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Chapter Text

Sasha was pretty sure she’d throw up if she had to finish this assignment.

Apparently, Sasha had just found her way home from a “spontaneous camping trip gone wrong” that she and her friends took on Anne’s 13th birthday. That was the story anyway, and frankly, it was dumb as hell, but it’s not like anyone would believe the real story, so Sasha just smiled and nodded while the policeman told her everything about what she had gone through. That meant when she returned, she had six months’ worth of make-up work to do if she ever wanted to graduate middle school. Of course, because the universe hates her, that meant the first assignment on that list was that fucking frog dissection she and Anne had regrettably decided to skip the day of Anne’s party.

Six months of radio silence and then the sudden appearance of two dirty, ragged, partially traumatized middle school girls on a random highway in LA apparently did not warrant any kind of permanent exemption from schoolwork.

Sasha absently twirled her pink glitter pen around her finger, trying to avoid the untouched Biology work on her desk. She’d never really been the academic type, but she still managed a B most of the time without trying too hard. Still, as she stared at the empty page, nothing came to mind.

The only consolation from this assignment is that the dead frog kinda looked like Hop Pop, which first made Sasha laugh so hard she thought she broke a blood vessel, but then she realized how hard Anne was probably taking all this–this was an assignment they both missed, after all–and she shut her mouth. It can’t be a good feeling to look at everything you missed and left behind bolted into a piece of wet cardboard, lifeless and small and undeniably dead. Distantly, Sasha was grateful Grime was a toad and not a frog.

Undeniably dead. Sasha pushed the thought to the back of her mind. Her gel pen felt heavy, scribbling words on the biology worksheet that Sasha didn’t care enough to fully read. There’s no way they’d judge her for not being totally academically back yet, right? She’d been missing for six months! And this was middle school anyway. Nothing mattered. To the chagrin of her teammates, she’d been able to push off cheerleading practice for a month, citing the mysterious back injury she’d had when she returned–courtesy of King Andrias slamming her against a wall–but Sasha knew she couldn’t avoid it forever.

There were truths like that which she knew but couldn’t bring herself to say.

People asked and asked, poked and prodded–Jesus, nobody ever stopped asking questions –and Sasha said things sometimes, but just like during the police interrogation, Sasha had this wall between her body and her mind.

Her story didn’t match up (probably because it wasn’t hers to begin with, it was the stupid police chief’s), her injuries couldn’t all be explained (how the hell did she get a type of bacterial infection that was usually only restricted to toads?), and most of all–(in Sasha’s mind at least)–, there was still no concrete explanation for where she could’ve gone. She couldn’t believe the camping story was so easily accepted, as if Anne Boonchuy the family girl who begged to go home to mommy and daddy in time for her stupid party would just skip it all to go fucking camping with a girl who hates bugs and another who–

Sasha had no idea how she’d never realized before that all the adults in LA were really stupid. Actually, pretty much everyone was really stupid. Did nobody ever think about it for more than two minutes?

I mean, she wasn’t expecting everybody to come to the conclusion that she’d been magically transported to frog hell, somehow survived for six months, and again been miraculously teleported back, but Jesus, was it that hard to believe their disappearance wasn’t intentional?? All of them had people to go back to, lives to live, and everyone (even Boonchuy’s parents) just believed it was a couple of dumb teenagers who decided to go on some dumb trip on a whim and got lost in the woods for a while but oh, it’s okay because they’re back now. And something was glaringly, obviously missing, but nobody seemed to point it out, and it made Sasha’s head hurt so much she didn’t know how to deal with it, so she didn’t, she just ignored it like everybody else. And tried to forget.

God, Hop Pop’s face was going to make her vomit.

-

Monday morning rolled around again, and Sasha stared at her painted white ceiling with no real focus, ignoring the alarm that blasted incessantly in her ears. She had a talent for tuning things out these days, and she wasn’t sure what exactly to do with this new power of hers except tune things out.

She unwillingly pulled herself up, her pink comforter scrunching at her waist and her pajamas feeling too comfortable to change out of. She half-wanted to beg her mother to stay home again, but knew with another absence her coach would send an irritating, faux-concerned email about her “worrying absences that could regrettably jeopardize her place on the cheer team,” and that was more exhausting than going to school another day. So she put on her Saint James Middle School uniform with gritted teeth, brushed her hair (ignoring the photo on her nightstand), ate pre-prepared breakfast in a quiet house, and caught the bus.

By the time she arrived at school, she had already exhausted a quarter of her energy (didn’t she run out of energy awfully quickly these days?) by talking to seatmates about things she couldn’t remember by the time she stepped off the bus. Wasn’t she supposed to be an extrovert? Sasha felt a lot of things had changed about her recently, felt this weird writhing mass of something in her core, strange and unfamiliar.

Actually, there was something strange and unfamiliar walking the halls-- a stranger to Saint James Middle School since the disappearance.

-

Anne Boonchuy had never been a very remarkable person. Sasha wasn’t trying to be mean this time–it was just true, and everybody knew it. Anne and Sasha had established their dynamic years ago; Sasha always took charge.

She knew Anne better than anyone. Anne needed someone to lead her, to push her into decisions she was too pensive and forceless to make, and sure, sometimes it ended… unfavorably, but it was never really Sasha’s fault, right? She never got in trouble for any of it– Anne always took the fall, that was just how it was. Sasha was objectively stronger, and Anne needed Sasha to push her just as much as Sasha needed to take control. That was what she always believed.

So why were the past months so…confusing? 

The fight Sasha and Anne had on Toad Tower cycled in her mind more than she’d like to admit. The conversation they’d had in the throne room replayed like a broken record, sneaking its way into her head. So did the way Anne looked at her when they fought on top of the city wall, the way she…looked at her like she’d never trust her again.

It twisted something in Sasha’s stomach. Slimy and rotten, squirming and writhing like too many tadpoles in a bucket too small. Sometimes, in the dead of night, she lied awake in her bedroom, like those shivering nights in her cell when she first got to Amphibia except instead of burning plots of world domination, there was just Sasha Waybright and this pit in her stomach that didn’t go away.

Whatever. The point was that Anne was super weird now, she’d been walking around with this crazy weird aura and it pissed Sasha off. And surprisingly, it wasn’t that teal aura that turned her hair blue and made her look like an anime character, which Sasha was still unsure if she had hallucinated.

Anne didn’t talk to her like she knew her anymore.

She probably should’ve noticed it when they were taken to the police station together. Anne sat through the whole car ride in silence with her head turned toward the window, staring out with glassy eyes, while Sasha ranted and raved to the police officer. They’d just been through a (literally) wild six-month-long experience, one where Sasha hadn’t exactly always done the right thing, so Sasha didn’t think much of it. And their friend was—

Sasha wasn’t dumb enough to not realize how much the Plantars meant to Anne, she literally chose them over her, and now there was no certainty she could ever see them again. Duh, she’d be upset.

Since then, Anne was probably busy making up for lost time with her parents, who clearly hadn’t stopped thinking about her since she disappeared, so it was understandable she sent clipped responses to Sasha’s messages. They’d probably go back to normal soon enough. But then there was Biology class.

They went back to school, they still sat next to each other in their assigned seats, still had maybe the facade of friendship. But plainly, there was a gap that wasn’t there before Amphibia, a fucking cliff that Sasha didn’t realize would be so damn uncomfortable. It was like the dinner party, like their reunion at the Third Temple, except this time Sasha didn’t have some conniving plot to follow so it was somehow even more awkward because the blonde had no idea what she was supposed to do because this time Anne wasn’t even pretending to get along with her. Fuck, she might as well just switch seats at this point because one more class with Anne ignoring her would–

An arm wrapped around her shoulder, jolting Sasha from her thoughts.

“You need to watch where you’re walking,” chastised a voice from behind.

Oh.

Sasha didn’t even realize she almost just rammed straight into the closed classroom door.

“Thanks, Hallie,” she said sheepishly.

God, if you're listening, please kill me.

“You’re lucky I was here. You might’ve died.”

Sasha turned to face her.

Hallie had a lopsided grin that exposed her bright pink braces. Her long brown hair was tied back in a ponytail today, like Sasha’s, but a few wispy hairs stuck out to frame her sleepy eyes.

