Work Text:
The bars on the windows make her feel trapped.
They’re cold and foreboding and peeling with paint, the varnished lacquer chipping away over time to reveal the true rot beneath.
The air of impenetrability they exude is unwelcome. But not unfamiliar. They cut scorched grill marks of shadows through the dismal sunlight that spills across the floor and she hates the symbolism of it all.
Still, Cheryl reasons, the gymnasium windows need protecting from wayward balls. They’re not there to keep things out but to keep things in.
She feels the dense frigidity of a bar pressing into her forehead as she sits, perched on the very top bleacher, and stares out at the raindrops on the window pane. The melancholy of the act feels normal to her, almost as if she’s done this before.
She blinks, trying not to be so woeful, and reaches out to press at the glass with the pad of her finger. She feels nothing. She presses harder and still feels nothing.
You’ll never reach the outside like that.
She lets her hand drop, closing her eyes.
“Wake up, Cheryl.”
She lifts her head, turning towards the voice and sees no one. It sounded distant to her ears, the thrumming of rain against the window encasing her in white noise, and she thinks for a moment that she has imagined it.
As she turns back, suddenly, a backpack is dropped with a hollow thud onto the bench next to her and she flinches following, with her eyes, the tanned skin of the arm still attached to it until she reaches a face.
She breathes.
“Toni.”
Her pink hair is dampened in patches, from the rain, Cheryl notices, and falls in sinewy strands around her face, meandering over her bare, shapely shoulders and Cheryl marvels at the goosebumps that gather to worship at the site of an errant raindrop on the caramel skin. She wants to press her lips to it and watch them disappear, obeisant to the warmth of her mouth, and her intentions.
She watches Toni’s hair shift against her face as she moves in her seat, draping one little leg over the other and turning her body further to face her. She’s talking; Cheryl can see her mouth moving but no sound resonates to Cheryl’s ears as she watches intently, almost as if in slow motion, as the soft pillowed skin of the top lip bows and curls around her words, pressing decadently to the pouted perfection of the lower, padding open and closed like soft blinks of an eye.
Cheryl is enraptured. The skin is matte, and pink, with hues of orange and brown and she spies a burst capillary, no bigger than a seedling, on the left corner of the lower lip and she wants to touch it. To soothe it. To acknowledge that it’s there and that she has seen it because she likes to study these lips often and she observes them more than anyone else and she notices things about them, and notices things about this girl in front of her because she likes her.
Cheryl Blossom has noticed a girl and she goddamn wants it to be known.
She wants everyone to know.
She wants Toni to know.
The lips peel back slowly on both sides to reveal white teeth, perfectly placed in their rows, and she finally realises Toni has stopped talking.
Instead, she is smiling.
Toni Topaz is smiling at her.
Cheryl doesn’t know what she has ever done in her years of anger, and bullying, and torment, and misery to ever deserve to see such a sight but she straightens her spine to sit further back and drinks it all in anyway because Toni Topaz is smiling at her.
Creases in her cheeks curve beautifully around freckles painted by God and Cheryl spies a neatly drawn eyebrow, sisters not twins, arching inquisition at her and she finally drops her gaze to Toni’s eyes. A shiver ghosts through her. She feels a burning in her very veins. A connection is reaching out to her. A purpose. A light. She sees intrigue. She sees curiosity. She sees acceptance and patience and life in those eyes. Hope. Passion and spirit and joy blotting like ink, on a page from which Cheryl gratefully reads, in the warmth of Toni’s eyes and it steals her breath from her.
Toni Topaz is not merely smiling at her.
She is smiling because of her.
Cheryl’s chest feels light and the sensation draughts to her head and she feels a smile tugging at her own mouth and finally, despite the bars on the windows, she feels free.
Because Cheryl Blossom has noticed a girl.
And Dear God she just wants everyone to know.
Cheryl glances at Toni’s hand as it fidgets with a rip in her jeans.
