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i.
stephanie lauter is thirteen years old when her mother goes missing. she's nearly eighteen when she figures out why.
(her parents go for a drive three months before the next election. when she wakes up the next morning, only her father sits at the kitchen table. it isn't until wiggog utters the words “what you cherish most” that it falls into place.)
hatchetfield holds its secrets close like briers; barbed vines that pierce when you get too close. steph learned young there's no use in looking, anyway.
(her hands, stained with blood of her father's own. regret. don't look back.)
ii.
steph has never known how to feel about max, really.
never quite friends but something worse, something deeper; two fucked up kids with fucked up dads and fucked up grades, moms gone too soon. no, they weren't friends, but max would still watch her back at parties and in the hallways with a misguided sense of duty. it was whatever, until it wasn't.
senior year is different. he is so cruel now. and yeah, she can be too, but this–
(pete doesn't deserve this, she thinks. no one does. not now, not anymore, not ever. things will change.)
iii.
now pete… well, that's a different story entirely, isn't it?
they meet for the first time in first grade, just like he says; cubby buddies for the year, because ms. swift has no care for the social divisions of six year olds. lab partners sophomore year, just after pete starts to transition and steph has spent a whole year crying for a mother long gone.
so yeah, they may not talk much, they may not be friends. but there's history there– at least, more than she shares with half of their graduating class –and that has to mean something.
doesn’t it?
iv.
there's few people steph feels as conflicted about as grace chastity.
(her father, for one. max jagerman, for another. but those are both stories for another time, and not one for when they're washing literal blood off of their hands.)
there's never been much common ground for the two of them; while grace spent her saturday nights on bible study, steph spent hers making out with girls at parties. steph finds her prudish, rude, and overzealous, and this night has not changed that view.
still, burying a body is a blood pact, of sorts. that has to mean something, right?
v.
and then there's ruth and richie.
(there's a moment– just a brief one, that first time after pete stands her up –that she really thinks they could destroy her down to the bone if she lets harm come pete’s way even one more time. they never get the chance.)
ruth is desperate and richie is cutting. richie is attentive and ruth is efficient. richie is dead, and ruth is too.
in another world, she thinks they would have been great friends, the kind that can only come with secrets like the ones they shared. they never got the chance.
vi.
the vines of fate twist. max yells, max leaves pete bruised in an alleyway, max falls.
steph’s arm twitches at her side as the world turns to slow motion; all she wants to do is reach but she'll never get there in time. when they get to the basement, it's already too late.
she's too busy trying to find a way to save him that he dies before her eyes.
(blood on her hands, like father, like daughter. she scrubs and scrubs and scrubs but it’s no use. her hands will stay stained for the rest of her sorry life.)
vii.
if there’s one thing that’s for sure, steph really needs to stop listening to grace chastity.
(she doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry as grace bursts into the coffee shop, another doomed plan on her lips. that’s enough to make her shake with rage, but the way pete stiffens at her casual reveal of ruth’s demise is enough to let her nails pierce her palm.)
burying max was a bad idea. letting grace fucking chastity speak to the cops on her own was an even worse one. watching her wield a gun? worst of all.
no more. time's up.
viii.
her father dies. she doesn't have it in her to regret it.
solomon lauter was a hard, cold man. she thinks he probably loved her, once, but he loved her mother, and look where that got her. so she stands there– feet on the forest floor, dirt beneath her fingernails, ire curdling on her tongue –and lets him go.
(if he taught her anything, it's this: make up your mind, cover your tracks, don't turn back. so she doesn't.)
they have the book now, and half a chance of getting to an altar before max can stop them.
time to end this.
ix.
the chants are louder than her heart beating in her ears.
(what do you want steph what do you want steph what do you–)
it feels like a mistake. granted, listening to her father often was.
(–you gamble it all on the roll of the dice–)
she is desperate, now, more desperate than she's been in a while– though, not enough to miss the glint in grace’s eye.
(–the thing you cherish most–)
the phone’s a half-hearted attempt.
(–pay the price–)
there's a gun in her pocket.
(–or FUCK OFF!)
the conclusion is inevitable, but that doesn't make it any easier.
x.
(there’s a moment when everything freezes.
the regret is palpable the moment the bullet leaves the chamber. it stings as her heart beats down to her fingertips, pulsates in her veins like an infection curdling her marrow. in this moment, a million possibilities coalesce into one; a thousand choices distill into the one she’s made and there’s no going back.
it’s hard to be a normal teenager in a place like hatchetfield any day but especially– well, it’s a kick in the face to have to shoot this boy she thinks she could(‘ve) love(d), to say the least.)
xi.
it doesn’t work. by some fucking miracle, it doesn't work.
(steph doesn’t know what she would have done if it had, how she would have lived with herself. it’s a bittersweet kind of blessing that she’ll never have to find out.)
the scrapes she gets from max throwing her to the ground, she won’t notice until the morning. right now it’s just pete’s pained breathing and her life flashing before her eyes.
and then it ends, for real this time.
(let grace chastity save the world, she thinks. she’s had enough misguided heroics for a lifetime, turns out.)
xii.
stephanie lauter is seventeen when her father dies. she’s eighteen when she learns how to be alive.
that’s not to say things are perfect– she’s irrevocably traumatized, for one, and grace still has that damn book. but, despite everything, she might just make it through senior year.
she doesn’t miss her father as much as she should. she tries to live with that.
(and if she scrubs her hands raw for nonexistent blood, that's hers alone.)
hatchetfield still has its claws in her. whether she'll ever escape, time will only tell. and if there's one thing she has these days, it's that.