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She is sooo good at this, she just knows it. Can feel it deep in her ectoplasm. She is going to get a good grade in therapy.
At least that’s what the goal is. Not for self improvement or anything- Chairman no! Eugh, she’s gonna barf. No, she’s just smarter than any of these other losers and knows what the sycophants want.
“A penpal sponsor program? Well doesn’t that sound like a lovely way to connect with others and learn about my wrong doings!” Get your foot in the door early. That’s what you do. Smile and nod and play along and be not just a good, but the best little follower in the room (and maybe falsify some evidence that the others are slacking along the way- hey, you do what you can!) and BOOM! Like putty in your hands, they fall for it. Sure, she’ll do your little extra credit programs. That way they know who’s their best underling, who will be the first to rise up the ranks and get out of here while the others sit and drown in a pool of their own stagnation.
…Unfortunately, what they want from Jinx is extremely tiring and nauseating to give day-in and day-out. So many fake emotions! And so much talking- not that she’s one to speak about that, but hey, at least when she talks it’s interesting! Gossip! Relevant stuff! Not feelings~ ugh, makes her sick just thinking about it.
They seem annoyingly quick to notice her tactics too, which puts a pretty big wrench in the whole ‘lying’ plan. Therapy quickly turns into an interrogation session, with her fumbling and becoming flustered as her ruse is picked apart piece by piece.
“Why are you doing this?” They ask, as though the answer isn’t obvious to anyone with brain cells.
So ok, fine, maybe she can’t lie to everyone, especially those who work closely with her, but that doesn’t mean she won’t try! And when that doesn’t work…
Well, then she falls back on ol’ reliable. Sulking.
-
Jinz grumbles bitterly to herself as she enters her room for the night. Stupid Caligula eating the last of the poptarts. If she still had her powers he would RUE the day.
“Comfortable?” The nurse acting as her parole officer for today asks in that annoying, sickly sweet, patronising tone of voice. Damn it, being fake is HER thing!
“Very.” She says through gritted teeth.
“Alright, Jinx-“ The sound of ectoplasm against metal.
Like a feral cat, Jinx’s ectoplasm spikes out and she whirls around, yanking the door open furiously. “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?!” Taken off guard like this, the nurse can’t hide her flinch, and it makes Jinx feel powerful again. She’d smirk if she weren’t in fight or flight mode right now. It’s a rare feeling these days.
Unfortunately, her training and experience with some of the other ‘guests’ here have hardened the nurses resolve enough that she recovers within seconds. (Though Jinx can still see her hand hovering over the crisis button on her belt). “Nothing, Jinx.” She schools her expression to a calm, pacifying smile that makes her just want to tear her hair out-
“I was grabbing my car keys. It’s the end of my shift.” She explains, holding them aloft in her other hand. Jinx stares at them blankly, still panting and still making herself as big as she can in the doorway with her limited shape shifting skills. Sure enough, she’s telling the truth. An ugly keychain, shaped like some comic book hero, clinks against her keys in a perfect echo of the noise from before. The noise that sounded so much like the handle of her…
“No one is going to touch your door, I assure you.”
Her expression is pitying now, and it makes Jinx recoil back to reality with nausea. Cheeks burning slightly with embarrassment, all she can muster is a sharp “They better not.” with a point before she slowly closes it behind her. Never all the way, never until it clicks. Just enough of a gap left for a sliver of light to creep in.
She floats there, tensely, and watches it until the nurse can be heard leaving her floor of the building- and then for a few minutes after to make sure. Only then does she finally relax, her ectoplasm jiggling with a full body sag that serves double duty as relief and exasperation. Mostly the latter.
“Ughhh, this place is killing me!” Jinx runs a hand down her face, pulling on it before letting it snap back into place with a wobble. Her features drift ever so slightly on her face with the ripples, though she doesn’t react to it. The sight of herself in the mirror makes her sigh as she unties her ponytail. At least her makeup held up from the impromptu face massage. They let her keep her humanity enough in here to let her order herself the good stuff, thankfully.
“Hmm. You’re getting worse.” She mutters, directing the comments upwards as she squishes at her forehead to observe the wrinkles. “What happened to this being a place to ‘relieve stress’~?” She scoffs, turning sharply away from her reflection. Her shirt- a disgusting clinical white and turquoise polo they’d given her- is thrown off in one smooth, angry motion. Instinctively, she reaches out with her magic to catch it before it hits the floor, only for the unceremonious ‘plap’ of fabric against linoleum to drag her mind back to the present.
