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“Can I talk to you after practice?”
Ocean blinks at Penny. Penny has a small, genuine smile on her lips, and Ocean can’t help but agree to her request. It’s something to do, at the very least.
When choir practice is done, and everyone else leaves, Ocean and Penny find a bench to sit at outside. They talk about a few meaningless things for a little while, but once a moment of silence dips between the two of them, the real topic of conversation starts up.
“I don’t mean to be blunt,” Penny begins, “but Noel said he saw something on the back of your neck. Something that looked like burns. I wanted to ask you about that.”
Ocean’s whole body tenses. She can’t bear to look at Penny, so she keeps her gaze downcast, staring intently at the pavement.
She should have been smarter. She should have hidden it better. Stupid, stupid!
“Can you tell me what made them?” Penny asks.
Ocean doesn’t answer. She can barely breathe over the dread and shame that courses through her veins. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
Penny nods out of the corner of Ocean’s eye. “I understand,” she says. “This probably isn’t what you were expecting, and I get that this is, like, SUPER SUDDEN, I was just worried. I know what it’s like, so I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Ocean raises her head a little, but doesn’t quite look at Penny fully. “You do know what it’s like, don’t you?”
Penny nods, a thin, grim smile on her lips. “Yeah. I do. They hurt like hell when it first happens, but I always thought the pain after was worse. It smells horrible, too. Like weed and burnt flesh.”
Ocean closes her eyes against that imagery, but she can’t possibly close her nose to the phantom smell that pervades her nostrils. Like the odor of her house that stains her body, hair, and clothes, it sticks with her.
“One of mine got infected once,” Penny goes on. “It was so small, but when the infection set in, it swelled up and turned this purple color. Gross, greenish discharge kept coming out of it. I felt really sick for a while, all because of this burn the size of a quarter. I still have the scar on my thigh.”
Ocean is quiet. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to say. She doesn’t want to say anything at all. She wants to get away from this horrible situation, but at the same time…
But at the same time, there’s some layer of relief that she feels somewhere inside of her. A sort of relief that makes her feel not as alone in this sort of situation. And it’s so confusing.
In truth, as she’s sitting here on this bench, she isn’t sure what she’s supposed to be feeling.
She feels like she is standing in her own grave. She feels like she’s never been so alive before.
A freezing blanket of dread smothers her. A warm golden light surrounds her.
Someone is ripping her heart out. Someone is painting her heart in silver.
She wants to run away and never be found. She wants to throw her arms up in the air and celebrate.
She hates this girl for making her feel these things inside of her. She loves this girl and wants her to keep talking.
She doesn’t get it. She can’t understand.
“I remember you.”
The sentence catches Ocean off guard; she can’t help but finally look over at Penny, but Penny isn’t looking back at her. Instead, Penny is gazing out at the sky, at the light of dusk that has begun to spill its gruesome red light across the horizon, and there’s a small smile on her lips and an emotion in her eyes that’s nearly unrecognizable.
“What?” Ocean says softly.
“I remember you,” Penny repeats. “From one of the deals. I don’t know why your parents brought you along. I still don’t. Maybe it’s better for that to be left unknown. But you were just as small back then as you are now, hehe. I think your red hair stood out to me the most, though. I always thought it was weird that your parents didn’t have the same color.” She pauses for a moment, and Ocean can see the emotions building up in her expression. “You had the same look in your eyes as my younger brother. Innocence. Morbid innocence. Innocence that I knew was going to get shattered. And in that moment, I wanted to just hold you in my hands and protect you. I didn’t even know your name, but I wanted to take you, me, and my brother far, far away from that stupid drug deal. From our parents. From everything. I’m sorry I couldn’t do that.”
“No, it’s not— you have nothing to apologize for, Penny,” Ocean assures her. “We were kids, what were you supposed to—”
“And that’s exactly it!” Penny shouts, and her outburst startles Ocean. “We were kids! We’re still kids! What did we do to deserve the life we were forced into? How fucking selfish could our parents be?”