“Can you hear me?”
She returns her eyes to Toni’s face.
Goddamn beautiful.
“I’m so sorry, Toni. I didn’t catch a word you said.”
She doesn’t know why she whispers it but everything seems so quiet and she’s happy to let that comfort her for once.
She watches Toni chuckle, stretching out her lithe little arms in front of her and drops them tiredly to her lap.
“It doesn’t matter.” Her voice calms Cheryl’s heart to a slumber. She shrugs a dainty shoulder, leaning her hand on the bench and resting her weight onto it, her face looming closer to Cheryl’s. “I just wanted to see you…”
Lord have mercy.
“…You look nice. I like your dress, Cheryl. Blue looks good on you.”
Goosebumps prick this time at Cheryl’s skin but not due to raindrops or steel window bars.
She holds her eyes to Toni’s, and should even the closing sound of Gabriel’s Trumpet ring out to call the earth to its final end, she would not let her gaze be torn from the sanctuary that stared back at her.
She pushes the backpack between them to the floor and usurps herself into its place, pressing her thigh to Toni’s and sighing into the reassuring touch of warm denim to her skin.
“Have you ever read the Bible, TT?”
She slides a pale hand along Toni’s neck, cupping it gently to hold her face and caresses her thumb in worshipping sweeps to the smooth skin of her jaw. Pink hair tickles her fingers and her lips twitch at the sides as she sighs against Toni’s mouth, a small, tanned hand enveloping her wrist in a squeeze.
“Not one fucking word, Cheryl. Why?”
A crease knots Toni’s brow but it is laced with humoured curiosity, her head resting back against the window bars, as she reflects the look of peaceful adoration back at Cheryl.
Cheryl leans her own head, touching the end of her nose to Toni’s.
“There is a passage, from the book of the Song of Solomon, which makes me think of you...”
Toni waits, patiently, her hand travelling in aimless strokes across Cheryl’s wrist.
Cheryl drops her voice to that of a mere breath, dipping her eyes to Toni’s lips.
“...You are altogether beautiful, my darling; there is no flaw in you.”
Toni’s lips encase her own before a breath can even be drawn and Cheryl sinks into its softness with a delicate, contented groan. She moves her lips in time with Toni’s, unhurried, and slides her fingers deeper into damp hair to tug at it, a gentle whimper bouncing from Toni’s mouth to Cheryl’s tongue as she teases it past her lips.
She stops, eyes closed and mind silent, and revels in the light friction of Toni’s breath against her mouth and presses one more full, pillowed kiss to it.
As she feels skin peel away from skin, she loosens her grip on the hair in her hand and opens her eyes to find Toni’s already clear and unbarred, studying her face with a look soft and saccharine, melting in honeyed amber, more than the rain could ever do to the finest of sugar.
Cheryl Blossom likes a girl.
And that’s the Gospel truth.
She tells her so.
“I scarcely can breathe around you, TT. Let alone think to say more than simply… I like you. I like you so very much. I pray you like me too.”
The lighting in Pop’s is dim.
It always is, and she’s used to it, living in the Gothic mansions of her childhood, but familiarity still doesn’t stem the encroaching suffocation of claustrophobia that it brings.
The moonlight, that mists hazily in through the windows that line the perimeter of the building, is tainted a deep blue by the glass and it blends with the neon red of the signage outside.
She casts her eye over the lines of windows that she has now noticed expose the interior from all angles and feels watched, bare, trapped.
The darkness of night curtains a reflective barrier to the outer plains of existence beyond this place and she can see nothing of what lies behind those panes.
You’ll never reach the outside like that.
The all-seeing eye of judgement burrows into her being and she suddenly feels as if she would rather be anywhere else than this panopticon of a chock’lit shoppe. And yet, compellingly, she can’t leave.
She swallows, the steam of a coffee machine heating her face from the side, and allows her eyes to adjust to the aesthetic before her.