Hallie Davidson was one of those people Sasha wasn’t sure gave a shit about anything. She showed up late, left early. She wore her school uniform a size or two too big, hanging off her loosely like she was wearing pajamas. Her socks were mismatched in color and length; one was pulled up to her knee and the other pooled down near her ankle. Honestly, Sasha had no idea how Hallie was even allowed to stay in their private school for the abomination of her uniform alone, never mind how Sasha had never seen Hallie do anything resembling schoolwork.

Despite this, she was quite a popular girl. Hallie was on Sasha’s cheer team, after all, but she wouldn’t say they were friends. Hallie probably thought they were, like most people who thought they were friends with Sasha, but Sasha didn’t care one way or the other.

Which begs the question…

Why was she here? Sasha raised her eyebrow.

“Hallie, what are you even doing here? Your first class is on the other side of the school.”

Her brown eyes twinkled. “Awww, you remember,” she giggled before pushing out a sigh. “Sasha, I’m so boreeeedd…” she groaned, dragging out the last syllable of the word.

Oh, great. Sasha frowned. “I don’t really know what to do about that.”

“Ouch,” she feigned, her lips pouting, but changed the subject. “You’re coming to cheerleading practice today?”

“No.”

“You know Coach Marly is gonna kick your ass.”

Sasha grimaced. “I know.”

She saw a head of curly brown hair in the distance. Hallie opened her mouth and Sasha knew she was still talking, but suddenly she couldn’t hear a word anymore. Why did her first period have to be Biology? It ruined her day before it even had a chance to begin. She saw the teacher approaching, keys in hand. Fuck my life, here we go.

“...wanted to say I’m here,” Sasha barely caught the tail end of whatever Hallie was telling her.

“Thanks,” she said absently. Part of her hoped Hallie didn’t notice, but another part really couldn’t care less.

Her stomach growled, despite the fact she ate breakfast.

Sasha gave a half-hearted wave. Hallie can find somebody else to bother, because Sasha literally can’t be bothered to deal with her right now, not when Anne was about to walk in.

-

Sasha sat nonchalantly in her assigned seat–- or at least she hoped she looked nonchalant–- trying to ignore her heart beating in her ears. Her knee bobbed up and down under the table. And–

There she was.

Pretty brown curls that looked lonely without the characteristic leaves and twigs that practically became part of her character design in Amphibia. Stainless yellow converse. Clean white socks. Sasha’s heart skipped a few beats. She covered her face with her sleeve uselessly, as though she could just pretend to be invisible, but Anne saw her anyway. It was obvious with the way Anne’s shoulders bristled, her face scrunching up, though she tried to hide it.

Fuck.

The first day of class, Sasha made the mistake of greeting her with an enthusiastic “Hey, girlfriend!” like she would’ve before everything happened, but Anne physically recoiled, her eyes wide. Like ooookayyy I kinda forgot you hated me. God, that was mortifying. She never said anything to her after that. It made her too guilty. Why did Sasha think anything changed after she betrayed her for a second time?? “I’m done trusting you,” is what Anne had tearfully lashed out at her, and Sasha tried to pretend like everything was fine? What an idiot. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

So, Sasha didn’t say anything, hoping if she made herself small enough in her seat Anne would forget she existed at all. She deserved it. Her stomach ached, but she bit and swallowed the feeling.

Anne seemed like she was trying the same thing, her shoulders hunched over in her chair.

This sucks ass. It would’ve been better if we never met at all, Sasha thought glumly. Maybe if she never met me at all.

Thankfully, the teacher seemed to be coming toward them with some kind of purpose and papers in his hand, so Sasha’s torment would be over soon enough, and she could just focus on whatever make-up Biology bullshit he wanted her to do.

“Sasha, Anne, do you guys have your anatomy labs?”

“Right here, teach,” Sasha said, grateful she had ended up writing shit down on that frog thing, even if that frog did look disturbingly like Hop Pop.

Anne looked sheepish for some reason. 

“Um, sir. I think I was absent last class. Could I have that paper?”

He nodded. Sasha felt sorry for her, as Mr. Whogivesafuck had ambushed her last week with a stack of make-up papers. Most of which were still sitting untouched in her room.

“Sure,” he said. “And Sasha, if it’s possible, could you have some of those missing assignments in by next week?”

She grinned, her voice dripping with charm. “Absolutely.”

There’s no way I’m doing those, buddy, but hopefully I can get away with this if I just smile.

He raised his eyebrow. “Okay. Anne, we can talk after class about what you missed.” He walked away.

So Sasha locked in on her work, annotating and going at a pretty good pace–

Anne stiffened abruptly. The air suddenly had an edge to it. What was wrong now?

Sasha peeked at her through the corner of her vision, seeing a glimmer of wetness in her eyes–

What?

Anne stood up so fast and so violently Sasha didn’t even have time to blink. Her shoulders were heaving, and Sasha was pretty sure Anne’s hands were shaking. Her chair made a clack sound as it hit the floor, drawing attention from their classmates. What the fuck–

Suddenly, it all hit Sasha like a bat to the head.

There was a dead fucking frog on Anne’s paper that looked like her found-family grandfather oh my god–

Oh god and now Anne was crying. In the middle of Biology. God fucking–- 

Anne beelined for the door, her pushed-over chair abandoned on the linoleum. Sasha looked around helplessly, panic rising in her chest.

I’m the only one who knows what’s going on.

Why is everything shit.

She made eye contact with the teacher. His eyes widened, his gaze following Anne to the door. 

Then, he met Sasha’s desperate eyes again.

He gave an almost imperceptible nod.

She got up and raced after Anne as the only other girl in the world who understood.

-

Anne didn’t understand anything anymore. Everything was bubbling up and exploding into a million pieces all the time and she couldn’t escape any of it. Frogs, rain, bugs, dirt, anything and everything reminded her of Amphibia, and that just reminded her of everything she lost, everything she left behind. Her eyes were too blurry to see through, but she didn’t care where she was going anyway. She stumbled past corridors, through hallways and classrooms full of kids who had no idea of other worlds or missing friends or missing… well, everything.

She missed a lot of things. She never thought she would, but she missed eating bugs and waking up with soggy socks and getting soaked in mud with Sprig and waking up every morning in that dingy basement and eating breakfast with Polly and Sprig and Hop Pop. She missed it so much that it ached like a physical wound. And she knew it was irrational, but that frog just… looked so much like Hop Pop. As if that was even possible. And as much as it made her sick to see something like that it made everything come up again. And Sasha was there, and that just reminded her of--

She tripped on her shoelaces, smacking her face down on the pavement. Sharp pain hammered in her surroundings. She didn’t remember running out of the school, but now the world was brighter, and she could see the parking lot. Her eyes stung. She was shaking, her shoulders wracking with tremors she couldn’t stop. She wanted to be strong, but sometimes she couldn’t stop herself from falling apart.

She thought about her parents. Seeing her parents again two months prior would’ve made her cry from joy, but when she met them at the police station a month ago after falling through a portal, it just felt… wrong.

She knew she was supposed to be meeting them with someone else by her side, the people (frog people?) she’d really spent the six months with. And someone else that wasn’t a frog person that for some reason nobody ever acknowledged was there to begin with-–

She felt a hand on her shoulder and flinched, whipping around.

Familiar cerulean eyes stared into hers.

A pink scar firmly sliced on her cheekbone, healed and faded but still clearly visible and permanent. A beauty mark under her eye.

“S-Sasha,” Anne stammered out, her voice shaky and hitching with the word.

“Hi,” Sasha replied.

-

“Hi,” Sasha said, dumbly. 

Weird that this is the first time they’ve spoken reciprocally since the night at Andrias’ castle. Sasha had thought this moment would be a lot more cathartic than it actually was. Anne finally acknowledged her, great.

But, now what the hell was she supposed to do?

Hey, I know your surrogate frog family was super important to you–-sorry for trying to kill them multiple times by the way–- um sorry you had to see…something that reminded you of it? And sorry I’m still trying to talk to you?

Sasha wanted to die. She swallowed even though her mouth was dry.

Ironically enough, Anne was always better at this than she was, even though Sasha was supposed to be the most socially apt out of the group. Sasha would never admit this, but at the end of the day, she wasn’t really all that socially conscious; she was just good at making people do what she wanted.

She remembered back before Amphibia when Anne was crying over some fucker that said something nasty to her. Sasha didn’t remember his name. They were just about to be late to a movie, so Sasha sat her down on her bed, rubbing circles into her back and whispering gently into her ear. She watched as Anne’s chest rose and fell, rose and fell, until it slowly evened out. She pretended Anne was a puppy, scared and stupid with emotion. It worked.

