of her, sitting in the principal’s office in a silence only punctuated by the clicking of fingers on a keyboard, wondering why Sasha isn’t immediately smooth-talking her way out of this. Why she’s just sitting there, her eyes blank and unseeing, her face pointed towards the floor. Why she didn’t ease Anne’s and the teacher’s concerns with a swipe of the hand, a practiced smile, as soon as they sat down.
She comes to a striking realization, then, dumbly, like it’s been a piece of paper sitting in front of her face this entire time but only now does she decide to read it: Sasha doesn’t always know what to do.
It shouldn’t be surprising, shouldn’t be a revelation, because the knowledge must’ve been creeping around somewhere in her brain, because she knows everybody stutters and everybody feels lost, but she’d never pictured Sasha ever having any indecision. It just wasn’t who she was: you’d look at her and go, oh, that’s a girl who knows what she wants. Anne had been jealous of that— someone who didn’t blank when you asked what they wanted for their birthday, someone who finished About Me worksheets in five minutes rather than fifteen, someone who could go on and on about their future plans and how many kids they’re gonna have and where they’re gonna live and who their friends are. She’s probably still jealous, because after everything Anne still doesn’t know who she sees when she looks in the mirror. For once, though, she’s considering the possibility that Sasha, despite all her demands and her itemized list of wants and desires, stares into the mirror at the end of the day and sees the same thing.
She’s looking at the girl and there are things she hadn’t seen before woven into her jean jacket, bound in her tight ponytail, hidden under the bandaid above her eyebrow, camouflaged like cracks in a marble pillar that you thought were just part of the patterning.
And Anne wonders, in the clicking silence, just how long those cracks have been there.
Or how long it’ll take for them to bring the whole pillar down.
-
Sasha would probably be anxious right now if she didn’t feel like she was about to keel over at any minute.
Being in the principal’s office, for arguing and almost getting into a physical fight with a friend especially, should be nerve-wracking. She knows she should be thinking of some way to get out of this, to escape.
She counts the tiles on the floor and spends her energy trying not to throw up on them, instead.
“Okay,” the principal says after what could’ve been an eternity or just five minutes. “What do we have here?”
Her tongue feels heavy and twisted in her mouth, like she’d accidentally swallow it if she tried to talk. She stares at the principal who’s name she cannot be bothered to remember.
The silence lapses on. The principal raises an eyebrow and looks between the both of them. “You guys were arguing and screaming at each other just a couple minutes ago, now you’ve got nothing to say?”
In the corner of her eye, Sasha sees Anne shift uncomfortably in her seat. Shit. A light clicks on. She shakes her head. She hasn’t been paying attention. She tries to swim through the fog in her brain. If she wants this interaction to go smoothly, she’s gotta start saying what this woman wants to hear.
“I—“ “Miss—“
Sasha and Anne start at the same time. Oops. Sasha glances over at Anne, who looks like she’s on the verge of shitting her pants. It brings her out of her head.
Jeez, Anne, Sasha can’t help but scoff fondly, not like we’re actually gonna get in trouble. You’ve got me.
Though considering she’s spent the entire interaction thus far zoning out and trying not to either pass out or throw up, she can understand Anne’s nervousness.
“Miss,” Sasha starts again, and considers clearing her throat. “I think there's been a misunderstanding.”
The principal raises her eyebrow, forming lines in her forehead. “Considering Mrs. O’Keefe saw one of you holding up the other against a tree, I’d like to take a crack at knowing what that misunderstanding is.”
“I got my hair stuck in the tree,” Sasha waves off before Anne can say anything. “It was dumb,” she laughs, “I was leaning up against it and realized I couldn’t get free. I screamed ‘cause I thought I’d have to cut my hair off and then Anne screamed because I screamed and it was just a mess.”
She’s aware that Anne is staring at her now but she doesn’t stop talking. “Glad I didn’t have to cut it, though,” she says sweetly, saccharine. “Being the cheerleading captain and all, my hair means a lot to me.”
She twirls a blonde lock around her finger for emphasis.
Principal Murphy raises an eyebrow but offers no further objection.
“Okay,” the woman finally says after a critical look. “Since neither of you are hurt, assumably, I can let this go.”
Sasha stands up.
“But do be aware, Mrs. Waybright,” and Sasha feels a sick sort of anticipation, “that missing as many practices as you have is grounds for terminating your position on the team.”