“Ugh, right. No powers.” Massaging the bridge of her nose, Jinx curses that dumb chairman kid for the umpteenth time just today and tries to hold off a rage. Last time she broke stuff she lost TV privileges for a week. Still grumbling to herself (English curses, at least! They can’t police her in here!), she picks up the item and flings it into her laundry basket with the others.
“I don’t know how sticking me in scrubs and making me talk about my feewings~ is supposed to make me better.” With a scoff, she searches around in her cluttered vanity drawer for her makeup wipes. Her voice turns quieter, though no less malicious, as she begins to swipe away her mascara. “Focusing on the past and the bad only manifests more of it, morons.” A tut. Of course they don’t understand that. No one ever does.
You’re supposed to look forward and up. She glances up above the mirror with her one open eye, untensing and smiling to herself at the sight of her vision board. The staff hadn’t trusted her with pins, but a whiteboard and magnets works almost just as well. It’s littered corner to corner with polaroids of the OTC, drawings of herself back on his throne, a tiny scrap of the robe she’d managed to snag before being trapped in that canister-
An involuntary twitch at the memory has her poking herself in the eye and she winces, blinking frantically. The sight of the rest of her pictures turns the burning from her pain down into a low, simmering fire deep in her stomach. She chuckles deeply, a sound unmistakably evil and vengeful. The rest of the vision board is covered, almost entirely, even, with photos of Scratch and that human girl scrawled on frantically with marker. Target marks on their foreheads. X’s for eyes, scribbles all over their stupid faces-
“Delivery!”
“WHAT?!”
Jinx snaps her head over to her door, as threatening as one can look with only half a face of makeup. As usual, and to her utmost annoyance, her case worker remains unphased by her behaviour. She simply smiles enthusiastically at Jinx, peaking around her door and waving a letter. “You’ve got mail!”
“…What are you talking about?” It comes out deeper and more hurt sounding than she intended. She’d been going for annoyed. The expression of sympathy on her case workers face makes her grit her teeth, fingers clawing uselessly at her vanity without the use of her scare form. She doesn’t even have the dignity of that anymore.
“It’s from the outreach program, remember? You signed up to let a penpal sponsor you!”
…Had she? Oh wait- no, yeah, she remembers now. She’s kicking herself as she realises what this actually entails.
Sensing her lack of enthusiasm towards the idea (stupid shrink being able to read her. She repeats: THAT’S HER THING!) her case worker extends an arm to forcefully hand over the letter. When Jinx doesn’t move to take it, she just places it on the vanity. “I think you’d really like this if you gave it a chance!” She says in that annoying, faux-encouraging tone. Jinx knows her game though- she knows fake like the back of her hand. Once she’s off the clock and has her paycheque it’ll be a whole different story. “You’re always saying how bored you are here. This would give you someone to talk to!”
“I doubt it.” Only an insufferable sap like the new ‘chairman’ or that human girl would volunteer to sponsor a criminal like her’s recovery. That much optimism can’t fit in the brain without a significant lack of common sense to make room. She sneers dismissively at the thing, before waving her case worker away. “Is that all? Because I’m trying to settle down for the night.”
“Yes.” Annoying shmuck is still smiling at her, she can see it in the mirror. “Goodnight Jinx.”
As she moves to pull the door to behind her, Jinx instinctively roars “LEAVE IT AJAR!”
“I know, Jinx!” A lighthearted chuckle. She huffs. No one in this place takes her seriously.
(Even if they do always obey the request…)
Annoyed, Jinx turns back to her mirror and continues wiping her face clear of makeup. She looks much older without it and the thought makes her grimace. If she can’t be the hottest bitch in the psyche ward then what does she have left? Certainly not her pride.
They can never take her stubbornness from her though, she thinks smugly as she washes her face clean in the bathroom. The chemicals from the wipes probably don’t even do anything to ectoplasm but rituals are rituals. The same way a hot shower helps her nonexistent muscles untense and a fluffy robe makes her feel warm and covered despite most ghosts comfortably staying naked 24/7.
She tucks her hair into her bonnet, making sure to get the few stubborn, shorter curls that bounce up around her hairline and the base of her neck. As she checks in the vanity mirror again to make sure she got them all, her eyes fall back on the dumb letter. Rolling her eyes, she figures she might as well check it, since she has nothing else to do. Her newest book about unlocking the secrets of the universe hasn’t arrived yet.