The scene feels other worldly to Cheryl, as if not quite real, but she figures that the late hour and the lack of any other patrons in the joint has weaved a warped sense of alternate reality into her head.
The brightly polished chrome edging of the countertop gleams with an almost surgical touch, like the needle of a syringe, and she steps closer to it, lifting a long leg to seat herself on a stool cushion with all the support of a well-worn mattress.
She places her hands atop the counter to steady herself and, yet again, she feels nothing.
Brushing crumbs from her palms she turns to the mass of leather jacket on the stool to her left and tips her head slightly to peak around a veil of pink hair, plucking a strand into her fingers and tucking its silken drapery behind an ear.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
Toni looks up from the book she is reading, tattered and stained and lain decrepitly on the counter, her cheeks reddened from the pressure upon which she had been resting atop her hands.
She smiles demurely, her tired eyes brightening at the sight of Cheryl.
“A milkshake, please.” She rasps, her hair falling in waves to the side as she turns to lean her head on her fist.
Cheryl takes a moment to savour the fact that Toni is looking at her like a treasured possession once lost, now found, and she imprisons her own smile in the cage of her front teeth, nodding.
“You got it.”
She turns to order their drinks to the figure of a waitress in the corner.
“A cherry cola and a ch-.”
“-chocolate.”
Red lips tip at the edges.
“…Chocolate milkshake.” Cheryl finishes.
She redirects the smile to Toni with a pivot of her head and shifts on her stool.
“I know your order, TT.” There’s an air of absoluteness in her words and she watches Toni’s eyebrows rise on her face.
“You do?”
Cheryl flips Toni’s hair from her neck, travelling the flat of her hand down over her leather-clad back and rubs gentle furrows across it, up and down, soothingly.
“Of course. I pay attention to what you like.”
She can feel the heat of Toni’s body through her jacket and it complements the warmth of Toni’s blush that fans across her cheeks, a spritely youthfulness radiating from it.
Cheryl wants to feel it against her lips, and so she does.
She leans forward, plumping her lips to a kiss as Toni moves to meet her, her mouth bestowing a small peck to the soft skin of Toni’s cheek.
She feels it bulge beneath her lips and knows that Toni is smiling. So she kisses it again, sliding her arm around Toni’s back to pull her in closer.
“How was your shift at the Wyrm?” She murmurs tenderly against Toni’s face, squeezing the hand on her waist and leaning in to the touch of little fingers as they move to trace the line of her jaw.
Toni leans back just a fraction to catch Cheryl’s gaze but the heat of her skin remains ever present.
“Tiring, like it always is.”
Cheryl’s eyes soften.
“Would you like a warm coffee? Perhaps some food?”
Toni shakes her head lightly, her attention now on Cheryl’s lips as her fingers patter softly across their curve.
“No… no thank you…” Her words are whispered, distracted. Cheryl places a kiss to the pads of her fingers and watches her smile, “… I’m just happy to see you, Cheryl.”
Cheryl believes her. She sees the sincerity in her face.
“Likewise. I’ve been thinking about you. So much. Most of my time is spent thinking about you actually, TT. Seems to be all I do all day of late.”
Toni’s chuckle blows a wind to her red hair and Cheryl feels her own laugh reciprocate.
She watches as Toni presses her lips together, flicking her eyes between Cheryl’s, and shuffles closer, reaching out to press a kiss to Cheryl’s lips.
They linger there, warm breath permeating at her mouth and mixing with her own. She feels the world began to dissolve away and she closes her eyes for a moment to ground herself in this feeling of beautiful repose.
Suddenly, she is disturbed.
A mechanical grating sound hits her ears with unwelcome intrusion, the rhythmic squeaking of wheels and the clatter of metal breaching the calm of her dimly-lit cocoon and invading from outside.
She can only attribute it to some rowdy youths gallivanting across the asphalt in a stolen shopping cart.