Sasha freezes.
“Marly tell you that?”
“Coach Marly,” Murphy corrects. “We’ve had conversations.”
Vague. Okay.
Sasha waves a hand nonchalantly, feeling ice creep its way through her veins. Nausea swirls in her stomach. “Whatever.”
“What is that?” Anne points out abruptly, and Sasha startles, forgetting Anne was there for a second. She turns her head to find her staring at Sasha’s hand. Her eyebrows are pressed into a line.
“What?” Sasha says, confused, turning to look behind her.
“Did you get those from the tree?” Anne’s expression is horrified.
She looks back at her hands, at the dull pink scabs slicing their way across her fingers. Realization hits. “Oh. No, no.”
There’s a faint wrinkle in Principal Murphy’s face, up near her eyebrows. “Did you hurt yourself?”
Sasha stalls at the question, the words like a cold bucket of water dumped over her head. She stops her eyes from blowing wide and forces herself to stay calm. “These are old,” she says with as much indifference as she can muster. “Got stuck in a rosebush. Stupid thing got me while I was gardening.”
Principal Murphy seems to accept that, leaning back in her chair with a satisfied, if not indifferent expression. Sasha scratches her hands uncomfortably under Anne’s heavy gaze, her eyes still having not left Sasha’s hands. She covers them under her sleeve. “Well, I hope we figured everything out here. I’d hate to leave so soon but I have a ride waiting for me, unfortunately.”
Anne looks like she wants to say something but Principal Murphy nods, leaning her head towards the door. “I expect not to see you two in my office again.” She grimaces at her computer screen.
“Right, right,” Sasha smiles apologetically. “Sorry.”
Sasha steps outside, Anne not far behind her. As soon as she’s out of the office, she starts speedwalking to the exit, her Mary Jane’s clacking on the concrete.
“Sasha, wait!” Anne calls, and it sounds like she’s out of breath.
She doesn’t stop. She walks even faster, not slowing until she’s breached the school gates. She takes a tentative step out from the cover of the school’s overhang.
At some point between them getting caught and them leaving the principal’s office, it had rained. The concrete was dark grey, almost a soggy black in the dim lighting of the lingering rain clouds.
“Sasha!”
Sasha whips around. “What?”
“I just—“ Anne catches her breath for a moment. “Wanted— to talk to you.”
“Well, I don't want to talk to you,” Sasha says waspishly. She turns back around and starts to walk away. “Bye.”
“Sasha, stop!”
She does, begrudgingly.
Anne takes a deep breath. “What’s all this about? Huh? You missing cheer? That’s not like you.”
“And how much about me,” Sasha spits, breathy, the words venomous, “do you even know at this point? You’ve ignored me since the day we got back.”
“Sasha,” Anne presses gently, “I really don’t want another fight. I just want you to tell me what’s going on.”
She sounds so sincere that it makes Sasha pause.
“Why?”
“What?"
“What does it matter?”
“Um, you’re my friend and obviously I’ll care if there’s something bothering you?”
“I haven’t been a very good friend lately,” Sasha mutters, kicking a rock. Or ever.
“I’ve found I’ve made some mistakes, too,” Anne admits softly. “I just don’t want to fight anymore. I miss you, Sash. And you know that I care.”
Tears threaten to brim in her eyes.
The words are warm, syrupy and honey-sweet, and all Sasha wants to do is swim in them, let herself close her eyes and be submerged. She wants to believe it more than anything. But like everything else good in her life there’s this aching, terrible sinking feeling, like she can feel the warmth getting sucked up by the black hole in the center of her chest and swallowed.
Sasha was sharpness and jagged edges. She was volatile and prone to exploding in the kiln like doomed pottery. She was not, in any way, soft and smooth and delicate in the way that she knew Anne deserved— she was not easy to handle or to swallow, she was covered in broken glass that jutted out in every direction. If you reached out to hold her, she’d cut you bleeding dry without even blinking because sharpness was just what she was, her principal characteristic. And pain was something she’d never wanted Anne to feel, not because of her, not because she’d somehow tricked this girl with warm eyes and soft hands that Sasha was somehow worthy of being held. It would be a deception too sinful even for Sasha’s repertoire. She could be conniving, yes. And rude and bold and audacious, and selfish— she was selfish to the highest extent, because she was prone to sabotaging, traitorous thoughts, ones that she knows will lead to suffering, but ones she carries out anyway— but nothing she has ever done would compare to letting Anne, sweet, forgiving and soft-hearted Anne, be cut by her thorns, her jagged edges, and maimed by them.
