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Truth be told, the first time you lay eyes on her, your heart starts pounding like a jackhammer. And then immediately drops into your stomach, precisely because she is a she, and girls shouldn’t make your heart do things like that. Truth be told, your brother is not the only liar in the family and you build your walls up with bricks of bullying not only to keep people away, but to deter them from wanting to get through at all. No one wants to befriend the bully, not really.
It’s high school and you are the spitting image of the most beautiful bimbo bully. Blonde hair, expensive taste, a pack of ruthless but stylish underlings to back you up. You own it, camouflaging yourself with smooth foundation and gutting gossip until you truly feel like the embodiment of the picturesque stereotype. Until you buy your own bullshit and your brother— an expert liar in his own right —buys it too.
You stomp on the weak and feast on the feeble. You turn confidence into cowardice with words as violent as the slaps you pretend not to hear at night and when you’re feeling especially vengeful, you slap your targets too. When you slap, it’s with a curve in your wrist so your nails will catch— nails filed to be sharp as claws and decorated only by the hottest designers at your disposal.
You go after Marcese with a particularly potent venom pumping through your veins, and you claim it’s because she likes Castiel. She insists she doesn’t like him at all, that he’s not her type, but you vehemently assert that she is a liar and you continue to use this as your cover as you mercilessly tear her down at every opportunity you get.
It’s not like you didn’t know about your deviant sexual preferences before Marcese. You’d noticed in middle school that the way you looked at other girls wasn’t right. You admired them the way boys were supposed to, according to your parents. You’d look at your female peers with silent longing, thinking about slipping your arm around their waists instead of their shoulders, thinking about kissing their lips, most of which messily glossed with amateur ventures into the world of makeup.
Those types of thoughts went against everything your parents instilled in you about proper behavior, about men’s and women’s roles, and about your very nature. If they knew about thoughts like those, your mother would guzzle even more wine than she already does and your father would gift you with his fists. So you squash thoughts like that down deep enough to drown and pretend you don’t have them at all.
Most of the time it works. If you feel an unnatural thought bubbling to the surface, you can choke it back and bury it under thoughts you force of the very next boy that crosses your path. But Marcese poses a threat because she unleashes these thoughts over and over.
She flirts with you as blasé as a bumblebee in a garden, flashes you these lopsided grins and hits on you with all the decorum of a drunk frat boy. Flirts with you even when you dump her textbooks in the toilet or stuff her locker with garbage left from lunch period.
She seems to thrive on any scrap of attention you give her, good or bad. With a cheesy pickup line or a risqué quip, she casually opens the door to possibilities you don’t dare pursue. Like it’s nothing to throw the offer out there, to tease you with tastes of an affection you can’t afford to act on.
How dare she.
Maybe it is nothing for her to do so, to act as though it’s normal to chase girls and boys alike. To flaunt her interest in you like a peacock fanning its feathers, shameless as could be. She’s from a broken family of weirdos with an aunt who wanders the school halls dressed in fairy godmother getup.
Your family is nothing like that. Appearances are everything to them and it is your duty to help upkeep such appearances, to be a shining pillar of their reputation for poise and class. You couldn’t even hold her hand if you let yourself want it, let alone do any of the dirty things she playfully suggests of you, eyelashes batting and impish tongue poking out.
How fucking dare she.
So you bully her more than anyone else, so vicious at times it even gives Charlotte pause. You put tacks on her seat and spread ugly rumors like wildfire, trip her during gym class and swipe every last coin from her wallet.
She breaks your heart as she so obliviously taunts you, so you break her down in every way you can think of.
Most of it rolls off her like water, or seems to, at the very least. But junior year you get her pretty bad, one of your schemes finally managing to shake her up.
You trick her into the greenhouse, slam the door shut behind and lock her in without her phone or backpack. She’s trapped with the sun and the plants and there’s nothing she can do about it. You’re the only one who knows she’s there; the only one with the power to set her free.