“Diazepam. Strong stuff.”
Cheryl frowns, opening her eyes to glance behind her at the entrance doors. Still their windows are blackened.
She turns back to Toni.
“What did you say, TT?...”
Toni’s mouth is shut, she shrugs.
“…the noise, Toni.”
Toni reaches out to rub the white fabric of Cheryl’s collar between her thumb and finger.
“Oh. Kids, Cheryl. They’re probably high.”
“Oh, I see.”
Toni’s smile returns as she speaks.
“You’re wearing the blue dress again.”
Cheryl finds her focus is tunnelled once again to the simple beauty of Toni’s pretty face and she lets the observation wash over her, slipping her hand beneath Toni’s jacket to rub her palm to the skin of her back. Her other hand reaches out to traverse the small distance between them and squeezes itself to Toni’s thigh, pale fingers touching fleetingly to hot, tanned skin through the ripped hole in her tights.
Cheryl studies Toni’s face with an interest that seems infinite.
“I want to know everything about you, Toni Topaz.”
It’s true. She does. More than anything she’s ever wanted in her whole life. More than a happy childhood or high school popularity or even to hear Jason’s voice say ‘I love you’ once more.
More than all of it.
Swear to God.
Because she realises those are fleeting things.
They no longer matter.
Her childhood had befallen her and could not be undone, and the sands of High School reputation passed freely through her fingers, the importance of her status decaying more and more with each passing day just like the corpse of Jason, buried in his grave for evermore, no longer able to speak words of comfort to his sister’s ears.
They had all been destined to pass.
And, Cheryl finally sees, finally understands, when it comes to it; to the final judgement. When she is lain, incapacitated before her maker, and the figures in white surround her numb body to pass their verdict. None of those fleeting things shall matter. None of those thoughts shall enter her head.
But that face.
That freckled face at which she is gazing with an adoration beyond reality.
That face would enter her head.
And this feeling. This interest. This keen, all-encompassing desire to like a girl. This girl.
That would matter.
It felt permanent. A part of her. It would not simply pass.
And this girl, this beautiful little warm body of pure quiet contentment that sits before her, encased in her pale arms, and the way Cheryl feels for her, the way her heart skips at the sight of her face in her mind or her fingertips tingle at the smell of old leather or how her skin ripples with excitement at the thought of those lips meeting her own…
…that would not be destined to pass either.
“Everything?”
Cheryl finds herself at the mercy of that sensual voice once again.
“Everything. I want to know it all, TT. I should’ve asked you sooner. I should’ve done something sooner. Instead of being stubborn and foolish.” She pulls her hand from Toni’s jacket to caress it over her hair, “I am so drawn to you. You are perfect to me.”
Toni takes her pale wrist in her hand and presses tender kisses to Cheryl’s knuckles, holding her hand tightly to her face.
Her eyes are affectionate.
Cheryl pulls her closer.
“You are, TT… my heart simply yearns to tell you.”
Cheryl stares at the foot of her bed.
The candle on her night table flickers in a draught and dances shadows across the darkness of the room.
She watches, one pale hand kneading a thumb into a knot on a slim, tanned back, as the light tricks her senses.
Outlines become distorted, disfigurations of familiar objects become sinister fabrications to the eye and shadows create a peculiar artistry before her.
She switches hands, reaching across to continue massaging Toni’s back, and frowns, tilting her head as she examines the wall opposite.
A silk robe is hanging from the door. The naked eye could not see such detail in this darkness, but she knows it to be true because this is her room, and that is where she hangs her robe. But the candle twitches the light once more and, curiously, the line of fabric draping on the door moulds with the coat rack on which it sits; running horizontally behind it.
It looks like a crucifix, she interprets.
A giant, darkened, foreboding cross looming at her from the end of her bed.
She almost wishes to close the door.
You’ll never reach the outside like that.
She blinks, readjusting her eyes.