The letter inside slaps her in the face with the scent of pineapple and she immediately notices the scratch and sniff stickers pasted to the top. She’s hit with warring emotions of resentment and enthusiasm. Scratch and sniff never gets old, no matter how much she does, ok?! No fake chairman can ruin that for her…
The letter is clearly written by a child, she notes with mild disdain. Purple glitter gel ink covers the page, written in a script that’s admittedly rather neat for its apparent author’s age- but still betrays itself with misspellings and strange spacing at times. As though the penman needed to copy something when writing certain larger words and only had one eye on the paper.
Great. Some kid chose her as their little feel good ‘I’m helping!’ pet project. Swell. She bets the little twerps parents are sooo proud of them right now.
She leans back, lips parting in a sneer, as she silently begins reading whatever slop the probably barely coherent runt has sent her.
“Dear miz Applesaurce”
Automatically, she raises an eyebrow before remembering the half-listened to explanation from last month. Right. Anonymous. She’ll have to come up with a better code name than that though, by Chairman. Trust the RC to come up with something that makes her sound like a total dweeb.
“My name is-“ A snort escapes her at a furiously scribbled out blob of ink. She can just about make out a ‘J’ and an ‘f’ in there. “I cant tell you my name but you can call me-“ Several more crossed and scribbled out words, before finally “-pineapple. I thort youed like that sticker. I like pineapple. Do you like pineappel? We can talk about that.”
What a dumb, innocent kid. It would almost be cute, were it not so barf-inducing.
“I dont now what you like yet sorry. I dont even now you exept that your in prison the red e mpt i o n cen t er. Im not aloud to ask why apartntly apparrun appr .
I dont now what to say im sorry. Maybe you can fink of what to say next time? Goodbye
Yourse si nc e r e ly
J pineapple XoXo”
Cute.
In the pathetic, insulting way it was cute to watch Scratch think he could trick her into undoing his jinx.
“Euch.” She throws the thing over her shoulder. Disgusting. The sight of so much glitter at once makes her shudder with the memory of all the joy pollution What’shername McGee left around town. (She swears she still feels stems growing from her scalp sometimes).
The letter floats awkwardly to the floor, landing with an anticlimactic crinkle next to the bin. She leaves it there, out of sight and out of mind, as she pulls back her bedsheets.
-
She thought the kid would forget about it in a week. Kids are fickle like that. They pick up one thing after another and forget them just as quickly. Get them a new toy and it’s in a box collecting dust before the packaging even reaches the dump. Soon the brat will be back to trading baseball cards on the playground- or whatever it is kids do these days- and the staff will have nothing to pester her with.
…She was wrong.
Ok, two letters. By kid standards, this one has the patience of a saint. “Real stubborn one, aren’t ya, kid?” She remarks dryly, staring at the thing as she sits on the edge of her bed, waiting for her alarm to go off. Until that thing blares the day doesn’t start, no matter what anyone says.
“Dear Appelsaurcse
You didnt repply yet but papa said I should try and send a letter every week. I hope you repply to this 1. I realy want to meet you.
Is it scary in pr redemton center? On tv it looks scary but dad sed they dont have 1s like that anymore and theyeare nice now :)
Mayby you could tell me about your afterlive and i can tell you about mine? :)
Pleas respond soon
XoXo from Pineapple
PS: i put a ladybug in the onvelope so you can have a frend :D”
Jinx’s eyes bulge wide at the final message and she looks around her frantically, feeling itching along all her body. The sight of a red blur landing on her desk side table makes her screech like a banshie and leap to the ceiling. As she hangs there, shaking and swinging by the light shade, she internally curses this child and everyone that lead up to this moment.
-
“Dear Pineapple
Do not send me bugs ever again. I don’t want bugs and I don’t want to talk about our afterlives.
Don’t expect me to keep in touch.
-J (If you must reply, call me J. Applesauce makes me sound like a teddybear who goes around teaching kids about friendship)”
-
“Hi J!!! Thats such a cool name. Haha your rite about the teddy bear haha XD your funny
Sorry i didnt now you dont like bugs :(((
My papa doesnt either hes scared even though hes so much bigger than them. I bet your not scared thouh because your tugh.”
Jinx glances away, annoyed, as she reads this one over breakfast. The canteen is loud and that woman down the hall who set her family on fire keeps trying to peak over her shoulder. She’d let her read it- who cares- but the invasion of space makes her want to flip the table and throttle someone. It takes all her willpower and desire not to miss this week’s episode of Edwardian Women Wrestling to keep from exploding on this woman.
The patrol officer pretending to be a nurse by her side can clearly tell it bothers her but he isn’t saying anything. When Jinx gives him an annoyed glance, he mimes a deep breath and mouthes ‘use your words’ at her. She almost uses some choice words on him.