She was selfish to a horrible, cruel degree because part of her, the sticky, stupid, irrational part that lived on stolen glances and fleeting touches, on ruminating about futures that could never be hers because they were too soft and doughy and lacked the serrated edge Sasha has carried all her life, that part of her wanted someone to look at her and hold her anyway. To kneel with her on the dining room floor with a dustpan to help her pick up her broken pieces and glue them back together, knowing she was always a hair’s breadth from shattering again.
The worst part is that she knows, she feels it like it’s a physical thing in the pit of her stomach that’s always been sitting there undisturbed, even after hanging off buildings and watching brown eyes contort into cold betrayal, she knows it like she knows her own name that Anne would do it if she asked. Anne would put her in the kiln knowing she was full of air bubbles, would kneel on broken glass to pick up the pieces of Sasha’s soul, would risk blood and sweat and tears and everything if only Sasha looked at her and said she wanted her to.
And she knows, like she knows the sky is blue and the world is spinning and the grass is green that Sasha could never, ever deserve it.
So she hardens her expression, balling her fists until her fingernails dug into flesh and beyond like it would somehow quell the voice in her head that’s shrieking like an alarm, the heartbeat racing in her ears.
She stared at the weeping willow tree in the distance as she said, “I don’t want to be friends anymore.”
Anne doesn’t say anything right away. Part of Sasha wants to crawl out and take the words back.
Then: “What?”
It feels like she’s on a sinking ship.
“I don’t want to be friends anymore. I don’t think it's working out. I need a break from you, okay, Anne?”
It’s done.
For a moment Anne just blinks slowly in her peripheral vision, like she can’t comprehend what’s happening. Like she’s not here, not seeing or hearing, and Sasha wishes she weren’t, wishes she was dreaming.
Sasha’s gaze breaks away from the willow tree and glances at her phone, at her driver’s contact. He should be here any minute; she’d sent a text.
“I’m leaving,” she states.
“But… you…” Anne finally croaks, her eyes wide and disbelieving.
Then her next words come out quick, sharp, like a strike from a snake, “You’re running away? Again? Really, Sasha?”
Sasha glances back.
“That’s just what you do, isn’t it,” Anne sneers, but the longer it sits in the space between them the more her voice deflates, “Have me thinking you’ve changed. Jeez. I should’ve known.”
She breathes and the sound hitches and it somehow makes the air heavy, like strong humidity.
“Frog, I’m gullible. I really believed it this time, like you’d give a crap about anybody else,” and it’s supposed to be mean, harsh, cutting, all the things Sasha had imagined in this moment— relieved, maybe. Angry, betrayed. Anne’s supposed to look at her with wild eyes and curse her out, spit on her or punch her or— or, Sasha doesn’t know what else, because that’s what she would have done: get pissed. Break something.
But Anne trails off like she’s run out of energy to speak, like the words are stuck in her stomach, like they’re not enough, and they both stand there.
Sasha just stares at the trees, at the sky, at the concrete, to pretend she’s anywhere other than here.
Her driver finally rolls around the corner, pulling up feet away from her on the asphalt. She waits for him to stop so she can get in.
It’s supposed to be triumphant, relieving, but Sasha doesn’t think she’s felt worse in her entire life.
Anne says nothing, like the quiet before a jumpscare in a horror movie, as Sasha climbs into the passenger seat of the car. She flits one last stolen look behind her.
Anne’s eyes are blue, shiny with tears, as she whispers, “I wish Marcy were here instead.”
Sasha hears it, though she shouldn’t be paying attention.
Me too, and all the things Sasha doesn’t say back echo in the silence as the car pulls off the curb.
She stares at her hands, ugly red scratches mottling them like cracks in ceramic, and feels something small, something worn and deep inside her soul that she’s never paid much attention to before because it has always been the quieter of her emotions, the softer part that’s easy to ignore when everything else is flashy and sharp, it sinks like a stone in the middle of the ocean.
She imagines it falling into an inky abyss, swallowed by the hole inside her.
Pinocchio and the whale.
-
Sasha almost calls out I’m home when she steps inside and shakes the water off her backpack, closing the door to the sudden rain that had come back with a vengeance on the way back.