Sasha’s heart was beating too fast. The memory made her chest feel tight.

Anne was looking at her with these puffy brown eyes, red-tinged but not as wide as they were before. For the first time Sasha noticed just how tired she looked; her eyebags were deeper than Sasha had ever seen them. Despite this, she seemed calmer. Oh fuck, did I zone out again?

Sasha cursed herself. How long was she just standing there thinking of something to do?

The silence was deafening. A cool breeze fluttered by. Anne’s curls danced in the wind. For a moment Anne just sat there, staring up at Sasha.

Then Anne sighed, turning her back to Sasha while she sat on the curb.

Sasha didn’t know what to do. So instead of opening her mouth and saying something dumb, she too just sat down in silence.

She didn’t know how much time had passed. She was just staring at the back of Anne’s head, clenching and unclenching her fingers. Both Sasha and Anne jerked up when a female voice yelled, “Girls! Everything alright?”

“Yes, ma’am!” Anne said, loud and clear.

Sasha noticed how her shoulders rose and fell evenly now, her voice strong without any hitch.

Sasha quickly stood up, frantically dusting off her pink skirt and jean jacket. Anne was already getting up as well, heading back towards the school. She couldn’t help but smile at how Anne had recovered from her breakdown so fast—she really had been improving.

Thinking of something else, Sasha automatically put herself in front of Anne like they used to walk in the old days.

The crisp air turned thick. Oh shit.

Embarrassment burned through Sasha’s face as she slowly fell back behind Anne, her Mary Janes dragging on the concrete.

-

Sasha was still reeling from her mistake when they re-entered the classroom. She made eye contact with the teacher, flashing him a weak smile. He wore a look she was surprised to see appeared like actual concern.

She really hoped the class would end soon because she was super exhausted. She sat down next to Anne, whose shoulders bristled.

Okay, something was still wrong. Was Anne hurt or something from when she fell? Did the frog still—

Oh. Sasha realized it dumbly. She’s still afraid of me. She’s uncomfortable with me.

When the bell rang, she walked as quickly as she could out the door, shoving down the rising dread in her stomach, and forgetting her folder behind her.

Chapter Text

Flashing blue lights. A growing pain in her side. Everything is too bright, too loud. She feels like vomiting. There is a blurry, glowing white orb of light. She screams at herself in her mind–or maybe out loud-she can’t remember. She can't move. Her body isn't listening. Something is shooting past her, small rocks bouncing past. Something else is moving, something screaming, when–

-

From the moment Sasha opened her eyes she could tell it was going to be another shitty day. 

For one, she was still reeling from her dream (Sasha was too proud to call them nightmares), goosebumps lining her arms and her heartbeat drumming in her ears.

It wasn’t the first dream she’d had since what happened in Amphibia, and she was sure it wouldn’t be the last. Still, each one still cemented an uneasy feeling in Sasha for the rest of the day.

She used to research ways to change your dreams, lucid dreaming, anything, even how to not dream at all. The nights when Sasha was so exhausted she didn’t have the energy to dream, where her mind went black as soon as her head hit the pillow, were so blissful. 

Unfortunately, since that fateful night of her return to Earth, those nights have been few and far between. 

She tried to not let her stupid dreams ruin her day but sometimes it was hard to feel like things would get better when your day started off at a point worse than zero. It’s like the whole world is actively trying to fuck you over, even when you’re asleep.

And don’t they say that when you’re at rock bottom, the only way to go is up? Sasha thinks that’s bullshit—she’s broken through far more rock bottoms than she thought possible. Her first night in Amphibia was spent sleeping on the cold ground, cold dirty ground that had bugs everywhere. That was her rock bottom, but wherever she is now is so deep in the depths of hell that she’s not sure she could ever make it out.

She climbs, she claws, breaking her fingernails on the way up, but she will always slide back down again. 

Sasha contemplated going back to sleep (preferably to never wake up again) but reluctantly pulled her tired body up, turning off her alarm with a shaky wrist.

She tried to blink away her sleepiness and calm her racing heart. Through heavy lids, she noticed the light in the hallway was on.

Sasha rolled her eyes and groaned inwardly. Of course.

She pulled herself off her bed, forcing her feet to touch the floor.

That was the other thing; Sasha’s mother was home.

Sasha distinctly remembered turning off the hallway light before she went to sleep. And the only other person who ever stepped foot in the house was her mother. 

That was typically how Sasha figured out her mother had returned from a work trip. There’d be an empty mug on the countertop, ringed with cold coffee at the bottom, or an opened bag of chips in the pantry, or sometimes even just a misplaced TV remote. Something Sasha didn’t remember doing.

It felt like a ghost had swept through the house, touching small things here and there but leaving nothing else. Like a breeze or a wind that left no trace but the whisper of someone who might’ve lived there. Who might’ve eaten breakfast at the kitchen table, who sat down on the couch and watched TV, who pretended like Sasha wasn’t the only person who called this place home.

Sasha pulled on her uniform.

It didn’t guarantee that Sasha’s mother was still home. She was never home for very long, maybe two or three days tops. Then the ghostly movements would stop suddenly. Then Sasha would stop seeing empty mugs on the counter and banana peels in the garbage, and the whole-grain cereal in the cabinet would go stale. 

A stagnant air would sink in. Sasha would commit to the stillness, breathe it in and not choke. The house would feel empty, as it always has.

That is to say Sasha loved it, of course; she could hold as many parties as she wanted to without an adult to call the shots.

She could drip into the house sopping wet from the pool, leave her socks on the counter, sleep wherever in the house she wanted to. She could host parties where they screamed and laughed, where they ate in the pool and snuck peeks into her mother’s liquor cabinet. And she had no one to yell at her when the house was a mess the next day. She could stay up all night and eat ice cream for breakfast and sleep in until noon. She could stay in bed all day, watching the sun rise and set, and have no one to shake her out of bed for school.

Obviously, Sasha doesn’t do a lot of those things anymore—eating in the pool isn’t fun anymore when you have to fish the soggy pizza out the next day. Ice cream for dinner gets boring after a while. And it turns out eating whatever you want all day means you have to actually cook yourself something if you don’t want processed crap. And she still had to make sure the house wasn’t a mess when her mother came home, which, when your mother was sometimes gone for days and other times for months, it was a lot more difficult to time when (if?) she’d be back.

But regardless, everything in the house was under Sasha’s sole control and discretion: there was absolutely nothing she couldn’t do. There was no one to tell her how clean to keep her room, what grades she could have. That was when Sasha thrived—that part was fantastic.

Her mother’s bedroom door is closed. She cracks it open slightly, silently.

Sunlight bleeds through gray silk curtains, pouring onto the figure in the bed. The white pristine sheets are crumpled, the blankets rising and falling in an even rhythm.

She remembers, years ago, right after her parents got divorced, when her mom would quietly come into Sasha’s room whenever she returned home in the night. Sasha wasn’t sure what she did–for all she knew, her mother just stood there silently. Maybe she was curious if Sasha’s room, like the rest of the house, stayed constant in the time she’d been away. Maybe she was just trying to make sure Sasha didn’t slip away while she was gone. Sasha didn’t know. But what she did know, and how she figured out her mom was there at all, was that she’d never close the door fully when she left. So when Sasha awoke in the morning, her door would be slightly cracked open, and her mother would be home when she went to look.

It bloomed a warm feeling in her chest, knowing that her mother at least cared enough to check on her. Even though she never said anything to Sasha about it, Sasha would find comfort in knowing her mother’s secret. She’d hold it close to her chest, warm and sturdy and proof that she was loved, that her mother still loved her, even if her mother wasn’t home anymore. When the night was so dark and the house so silent that it felt like a physical being wrapped around her throat, suffocating her, the light of that knowledge kept Sasha’s spirit from drowning in the endless abyss.

Now, though, Sasha slams the bedroom door, startling herself and certainly waking up her mother. 

Because her mother had stopped doing that years ago. When she stopped giving a shit about Sasha, or really anything at all besides work. When she had stopped acknowledging Sasha was there.

She could hear her mother shoot up out of bed, blankets crinkling.

Sasha makes sure to turn the hallway light off before she leaves for school, slamming the front door behind her.

-

Thank god Sasha didn’t have Biology two days in a row.

She really didn’t want to have to sit so close to Anne so soon after what happened yesterday. 

Sasha had been mulling over their interaction all night, replaying it over and over in her mind in cycles her brain insisted on.