“Heather, get out of my space.” Is the most polite she can be under duress. The words force their way out of her gritted teeth like meet shoved through a grinder. Chairman, she’s going to be sick.
“The air is public.” The woman says, just to be annoying.
“We’re in the vacuum of the Ghost World- there is no air!”
“Caaalm, Jinx.” The hand on her shoulder makes her madder than Heather does. “Janice!” Her nurse calls for backup, while Jinx sulks in her seat. Can’t do anything by herself because she has to be nice~
“Are you a boy or a girl?” The letter continues asking.
“Im a girl.
Whats your favorit colour?
Do you like puppies or kittens more? I like puppies. I have a dog called jammy (does she need a code name too?) but shes reelly old.
What do you want to be wen you grow up?
I forgot your a grown up
I ran out of idias. Mayby you ask the qesch q uesti ons next time
Love
Pineapple.”
The bottom of the page receives a jam stain as Jinx loudly crunches her toast. If she wanted to be interrogated she’d ask for more mandatory sessions with her shrink.
-
Today has been awful. Just horrendous. Her back is killing her from this week’s communal space cleaning. She’d dusted every corner the other slackers missed, she’d raced to the vacuum before any of them, she’d even found evidence that Vlad the Impaler had snuck in contraband peanut butter cookies into the common space!
Yet the ungrateful jerks here didn’t appreciate ANY of it!
They just told her she did a ‘good job’ but doesn’t have to ‘overcompensate’. They reprimanded Vlad but didn’t even thank her for telling them! No extra rewards or privileges, no sign of any of them cracking and warming up to her, no nothing! Well ok- they had technically rewarded her- but it was in the form of more brain-numbingly dull group activities. What about more tv? What about being first for canteen food? What about always having her word implicitly believed over others’, hmm? The good stuff.
Instead they just said they ‘want everyone to be equal here’ and it ‘isn’t a competition’. Uhh, yeah it is? That’s what any businessman worth their salt will tell you, if you ask them! Honestly, the ignorance is astounding… If you want to get anywhere in this world you have to learn how to network. Get a foothold in early then keep climbing and never stop, to set yourself apart from the other losers dragging their feet. She didn’t get to be number 1 joyhunter by being equal. She got there because she showed the Ghost Council that she was the only one on the payroll worth giving a damn about.
You know how many people who treated it like a competition were in the flow of failed phantoms? ZERO!
Now the other patients are all calling her a ‘rat’. What do they know? ‘Rat’s’ won The Cold War!
(Actually, she doesn’t know that, she hasn’t been checking the news all that closely since she died. For some reason, she hasn’t heard much from the Soviet Union after the 80’s).
Of course nobody listens to her. The nurses just nod and she can hear them muttering down the hallway through her cracked door in clinical voices about not ‘encouraging her behaviour’ and ‘following up’ with her therapist. Great! Let them get the first word in before he even gets to hear her side of the story!
Ugh, she hates that this stupid place has gotten her wishing for that therapy session to hurry up. Without her sobgoblins to talk to, she has no one to vent all her thoughts to.
It isn’t a decision she thinks through- fully aware she’ll gag if she does- when she grabs a notebook from her bedside table. Her case worker left it behind once and Jinx had claimed it as her own like a crow hoarding treasure. Unfortunately, she didn’t learn anything exploitable about what they were saying about her from it, nor did she get any juicy material on the other patients. Just a shopping list and a series of medications to stock up on. Now it’s just her sketchbook.
The words on the page come out unbidden; not thought through by logic but run purely on frustration and loneliness
“Pineapple,
Nobody here appreciates what’s in front of them. You could give these people the world and they wouldn’t be impressed. They all think they know what’s best for me- as if I haven’t gotten myself this far in life/afterlife just fine on my own! Noo, J is an idiot who doesn’t know how to talk to people! J OUTRANKED EVERYONE HERE, ONCE UPON A TIME!
I hate it here, if you must keep prying. It’s miserable and I’m alone and surrounded by idiots. I don’t like animals, I don’t have a favourite colour and I’ve already been everything a girl could hope to be! I don’t have anything in common with a kid like you! I’m too good for this place and no one understands that but me.”
She stares at the paper for a long while, her hand poised to write more- shaking around the pen in anticipation actually.
…But there’s nothing more to say.
What can she say? Nobody understands. Nobody understands what she did to get where she was, only for them to rip it all out from under her in an instant.