She meets her mother in the kitchen again. She doesn’t think it’s possible to feel any worse, so she doesn’t care.
“I got a call from Coach Marly,” is all the woman says, her gaze fixed on chopping vegetables.
Cold.
Not angry. Or even inconvenienced.
Coldly her mother sighs, deeply, in a way that often made Sasha feel remorse for existing. The kind of exhale of breath, staggered and exhausted, like Sasha had done something that provoked so much disappointment and dissatisfaction that it could not be expressed in words; she had done something that ached like a dull wound, that made her mother tired. And somehow the silence afterward, though Sasha is plenty used to silence, digs its way through her ribcage farther than any harsh word or punishment, and settles in her hollow chest.
“I didn’t know you had other kids,” she says, thinking back on the conversation with the driver.
Her mother looks up at this, turning around with a surprised, almost incredulous look. Her blonde hair is impeccable, not a strand out of line.
“Where do you think I’m off to all the time?” she says, like the sentence means nothing.
And it sounds wrong, like an out of tune guitar.
“I thought you were at work.”
Her mother scoffs like Sasha’s playing a joke on her, like she’s picking a fight. She chops an onion into small pieces, quick stabbing motions. The timer on the toaster oven ticks. “Sash, you know I haven’t been to the office in years. Not since I started working from home, anyway. I don’t know if that old building’s even still open.”
Chop. Tick, tick, tick.
Something heavy and metal and hard as a rock feels like it’s banging itself against Sasha’s head like a gong. “What?” she says, but she’s not in the kitchen anymore. She is seven years-old in her bedroom, and she is waking up to a slightly cracked door and a muted realization blooms in the pit of her gut.
Mom didn’t close the door, but she still checked on me, she thinks happily, the knowledge warm in her chest like it’s been microwaved, as though it dissolved the countless nights she spent alone. Now, though, in that memory she’s focusing on the breeze, the waft of cold wind that woke her up in the first place. She’s focusing on how she followed it to her mother’s bedroom, the door also cracked ajar.
Tick, tick, tick.
“I thought,” she stumbles through her words in the present like she’s blindly clawing through the forest. “You always came to check…” she trails off.
“What?” Her mom blinks expectantly, and everything becomes clear for a moment.
The wind. The door.
Oh. Sasha opens her eyes for the first time.
Her mom wasn’t checking on her.
Her mom opened a window.
The draft opened the door.
Sasha feels distantly like she’s falling, spinning in circles like a skydiver without a parachute, falling into a void. This shouldn’t break her, she knows, because she should be used to this. She should have known. I mean, if her mom didn’t care enough to make her dinner or stay with her when she’s sick, why would she care enough to check in on her after coming home?
Why would she care when she’d already replaced Sasha, anyway? Who would give a shit about the whereabouts of your seven-year-old daughter if you had several others from a marriage you actually wanted? It all made sense now.
Sasha stares at her mother’s back as she continues to chop, chop, chop, and the timer keeps ticking, ticking, ticking, all the energy leaving her body like sand leaving a beanbag.
Dulled sparks flare in her stomach, in her lungs, warming her brain instead of setting it on fire.
One thought in particular stands out, a coherent thought in the whirlwind: she doesn’t blame Mom.
All of a sudden she’s bleeding from a wound that was never stitched, never mended– has been open and trickling scarlet drops for such a long time it has created a pool of blood beneath it.
She is a little girl in the backseat of a white Lexus sedan and you are hard to love is repeating in her head like a malfunctioning alarm clock.
She is half-naked in a hospital gown and a man in a white coat is telling her softly, with a gentle tone that only comes from complete resignation, that she’s a rotten liar.
She is spending her birthday in an empty house, rereading the same text of apology over and over like it would make Dad change his mind.
She is on a grey faux-leather couch and rubbing at indents of acrylic nails long since faded, wondering if the woman with hot breath and wild hair was right after all.
She is hanging from the highest height she’s ever been, her cheek an angry red, and for the first time in her life she understands she is dead weight.
She is watching her best friend lie limp like a sack of flour on palace floors, and she is seeing her reflection in the flashy sword sticking out of her abdomen.
She is waiting at the police station for someone that would never come.
And she feels it as certainly and vividly as she would if it were physical and grabbing her by the throat at this very moment, pressing finger-shaped bruises into the sides of her neck: she is not lovable.