A million ways the conversation could’ve gone, and it basically ended before it ever really happened at all. And now there’s a whole speech written out in Sasha’s mind that never got to leave her mouth.

I know what you’re thinking and I’m sorry that you feel that way. I totally messed up and I won’t do it again. We belong together as friends, you can’t throw that all away. For the sake of both of us, forgive me.

Should she send Anne a letter or something? She didn’t really think Anne would even give her the chance to speak. Yesterday was a rare opportunity—although in hindsight it might’ve also been a bad time to give her the whole let’s be friends again because I think I feel guilty or something and it’s throwing off my game speech because Anne was already crying her eyes out and you know how she gets when she’s emotional. 

It’s not like it mattered though, since Sasha pissed away any openings for communication that experience got them by being stupid and forgetting all the things that are different now. It seems like for all the weeks that passed since they came back from Amphibia, all the weeks Sasha spent in her empty home staring up at her white ceiling trying to figure out what to do, something to relieve the sick and heavy feeling in her stomach, to quiet her of the tension that’s been building in her for a while now, there’s nothing to show for it.

Because when Sasha did have the chance to have that catharsis, she found a way to fuck it up with her actions, which apparently might actually speak louder than words? Percy and Braddock seemed to think so.

She winces at the memory.

She’d been trying not to think about Percy and Braddock.

It hurt, the way they just left, but she didn’t know why it hurt; they were useless to her anyway.

Sasha had only ever tried to help them, and just because they got a little scared Sasha was supposed to stop everything even though they were so close to that goddamn hammer? So close to the end of their mission, and those wimps couldn’t handle it.

All her life, “Seize the moment,” her teachers had told her. “When your success is in sight, don’t let anybody get in the way,” her mother had said.

And there they were, shaking like shitting dogs when Grime and Sasha were doing just fine facing the same monster. Who fucking cares what Sasha said earlier about ‘stopping the mission whenever they say so’? Words were just ways to get people to do what you wanted, everyone knew that.

Words literally didn’t have to mean shit. People lied all the time. “Oh, no your hair doesn’t look greasy!” “Of course I want to go to the family reunion!”

It’s all bullshit. Nobody ever meant what they said. And if Percy and Braddock hadn’t learned that by now, Sasha just gave them a damn good lesson that was far more valuable than anything they could've offered her.

When you have the end in sight, why stop? Who gives a shit about all the people you step on to get there? Sasha didn’t understand it. Why hold yourself back when you’re so close to achieving what you want?

And if this was all so bad, if Sasha had really cosmically fucked up, why didn’t anyone else ever say anything?

The toads celebrated her victory to obtain the hammer in the end. Even if Percy and Braddock weren’t there to join them. Her teachers gave a standing ovation for everything she did. Even if Anne was sitting in the principal's office.

If it was all so wrong, why didn’t anyone tell her?

And a smaller, quieter voice, one she almost didn’t hear because it was so pushed to the back of her mind, whispered,

Would she have listened?

Sasha feels a poke on her arm, jolting her out of her thoughts.

A purple sticky note found its way onto her desk in the time she'd been zoning out. Sasha looks up.

She makes eye contact with Hallie sitting in the seat next to her. Her sleepy eyes, downturned and mildly bored, shine with concern. Her eyebrows are bunched together, forming wrinkles.

Hallie looked the same as always. Sasha was somewhat grateful they had a few classes together because they were somewhat friends? But not really? and it was always easier to get through a class when you’re sitting next to someone you somewhat know. Even if it’s somebody who’s totally shit at math when you’re in a Geometry class. Anyway, Hallie was looking at her expectantly.

Sasha glances down at the note.

are u ok?

Oops. Sasha didn’t realize her misery had leaked out of her brain and into the air around her.

She writes an affirmative reply before handing the note back, giving Hallie an easy grin.

Hallie visibly relaxes and smiles back, her shoulders loosening.

See? A worthless exchange of words. When something out of the status quo happens, you want to go back to normal. You do that thing where you act like you want to help. You ask even though you couldn’t care less. 

Everybody’s done it. There’s no shame there.

Sasha looks away, trying to figure out if she can speedrun memorize whatever the teacher’s writing on the board just in case she gets cold called. 

But none of what’s on the board really makes sense. 

Sasha’s head is clouded in fog, a headache building behind her eyes. Shit. She needed to drink more water.

The rest of period 1 Geometry dwindles away. She can’t force herself to concentrate so she gives up, stretching her arms and leaning back on her chair. Oh well.

What does math matter anyway? She used to be a warrior, a commander. She took over Toad Tower in a couple weeks with pure charisma and confidence, climbing the ladder from prisoner to leader faster than anyone expected from a 13 year old girl.

And now she’s back as a prisoner, and geometry isn’t something she can sweet talk her way out of. How far the mighty have fallen. A smile blooms across her cheeks. Sasha wonders what Grime would think of her now. 

He’d probably be embarrassed for her—he was never one to tolerate weakness. Even though he was a dope sometimes. Silly Grime. She felt comfort in knowing he probably wouldn’t be any good at geometry either.

Somehow, the thought makes her head a little clearer.

She doodles a little toad on her paper.

Sasha is not an artist, so it looks more like an egg than a toad. But she giggles anyway. Hallie looks at her funny.

And the next time Hallie makes a joke with their tablemates, it makes Sasha laugh too.

-

Her good mood immediately evaporates by the end of the period when her teacher pulls her aside to chastise her about her missing work.

A smile and a “You got it!” manages to get her off her back, but still. Sasha hated the pity she saw in the woman’s eyes. Like she knew anything. It pissed her off.

Like most of her shitty days, Sasha slogs through it with a slowness to her movements that doesn’t dissipate.

It reminds her of those car trips with her father, where she stares out at the passing houses and cars and blurry lights. An image behind glass that’s moving too fast to focus on any part of it.

So she doesn’t really notice when she’s about to walk into somebody until it’s too late.

She hits something hard, barely managing to avoid falling over.

Fuck. She thinks she hears papers fly everywhere.

“Woah, hey–”

“Can you watch where you’re fucking–” she starts to spit.

Immediately she stops dead.

She feels her face begin to burn as she looks into the eyes of the Biology teacher she still hadn’t learned the name of. The teacher whose stack of papers she also just splattered all over the floor.

I’m so fucked I’m so fucked I’m so fucked I’m so fucked

Where did he come from? Was she really that lost today? How the hell was she supposed to recover from this?? She just walked into a teacher and blamed him for it–and she swore at him too. Adults hated it when she swore. Shit. Goddamn it – Okay pull yourself together.

Oh shit he was talking.

“..sha, right? I’ve actually been meaning to run into you,” he said, way too calm for having a stack of papers essentially brute forced out of his hands.

Sasha cringed. “been meaning to run into you”? Ha ha. She took that literally.

He’d been meaning to talk to her? That didn’t bode well. Teachers who wanted to talk to Sasha alone never meant well. What if he wanted to talk about what happened yesterday between her and Anne?

“S-sorry! I actually really didn’t mean to do that,” she admitted with an unwanted stammer.

Whether she meant the swearing or the bumping into him she didn’t know. Her brain was mush. God now her words weren’t working either. Great. The one thing Sasha has always been good at. 

Fuck. She wished she hadn’t woken up that morning.

He was picking up the papers. Sasha’s face burned like fire.

She hurriedly helped him gather them all in a stack, hoping he didn’t mention Anne’s name and make things even more uncomfortable.

When they were done, Sasha wiped the dust off her skirt and started going through a million ways to get this guy to forget what just happened so she didn’t end up with an F in his class.

“...in the classroom.”

What? Oh shit she wasn’t listening again.

“Sorry?”

“You left your folder in my room.”

He handed her something pink and with a few stickers on it spelling out the name SASHA in white bold letters.

Oh.

She hadn’t even noticed it was gone, but now that she’s thinking about it, her backpack did feel a little lighter when she went home yesterday.

“Um…thanks,” she said awkwardly.

She took the folder.

“Don’t mention it,” he replied.

With that, he turned and walked away.

Huh.

That’s it? No comment about the swearing? About bumping into him?

Sasha frowned down at her folder. (Had he been carrying it around this whole time?)

Maybe he hadn’t heard her?

He was a young guy, she could tell, maybe just a few years out of college. Probably pushing 30. Maybe 27? 28? Was he going deaf early? Or just didn't care? She didn’t remember him from the beginning of the year (although granted she’s not sure she remembered many of her other teachers since she wasn’t sure she’d ever see them again) so she wondered if he transferred to the school some time between her getting lost in Amphibia and her coming back.