Ocean can’t help but shrink away from the fiery point of Penny’s wrath. She never liked it when people yelled.
Penny catches the way she’s practically cowering and calms down. Her shoulders slump, and she looks forward again.
“Wanna know something horrible?” she asks.
“Sure,” Ocean answers.
“I thought you died,” Penny tells her. “I had no reason to think that, I just did. But the horrible part is that I believed that was better for you. If you were dead, you didn’t have to be around your disgusting parents anymore.”
“…Wanna hear something even more horrible?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve considered dying. A lot of times, actually. To get away from it all. And I always wanted to go out in the most horribly bloody way possible to make my parents regret the lifestyle they forced me into. I wanted the guilt to haunt them day and night. I wanted them to feel in their bones what they had done to me.”
“…Same.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Sometimes I thought about poisoning my brother and I. To just get it over with. To escape everything.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Truthfully? I don’t know. I wish I could say that I had a change of heart, that I realized that things could get better, that I realized I wanted to live, but I wouldn’t be being honest with myself if I said that. Because it’s not true. I had no will to live back then. I didn’t care what happened to me. My parents destroyed that inkling of hope I had. But even still, I stuck around, and I can’t tell you why, even now.”
“Do you have a will to live now?”
Penny glances at her, then back at the sunset. She considers the question, then says, “Yeah. I think I do.”
Ocean nods. “I’m glad.”
“Why did you stick around? If you don’t mind me asking.”
Ocean has to think about it. She wants to tell Penny it’s because she loves herself, that prideful persona she always wears certainly makes it seem that way, but that would be a lie.
“I don’t know either,” she finally says. “I mean… I’ve— I’ve tried. And it almost worked.”
“Really?”
Ocean nods. “Yeah. Two years ago. My parents— this is gonna be the stupidest reason someone has ever attempted suicide, but my parents didn’t come to a really big choir concert. They’ve never gone, and I don’t know why this one finally pushed me to my breaking point, but it did. So, I swallowed an entire bottle of this weird herbal crap my parents had lying around. It made me hallucinate horribly. I couldn’t distinguish what was real and what wasn’t, and I wondered if this was what my parents felt like when they got high, and that terrified me more than the thought of dying. I woke up god knows how many hours later, covered in my own vomit. My mom and dad didn’t seem to care. They just laughed and said I had a bad trip, thinking that I had finally stooped to their level. But the rest of the choir— well, they didn’t know—they STILL don’t know—but they were texting me, and they were there, and they cared. And I appreciated it, but I still felt so horrible, I still wanted to just disappear.” She shakes her head, her throat aching. Her chest feels horribly tight, and she doesn’t want to cry, but she feels like she’s drowning in her own emotions. “I didn’t try again, though. Not because I wanted to stay alive, not because I didn’t want to leave my friends, but because I just felt so defeated. I was exhausted, both physically and psychologically. I didn’t know what the point was anymore, so I guess I just…stopped caring after that. And after a while…maybe I started thinking that I deserved it.”
“No,” Penny says.
“Yes,” Ocean says somberly. “It was the only explanation I had for it. That I did something to warrant this existence. That maybe life was my punishment. So I did everything I could to make it, I don’t know, worth it. I became so desperate to feel something that I tried some of my parents’ stuff before.”
“Really?” Penny asks.
“Yeah,” Ocean answers.
She remembers that experience well. She was fourteen, standing determinedly in the doorway to the sunken living room of her house with her fists clenched at her side, feeling the euphoric buzz of the marijuana wrack her entire body as she announced, “I’m high.”
The two figures in the den, both of them shrouded in shadows thanks to the low light that often shaded the houses, turned to look at her and squinted for a moment as though trying to figure out who she was. And then, one sagged back into its wicker chair with an air of disappointment. Like it had been expecting someone else, someone better. The other continued to stare, and Ocean stared back defiantly through the thick mop of red hair that had started to hang in her eyes lately because her parents had been too lazy to cut it.
