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Marcy wasn’t able to say she was fine after getting back home from Amphibia. She was far from fine.
The first thing she’d found out after getting back was that her parents had moved without her.
For the first night staying at Anne’s house while Anne’s parents made arrangements with her and Sasha’s parents, she’d shut herself in Anne’s room.
“It’s okay, Marcy,” Anne had told her through the door after Marcy’d had a meltdown when they got home from their welcome-home dinner. “We’ll sleep on the couch. Take your time.”
So she stayed there and sat in the silence. She didn’t know if she liked the silence or not. It was her first night without the core whispering in the back of her mind.
She was alone.
She had her brain to herself, for once. That didn’t mean she knew what to do with it.
As she laid in bed that night, she racked her brain for things to think about that she couldn’t link back to her time in the Core, but everything seemed to go back to it.
Except her parents, but she wouldn’t think about them. They would probably give her a firm scolding next time she saw them. It wasn’t exactly something she wanted to spend brain energy on, so she decided on imagining Anne’s cat Domino, something the Core didn’t deem important enough to touch. She finally dozed off.
-
When she woke up the next morning, her whole body ached.
Side effects of being a puppet for however many months.
She grumbled to herself as she turned over to check the time, ignoring the protest in her bones. 5:36am. The house was silent, aside from the ticking of the clock on the wall. She was alone with her thoughts. Again.
Of course you had fallen for it all.
The Core?
Of course you had put her faith in the box, and Andrias, and his plans, and of COURSE it all had to come to a head. You were a fool for expecting it not to.
Marcy buried her face in her pillow, trying to get the voices to stop.
And of course Anne and Sasha hadn’t fallen for it. They’d put their faith in the box, too, of course, but they hadn’t put their faith in Andrias, and they hadn’t put any faith at all into his plans. They aren’t naive, like you are.
Of course they weren’t going to stop. They were part of her now.
Maybe you should have seen all of this coming. Maybe it was all your fault. If you had been thinking about how dumb you were to think that your friends wanted to listen to your interests, you would have thought about how dumb it was to think they would want to do this with you.
How dumb it was of you to think that maybe, just maybe, you should stop thinking they wanted to be your friend.
“STOP.”
Oh, Marcy.
“Just shut up, already. You lost, Darcy. It’s all over.”
Marcy, the Core isn’t here.
“...”
Of course it was just… her.
She was doing this to herself.
Like always. Like she’d been doing even before Amphibia.
You never needed the Core to make you think like this.
She never needed the Core to make her think like this.
It was all your own mind .
It was all her own mind.
All your fault.
All her fault.
All her fault.
All her fault. All her fault. All her fault all her fault allherfaultallherfault-
The door cracked open, and Marcy unburied her face from her pillow to see that the sun had risen at some point, the golden rays filtering in through the window. Anne and Sasha were peeking in.
They’re only looking at you because- (shut up.)
Maybe it was just impulse. Maybe it was her wanting to tear herself out of her brain. Maybe it was a combination of many things.
In any case, she hauled herself out of bed and left the room, shoving past Anne and Sasha. She stumbled downstairs, ignoring Anne’s parents having coffee in the kitchen, and burst into the backyard where Anne’s dad had left the gardening halfway unplanted. She dropped to her knees by the pile of dirt and sank her hands in, adding the fact that she was currently barefoot and in pajamas to the list of things she was ignoring.
She sank her hands into the empty dirt and it felt good. Refreshing, even. She let herself feel the pieces of white fertilizer as they lightly scraped against her hands. She could feel a worm wiggle against her pinky. Mr. Boonchuy would probably find that later and set it free in an unused patch of grass. She squeezed some dirt in her fist and brought it out, letting the packed clump go and watching as it fell from her open palm and crumbled upon impact with the rest of the dirt.
Her thoughts weren’t real. Not as real as this dirt. Not as real as the dampness of the morning dew soaking through her pants. Not as real as the ache in her bones re-registering as she finally resurfaced.
This dirt was real. It was cool and damp, and things grew from it, whether they be weeds or vegetables. It smelled like organic fertilizer (which was just a fancy term for poo) and she smiled to herself. Stinky dirt. Good dirt. Real dirt.
A presence appeared next to her and she froze, hands halfway back to the dirt again. It was Mr. Boonchuy, who had knelt next to her with two small tomato plants from the grocery store, growing in their plastic cups. “Since you’re here already, do you want to help me?”
Marcy took the tomato plant. She watched and copied as Mr Boonchuy flattened out the dirt in the raised garden bed and made a hole big enough for the plant. She copied as he held the plant in the cup between his hands, rolling gently until the plant came out easily with the dirt. He continued rolling the plant, as the dirt and roots had stayed in the cup shape when they came out. The dirt and roots loosened, some dirt falling away into the hole. Mr. Boonchuy planted it, adding more dirt to the base and watering it. Marcy’s plant looked similar and she smiled.
In a few months, this plant would be taller. It would produce tomatoes the size of her fist, but she wouldn’t be there to see it. No, she would be in Denver. She would grow her own plants there, start a new school, make new friends. She would start a new part of her life, but keep some parts of her old life. Her new plants would come from seeds that Mr. Boonchuy had gotten her. Her new school would have the same classes as her old school. Her new friends reminded her of Sasha and Anne in tiny ways, and she would still talk to her childhood friends via texts and calls. They’d found a way to forgive her, somehow, even if the tiny voice in her head said otherwise.
The thoughts would never completely go away, but that was okay, because neither would the dirt.