He was already pretty different than what she's used to with teachers. He let her go after Anne yesterday without a word, just a look of concern. She guessed that the conversation wasn't over, it was coming someday, but for now she didn’t even have to convince him of anything and he was already leaving her alone.

He’s new. Unfortunately she doesn't think she can convince him to drop all of the makeup work but maybe she could...

Her lips quirked up at the edges.

Yeah, she could work with this.

-

Anne couldn’t sleep last night.

She managed to convince her mom to call her in late (although it took some guilt tripping) but she was still dragging her feet as she walked into school.

Her mind was too busy turning its gears, an electricity–so strong she could almost physically feel it buzz under her skin–coursing through her veins.

She still had no idea what to do about Marcy.

She’s been looking and looking, scouring the Internet for any semblance of information that could help her figure out how she’s supposed to get back to Amphibia and bring Marcy back in one piece.

Which she knew she could do– even if a small, rotten voice at the back of her mind whispered what if she can’t come back?

Which is impossible. Marcy being dead isn’t even a consideration, Anne scolded herself.

Anne WILL find a way to get back to Amphibia, to bring her back. Even though she’s read in the newspaper that the search for Marcy had been called off.

Whatever. It’s not like the police searching for her had ever amounted to anything. They couldn’t possibly know the three missing girls had been transported to another dimension. No, the police couldn’t help her here anyway.

They’d already been wrong before. A month after they went missing, the police declared their case closed. A decision that devastated her parents.

Everybody knew the statistics. Everybody knew that over 80% of missing kids are found within 24 hours, and their chances of survival drop dramatically after that. Everybody knew that if they weren’t runaways, (99% of whom will return home), if they had been taken, that it was overwhelmingly likely they were as good as dead. Even the police had basically told her family there was no hope left by closing the case.

76% of abducted children who are murdered are killed within the first three hours. That number jumps to near-90% after twenty four. 

And after six months?

Anne was actually surprised the police hadn’t already planned her funeral with how quick they seemed they wanted to get this case over with.

She could tell her parents hadn’t really believed the whole camping story. She could see it in the way their eyes shifted to her, uneasy, questioning.

But she couldn’t bring herself to tell them about Amphibia. About the Plantars. About…her. Not yet. Not until she could bring Marcy home.

Seeing their names and faces in the newspaper was so...strange. Anne was still 12 in the photo they used of her. She knows it wasn't really that long ago but seeing that photo made her stomach queasy. Like she was looking at a person who died rather than went missing.

She guesses in some way, that person did die. The Anne who let people walk all over her. The Anne who didn't know who she was. (Granted, she's stillllll not sure who she is, but hey, she's made progress).

Of course, Sasha dominated the news when it dropped. A pretty, rich, white, popular cheerleader athlete gone missing? What could be a bigger story than that?

Anne knew it was dumb to blame her for society's stupid rules about what goes viral or not but couldn't help but feel resentful towards her ex-friend for everything. A fact that got weirder and infinitely more complicated because of the way that every time she saw her, below all of the scalding bubbles of rage and resentment and betrayal that threatened to burn her alive, there was this twinge that felt a little too much like longing.

And that was not something she wanted to--

“Your dark circles get worse every day I see you. Are you drawing them on or something?”

“Shut up, Cassidy,” she groaned at her deskmate, blinking out of her thoughts.

She dropped her backpack like dead weight and put her head down on her desk. Thank frog this was the last class of the day. Even if Sasha was in it. Which really made everything 10x worse.

She shifted her head.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Sasha Waybright seated at a table across the room from her.

At the beginning of the year, Sasha and Anne were so annoyed at the assigned alphabetical seating.

“You’re all the way over there!” Anne had complained.

“We work better together, promise!” Sasha had tried to convince their teacher.

It didn’t work. And Anne had never been so grateful that the teacher for this class was a stickler for the rules. Having to sit next to Sasha in Biology was enough– she wasn’t sure if she could handle a second class where they were forced to interact.

She also thanked frog that B and W were so far from each other. Even if she did have to sit next to Cassidy Booth, who drove her crazy sometimes with all her sarcasm and the way she’d always cheat off Anne’s paper. Anne never used to mind, and recently she’s thought she’s actually grown a bit of a backbone but Cassidy is really making Anne question that. Was Anne always this much of a pushover that Cassidy didn't think twice about copying off her? Like she'd already assumed Anne would never say anything?

The bell rung.

That was something to think about, for sure.

While the teacher started to drone on, Anne absently twirled her pencil. She wondered if there were any other thrift stores in the area that had something like that music box.

She had already gone back to that specific one, apologizing profusely for her part in the box’s disappearance. But the clerk didn’t have any idea what she was talking about.

According to her, they’d never had any donations of a music box that looked like what Anne described.

So that left Anne with somehow less leads than what she started with.

What was she supposed to do now? Just go around to random thrift stores and be like, “Hey, have any of you seen any magical items with frog paraphernalia? Or have something to do with the three girls who went missing seven months ago? One of them didn’t come back and I’m trying to find her. It might have a few gemstones on it? Let me know.”

She wished she was as good with her words as Sasha was. It would make everything a lot easier.

“Ohhhh fuck me…” she heard Cassidy mutter under her breath.

Anne glanced up.

There was a list of names on the board, paired together in groups of two.

“She’s never gonna get her work done…I’m gonna have to do it all…” Cassidy was still cursing under her breath.

Ah, group projects. One of life’s greatest pleasures.

She found Cassidy’s name. “Cassidy Booth and Bella Spring”

Anne cringed. Bella was never known to be a good student.

Her eyes flickered over several pairs of names. Isabella Sandoval and Enzo Agosto, Hunter Hill and–

Her eyes stop on a certain pair of names. She stares. The text burns into her retinas.

Somehow, she’s not surprised when she reads

Sasha Waybright and Anne Boonchuy.

Fuck me is right.

Chapter Text

Fuzzy like a dream. Messy voices, blurring together. She tries to open her eyes but she sees nothing. Something smells funny. Her hands touch but they don’t feel. Like whatever she’s touching has no grip, no texture, no neurons sending signals. Is something burning? She thinks of plastic tupperware.

In the oven on? She falls asleep.

-

What do you do when you think something’s missing?

Sometimes Sasha felt a considerable hole in her chest, centered and bottomless and inconsolably empty somehow. Like she knew there was something, and she didn’t really know what, but she knew there was something that was supposed to grow there, curl its branches around her ribcage, bloom in spring. Something greater, brighter, something that brought her pieces together into a stronger, better whole. And it wasn’t there.

When there’s a piece missing from a puzzle, even if you spent all afternoon putting most of the pieces together, don’t you always just stare at the hole that still needs to be filled in? The tangible gap that says unfinished, that signified incompleteness. What do you do if you can’t find that last piece?

Towards the end of the fourth grade, a year before Sasha would move up to sixth at the middle school, the elementary school bought a new set of swings.

Sasha thinks it might’ve been then when she noticed it for the first time.

“MARCY!! Ewwww, please for the love of god don’t–”

Marcy was already gripping the chains. Despite the disgusted sigh it brought Sasha, Marcy hoisted herself up onto the seat of the swingset.

“Aww, come on guys look!! There’s no one here yet!”

Sasha squinted her eyes in judgement. “Because nobody except you wants to touch this nasty thing,” she snapped, crossing her arms. “It’s covered in rust.”

Which wasn’t an understatement— the old swingset had sat abandoned in the corner of the blacktop for as many years as Sasha saw it. To be honest Sasha kinda thinks that day her, Anne, and Marcy decided to check it out had been the only time she’d ever noticed anybody even go near it.

Sasha kicked a wood chip that had somehow made its way across the playground. “And I’m getting boredddd.”

“Um…” Anne cautiously reached out to the metal support pole. “Dude I don’t think this is like… safe.”

Promptly Anne jerked her hand back as soon as it grazed the pole, a new rusty orange stain now coloring the palm of her hand. She wiped it on her uniform shirt, shooting Marcy a frown that said she just proved her point.

“Actually, rust is not really inherently dangerous!” Marcy piped cheerily. “People worry about tetanus when they see rust but tetanus is actually caused by the bacteria present on rusted objects, not the rust itself-– Isn’t that cool!?”Sasha rolled her eyes. “Whatever, nerd.”

