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Ginger was thirteen when Trina Sinclair kissed her.
The Fitzgerald sisters had not expected to be invited to be invited to Trina Sinclair’s birthday party. Naturally, Trina was plotting something at their expense, but their mom insisted that they go because she didn’t like how isolated or antisocial or whatever they were, and so the sisters resolved to use the opportunity to try and fuck Trina up first.
The two hung together, skulking in odd corners of the Sinclair residence, because they knew division meant destruction. Division meant getting cornered with no one to have your back, and Ginger wasn’t going to let anyone touch her sister. They kept watch on Trina Sinclair, never letting her out of their sight, following her when she left the throng with some scheme to shut her up in a crate in the garage like that bride who had gotten herself trapped in a chest while playing hide and seek on her wedding day and only been found years later, a skeleton in yellowed bridal array. It was one of those ghoulish stories Brigitte read in a book once. Of course, they’d let Trina out eventually. Probably.
Ginger expected an attack, expected a shove or a kick or maybe Trina locking them in the garage herself so that she could gloat all about the party they missed the next day at school. What Ginger did not expect was for Trina to kiss her, for Trina Sinclair’s lips to be pressed against hers, and for her to be kissing back because Trina’s lips were so soft, because the kiss sent something electrifying through her body, (because she would never have a chance to kiss B like this – she hadn’t thought that, she hadn’t thought that), because all the feelings, roiling and repressed, inside her body, were coursing through her in this moment like lightning through a corpse –
A scream. “Get off me!”
As if in slow-motion, Ginger processed Trina tearing away from her, processed the mortified anguish on B’s face that hardened into anger, processed her peers pouring in around her at the sound of the scream, but nothing seemed real until she heard Trina’s voice, high and shrill, cry out:
“This dyke’s trying to force herself on me!”
Oh, you fucking bitch.
Ginger felt white-hot rage, but it paralyzed her. It was B who was forced to act, forced to make a decision instinctively for both their sakes and get them out of there. Ginger felt Brigitte’s hand in hers – her hand was softer than Trina’s lips – felt her pulling her, dragging her through the crowd, eyes flashing at any scumbag who came near, until they were out, out, out, out of the house, in the street, through the door, down the stairs, safe. Safe.
The dappled shadows and dim candlelight of their basement bedroom offered solace, memories and morbidity scattered upon the walls – suicide pictures, suicide notes, scrawled snatches of poetry, horror movie posters, polaroids of the two of them together – hugging, smiling, Ginger lolling her head lazily against Brigitte’s shoulder with a gash in her neck, Brigitte failing not to laugh (it ruined the grisliness of the scene, admittedly, but they’d kept it anyway, because B’s smile was so cute), one from B’s Frankenstein phase a while back – she made a wonderful Creature, dark hair cascading around sallow skin in a truly Gothic, truly Romantic fashion (it broke Ginger’s heart when she learned that the Bride had never been animated in Shelley – not because she wanted to play the Bride alongside B’s Creature, she didn’t, she didn’t, why would you fucking think that? Sicko – but because I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me would have been “so us, B.”), the picture they had finally taken together in B’s Frankenstein getup – the death of Elizabeth, gloriously, gruesomely staged, with Ginger a bride after all, covered in blood, B’s hands around her throat (she hadn’t trembled in anticipation when B crawled on top of her, when B’s fingers touched her skin, she hadn’t, she hadn’t, she fucking hadn’t…)
Ginger threw herself onto her bed and screamed into her pillow. “I am going to murder her!”
Brigitte hung back, watching her intently, letting her have this moment to herself.
“I am going to cut her throat so she chokes on her own blood, then douse her in gasoline and set her on fucking fire!” Her eyes were raw and red with tears. “And after she’s good and burned,” she mused, her voice steadying darkly, “I might keep her blackened heart as a trophy. Warn anybody else who wants to mess with me.”
Brigitte placed a hand upon her shoulder. Ginger flinched, but said, “No. Stay,” when B recoiled. Brigitte stayed. Her hand was soft, comforting.
They stayed that way a long time.
“Ginge?”
“Mhm?”
“Are you a lesbian?”
Ginger’s whole body shuddered. She wheeled around, screaming once more, voice almost inhuman, “I’m not a fucking dyke!”
Maybe she was. She didn’t know what she fucking was. Maybe Bailey Downs had… blighted her… somehow – a world without light, without air, where nothing grew or else grew wrong – stunted, rotting inward – unable to break the surface – able to break the surface but in the wrong way – for nothing blossomed here, it only festered until it died… or lived, a perversion of itself. Attraction to girls buried deep, deeper than the reach of light – until the tendrils spidered out to touch the only girl close to her – until that attraction found an outlet but found it wrong – channeled to the wrong person – because that wrong person was the only one she could hold.