A small sigh comes from the body next to her and she smiles, scratching her fingers lightly up her back to delve into pink hair, massaging slow circles into the scalp.
“Your hair is absolutely gorgeous.” Cheryl whispers, running her fingers through it to the ends. “So long and wavy and soft.”
Toni’s arm reaches back to grab at her and Cheryl takes the hint, closing the distance between them and enveloping her body from behind.
Toni sighs again.
Cheryl feels the vibration of it through her back and she winds her arm around a toned stomach, resting her chin on her shoulder. She presses a kiss to it softly.
“It was one of the things I first noticed about you in fact.”
One of Toni’s hands reaches up to cover hers.
It’s warm.
“You notice a lot of things about me, huh, Cheryl?”
Cheryl grins at the chuckle that follows these words and turns her head to kiss the skin of Toni’s neck.
“Yes I do. I have an invested interest in all things Toni Topaz. You are my favourite thing to think about.”
“Oh yeah?”
Cheryl detects the coyly guised mirth in the words and pulls Toni’s little body in closer.
“Undoubtedly, TT. Especially in times of sadness. I like to think about what you might be doing. Where you may be going. What you would be thinking about.” She lists her thoughts will ease, resting her face atop of Toni’s comfortably, “…What you’re wearing…What we could be doing together.”
Cheryl smirks at the laugh she manages to garner.
“Oh so you’re really thinking about me, aren’t you?”
Cheryl bites her lip.
“Oh I am, TT. Many a time I’ve looked over at you and wondered… how you’d feel… how you’d kiss… how you taste…” She feels Toni shift in her arms, “…How you moan… how you touch… how you’d beg for more…”
Toni turns in her grasp, twisting the blanket laying upon them in her haste, and pulls Cheryl into a deep kiss.
Cheryl moans, her tongue pressing as tightly to Toni’s as their bodies are to one another and fists Toni’s shirt in her hands.
She is grasping on to something that she doesn’t want to disappear. She knows this. Why it feels so possible, however, she doesn’t know.
She clutches a supple lower lip betwixt her teeth as she pulls away slowly, flicking her eyes up to meet Toni’s gaze and she reaches up to brush the hair from her face.
Her words are as gentle and deliberate as her hands.
“You are so beautiful. You’re truly special, TT. I cannot get you out of my head.”
Instead of answering her, Toni kisses her again, chaste and slow, her fingers drawing airy crosses on Cheryl’s back.
Candlelight is befittingly flattering to Toni’s face.
Cheryl pays astute attention to the features.
The smooth curve of her cheekbone, swooping down into the shadowed valley of her face, the cambered form of her mouth resting plumply next to Cheryl’s, glistening in the soft flame light.
Beautiful.
She presses the pad of her finger to a freckle on Toni’s chin and breathes in.
“I think my mother knows how I feel about you.”
Toni’s hand falters in its aimless sketching across her back.
“How?”
Cheryl licks her lips.
“I think she’s noticed the way I look at you. The way I am around you. How insistent I was that you attend the sleepover here with my Vixen-sisters.”
Cheryl’s panic diminishes her voice to a tense whisper.
“Is this something you should be worried about, Cheryl?”
Cheryl peels her face away from Toni’s to meet their gazes.
There is no panic there, she notes.
She wishes she could rid the fear from her own eyes.
“Yes, TT. You have no idea how wrathful she can be. And after what she did when Heather and I…”
She stops, needing to take a breath as the pain thuds dully at her chest, entreating entrance.
Her head swirls, the light playing tricks on her again as the room seems to dissipate.
She closes her eyes, wishing it away.
“She’ll come around sometime. It won’t be long.”
Cheryl frowns, her eyes snapping open.
“TT…”
Toni blinks, quiet for a moment, her eyes ghosting over the loose hairs surrounding Cheryl’s head. She reaches up a small hand to play with them.