It’s doubtful she ever was.
Everything she has done in life has been an elaborate dance, a waltz of lying and ordering others around, to hide from this simple fact: Sasha Waybright is not a beautiful, loving, compassionate, or particularly deserving person.
Something inside her shatters like a bowl on the dining room floor. It echoes in the hollowness of her chest, reverberating off the walls of her ribcage.
One second she feels thick with novocaine, her limbs heavy and disoriented. And then she’s splintered, broken, fractured in fragments and she’s all over the carpets and the tile and there are so many pieces of her that she cannot begin to pick herself up, cannot bring herself to even glance her reflection in the shards, because she is a girl in pieces, in a hundred, in a thousand, in a hundred thousand pieces.
She slams her backpack on the floor, slams the kitchen door, and slams the door to her bedroom.
She flings herself onto her bed, unable to stop the barrage of tears that spring to her eyes as whimpered sobs escape her lips. She clasps her hands over her mouth and shoves her head into the pillow, muffling the sound of her useless screaming.
Heaving sobs wrack her frame, her scabbed fingers a leaky dam against the incessant, uncontrollable crying pouring out of her like it’s never going to stop, never going to end, and she ponders with a terrifying thought that it might not. She thinks about showing up to school tomorrow with tears streaming down her face, thinks about showing up to her wedding and being unable to say her vows because she can’t stop bawling, thinks about dying when she’s 80 and she still can’t stop crying. She thinks about dying from dehydration before she makes it there. She thinks about dying.
Every inhale is painful, every full-body shudder like an electric shock from a cattle prod. She cries like children do, contorting their faces and dedicating their entire bodies to the emotion, lost to it like a ship would be in the middle of a storm: Sasha sobs like a little girl who wants her best friend.
And it hits all at once that she doesn’t have one anymore. That she never will, because she’s fucked it up like she’s fucked up her body and her mind and the people around her, and she knows this, she feels it, it’s why she broke it off, but that knowledge, the feeble sense of control, does nothing to dull the edge of the knife that feels like it’s plunging into her chest and twisting. Because she’ll never hear Anne laugh again. Because she’ll never share boba with her again, never giggle under the covers as they watch a cheesy movie, never smile at inside jokes only the three of them understand, and it’s like another slap in the face that they don’t have inside jokes anymore.
Marcy’s gone, Anne is too, not dead in the same fashion but Sasha’s holding the knife all the same, and her hands are caked in red and her face is grey with ash and she’s telling herself it’s for the better but she doesn't really believe it because she doesn't feel any better. There’s this insurmountable loss of what could’ve been, what was, and it crushes her, it cuts her open and guts everything out of her in a way she’s never felt before, because each realization is something new, something else to mourn.
She’ll never be the first one Anne calls, she’ll never be the person Anne finds in a crowd, she’ll never be the person that makes the tension ooze out of Anne’s shoulders when she walks into a room. It’s stupid things, menial things, that gets her, too, memories now buried under six feet of gravel: Sasha will never sleep at Anne’s house again; she’ll probably never see her parents again, even. She’ll never drink out of her water bottle when she forgets her own, she’ll never trade Halloween candy, she’ll never have late-night calls where they both get pretzels and giggle about nothing, she'll never look at her at the same time Anne looks back and the words Sasha's never been able to let go of will never leave her mouth.
Someone else will make her laugh, hold her hand, love the way her eyes look like molten gold in the sunlight, love her, and Anne will forget, will get over the momentary heartbreak and pass over her memory one day like it didn't mean anything.
On a sunny day she'll pass Anne in the hallway and realize she's changed her detergent, because she doesn't smell like lavender anymore, and she won't know when she changed it or how long it's taken her to notice, only that Anne doesn't smell like Anne-- she smells like someone else, someone older and pine-scented, like a stranger Sasha will never get to know.
It's grief, the inevitable kind of sadness.
-
She must’ve fallen asleep eventually, her head pressed into the pillows, because at some point she wakes up and the world outside is dark.
Her skin feels raw, hot to the touch and carved, hollow like a pumpkin on Halloween. Tears no longer flow in rivulets down her cheeks but she still feels like she’s crying, in a way: that the tears aren’t coming only because she’s run out of water.
She peeks outside, moving the blinds to one side, and notices the absence of a white Lexus in the driveway. Then she shakes her head, feeling silly, because what does it even matter?