Marcy swung her legs forward, propelling her into the open air as her answer. Her cropped black hair blew back in the wind, her always-present green hair clip preventing it from flying into her face. 

Sasha shot Marcy a displeased look before her eyes wandered to the brown mark now smeared onto Anne’s shirt. Sasha wrinkled her nose. “Great idea Anne, by the way. If you don’t wash that stuff out now it's gonna stain there forever.”

“Really?” Anne’s face perked up, contorting into a wicked smile that drained the color from Sasha’s own. 

“Why are you looking at me like that.”

But Anne was already charging into a run. Sasha screamed in fear, bounding across the blacktop while Anne chased her with her rust-stained hand pointed outwards like it was diseased. To Sasha, it might as well have been.

“Holy crap guys, look how high I’m getting on this thing!!”

“Marcy,” Sasha gasped. “I get you’re having the time of your life… on your little tetanus machine… but Anne,” she managed through heavy breaths, “…is trying to kill me!!” she squawked.

Anne giggled menacingly, hitching every “hehe”. She laughed in a deeper voice than you’d expect from her face, and in normal scenarios it was fine but when you were running for your life…

Sasha felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise and prayed to god to not let her die to Anne’s hands.

Anyway, that old swingset had been there since the school’s conception, probably. After Marcy got an earful from the teacher about the rust stains splotching her hoodie and skirt—and Anne and Sasha got a similar lecture about their own stained clothes—they weren’t really allowed to freely use those swings anymore, to Sasha’s relief, in an attempt to avoid any more purchases of new school uniforms. So pretty much nobody used those swings at all now. What a surprise. Honestly the only question was why hadn’t the school replaced them sooner.

Sasha guessed it was because the parents had the ultimate say in everything and parents didn’t really care what their kids did, as long as it was out of sight and mind. What did it matter if nobody used those swings? It was there, that’s what they can check off on and forget about it; Hey, we tried, they can pat themselves on the back with.

The day after spring break, Sasha and Marcy and Anne were let out for recess like usual. And something unusual caught her eye. Something pink. She stopped. Marcy bumped into her back. 

“Hey, hello–” Marcy startled.

“Shut up for a second, Marcy.”

Sasha remembers that moment of awe: the new swings. They were shiny. They were pink. And there were only six of them, but that didn’t matter, because from the moment Sasha’s eyes landed on them, she knew she’d be on them every recess from then on no matter what anybody else said or did. They were, for the third time, pink. As expected, she was the first to use them.

From that day forward, until the end of fifth where Sasha would advance to middle school and  regrettably be forced to part with them, her and that swingset were practically glued to each other. She claimed a particular seat; it was the second one closest to the fence, far enough away from it that she didn’t have leaves falling in her hair, but still offered shade cool enough that the sun didn’t make her sweat. Anne and Marcy were usually right next to her on either side.

It wasn’t her fault that some kids didn’t know how serious she got about her seat. Didn’t know that that seat might as well have had Sasha Waybright on it, carved into the side next to the chain that didn’t stain your hand when you touched it. Everyone in her grade knew it. Anne and Marcy switched their seats sometimes, trading places, before Marcy settled on the one closest to the fence and Anne to the one in the sun, but nobody questioned that the one seat in between was Sasha’s.

Sasha wasn’t sure what to do when that third grader whined at her, wanting a turn. Big, round blue eyes, lighter than hers, framed by a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. What was she supposed to do when he poked her, when he shook the chains of her swing, when he cried? When he didn’t take no for an answer? What else was she supposed to do but think, and come to a solution?

She remembers the way his eyes darted around, confused, desperate, tears slipping down his face like raindrops. His blue eyes were blobs of color, shifting and glistening. Marcy was sitting cross legged on the swing, eyes glued to her game. Anne was talking to some girl on the tennis team Sasha didn’t care enough to learn the name of. Nobody was looking at Sasha. Her quick swipe and throw had gone unnoticed by everyone except the boy.

She remembers the moment he spotted the blurry glint of the sun on glass, a shiny spot in a sea of wood chips, and how he walked to it, reached for it. How his chubby fingers closed around the glass, his face painted with relief.

Sasha smiled.

Sasha looked at the sky.

Sasha made sure to back up her legs as far as she could before she swung.

-

Walk, walk, walk in their shoes. Sasha scanned the poster over and over again. It was a drawing of a smiling girl, pigtails and speech bubbles. A drawing of a pair of yellow sneakers. A large word that started with E written in script at the top. The poster looked handmade. The markers used to draw it were clearly running out of ink. Sasha frowned. She’d expect better quality from the principal’s office.

The third grader was still crying, high pitched and offensive to Sasha’s ears. She’d tell him to shut up if his mother wasn’t sitting right there, anger swirling in her eyes. 

The brow of her own mother’s face was scrunched like the wrinkles of her pantsuit as she sat in the chair that was much too small. She was tapping the heel of her, well, heel on the tile. Tap, tap, tap.

“I really had to miss work for this?” her mother said.

Tap, tap, tap.

Sasha couldn’t help but feel obliged to a similar irritation.

The principal rearranged his already tied tie. “Mrs. Waybright–”

“I’m not Mrs. anymore.” Factually, indifferently, she said it.

A funny way to describe a divorce, like it was just a change from one silly title to another. Her mother always took that tone when she talked about it with others. Sasha didn’t think that made it any better.

He cleared his throat. “Ms. Waybright, your daughter had an…” He struggled to find the right word. “...altercation with another student.”

Stupid man looked proud of himself. He did not, in fact, find the right word. Like the trigger to some metaphorical fuse, the other woman abruptly stood up, words blazing like a bomb set off.

“An altercation? Like it was mutual?”

Yes, actually, it was, Sasha would say, but she had a feeling the woman wouldn’t listen to her.

“This was an assault!” the woman continued in a rage. “Look at him! Look at her! Did you see what she did to him?” In a sadder tone, full of fury, she added, “to my boy?”

The boy in question sniffled into his bloody tissue. Sasha wrinkled her nose. What a crybaby. 

Tap, tap, tap.

“I’ll say it again. You called me out of work for this? 4th grade drama?”

Her mother’s voice was calm, controlled, but Sasha almost winced at the venom brewing under the surface, threatening to leak into her tone. She fidgeted with the collar of her uniform, noticing for the first time the dark red blotch in the center of her shirt. Blood?

The principal’s bald head looked wet and shiny. “Since this is her first offense, your daughter needs to take a few sessions of problem resolution counseling that we offer here, so we’ll need you to sign off on–”

Scratch of pen on paper. “Done. Is that it?” 

Tiredness seeped from the words like slime. Despite the annoyance it would cause her in the future, Sasha couldn’t help but feel relief trickle through her body. At least her mother didn’t have to do anything. In some other incidents Sasha’d been involved in, her mother was assigned to attend those counseling sessions with her. God knows why. It was funny, waiting in the counselor’s office for the only person Sasha knew wouldn’t show up.

It wasn’t very funny when the counselor got pissed and Sasha had to take even more classes because of it. So at least they started with this off the bat, right?

“Are you– are you serious?!”

Sasha noted the way the other woman’s veins protruded out of her head when she yelled. She figured the woman might explode.

“She needs to be suspended, at the least!” 

Sasha giggled at the thought of her suddenly cracking, bursting apart into strawberry jam. Wet and chunky.

That was apparently a mistake as the woman’s head whipped around, eyes blazing. Her furious gaze zeroed in on Sasha. Oops.

“You think this is funny?”

“Ma’am–” the principal tried, but his words fell weakly.

“No. You attacked my son and now you laugh?” Her head snapped to the principal.

“Is this what you’re teaching your students? A lack of blah blah blah? Blah blah blah…” Sasha rolled her eyes and studied the wall again. Walk, walk, walk in their shoes. What the hell was that supposed to mean, anyway? Who made these posters? There always seemed to be different ones on the walls.

The principal fidgeted with his tie. Sasha noted it fell looser every time he touched it. “Ma’am–” he tried again.

“What world is this acceptable!? What world is this okay or fair? What world is this justifiable in any way?” the woman seethed, sucking air through clenched teeth.

“Please–”

“Because if it’s normal here, if you allow this to happen, then I’m taking my boy and you’re fucking crazy if you think I’m sending him back,” the words sparked.

“after his classmate broke his nose,” they burned, they bit.

They exploded.

Sasha sat up straight. 