And it gives you satisfaction to have this, to have power over her when you have no power in your household nor power over the distasteful, disturbing way she makes you feel.
You leave her there for hours, even after school is out. When you return, she is drenched from head to toe with sweat, gray shirt so soaked it looks black. Heavy humidity makes the whole room feel like an oven, the air as thick as wool against your skin.
Something haughty sits on the edge of your teeth but before you can bite it out, she flings herself at you with an animal cry. You gasp as you hit the dirt beneath her weight, air whooshing out of your lungs. She keeps you pinned and gapes at you with wavering eyes.
“Why do you hate me so much?” she begs, moisture falling from her face and splashing softly to your cheeks. You can’t tell if it’s sweat or tears.
You’ve been sticking to the Castiel excuse like glue, but here, when it is only the two of you and you’re watching the beads of perspiration roll between her teacup breasts as her chest heaves above you, your walls crumble away. The heat must be getting to you too, because your heart lurches and you blurt something painfully, cuttingly honest.
“Because you make me wrong,” you spit. “You make me think disgusting things and you make me want everything I can never have.”
Golden eyes flash with realization. Her mouth falls open in surprise and in the next breath, it’s covering yours. Her grip slips off your wrists, the pressure of her knees disappears. You could kick her off if you wanted to, but you don’t. She kisses you and you kiss her back despite the chorus of no, no, no’s that scream in your mind.
As wrong as this is supposed to be, it doesn’t feel wrong at all. Her lips are sticky and salty, probably from the perspiration. You savor the flavor, because even in this moment, you know it will be soon be over. Her tongue pushes against yours and a heat that has nothing to do with the weather surges beneath your skin.
When she pulls away, you can see your gloss messily smeared around her lips, shiny and pink.
“You can have this,” she pants as she climbs off you. She kneels in the grass and reaches for your hand. “Amber, we could have this— A-Amber!”
But you’ve already hopped to your feet and you’re pelting back to the school as fast as you can run in these heels, the wind carrying away the tears you pretend you don’t feel.
That is the only time she retaliates against you, one way or the other. At least until Deborah comes along. When Deborah arrives, her interest in you evaporates into think air. If anything makes you sicker than the way you feel when you want her, it’s watching her want someone like that. Watching them together, the sequined serpent and devoted doormat hand in hand.
And she never defends herself against you for anything, but she defends Deborah in spite of everything like some knight loyal to a corrupt queen.
“You think I’m bad?” you challenge her once in the hall, when you’ve finally caught her alone. “I'm a daycare worker compared to that banshee! Deborah will utterly destroy you.”
And Marcese just rolls her eyes. “Green isn’t a good color on you, Amber.”
“I mean it. You saw what she did to Castiel.”
“I’m smarter than Castiel.” She shoulders you out of the way, pushes past you and doesn’t look back.
Another time, you catch them making out in the courtyard. Eyes closed in passion, Marcese doesn’t even notice you. It’s Deborah who does. Deborah smirks beneath the kiss, mischief glinting beneath her cobalt mascara. She watches you watch as she pushes up Marcese’s shirt, fanning her hands over the stripe of revealed skin. It’s as though she’s showing off, rubbing your face in this moment that in another life, might’ve been yours.
You turn away and go back to class but later that day, you corner Marcese under the guise of stealing her homework.
“You shouldn’t be with Deborah,” you fume instead, teeth in your lip. “She got this whole school wrapped around her finger by being a manipulative jerk.”
“Pot calling the kettle black, much?” Marcese huffs. “Why do you care, anyway?”
“I don’t care!”
“Right,” she snorts in disbelief. “Whatever. At least Deborah doesn’t lie to me.”
With that, she ducks under your arms where they caged her to the wall, and slinks off to go suck on Deborah’s face again, probably.
The third time, you’re not even talking to Marcese. She happens to overhear you insulting Deborah to your friends (followers) and snaps like some kind of beast gone savage. She cracks you in the face with her textbook, snarling and feral-eyed.