Nobody understands…
Hand shaking, she finally puts the pen down and buries her face in her hands. She stays there for a long while, until the murmur of the nurses voices outside disappear out of hearing range. Eventually, when she’s calm again, she peaks down at the paper through her fingers and sighs.
She scrawls a quick and messy ‘-J’ at the bottom and, before she can think better of it, drops it outside of her room. If her case worker sees it first and sends it, so be it. If it’s another patient, let them read it. It’s not like she can get any more pathetic in here.
-
“Dear J
Im sorry your feeling so bad in your last letter :( I think you sound cool if that makes you feel better :’)
I wish you werent alone :( i now you dont like bugs so i put in a pretend frend (dont worry its not reel its an erazer) that looks like a sob goblin. You had some drawings of them on the back of the last letter you sent. They were really good!!!! I put another sticker here becos of how good they are. I like this one it smells like jelly beans. Miteve scratched it already to smell some sorry XD
I hope you feel better. I can talk to you so you wont be alone if you want
Bye
Pineapple XoXo”
She hadn’t expected the kid to respond after she blew up on her last time. Honestly, she hadn’t even expected the nurses to send it- surely they vet these things?
Her therapist praises her for ‘engaging’ with the penpal system and other buzzwords. It’s every third word out of the man’s mouth, honestly- ‘recovery’ this and ‘coping mechanism’ that. She thinks he needs to stop trying to find patterns in everything and get a girlfriend and tells him as much. To her annoyance, he only laughs, as though the joke isn’t directed at him.
“You’re very funny when you want to be.” He smiles. “And a great actress. Have you ever considered performing as your calling after all this?”
“Slow down there, buster. Not even gonna ask if I’m taken, first? Men have no manners these days.”
Just like her infuriating case worker, he doesn’t rise to her comments. Just smiles and laughs and continues on as if nothing happened.
He explicitly does not encourage her to send another letter so, in time, she does. Looking back, she thinks that might have been reverse psychology and wants to rip her nonexistent skin off for falling for it.
Her letters aren’t as long as her penpal’s. She doesn’t have much to say, really. Mostly she just complains. (Though she did begrudgingly thank her for the jellybean sticker. It had made her feel better. A little). Pineapple doesn’t seem to mind.
Her sobgoblin eraser sits on her desk now. It makes her sad to look at, for more reasons than one.
Still, it’s nice to have if she can’t see her babies in person again. Apparently, that’s ‘too risky’. It’s even specified in her files to not let her near them.
She misses how they made her feel empty. Stupid biweekly therapy sessions make her feel too much. It’s not the sad wailing ‘waaaah my childhood was bad!’, ‘waaah, I’m so sorry for making the ghost world not suck again!’ kind of emotions they clearly want out of her, but frustration is an emotion all the same. Pineapple is easier to talk to- she doesn’t have to see her face or even read her reply for a week. By the time she gets to the inevitable spammed sad faces in her letter, the feeling is comfortably in the past.
Despite her not-so-subtle resistance, Pineapple keeps asking questions. Jinx answered a few that didn’t particularly matter once and that seemed to open the floodgates. Often Pineapple will ramble about her own boring afterlife in response to her own questions. Almost like she knows Jinx won’t respond. (If she’s smart enough to know that, why does she even ask?)
Pineapple sounds like a fairly average kid. 2 dads, a pet dog, likes bugs and tv shows about ponies, yada yada. Her favourite animal is a chinchilla and her favourite colour is blue because it’s the middle between both her dad’s ectoplasm colours and she loves them equally. (Vom). She draws a picture of herself once with big curly puffballs for hair. Maybe Jinx is assuming but, especially with 2 dad’s, she almost feels tempted to send her recommendations for hair care. (It’s not that she cares for the kid- it’s solidarity!)
In the end, she doesn’t.
What she does send however, is gossip. Both from the other patients (overheard of course, no one wants to talk to her) and from her past. Did you know Grimbella wears a wig and she’s actually bald? Did you know that US courts are often paid off with drug money? Pineapple usually responds with a ‘woa :0 !!!’ and it’s gotten so frequent Jinx can almost hear a voice in her head saying it every time.
At one point she mentions in her letters her school is having a halloween party and her dads are letting her wear makeup, especially for it. Jinx writes a long paragraph back explaining how to apply it and how to tell what brands are worth the price. (“Don’t buy that cheap mascara that clumps your lashes together unless you want to look trashy”). It’s not until next week’s response, when it’s pointed out, that she realises she’d ended the letter “Tell me how it goes”.