“…You’re what?” said the figure slowly, its hands clutching a leaf green embroidery and a shiny sewing needle.
“I’m high, Mama,” Ocean said again, feeling a thrill that was equal parts excitement and terror run through her from head to toe as she said those scandalous words. She watched her mother’s dark eyes apprehensively, dimly aware through the buzz of weed that she was shivering.
Later, on nights when she had nothing better to think about (there would be a lot of nights like that), she would dramatize this event in her head. She’d think about what might have happened if she’d been yelled at or sent to her room or even slapped across the face so hard she was sent sprawling. It wasn’t that she did this to feel sorry for herself or to pretend that it had been worse than it actually was.
The truth was that all of those outcomes were things she wished had happened more than what actually had.
From the worn-out old armchair, the figure stared at her a moment longer, before simply shaking its head in silent amusement and looking back down at the embroidery.
“This is why we fear for you,” her mother said dismissively.
“I never touched their crap again after that,” Ocean says to Penny, back in the present, away from the smog of those awful memories. “I hated the way they made me feel. Or, not feel, I should say. I was paranoid, and yet I was numb all over, like my entire soul had left my body. It was terrifying how weightless I became, how empty my whole being felt. But even more than that, I was so scared of turning into them. I’m still scared of that.” She can feel her resolve starting to chip away, piece by piece. “I don’t want to be like my parents.”
All around them, the sky is like a bloodbath, dark and red, atavistic fire on the horizon. The world is going into slumber, but the monsters in the dark are not as restrained to only the night as they are in stories.
Is the existence of Ocean and Penny not proof of that?
“I know what you mean,” Penny says. “After my parents were arrested, and I was placed into foster care, everything I did became all kinds of venom. I became horribly depressed and started acting out because I wanted everyone in the whole world to feel equally as awful as I did. All I wanted to do was self-destruct. And I did a lot of things I regret because of it.”
Ocean lets out a bitter, cynical laugh that hurts as bad as the tears scalding her eyes do. “It seems like not even escaping them is enough,” she says. “The cycle of abuse really does exist.”
Penny’s face hardens at that, and she lifts her chin up in defiance. A new light dawns to her eyes, even as tears tremble treacherously in the lower lashes—one of pure, unadulterated temerity.
“I am not my parents,” she says. And then, again, firmer this time, like she’s trying to convince herself that it’s the truth even as she speaks, “I am not my parents. And neither are you. We aren’t like them. We won’t ever be.”
Ocean looks at Penny, and how badly she wishes she could believe her. But even as she takes in her words, there’s still the hot sting of fear burning within her, burning like how her father’s blunt had burned against the flesh of her neck the night before. This feeling is not one you can get rid of so easily, and Penny knows this as well as Ocean does.
And yet, Penny has hope. Or something akin to hope. Whatever it is, it’s present in her entire being. Ocean can see it.
“You asked me if I had a reason to live now,” Penny says. “You and the whole choir are that reason. You are someone worth sticking around for, Ocean. We won’t end up like them.”
Ocean cracks down the middle, and then she breaks open.
The tears come spilling free, and she hangs her head to weep. She feels Penny’s arms wrap around her, and Ocean returns the embrace with desperate, needy claws, and as their foreheads press together while they cry, Ocean is fully aware of how they’re making a vain attempt to protect each other’s bodies from this cruel planet. To shelter one another from any further pain that may try to mar what’s left of their human perseverance.
Sitting on that bench, under the blood red light of dusk, it feels as though the whole world is caving in around them, and it’s then that Ocean realizes her likeness to Penny is more than she ever could have imagined. It’s deeper than friendship, deeper than even blood. Ocean can feel it in her very soul, a sort of kinship born from only this measure of shared anguish.
Penny is, from that moment on, someone Ocean wants to protect. And as Penny tucks Ocean’s head beneath her chin and pulls her in tighter, Ocean knows Penny is thinking the same.
Ocean’s agony is Penny’s, as Penny’s is Ocean’s.
And if they aren’t sisters by blood, then they are surely sisters by bloodshed.