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Winter is brutal.
The goat's baby dies out in the snow, and Maude Ivory cries over it for a week. It was Covey , her young cousin insists upon the discovery of Lucy Gray's own apathy, It was one of us!
Maude Ivory can damn well believe anything she wants to. A baby goat is the least of their problems.
Lumber is hard to come by, harder even to keep lit and dry.
Carts wheel into The Seam with wood pilled higher than tarps can cover and straight into the Peacekeeper's base. Lucy Gray, hidden from sight with a shawl thrown over her shoulders, burns .
Billy Taupe had gone out that weekend to the market and came home with an armful of books, and Lucy Gray has to step out into the snow lest she strangle the stupid boy. For the kids , he reasons in the face of her ire, they can't read no more, sis. They need to remember. It goes unsaid that they need to be literate to get out of Twelve - at least, in Billy Taupe's eyes.
Lucy Gray has no idea how he's the same age as she is and is still so fucking stupid.
Nobody makes it out of Twelve. She uses his books - books he'd bought with her money, so really, they're her books - as kindling. After a beer or two, he doesn't seem to care either.
Maude Ivory doesn't understand the value of a coin - not yet, at least. Maybe Lucy Gray had been too lenient raising her baby cousin, she thinks, when Maude Ivory prances back from the market with a new woolen shawl over her shoulders. No wonder the coin for grains had been off.
Rage throttles her with every meaningless purchase her family makes. But the snow falling outside the house is calm, gentle, yet brutal in a way she longs to be.
Stepping out becomes a normal thing.
Maude Ivory strikes a stale note on her fiddle, and Lucy Gray is at the door, making her excuses. Fresh air, is the quickest that comes to her lips, be back in a few. The smell of stale alcohol on Billy Taupe's breath, perfume on his collar, lipstick on his neck and her bare feet are in the snow.
Don't get her wrong, it's damn cold. But snow is cold like an ice bath, refreshing like a dunk in the stream, and Lucy Gray begins to crave it.
It's not the first time. It was never going to be the last time.
The snow melts, as it tends to. Lucy Gray wishes she could bottle the very season, frostbite and icicles and all. The first spring shower sees Maude Ivory dancing in the rain, cheering happily as it washes away the last slushes of snow.
She slips and scrapes her knee raw, comes back to the porch crying. Her tears are washed away by the rain. For the rest of the rainy season, she stays inside and presses her cheeks to the windows, enjoying the weather even though it hurt her.
Lucy Gray starts budgeting in Maude Ivory's sly fingers. A few coins here, a ten pence there, a new pair of socks everywhere.
Too lenient , her mind screams at her, every time she sets some money aside. Three apples, it counts, four peaches. Two if harvest is bad. She sweats a little harder, sings a little louder, strums a little longer to make up for it.
Maude Ivory buys Lucy Gray a pretty guitar strap with Lucy Gray's own money for her sixteenth birthday. She smiles, all teeth, and grits herself to thank her little cousin. She leans down to kiss her chubby little cheek and thinks of greed, of her own gauntness, and burns .
Lucy Gray hadn't planned for Billy Taupe to take her to bed. Hadn't penciled into her budget flowers and pretty pins and the boy's deepening vices.
He doesn't give a damn. He takes her money and buys her presents with it, returns it in a flowers that will wilt within the week and bows that fray after the first wear. She doesn't ask for anything in return, but he gives it to her - lips to her neck in a semblance of thanks, an apology to sate the guilt that he feels when he keeps taking more.
Spring turns to summer and she trades out her pretty waves for braids and haphazard clips.
Billy Taupe would be nice enough to settle down with if he wasn't a fucking snake .
And usually she doesn't mind the animals - pretty like her, with teeth to match. Lucy Gray gets it, when somebody steps on them and they rear up to bite the shit out of their ankles. She wants to do the same when she's walked all over.
Billy Taupe is the worst type of snake. The proverbial kind, the kind that lives under little girls' beds.
Maude Ivory comes to her crying. It's not the first time, and Lucy Gray is quick to check her over, What's wrong, Sugarplum?
She babbles on for a moment, about someone having too much to drink and really, it ain't his fault, but I was just so scared and Barb Azure threatened him and he ain't deserve that.
Lucy Gray stops listening to Maude Ivory and instead listens to her consciousness - an overwhelming icy anger, a fury so deep it chills her bones. The things she thinks of doing, curling her fist in her young cousin's dress and dragging her further into Lucy Gray's shoulder, would terrify the girl.
It doesn't terrify Lucy Gray, not by any means. She itches to get her hands on Billy Taupe, to shove her fist down his throat and tug his tonsils out between her fingers and cut his hands off to feed them to him.
It's alright, songbird, shhh, she hushes, weaving her fingers through Maude Ivory's straw hair, it's alright to cry. Big sister's gonna take care of it, don't you worry.
And take care of it, she does.
They're all alone out here.
Lucy Gray had promised him something vague, and she knows what he'll think - she'll have promised him sex, a good time to take his mind off things, something he thinks he deserves .
Under the willow is her favorite little spot, and it only hurts a little to show him this part of her. The grass, too, is upset by him, just as she is. It curls around his ankles, teasing a trip, but it's not time, not yet.
Pretty day , he chatters, and she presses her eyes shut so hard that she sees stars.
He doesn't bother with any more small talk when she doesn't answer, and his fingers find the hem of her blouse to tug it out of her skirt.
She sinks her mental fingers into familiar greens and pulls .
With a twist of her fingers, a vine creeps up her foot, creeps up Billy Taupe's throat and squeezes . His eyes bug out and he makes to claw at the ropes but she slams her foot into the middle of his chest and he wheezes , more of a death rattle than a plead.
He falls back onto the rock she likes to perch on, a sickening crack echoing around the shade of the willow.
Lucy Gray leans over him, poking at his cheek. Billy Taupe's eyes don't flutter, his hands don't twitch.
He'll know what it's like to be forgotten, out here. Picked at by animals like he had picked at her, taken advantage of by the elements like he had taken advantage of her little cousin.
Good. It's all that he deserves.
Cattle carts smell worse than Lucy Gray ever imagined.
Bats lunge at them and Jessup covers her with his thick, bakers-money jacket. She loathes the notion but takes it anyway - this boy'll kill her, one way or another. She just has to get to him first.
Lucy Gray lets him get bit, lets him get picked off by the vermin til he's flushed and sweating. It ain't her problem.
Jessup still helps her off the cattle cart, ever the gentleman. It doesn't make her less determined to kill him, but it's certainly sweet.
The wind shifts just so, and Lucy Gray catches the scent of him. Dirt, roses, hunger .
Turning on her heel, she catches sight of him - harsh lines, soft curls, white rose.
She knows she has to have him.