“Thats the 1st time you asked me to tell you about me!!!!”
It makes her stomach hurt in an irritating way and she misses her sobgoblin’s numbness harder.
The party went well apparently. One of her dads (her ‘Papa’) was annoyed about Jinx’s long laundry list of tasks with the makeup but they’d both been willing to hear her out. Pineapple swatches some of it on the page and it’s clear it’s cheap, tacky childrens stuff- sparkly eye shadow and what looks (and reeks) like cherry flavoured lip balm but the mascara, at least, looks good quality. The thought of some poor confused man forking out for the stuff gives her a kick.
Apparently, at the party she’d wanted to compete in the dance-off but got too shy. Jinx makes it clear to her that you get nowhere in this world being shy.
“If you don’t let yourself be looked at, no one will ever think you’re worth looking at, understand? You want people to turn your way and see your talents- that’s how you get places, like me.
All shy people ever achieve is being the stepping stones to someone else’s greatness. The people who know how to win at life are those who take every opportunity to show off what they’ve got and never think twice.”
Pineapple had sent her back a thumbs up sticker. A little disappointing to have her wisdom ignored by yet another pair of ears, but maybe in written form it would sink in. In the meantime, she sticks the sticker on her forehead.
‘What’s your job?’ Comes up at some point. “Prosecutor.” Is her answer, because it’s the simplest of the three to explain to a child. “I worked to lock bad guys away.”
“Thats kinda funny that you ended up a bad guy locked away XD hehe”
She was going to ask Pineapple back what she wanted to be when she grew up but doesn’t feel like it after that.
The next week her therapist asks her about her past relationships so she breaks out of her penpal fast (‘’’mope’’’ according to SOME who should have their MEDICAL LICENCES TAKEN AWAY) to rant for 16 pages to Pineapple. Her eloquent response of “yuhuh girl men R trash rite????” makes her snort milk out of her nose laughing at breakfast. She barely even notices people staring at her like she’s a freak that time.
They get a rhythm going and, not to her it, but she thinks this might be the first good thing to happen to her in a while. Pineapple doesn’t even laugh at her when she tells her about manifesting and the universal consciousness! (Though given her reply, she isn’t sure Pineapple actually knows what those words mean). The kid offers some nice updates on the outside too- much more personal than the news provides. Granted, most of it sounds disgustingly joyful, but it’s not all horrendous. Apparently ‘superman icecream’ has made its way to the ghost world and tastes great. For some reason, no matter how hard she sucks up to them, the staff refuse to promise her tangible rewards that don’t involve socialising with the other patients. But she’s been promised they can get it ordered in for her as a Christmas present!
It’s in the buildup to Christmas that the letters just…stop.
She remembers sitting by their post boxes on the ground floor, waiting excitedly with the other patients. While they all posted their gifts, she had rushed to check her box only to find…nothing. The ghosts on either side of her were looking so she’d played it off casually, even though she felt like crying and screaming and hiding away all at once. Her case worker had annoyingly found her after and attempted to comfort her.
Jinx doesn’t let people ‘comfort’ her because she isn’t weak. You don’t get where she is by being weak or by caring. She’s certainly never comforted anyone in her existence, so she knows it’s a waste of time to anyone with potential.
“I’m sure it’ll be here tomorrow.” Was the last thing she heard before the door was pulled ajar. And because the universe knows how stupid and wrong all these sycophants are, it wasn’t.
Of course the kid grew bored of her. She called it way back at the start, why is she surprised? Why is she surprised that, yet again, she’s truly tried with something and nobody cares? Why is she surprised that it hurts? Of course it hurts! It ALWAYS hurts, she just tells herself it doesn’t! Such is the props of being a good liar.
Like always, she converts this hurt into anger. That’s what her dumb shrink says anyway, and he frames it like it’s a bad thing. Idiot. Doesn’t he know that anger motivates? To heal you must move forward, not linger in the past and cry. Anger motivates; it gets things done. It gets her recognised, it stamps out useless things holding her back like scruples or integrity or regret or friends. It’s a burning fire that smothers any inconvenience that could stop her from proving herself. (And if it can’t smother it then the smoke at least hides it from view).
That’s who she turns into as December rolls on with no message- a burning ball of flames ready to lash out at anyone. She has a total of 3 ‘episodes’ and has to be restrained at least once. Which they know makes it worse but apparently she was a ‘danger to herself and other’s’ just because she punched an itty bitty hole in Bloody Mary’s face and clawed off a lock of her hair. She looked better that way!