Unease swirled in her gut, pooling in the pit of her stomach. She shifted her head to her mom expectantly. She’d never really hurt somebody before. Her past incidents were usually just for using swear words or hitting someone a little too hard. Is that why his nose hadn’t stopped bleeding? She broke it? What did that mean for her? Sasha felt the palms of her hands go clammy with sweat. Had the principal’s office always been this uncomfortably warm?

Sasha wasn’t sure what she expected, her head still turned to her mom like there was some answer hidden in her pantsuit and shiny silver earrings. Did she want her to yell at her? Not really. Give her a harsh lecture? A stern look that said we’re discussing this later, because that would mean Sasha’s mom would think about her for an extended period of time?

Dread. Fear. Anticipation. And an inexplicable feeling, one that clashed with the others and Sasha felt in her core, that she could not name.

A four year old girl who shattered a bowl. Was there yelling? No. But there was a lecture. And enough time in the corner that Sasha left it knowing exactly how many tiles are on the ceiling. And after that? A mom who loved her again, cooing and forgiving.

But what Sasha hadn’t quite recognized at the time was that there had been a fundamental shift of sorts in the character of her mom, sparked by a few things– the most influential, probably, of which would be the famous divorce. Or, at least, the broad compilation of events Sasha considered to be “the divorce”, that didn’t just consist of a legal paper and signatures at the bottom. She didn’t know this yet, but in the period of “after”, there wasn’t going to be a mom who cooed over her again. She might as well have been something in the garbage, stuffed into the piles of her father’s clothes she threw out the window when she found out about the “work” trips he’d been having. Wrapped in silk bed sheets, sewed into his favorite pair of pants. Swirling in the cologne she bought him for their anniversary, the old version of her mom splattered on the pavement.

It was a truth that didn’t hit all at once. Like gradually filling a room with water so slowly you don’t notice how the water pools around your ankles, how it clutches your waist, how it trickles down your throat like syrup, because it happens too slowly to cause alarm. How you tell yourself it’s not flooding, it’s not cold, nothing has changed, and it’s funny because despite anything you think you’ve convinced yourself of, it’s not surprising or really all that acutely painful when your lungs choke with water, when the frigidity stings you numb, because all you realize is how used to the dull ache of it you are already. Isn’t it weird? That it doesn’t come as a surprise, drowning, probably because some part of your brain already knew– had accepted silently a long time ago– that the room you were in was flooding. And it made its choice, all that time ago, that you would sink. What a pathetic fucking ending.

For a few seconds the room stood in silence. Somehow even the ticking clock ceased to move.

Sasha waited for the moment to end. For the world to kick back into motion and everyone to inhale another breath. And time did start again. The woman huffed, heaving her chest from exertion. The principal darted his eyes around the room, desolately and uselessly. Sasha grinded her teeth.

And her mother was still.

When her mother didn’t scream or fume or even say a word, when she remained as indifferent and impartial as she had been the moment she walked through that door, in hindsight that was like turning on the faucet in Sasha’s brain. Sasha searched her face. For what? A speck of recognition? Of fury? Of shame? Of…anything?

Nothing. Sasha remembers the relief that didn’t come in that moment like she’s still waiting for it to hit her. A blank face, devoid of reaction or concern.

Isn’t this the perfect outcome? 

Something was wrong. Isn’t something wrong?? Twisting, clouding confusion. Writhing in the depths of Sasha, something ugly and vivid and sharp; tangible, like she could clutch it in her hands, grip it violently and bleed it out through her fingers. Something that burns and sparks. Sasha, in the principal’s office, tightens her fists. She lets the feeling burn her through. A fire she’d come to know very well.

What did the woman say? Her actions weren’t justified? What about her actions wasn’t justified? 

The swing was hers. And granted even if the boy didn’t know that, because Sasha’s name wasn’t actually on the swing– which wasn’t Sasha’s fault by the way, she’d tried very hard to engrave it much to Anne’s protest but it’s actually more difficult to carve into plastic than she anticipated– he still pushed her. He poked her. He annoyed her. He didn’t accept her “no, leave me alone”, he whined, he told her that she was being mean, and that he deserved a turn, even though he could’ve asked one of the five other people on the swings for a turn, even though Sasha had been late to recess so she’d been on the swings for much less time than everyone else. What’s fair about that? Was she just supposed to give up her seat, her seat on the swings that were new, and shiny, and her favorite color, and were much better than the old ones she had to deal with for the years up until this point, for some random other kid she didn’t know? For some random kid who was younger than her, who had much more time in this school to use these swings than she did, because she was graduating to the middle school soon?

No. That was the part that wasn’t fair.

Had she really done something wrong? Sasha knew she shouldn’t hurt people, physically anyway, because when she hit someone it got her in trouble. But he deserved it. In a way, it wasn’t her fault he got in the way of her swing, and he happened to get kicked. That her sneaker cracked his nose on the impact. How was she supposed to know that the pressure would break his nose?

She did take his glasses off his face. But how else was she supposed to get him to leave her alone? It’s not her fault they landed in the trajectory of her swing’s path. Even if she did throw them there on purpose. How could they prove that, though? If you don’t have proof, you’re not allowed to point fingers. No one saw her do it except him, so it’s her word against his. And Sasha’s word has always been smoother, stronger, easier to believe than the word of other people.

Was it not okay that when the boy looked up, his glasses smudged from his fingerprints, his nose bleeding from the impact of Sasha’s sneaker, Sasha didn’t immediately apologize? Was that what it was? But would apologizing have made any difference?

Apologizing wouldn’t have cleaned the blood off his face and wiped his tears. His nose would have still been broken no matter what. Didn’t they know that?

Didn’t anyone know that?

The boy’s mother was furious, boiling over with rage. And Sasha couldn’t help but succumb to a similar boiling, deep in the pits of her soul, churning like scalding water. The boy hadn’t stopped crying. Loud, wailing screeching. Screeching, scratching at her skin like a million tiny fingernails. I want a turn, I want a turn, I want a turn

Sasha didn’t care what he wanted.

Sasha wanted it more.

Sasha was always wanting something more.

Her mother’s hand found hers, leading her towards the doorway of the principal’s office.

Barely entering the doorway of the principal’s office, the woman suddenly grabbed her arm, pulling Sasha in close without warning.

With hot breath, the woman hissed,

“I’ve never met a kid as evil as you.”

She stared into burning brown eyes that mirrored the fire in her own. She felt like a bonfire, flames reaching up into the sky. Wide, violent, striking bolts of color and heat.

In strange clarity, she imagined what expression the woman might make in the second before Sasha’s fist crashed into her face. Shock? Anger? Bitter resignation? She wondered if she’d make the same expression as her son. 

But Sasha ultimately jerked her arm away, raking the nails of the woman over her skin, and spit instead. A gluey stain on the woman’s white shirt.

Sasha skipped next to her mother’s side. If Sasha’s mother had a reaction, Sasha didn’t see it. What a pity that the resulting pang in her chest was more painful than anything that woman could’ve said to her.

The door slammed, harsh cursing becoming muffled. 

The indent of acrylic nails on her arm stared at her on the car ride home, the boiling in her bones cooling off into quiet.

Was she evil? Or more generally, was she a bad person?

Sasha had never really contemplated the thought before. She’d done things that got her in trouble, sure, but Sasha didn’t really know where the line was between when you did bad things and when you were a bad person.

If she was a bad person, at least considered so in the eyes of others, what tipped it off? Was it that she refused to give that kid her seat just because he asked? Would a kind person have done so? Sasha thought.

Anne probably would’ve wanted to say no too. She wasn’t as serious about it as Sasha was but that didn’t mean she didn’t like having her own seat every recess. Sasha knew Marcy and Anne liked to hang out on the swings too. It was why Sasha made a point to let everybody else on the playground know which seats belonged to the three of them.

But Sasha had a feeling that stupid girl would’ve given up her seat anyway. Is that what kindness was? Giving up on your own desires because you convince yourself somebody else wants it more? Giving away everything you have just because you were asked to? Kindness sounds like bullshit.

Was it when she thought, this kid is really annoying, because it would’ve been a rude thing to say if she said it out loud? But Sasha actually didn’t say anything to him except “no” and “leave me alone”. How safe were her thoughts? Eh, it probably doesn’t count, Sasha reasoned. Not like anyone could read her thoughts.

Was it when she remembers the moment of impact, Sasha didn’t think she felt a crashing wave of remorse? That when she remembers the crack and gush of red, the way he screamed and fell over, and the way she swung so high she could feel the sky between her fingertips, she doesn’t think she really feels an ounce of regret except for the blood that stained her shirt?