-
The clock on the toaster oven reads three fifty-five in the morning when Sasha throws it into the pool.
The cerulean electrical sparks pitter out into nothing, swallowed by the darkness of the night.
-
Sasha is driftwood.
She’s floating stagnantly, waywardly, on a turbulent sea. Up and down she goes, vulnerable to the monotonous passage of the waves. Up and down, over and over. The sky is near-black. The water is dark green, sludgy and full of seaweed. There is no moon, but something pale blue reflects off the sea.
It’s the wrapper of an Oreo, floating adrift.
Sometimes, though she’s sure this means she’s faking it, she plans it. She patiently walks down each aisle in the grocery store, tossing any item that catches her eye into her overflowing basket. Or she orders delivery, scanning through all the options and clicking them into her cart, ignoring the rising number at the bottom. She’s giddy, on top of the world, flitting around from one aisle to another and basking in her infrequent freedom, her eyes darting wildly at the world of options. Or she’s dull, mechanical, scrolling through takeout menus with listless fingers and staring at shelves with deliberate, unfeeling purpose. It depends.
Planning usually comes with experience, though, and it’s not how it started. How it started is how it happens this time.
She breaches the doorway of her home at some time past seven in the morning because it’s bright again. There is this hunger, brewing under her skin, something wild and deep and ravenous.
She ignores the intensity of it. She notices a blue wrapper out of the corner of her eye. She walks over to it. She hesitates. She takes it. She stares at the packaging, Anne’s sixteen individual packs of Oreo’s. Before she processes the decision, she’s tearing open the plastic and shoving both cookies in her mouth at once. She wants another one even before she’s even finished chewing. This is the first red flag.
A wave comes and breaks over the driftwood. There is silence. The wood is submerged for close to ten seconds before it bobs back up to the surface.
She’s still thinking about eating that second package when the last crumbs of her first is gone. It’s like she hadn’t eaten the first one at all– it did absolutely nothing to satiate her. But that’s not so strange, is it? To still be hungry? She reasons that’s entirely normal. It is, sometimes.
Okay, she says, just this time, and takes another package, her movements mechanical. Everything is okay. There is nothing wrong, because the itch will go away after she finishes the second. The ravenous feeling will subside. Food will fix her.
The itch doesn’t go away. She licks her fingers. She looks longingly at the empty packaging. She is empty, still. She is hungrier than she was before. She is ravenous. The hunger is overwhelming, flowing from her stomach to consume the rest of her. If she could just eat, everything wrong in the world would be righted.
In no time at all, sixteen empty packages of Oreo’s lay like corpses on her kitchen floor. She can’t remember what they tasted like.
There is another crash of water, and the driftwood is submerged again.
She opens the fridge. She closes the fridge. She opens the fridge again and takes the cheese from the second shelf.
Another thirty seconds, and the driftwood floats to the surface again.
It starts off slow, like this, with a decreasing amount of time between each swipe into the pantry or peek into the fridge. For some reason, no matter how much she swallows, she doesn’t feel full. In fact, she thinks that after every bite, she feels hungrier and hungrier. She has a cavern inside her. Stupidly, at this point, she thinks that the hunger she feels can be satiated by just one more bite.
In a moment of clarity it becomes clear how many wrappers, Oreo’s and granola bars and peanut butter crackers, are accumulating around her now, gravestones of impulsivity and gluttony. Her stomach is full, bordering on discomfort. But still. She is hungry. She is so hungry she can hardly think. The noise in the back of her head is so loud, beeping and buzzing and shrieking. This is when some animalistic part of her makes a decision, pieces clicking together with an audible snap. Some part of her says fuck it.
A violent wave crashes down. The driftwood isn’t seen for more than five minutes.
Now she’s sticky fingers in the back of old cabinets, clawing for forgotten granola bars and stale graham crackers. She’s plucked strawberry leaves and wrappers of chocolate bars in the microwave, she’s the sleeve of her uniform wiping ice cream off her chin. She’s handfuls of kettle-corn popcorn, fingernails full of rotisserie chicken, messy scoops of shredded Mozzarella cheese. She’s back in the pantry, again and again, scouring for anything sweet or salty or sour.
She eyes the box of pasta she swipes out of the way to reach the dry goods holed up in the back of the pantry. She picks up the box, staring at the squiggly shapes. She hesitates. She sets it back down. No, she chides herself, too much.