You don’t remember the minutes immediately after the fact, you only vaguely remember going home bleeding. Shortly later, Deborah leaves her like you always knew she would, and you pretend to relish in it more than you actually do when you get to say, “I told you so.” It went down in flames, just like you predicted, and Marcese is distraught, sulking around the school like a lame horse waiting for someone to put it down.
The part that you don’t predict is the part when Deborah comes back for her halfway through the first semester of senior year.
“I’m leaving with her,” she tells you. “I’m going to be a drummer.”
“You’re going to be a dropout, you mean,” you correct, slightly perturbed by how much you sound like Nathaniel.
“Well, I’m not getting the best grades anyway,” she admits, hugging herself. “I’m not doing so hot in algebra and if I fail that, I’ll won’t be able to graduate anyway…”
“I’m not getting straight A’s, but you don’t see me throwing it all away.” You roll your eyes.
As long as you pass with C’s, your parents are happy. They put it on Nathaniel to be the brains and you to be the beauty, more of those proper gender roles they’re so concerned with. Girls don’t need to be smart, but they do need to be beautiful.
Nathaniel has to be the genius so he can make waves as a white collar businessman. You have to be the mannequin so you can turn heads strutting across the stage in stunning stilettos. With any luck, you’ll land a white collar businessman who makes even more your brother, so he can lavish your family with wealth and you can retire from the runway at the ripe old age of thirty to be a top-tier trophy wife.
“Aren’t some things worth throwing away for love?” she asks softly, shyly, giving you this look like maybe she wants you to give her a reason to stay.
Maybe she wants you to give her your love, so she’ll throw away Deborah’s offer. Maybe you’re overthinking it, worrying your pretty little head over a conundrum you couldn’t indulge even if it were true.
“Love,” you repeat like a curse word.
“Yeah…I love her.”
You look Marcese in the eyes as you speak truth to her for the second time in your life.
“Deborah isn’t worth being a dropout, no matter what your grade in algebra is. She isn’t a good person.”
“Maybe I’m not a good person, either,” she hums wistfully. “Maybe Deborah and I are meant for each other because we can accept each other, warts and all. Everybody can love you when you’re putting on your best impression, but it takes someone special to love what you are in the dark.”
You blink slowly, irresistibly thinking that this much, you can understand. You can understand, knowing the way love looks in your picture perfect family. How it looks like bruises on Nathaniel’s back. How it looks like the portions on your plate halved at best, quartered at worst. How it looks like everyone ignoring these things as you share your plastic smiles.
You offer Marcese one now, so phony it hurts your cheeks.
“Good luck being a drummer.”
And maybe she lingers a minute too long before she leaves, but maybe you’re just overthinking things some more. You should stop doing that because thinking is your brother’s department. You don’t have to think, you just have to look princess pretty and watch out for poison apples.
Marcese leaves with Deborah the very next day. You are never going to see her again.
Except you do see her again. Four years later and you run into her at Anteros. In the years that have come and gone, you’ve come to terms with your attraction to women. You no longer believe that it’s unnatural to feel this way, but you do think that it’s a bit unfortunate in your case, being that your family is who they are. So you don’t come out. Not publicly, anyway.
You kept your trysts private and your relationships short-lived. You are no longer disgusted with yourself, but you know you’ll never be able to bring home a wife. It isn't worth getting close to someone you could never promise commitment to.
When you run into Marcese, she flirts just like she used to and while you don’t feel like you have to hold back anymore, you do a little anyway. You tease her and it’s with lightness and gentle jesting, rather than the cruel mockery and ridicule you put her through in high school. You even apologize for that.
She’s doing okay, you think. She’s still with Deborah and Stars of Nightmares isn’t this showstopper band that dominates the trending chart on the daily, but they’re hardly underground. They’ve got a few hit singles that you like, even, though you’ll die before you admit Deborah can sing better than the tone-deaf banshee you once accused her of being.