On the third time, her case worker takes her on another infuriating walk around the grounds ‘to cool off’. She doesn’t want or need to cool off- she’s fine as she is- but she doesn’t want to be restrained and trapped again so it’s her only option.
“Jinx, I know it’s been hard on you, what with your penpal disappearing…”
Yippee. As if her shrink isn’t trying to project issues onto her enough.
“Stay in your lane, Pam. Therapy is tomorrow.” She mumbles coldly into her scarf.
One of those infuriating exasperated sighs that only Jinx is allowed to give. “You and I both know you haven’t been cooperating there either. Believe it or not, we do want the best for you here. But nobody can help you if you don’t let us.”
“Who says I want your help?” She turns to her, eyes sharp. “Who says I even need help?! I’m fine! I’m Jinx!” Then Pam does something she’s never done before, something that makes her freeze up in alarm.
“What’re you- hey! No! Do-don’t you dare! I am warning you!”
Ever so slowly, her face contorts into a look of pity.
Jinx almost throws up right there in the snow.
“I think one day you’re going to have to wake up and face that ‘Jinx’ isn’t who you think she is.”
Ridiculous. “What, you don’t think I know who I am?!” It’s getting real hard to hold back her aggression now. “I know who I am! I’m the greatest Chairwoman who ever died, I’m the number one joy hunter, I’m a respected federal lawyer, I’m-“
“You know who this persona is.” She interrupts her, voice loud and cold. “But a person is not a laundry list of achievements. Someone has to be there underneath it all, and that’s the only part people actually care about.”
Pam switches shifts after that, claiming she’s not in the headspace to talk to Jinx right now. It seems no one is. That night she has no one to vent to about how obviously ridiculous that conversation was but her sobgoblin eraser. It’s not the same.
-
When you’re played Jinx’s hand in life you have to play dirty to get on top. But that’s ok, so as long as you do get on top. It doesn’t matter how many you betray. How many you step on. How many you throw back down the metaphorical staircase of progress just to yank yourself up a little higher. The ends justify the means. You can’t afford to care, and you won’t have the time to, once you reach the top of that staircase and are finally safe.
The worst thing you can do in that position is give up or fail. The ends justify the means because the ends have to justify the means. With no ends, all that’s left is a conga line of evil and regret that was all for nothing.
Would you sell your soul to save it? You can call a sinner many things but mortal isn’t one of them. For all of Jinx’s famous history with the Flow Of Failed Phantoms, she’s never actually seen the inside of it. People love to call her evil but they don’t want to admit that what she did worked.
It worked perfectly until they took The Chairman from her and the entire system she’d spent 4 decades gaming fell apart beneath her feet. When she landed she was just one of the crowd again and it all meant nothing- and if it means nothing then she sold her soul for nothing. Then she was wrong.
And with that much to face if you do, admitting you were wrong is something you will fight to your dying breath to avoid.
“This is all HIS fault.” Jinx hisses, sending another dart-shaped finger into the photo of Scratch stuck to her vision board. They’d had to banish her to her room for the other patients’ safety- a rare punishment given her…history. The door is still allowed to be ajar, thank Chairman, but they’ve placed security outside it to ensure she doesn’t escape. Not much different, if you ask her. It’s the same. It’s all the same- they’re all the same! Just the same as her! A slightly manic giggle escapes her as she rocks back and forth in her foetal position on the bed. Her finger reforms into its normal shape and inches slowly over to her, like a worm, to reattach. She snaps off another, morphs it into a dart and sends it at his face again, with enough force to that her finger crumples painfully against the hard plastic. She yelps angrily like a wounded animal, but giggles nonetheless. The photo is more holes than face at this point.
She snaps off another finger to go again.
“Jinx?” A soft voice calls from her door. She barely even registers it anymore. There are no other voices in the canister and she is not about to entertain her hallucinations. Not today!
“Jinx.” She hits Scratch again. Her case worker winces.
“I think that’s hurting you more than him, dear.” She sucks her teeth sympathetically. Jinx just shakes her head furiously in denial, but can’t think of a worded response. Words are too hard at the moment. Just thoughts. Too many thoughts, too many bad thoughts. She misses the Frightmares- their howling screams of the damned always calmed her down when she got like this.
“I know you’re having a bad day, but…”
Those guys had the right idea. They didn’t have to think or feel about doing wrong- they just did! It wasn’t even wrong, really. Just nature. Why can’t anyone understand that it’s just nature?! Survival of the fittest! They’d have done the same thing in her position!
“…have a letter for you.”
The sound breaks her out of her trance.