Maybe she didn’t want B, the way she had already begun to lie to herself that she didn’t. Trina’s lips had been soft enough, but Trina was untouchable, Trina touched your lips and breathed the rot of the world into you. Maybe she wanted Trina, wanted… someone… who wasn’t wrong, but she had no power over them, the way she had power over Brigitte.
Maybe the only good thing in her life was born of a desperation for power – power over Brigitte, power over herself, power over the suffocation of Bailey fucking Downs. But it didn’t feel like power. It felt like want.
Maybe she didn’t want B, but she did. She did so much it hurt.
“I don’t mind if you are, you know?” Brigitte murmured. “‘Together forever,’ remember? ‘United against life as we know it?’”
Ginger sighed and rolled over on the bed, eyes clamped shut, trying to ignore her, trying to regain some sense of affected composure, some sense of what she was an hour ago when this wasn’t fucking happening this wasn’t fucking happening this wasn’t fucking happening. Trying to shut out the world.
Try as she might, she still heard Brigitte rummaging behind her, heard rustling, and then heard her sister’s voice, soft and soberly defiant:
“Which of the gods will dare to be your judge, Lesbos,
And condemn your brow, grown pallid from your labors,
If his golden scales have not weighed the flood
Of tears your streams have poured into the sea?
Which of the gods will dare to be your judge, Lesbos?”
Ginger opened her eyes, not expecting the dark lilt of the verse. It gave her pause, and so she faced B once more, but she did not like not having mastery over herself, did not like even her sister – especially her sister – to come rapping at the walls she had erected around herself. So, the grateful softness in her eyes gave way to bemused contempt, an opportunity – any opportunity – to regain control.
“You’re the one keeping fucking dyke poetry,” Ginger scoffed, “and I’m the dyke?”
“It’s not…” Brigitte faltered, looking down at her shoes. “It’s Baudelaire, for the collage we did…”
Brigitte had always been the bookworm of the two of them. Ginger relaxed, remembering the scattered volumes of Baudelaire. Brigitte had found as many different translations as she could and picked out her favorite excerpts – all about ennui, none about dykes (at least that she shared with Ginger), but Ginger had perused the volumes looking for passages as well… and her eyes had settled on certain ones…
“Highlighted certain lines that didn’t make it into the collage, though, didn’t you?” Ginger said with a smirk. Brigitte rolled her eyes. The bemusement still lingered about Ginger, but it was affectionate now, and the two sisters were falling into a rapport.
Encouraged, Brigitte continued:
“What are to us the laws of the just and unjust
Virgins with sublime hearts, honor of these islands;
Your religion, like any other, is august,
And love will laugh at Heaven and at Hell!
What are to us the laws of the just and unjust?”
The stillness of the moment. The gentle glow of the candles…
Ginger reached out to Brigitte’s face and kissed her, pulled her close and held her tight and kissed her – and it didn’t matter, didn’t matter that Brigitte was convulsing, trying to break free of her grip, that her whole face was writhing with resistance, that she bit her lips, bit her tongue as Ginger tried to force it through her teeth – Ginger kissed hungrily, greedily, savoring the choking taste of blood if, intermingled, she could just taste what she had been wanting, what she had been needing…
The stillness of the moment. Ginger did nothing.
They were all such pretty words until Ginger tried to make a new law for the two of them. What are the laws of men to us, indeed, B? Love may laugh alike at Heaven and Hell, but Brigitte would not be laughing, would be screaming, the one good thing in her life mutilated in image of her…
Ginger knew she was so fucked-up that even the broken and the damned despised her, even the ones indifferent to Heaven and Hell…
She sank onto the bed, crying again – hating to cry, because to cry was to be vulnerable, vulnerable before Brigitte, and any vulnerability could betray her.
She felt Brigitte lie down beside her, scooping her into her arms – a sister’s solace that Ginger shuddered to savor, for she corrupted it in thought – but she let it happen, let Brigitte rest against her, trying to offer what comfort she could for a pain whose root Ginger could never let her know.
When they had been making that collage together, Ginger had read one stanza from Brigitte’s books over and over again, to the point where she grew to dread the possibility of a crease in the binding, a betrayal of an oft-opened page. She had read it so often that it was on her memory like a brand, burning there as she felt Brigitte’s breath against her ear…
Do not look at me thus, sister to whom
By choice I pledged eternal adoration,
Even were you a snare set for my doom
And the first instrument of my damnation.