You feel remorse for the way you treated Marcese and the majority of your other unlucky targets. But you don’t feel a shred of sympathy for that viper, no matter how decently she may sing sometimes.
So you take Marcese back up to your apartment and discover she thinks you’re doing okay too. She’s been following your success as a model and you’re flattered, really. Maybe your heart even skips a beat, but you’re not in high school anymore and the days of silly crushes should be over. So if your heart does anything other than pump blood the way it normally does, you don’t admit it.
As the visit goes on though, you realize she’s not as okay as she seems at first glance and she realizes the same of you.
You’ve wanted her for years, wanted to feel her skin against yours and kiss her without restraint. Wanted to feel her murmurs and moans against your throat and be able to enjoy it. You want it still and when you give into the temptation, when you finally give into the longing to share this innocent sin you denied yourself for so long, you find the track marks.
They litter her arms like potholes in neglected streets and your desire drains away to uglier things. She was at Anteros to deal drugs. Of course she was. She hasn’t seen Nathaniel yet, so you don’t disclose that these are mostly his stomping grounds these days. She won’t be in town long enough to compete with him. But you do showcase your own skeletal form and you watch the heartbreak devour her face.
You challenge each other on your respective demons and neither of you have answers.
Neither of you have answers, but this does make you think a lot about the last conversation you had before she took off to be with Deborah. About how it takes someone special to love what you really are, when your public persona is turned off and you aren’t putting your best foot forward.
And you’re thinking, well, maybe it’s true. But maybe it’s not. Maybe it just takes someone whose pain can match yours.
So you don’t kick her out like you probably should, and you invite her to crash at your place for the week, the next two, to stay (forever) however long it takes Deborah to detox in her fancy rehab center that rivals the class of the hotels the more experienced models get to stay at. The ones you’re aspiring to be like even now, the ones you’re gradually killing yourself to emulate.
She takes you up on the offer. And it’s freeing, in a way. That you get to talk to her, to really talk to her and mean the things you say. To hold her hand and loop your arm around her waist, and kiss her on the mouth. Her attachment to Deborah isn’t an exclusive one and it’s not like you’re attached to anyone, either.
You do these pleasant things in between the unpleasant things. You are two sad, fucked up people who can comfort each other in the familiarity. Who bring joy to each other by at least imitating the relationship you both wish you could've had as teenagers. It’s sort of like a messed up version of playing house.
You’ve nothing to hide from one another and there is also comfort in this. Three days into her visit, you have so little to hide, you're vomiting in front of each other. Literally. You come home from a work lunch and sprint to your bathroom, cramming your fingers down your throat before the porcelain throne.
Everything you ate comes up in a slurry, stinking mess. You hear Marcese on the tile behind you and you expect she’s here to scold you. You’re surprised as she swivels around and drops to her knees before the bathtub, snapping forward as she purges her guts.
The sloppy sound of her vomit splashing the bottom of the tub is so revolting it prompts another round of sympathy retching from you. Your throat burns by the end of it, nostrils scorched from the rancid odor and eyes watering.
“You okay?” she asks wanly.
“Now I am,” you answer, shakily reaching up to flush. “You?”
She gruffly jerks her head in dissent. “M’dope sick.”
“What?”
“Withdrawals, Amber.” She rests her head on the edge of the tub, peering at you tiredly.
You stare back at her, taking in her appearance. She does look sick. Sallow skin, just as sweaty as she was the day you shut her up in that broiling greenhouse. Twitching— no, trembling— no, both.
“I’ve gotta go out,” she continues.
“You shouldn’t go out like that.”
“I know you don’t like it, but I’ll get sicker if I don’t score.”
For a moment, you don’t say anything. You watch her sweat and shake. You study the slug of remains that still clings to the corner of her chin, yellowy orange like the pizza grease you’ll never again allow yourself to digest.
“I’ll call Nathaniel,” you decide.
“Huh?”
“Nath deals now.”
Marcese huffs a bitter laugh. “Ain’t that the shit.”