Chapter Text
After - because all things are after, everything is a great big after for her, another bandage-laced trauma over the marks on her inner left arm - she orders in a bunch of old magazines to the newsstand and spends three nights awake, dry-eyed and cold with bubbles of glue stuck in the webbing of her fingers, lilac glitter sliced through her hair.
(Janice stays on the phone with her long into the nights, just breathing and mumbling quiet things; ramblings about artists and poets and muses and how she heard that according to physics, nothing ever really dies, just change state. Dawn thinks about how she would fall into her, her bones and her softness and her plush mouth if she were here, letting careful fingers comb through her long hair.)
Nobody sees it when it’s done. She just ducks out one day, house full of girls and noise and clamorous discord, and if they wonder after her nobody tells.
She hides it under the flowers and wreaths, buries it shallowly in the grass. One sheet of card folded into four, full of glitter and colour and purple-gold vibrancy like the colour of the light that occupied the space between her ribs for a summer and beyond.
Torn up magazines make this fitting, stolen letters for stolen words. Remembering those things / We did in our youth… It reads.
…Many, beautiful things…