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Addy wakes up to Beth struggling and gasping for breath as if she’s drowning underwater. Her flailing hand strikes Addy in the chin and Addy grimaces as the pain blooms outward. She props herself up onto her elbows and peers down at Beth’s panicked features, barely visible under the glow of the nightlight plugged into the wall.
Beth can no longer sleep in the pitch dark. She’d bought a tropical fish lamp and hung it on her wall. She’d used it at first, this humming moving picture that created the illusion of the brightly colored fish swimming inside the perfect, shimmery blue. ‘A virtual ocean in motion,' as described by the box.
It looked like an aquarium. Looked too much like an aquarium, like Will’s aquarium. Addy couldn’t sleep in any room that had anything that reminded her of Will, so Beth had thrown a towel over it and plugged in an old unicorn nightlight instead.
But it looks like neither the nightlight nor Addy’s arms could keep away the nightmares tonight.
“Addy?” Beth asks in a small voice, eyes flashing with recognition.
“Yeah,” Addy hums softly. “Just me. We’re in your room, Beth.”
“Right.” Beth swallows, blinking rapidly as she struggles to regain her composure. “I know that.”
Addy lies back down. She gently touches Beth’s shoulder, pauses for a heartbeat to see how this action is received. Beth doesn’t stiffen or jerk away. She simply lies still and catches her breath, eyes fixed on the ceiling.
Addy rubs her hand up and down Beth’s forearm and eventually Beth turns to her, lips soundlessly parting.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Addy asks.
She draws her hand back as Beth rolls onto her side, facing her in the dark.
“It was Kurtz again,” she admits, low and grave. “We were in that gross ass motel bathroom and I couldn’t get him off…he knew what he was doing to me, but he didn’t want to see it, so he kept pushing my face into that scummy tile. I could taste the grout. Even in my dream, I could taste the grout.”
Addy’s stomach gives a nauseated lurch. She swallows something thick and hot, tenderly sliding her hand over Beth’s face. Strokes her thumb feather soft along Beth’s graceful cheekbone.
“I am the one who's here now, not him,” she promises. “And your face is my favorite face. I’ll never push it into the floor.”
A ghost of a smile twitches over Beth’s lips but it quickly fades.
“I wish I could push his face out of my mind. I’m so sick of his fucking face fucking everywhere,” she growls like a cur, lip curling in disgust. “At school, in between classes. In my dreams, when I’m trying to sleep. I just can’t stop seeing him.”
Familiar anger flickers through Addy, a fever in her blood.
“I wish I could kill him,” she blurts, a bit frightened by how much she means it.
It’s too dark to make out the exhausted crescents under Beth’s eyes, but Addy knows they’re there. She watches Beth do her best to camouflage them beneath concealer every morning. She cannot see, but she knows there’s one beneath her thumb as she lightly rubs under Beth’s distraught gaze.
“I wish I could bash his face in with a brick, over and over, until it was just this mess like bloody mashed potatoes or something. That way he wouldn’t even have a face anymore, so maybe it’d stop haunting you.”
“I like the sound of that,” Beth muses, bringing her hand up and lightly resting it against Addy’s hip.
“How about running him over with my car?” Addy suggests next. “His fugly face crunches under the tire and his eyeballs pop right out of his head. Like those squeezable keychain critters at the mini mart.”
Beth nods along, humming a contended sound. The muscles in her face relax, something Addy feels more than she sees.
“Ooh, I’ve got a good one,” she goes on. “We take him to the old tire factory, tie him to a chair like they do to the bad guys in all those spy movies…”
“Then what, James Bond?” Beth asks, voice soft with wonder.
“Then we cut his balls off. His dick too, with something extra painful. Like a rusty saw.”
“Or garden shears.”
“Or those,” Addy agrees heartily. “He’ll totally die from it too, cause there’s arteries down there. And while Kurtz is dying, we can like…throw his junk on the floor. And stomp on it. Right in front of his hideous fucking face. The last thing he’ll ever see is our cheer shoes grinding his stupid sac into the dust.”
Laughter bubbles out of Beth’s throat. It tickles the air as soft as dandelion tufts at first, and then she tips her head back, teeth glinting eerily under the glow of the nightlight as it becomes uproarious cackling. It rings high and reedy and just a little unhinged.
She laughs and laughs until it brings tears to her eyes, and then the laughter dissolves into sobs. Addy freezes at first, startled. But Beth is like a broken dam and it’s all pouring out. Addy grabs her and pulls her close as she can, great, gulping sobs heaving in and out of her. Beth curls her fingers into her nightshirt and pulls until the fabric rips. Addy isn’t mad about it in the least, couldn’t care less about it as Beth pushes her damp face into her chest.
Addy holds Beth as tight as she can as she falls apart, her entire body quaking under the unyielding sobs. Addy kisses the top of her head and inhales the scent of Beth's shampoo as her nightshirt soaking through with her violent tears. Addy feels herself grow lightheaded as she listens to Beth’s rapid, heartbroken hyperventilating, her own lungs aching.
Beth sobs and sobs, and Addy feels them reverberate all the way down to her marrow. Eventually, they grow weaker as Beth exhausts herself with them. Until she's sobbed so hard, there is nothing left inside her to scrape out.
“I’m sorry,” Addy murmurs.
“No,” Beth gasps against her tear-slick collarbone.
“Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to talk about him like that.”
“No, no,” Beth repeats, sliding an arm under Addy’s and tracing her backbone with a ginger hand. “It’s nice to imagine Kurtz in pain. What I really like to think about sometimes, is Kurtz killing himself.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah…Addy…after it happened, I would think about that sometimes,” she admits in a voice so tiny and worn from the sobbing, it barely sounds like Beth at all. “Killing myself.”
Addy’s heart stops.
“What?” she asks, an unsettling, icy cold spreading through her veins.
“Yeah. Things were so bad between us at that point, and he fucking…he split me open, Addy,” Beth’s voice takes an on edge of venom. “He split me open and nobody knew, nobody stopped him, nobody fucking cared. Do you have any idea what that made me feel like?”
“I don’t know,” Addy admits, lump rising in her throat.
“Nothing, less than nothing,” Beth bitterly hisses into the night. “A scratchy tissue someone spat in and tossed in the trash. Some nasty thing that didn’t matter to anyone, not even myself…yeah, Addy. I wanted to die.”
Addy’s chest tightens, her insides roiling like a nest of eels. “You don’t want that anymore though, right?”
“No,” Beth promises her, releasing a heavy breath and then gritting her teeth. “But I want him to feel that way. I want Kurtz to wake up and discover he’s the most disgusting thing in the world for doing what he did to me. I want him to hate it so much, he can’t live with it. I want him to turn his belt into a noose and hang himself, and twitch, and writhe, and suffer in those motherfucking death throes knowing he deserves every miserable second.”
“He never will,” Addy chokes, mouth bone dry and eyes prickling.
And he won’t precisely because of what he is, because he is the monster who deserves all of these things and even worse, endlessly worse, wretched, inconceivable things.
“Of course not,” Beth mutters wearily. “But I still like thinking about it. It’s comforting sometimes.”
“Is there anything else I can do to comfort you?”
“Just keep holding me, Addy,” Beth murmurs, nuzzling into the crook of Addy’s clavicle. “Keep holding me and never let go.”
“I won’t,” she swears like a knight pledging fealty. “I promise.”