“I mean, are you sure it will be that bad?”
Cheryl can see the attempt at comfort in her face. She can see the effort with which Toni is trying to convince her that she need not be afraid. That face always brings Cheryl comfort.
But Cheryl has a feeling. She knows not why but she has a sensation tickling at the back of her mind like a spider. Something bad is happening. Something bad may even have already happened. And soon she would pay the consequences for her Sapphic indiscretions and this finely woven silken web of comfort will be batted away into nothingness.
“Yes… I have a foreboding presence at my back, TT. Mommy’s not one for showing mercy.”
Toni presses a hand to the side of Cheryl’s face and holds her firmly. She is looking at her with eyes that hold a firm earnestness. She needs her to listen.
“Then, Cheryl, I need you to listen to me.”
Cheryl nods, perturbed by the sudden change in Toni’s demeanour but there is still no panic in her voice or eyes.
Just clarity.
As if she knows that her face, her face is what Cheryl will see, what Cheryl will be thinking about when all the world falls to its knees and that she can channel that focussed devotion of Cheryl’s for the use of something good, something important.
Something she needs to hear.
To fucking do.
Her thumb presses tightly to Cheryl’s cheek and she gazes into her eyes, intentions loud and clear.
No distractions.
“You’ve gotta get out. I mean it. You’ve gotta.”
Cheryl suddenly feels a chill at her skin. She pulls the sleeves of her burgundy cardigan further over her wrists.
Her bed feels lumpy against her body. Why does it feel lumpy?
“You’ve got to wake up, Cheryl. Come on.”
The light of the room grows hazier to her eyes.
It’s so dark in here. The walls feel closer.
“TT… What do you mean?”
“You can’t stay here, Cheryl. What’ll happen to you… You just can’t. Please.”
Cheryl feels her heart begin to thrum in her chest and the sensation turns her stomach.
She moves to press her hands to Toni and pull her in but she feels nothing. She presses harder and still, she feels nothing.
“TT…”
“Wake up, Cheryl.”
“…TT, please, I’m scared.”
“You need to get out.”
Cheryl doesn’t like that the sentiment Toni is imploring of her is beginning to feel correct in some way.
Not in a way that makes sense to her. But the looming fear in her mind clicks into place at the forefront and somehow she knows what Toni is saying is true.
She nods, her mouth tightening dryly.
“But, how, TT? How?”
Toni leans forward to press a kiss to Cheryl’s forehead. Her lips brush the skin with a gradually weakening tangibility as she whispers to her.
“You’ve gotta wake up, Cheryl, and find a way.”
Cheryl lets her heavy eyelids fall closed.
“Dear God…” She murmurs, her limbs fatigued and stiffening, “…I hope there is a way.”
“Wake up, Cheryl.”
When she opens her eyes she is in her room, but not the previously padded sanctuary of her room in Thistlehouse.
This room, however, is still padded. Quite literally.
She casts her bleary eyes past weighted lids and notes the stained white fabric of the wall next to her bed.
Her bed, on which she lay, discomforted and tense like a stool cushion with all the support of a well-worn mattress.
She’s beginning to remember.
The light is dim. She’s used to it.
But her eyes are not playing tricks. She spies the crucifix on the wall opposite the foot of her bed and she wants to weep. She hasn’t the strength to, but she wants to weep.
She’s beginning to understand.
“Finally, Girly. You’re awake.”
Her neck creaks inside her head as she turns towards the voice.
Sister Woodhouse is sat, like a beastly harbinger of hell, crouched on the edge of Cheryl’s bed. Her wizened body offers no warmth to her, despite the closeness of its unwelcome presence.
“We gave you quite the large dose of sedative. Diazepam. Strong stuff. You clearly needed to be subdued after what you’d been up to.” Her aged voice cuts at Cheryl’s delirium like the rusted blade of a saw and she tries desperately to quash the hopeless pit forming in her stomach. There are two other nuns stood behind her, looming at her back like the disembodied wings of Lucifer in their alabaster nursing Habits, determinant looks upon their drawn faces watching her from all angles.