She eats three more granola bars and a pack of nuts before she dumps the entire box in a pot on the stove.
But the eight minutes it takes to cook is unbearably long. She shifts from one foot to the another, antsy. Her stomach is no longer just full. It whines in protest. It feels heavy. She feels heavy. If she thinks about how heavy she feels she’ll realize she feels revolted, too. Truly and absolutely disgusted. Horribly guilty. She wants to stop. More than anything, she wants this sick, hulking feeling to go away.
The driftwood reappears on the surface. It bobs. And it seems like it might not go down again. There is this sturdiness, now, that’s building. This firmness.
The beeping of the stove timer is another wave, stronger, crashing down.
There is salt. And then butter. And cheese. And more cheese. Then, there’s pepperoni. And hotdogs. And her stomach is so full, it’s brimming, it’s almost pouring out, it’s stretching farther than it should be stretched, and it hurts. But she doesn’t care. It has never stopped her before.
She has never been more glad in her entire life that she lives alone eight months of the year. So she eats alone, too, and the only one to witness her shame, to see what a monstrous, horrible gluttinous creature she is, one that can’t stop even though it hurts like her stomach is exploding, bloats like a dead body at sea, she’s melted plastic and ice cream cartons choking up streams by the highway, she’s the smog in the air and the oil in the sea sopping and dripping and clogging throats of sea turtles and poisoning rivers, she’s the waste that bubbles up from sewage grates during a rainstorm, and the only one who knows, who sees, is herself. And there is not much you could tell her, stupid, sad, ridiculous Sasha, that she doesn’t already know about herself. Solitude is the only mercy the universe has ever given her. She thinks not one person could stand the nauseating, polluting sight of her.
When a wave bears down again, the driftwood drowns with it.
-
The porcelain white bowl judges her.
She’s staring at her own reflection in toilet water. That’s pretty vain, isn’t it? Narcissus would probably do something like this. She doesn’t really know much about Narcissius, though, so maybe he wouldn’t. Somebody had a Greek myth phase at some point, she remembers, and that’s how she knows of Narcissius. He is selfish, she knows, and he stares at his reflection in the water a lot. They’d be a perfect match.
Her stomach aches, rolling in on itself and forcing out small hiccups. She’s stopped eating only because the pain has become overwhelming. So she’s in the bathroom, clutching the toilet seat, trying not to think about anything at all, but failing, because her own face is staring back at her. She is waiting for her stomach to finally heave and relieve all the pressure.
But it doesn’t. The blaring nausea subsides, and she realizes she’s not going to puke. But now she’s staring into toilet water, and there’s a prickling, familiar sensation at the back of her mind.
She blows out a breath. She winces as she leans away from the toilet seat. She’s sweaty, bloated, covered in stains from milk and chocolate and strawberry juice, clutching her stomach. She closes her eyes. She thinks of eating more to fix it all. The wave of nausea that overtakes her tells her it’s not worth it, for once. She opens her eyes. It is unbearable. But she can’t eat more. She knows it’s done.
There is only one thing left to do: she has to make this feeling go away.
For some reason, she always starts trembling at this part. Once she’s made her decision and begins to go through the motions, her body reacts like it knows what’s coming. Honestly, it should be relieved, but it’s not. It’s terrified. It’s anxious. Her fingers start to shake despite the warmth of the water she rinses them under.
-
In thirty-five minutes, she’s brushing her teeth and picking garbage off the bathroom tiles. You’re supposed to wait thirty minutes after throwing up to brush your teeth, she remembers reading once, a long time ago. It’s to protect your enamel, she knows.
She cleans. She throws everything away. When everything is spotless, when she’s scrubbed pots and forks until there’s no sign of crusted food, when she’s vacuumed cereal off the floor and wiped crumbs off counters, everything is done.
Everything is done.
She is aching, teary-eyed, and bloated, but it’s done. There is nothing else.
The toilet water is too cloudy to serve as a good mirror. She doesn’t look in the actual mirror as she brushes her teeth. She ignores the sight of her from the vanity. She pulls on an oversized t-shirt and baggy sweatpants to camouflage her body.
When she lies down for bed that night, stares into the ceiling fan and the cobwebs she’s yet to get rid of glare at her from the corner, the secret is that she still feels insatiably, insatiably empty.
Brown eyes plague her thoughts as she falls asleep.