Well, less ‘break’ and more like, slowly pulls her from it. Like when you emerge from underwater and it takes a second for your ears to pop and catch up with your eyes. Her ears metaphorically pop and Jinx blinks at her case worker like she’s never seen another ghost before.
“…Huh?” Her voice sounds awful- empty and tired and croaky from all the yelling earlier. Look at her. It’s Christmas Eve and she’s sat here alone, shaking and throwing tantrums in a psyche ward. Even when they’re not here, Scratch and McGee just keep on rubbing their victory in her face.
“You got a letter, Jinx.” Pam smiles, kneeling down to meet her eye. Normally she’d find it condescending, but today she feels too numb to and just appreciates the gesture. “It’s from your penpal.”
Jinx stares at the paper with wide eyes. It’s festive this time, blue with sparkling, wonky snowflakes covering it. Glitter drips from the thing like a faucet.
“I don’t want it.”
A frown. “Jinx-“
“She abandoned me.” With a huff, Jinx curls up further in her Christmas sweater, tucking her tail up inside of it so only the frills poke out. She crosses her arms over what could pass for her knees and buries her face in them. “I don’t deal with traitors.”
(The fact that she’s the biggest traitor of them all echoes in her head, mockingly).
“You say that, but I think maybe you might feel different later.” With that dumb, irritating, knowing tone of voice (you don’t know ANYTHING about her!) Pam places the card on her bedside table. “Open it when you feel ready. Dinner is in an hour and I’ll bring yours up for you, ok?” She mumbles a sulky, childish acknowledgement into her arms.
“Good. …I truly do hope you feel better, Jinx. Merry Christmas.”
Merry fucking Christmas indeed.
…
…Jinx is many, many things and stubborn absolutely is one of them. But, under the cover of dark, when no one’s around to see, she can also be lonely.
(She had friends once that she sold out in court with fake evidence and racist arguments. She thought those who championed her and used her as a token mouthpiece were her friends too. At her most egotistical, she thought the same of the Ghost Council and the One True Chairman himself.
Whether any of them were true friends doesn’t matter at this point. She’s lost them all).
It’s the dead of night when her resolve finally breaks and she tears open that hideous envelope. Glitter scatters all over her bedsheets and, while she wants to be angry, she doesn’t have the ability to care right now.
Inside is a card reading ‘happy holidays’ with a big tough polar bear and a tiny baby penguin embracing. A letter is tucked inside and it falls out the second she holds up the card to get a look at it.
In bright blue gel ink, stained with excess glitter, is one of the longest notes she’s received yet.
“Dear J
Im so so so so so so sorry i didn’t write!!!” That’s the first thing. In big huge capital letters, taking up about a third of the page. Jinx feels something in her chest squeeze tight.
“I got supper sick :( with the goo. I was in bed for soooo long i slept a lot! It was scary :( i had to go to hospital but dont worry im all better now!!! I wanted 2 rite to you but every thing was hot and fuzzy and i couldent think.
Feeling better now. I missed hanaka han nuka h :( but dad and papa said we can selebrate it late this year. I dont know if you selibrate hannukah or christmas (or nether!) so i sent you this. I hope you have a happy holiday anyway!
Im realy sorry i couldent wright i wanted to. Your my best frend. I love you J i hope your feeling ok and are not sick and you get the ice creem you wanted and your ferapist shaved his ugly beard you hate <3
Love you XoXoXoXoXo
Pineapple
Ps: its old now but i saved the sticker i got from the doctors for you. Its scratch and sniff your favrite!!!”
In the corner there’s a truly mangled and torn sticker with a picture of a donut. She scratches it but there’s only the faintest trace of scent left. Her fingers follow along the creases and bumps, each torn edge of the sticker…
Jinx turns blankly back to the card, hands holding her letter way too stiff. Slowly, almost like she can’t feel it at all, she picks up the card and looks inside.
It’s a drawing of a curly haired blue ghost hugging a mysterious grey blob with a question mark for a face.
It’s one of the worst pieces of art she’s ever seen.
Why is she crying.
-
There are things she should say. Her therapist suggests ‘thank you’ or ‘I missed you’. Everyone nags her about ‘sorry’ to the other patients. She doesn’t say either of course.
She wants to lay into the girl and tell her what she did to her but she also doesn’t. The thought of that little puffy haired doodle in hospital makes her want to rip out her twisting stomach. She wants to be angry but she isn’t and she doesn’t know what she is instead but it almost feels worse.
In the end, she settles on just sending her initial taped to some pineapple scented shea butter.