When she is lain, incapacitated before her maker, and the figures in white surround her numb body to pass their verdict…
“We’ve been trying to wake you, child. We knew you’d come around sometime.” Cheryl watches the artificial empathy flicker from Sister’s face and the lines around her mouth tighten to a sneer. “You are insolent even when unconscious, it seems.”
…her face would enter her head.
Cheryl peers down at her arm. She spies a pinprick from a needle in the crook of her elbow, the sleeve of her burgundy cardigan pulled back to collect around her bicep.
She wants to weep.
A complementary juxtaposition to the deep red tone beckons out at her in the form of a blue dress.
The fabric of her collar is white.
“…You’re wearing the dress again..”
She wants to weep.
The Sisters of Quiet Mercy.
She feels tears prick at her eyes but she would rather die than let these Spinsters of Evil see her cry.
She leans her head back against her bare pillow and turns to look away from them.
There are bars on her window. Cold and foreboding and peeling with paint.
She is trapped.
They are there to keep things in.
“Now, Cheryl...”
She turns to meet Sister Woodhouse’s dead eyes as she begins to talk, and a medical cart, laden with chrome syringes, is wheeled out of view with a rhythmic squeaking of wheels and the clatter of metal.
“…we need to do something about your naughty thoughts.”
A night table, upon which a flickering desk lamp is sat, is revealed from behind the cart as it is pulled away.
A bible sits upon it, tattered and stained and lain decrepitly, her only means of stimulation to pass the days in this circle of Hell.
It lays open, she remembers, on the last page she had been reading.
The book of The Song of Solomon.
A certain passage is underlined in pencil, the neatly scrawled motif of, ‘my TT x’ lovingly inscribed beneath.
“We do not deface the Holy Book, Girly. Especially not with the deviant sentiments that you have allowed yourself to become afflicted with. Yes that’s right…”
Cheryl notes the vicious mercilessness of the Sister’s eyes and she swallows aridly.
“…We found your note.”
She holds up a torn piece of diaphanous Bible page, ripped from the Book of Revelations, Cheryl recalls, in her gnarled hands and places it next to Cheryl with a calm precision that belies the anger in her gaze.
“Oh, my Child…”
Cheryl heart sinks.
An errant tear is finally allowed to fall across her pale cheek from the reddened strain of her eyes.
She flinches as Sister Woodhouse wipes it with a cold thumb.
“…you truly are sick. We need to heal you. There is still so much work left to be done.”
Cheryl’s lip begins to tremble and she tries to channel the power of it into her hands, fisting them tightly to the point of whitened knuckles.
Sister Woodhouse makes a hollow sigh, standing from the bed.
“Prayer time is not reserved for that sort of litany.” She motions to the scrap of paper resting next to Cheryl’s wrist.
Cheryl watches her stalk slowly to the door, ushering the others from the room as she removes a large ring of keys.
They jangle a grating minor drone.
“…I shall leave it with you, Cheryl. So that you may have a think about your behaviour. And how you can work towards leaving here. You simply cannot continue the way you are, oh no…”
Her body disappears behind the steel door as she closes it, but her head remains perched around the side, her eyes uncompassionate.
“…You’ll never reach the outside like that.”
Then, she is gone. The door echoes to a deafening closure of finality and Cheryl is left, despairing and inconsolable.
She turns on her bare mattress, to rest on her side, her joints aching in tandem with her heart, and brings her limbs into her body; foetal.
Peering down at the prayerful note, written by her hand, she traces the faintly written words of a sheer sincerity that was not destined to pass, with her eyes and finally allows a sob to sound.
‘Dear God, I hope there is a way…
…My heart simply yearns to tell her…
…I like her. I like her so very much…
I pray she likes me too...’