That if she had the chance, even now, having seen the watery blood trickle out his nose, smelled the iron of it, felt the hot fury in his mother’s eyes, she might do it again? Because part of her…

Her mother was taking her home early.

Sasha shifted in her car seat, watching the trees fly by her window. 

Part of her liked it. That for a moment, a brief pause in time, Sasha felt something that was stronger than guilt, stronger than morality, and it was power. The power to control, to change. To satisfy.

And she was surprised that when she imagined breaking his mother’s nose, that swing and crack, it wasn’t the revulsion of an intrusive thought that thrummed in her veins. It was anticipation. Adrenaline. 

Which part of that made her evil, if any of it did at all?

She gazed at the bright blue sky like it could answer the questions swirling in her mind. She chewed on her thoughts, rolling them around her mouth.

Anne’s face. She swallowed. Marcy’s stare. They were there too. Watching. She pressed the tip of her finger to the bloodstain on her shirt. Red flaked off.

Then she spoke aloud for the first time in a while, softly, quietly, the words unfamiliar on her tongue. “I’m sorry.”

Then, a sigh of irritation from the front seat. Words that were steeped in inconvenience, a chore that interrupted a more important task. “For what?”

“For kicking that boy.”

Her mother looked at her through the rear window, blue eyes piercing even through glass. She stopped at a red light.

“It’s fine. This was my lunch break, anyway.”

They started moving again.

Sasha stared at the acrylic indents. They were fading. 

“I’m sorry…” she said slowly. “I’m sorry that— that, um, his nose is broken.” Is this how you’re supposed to do it? She tried to remember.

She could see the glint of her mother’s hooped earrings in the rearview mirror. She wasn’t looking at Sasha anymore. Sasha kinda regretted saying anything— it felt like she was disturbing the peace, ruining the moment. Why didn’t she just enjoy that her mother was driving her home? It had been a while since she’d picked her up from school. Sasha usually took the bus. She’d let Anne and Marcy get into her head.

“Why?” her mother finally drawled. “It’s not like you could’ve predicted that. You were just trying to enjoy recess.”

She rolled into the driveway. 

“He should’ve asked you if he wanted a turn.”

Sasha stared at the folds of her skirt as her mother turned off the engine. There was a smudge there she hadn’t noticed before. Dark red, crusted over. What if he did?

The principal had gone over the whole incident from start to finish, explaining it to her mother and that woman. Every word between the two of them had been shared. Sasha thought about the mark on her shirt and now the one on her skirt. Her father said the best time to prevent stains was right after they happened, so you could rinse them out with cold water. But now it’s dry— her father would say they “missed the critical opportunity”. She knew nothing she did from then on would wash it out completely. It was an inherent truth, like the rust forever cemented onto Sasha and Anne’s old uniforms. Sasha’d had to buy a new one. If you stared hard enough at Anne’s uniform and Marcy’s hoodie, you could see a faint orangey darkness.

Sometimes Sasha felt like a piece of clothing like that. When there were moments that made her realize something in her was missing, she felt like she had a stain. Something that people stared at, thought was wrong. When people looked at her, when they really looked at her, and she knew they were seeing a lack of something that everybody else had. A stain she worried that even if she scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, drowning herself in soap bubbles and overflowing the bathtub with muddy water, would still stick out. That the glaring emptiness would catch people’s eye, make them think.

And did everyone always see it when they looked at her? Could she convince them, has she convinced anyone? Truly and for long?, that it wasn’t there?

She tugged the sleeve of her mother’s shirt. Clenched her own skirt in between her fingers. Stared at the floor. “Mom, do you think I’m a bad person?” Can you tell me why?

Her mother raised an eyebrow.

“Uhh, like…” Sasha’s skin grew hot. Tell me why she said that.

“I dunno. That lady said I was— I was, um, evil.” Was she right?

Her mother sighed again, deep and exhausted. Again, like the car, Sasha regretted opening her mouth. Her concerns felt like a waste of time, a buffer in between actual important tasks. A girl who could not fix her own problems. A girl who made them too often. But her mom would forgive her, wouldn’t she?

“Admittedly,” her mom finally started, exhaling out the word like it took physical effort to force it to leave her lips.

“You are sometimes…” she paused, seeming to look for the right phrase.

“…hard to love.”

What? That wasn’t really what she was expecting. Sasha’s grip on her mother’s sleeve fell. She scanned her face, looking for an explanation, elaboration.

But her mother wasn’t looking back at her anymore; her attention was now drawn to her phone that Sasha hadn’t realized until now was vibrating. A bold contact name at the top stood out— Joseph Fitz.

“Joe? What is it?” her mother hummed, holding it up to her ear and walking to another room, like she forgot Sasha was standing there, forgot she was talking to her.

 “I had to make a visit to my daughter’s school. What are you calling for?” 

Her words grew fainter as she got closer to her office but Sasha’s ears prickled with a sound she hadn’t heard in a long time.

Sasha watched the wood tiles beneath her shoes blur into squiggly lines as her eyes began to sting. Uselessly, as she would find out eventually.

Her mother’s muffled laughter, cut off by the closing of a door, rung in her ears as her tears fell.

-

Amphibia thrummed under Anne’s skin. It droned and pumped like a mechanical hum, high-pitched in its frequency. 

It was kinda hard to explain, and Anne wasn’t sure whether it was from her magical blue powers or something else, but she could almost physically feel Amphibia.

At the start, she kinda would forget she wasn’t there anymore. She’d wake up and immediately check for beetles in her sleeping bag (still traumatized by the one time that happened) only to find no beetles and no sleeping bag, just the empty sheets of her bed she hadn’t realized she missed so much. Those mornings made it feel like Amphibia had just been a really long overly complex dream, fit with flashy powers and an episodic flow, but Anne knew that Amphibia didn’t fade with the morning light. It was real, she had the unexplainable energy in her bones to prove it. But it was still weird to just wake up in the same bedroom you’ve been in all your life when you’ve been through something life-changing— like winning the lottery and waking up still under the fairy lights and glowing stars you put up when you were 11 the next morning, like nothing had happened.

Anyway, it’s not like Anne really expected anything on Earth to be any different just because she was. It was just… sorta jarring.

Like seeing Sasha again, on Earth this time.

Her and Anne have been sitting next to each other in silence, occasionally punctuated by the sound of their individual typing on their chromebooks after the teacher paired them up for the project.

And Anne couldn’t help but glance at Sasha’s side profile, the mole under her eye, the characteristic ponytail cascading down her back, and be hit with this strange sense of deja vu. Like everything was happening as it should. Like she could stare into the folds of Sasha’s perfectly ironed uniform, feel the whisper of blonde hair on her neck, drown in the ocean in her eyes, and everything would be as it should be.

Nothing between them in Amphibia had been for the better, but…

Seeing her kickstarted her longing for Amphibia again.

Because Sasha here, in her school uniform with that stupid jean jacket, blonde and pretty and perfect, made it look like everything was fine when everything was on fire.

That her presence made them look normal. That it masked the uncertainty, the questions of what and where and how of their disappearance, and boiled it down to, Oh that’s Sasha & Anne. Just Sasha and Anne. Like they always have been.

And, not going to lie, it pissed Anne off.

That was what Sasha always did— be smooth, charismatic, funny. She made Anne feel like she was supposed to be there.

But

Anne wasn’t fucking supposed to be here. Not yet.

Anne wished they were in Amphibia because at least in Amphibia they didn’t have to pretend like everything was fine because everyone saw them try to kill each other, like twice!! Here everything is fucked up!!! Nobody knows how much Anne wants to drive the point of her sword into the grass next to Sasha’s head, watch the ego drain out of her and just yell at the top of her lungs, scream at Sasha everything she’s ever wanted to say but never did. 

But she can’t. Because Sasha is acting normal. Because Sasha is still pretty and charismatic and she doesn’t have eyebags because she’s not spending every night looking up ways to save the friend she won’t even acknowledge out loud and she’s keeping up with schoolwork and trying to do her work and Anne is visibly a fucking mess all the time and Sasha is still perfect. Anne doubts Sasha has even cried since they got back. And the stupid part is it makes Anne feel crazy, crazy for being angry for being scared for being anything. Crazy for doubting Marcy’s safety, for sobbing over missing frogs, for missing that Amphibious place like it didn’t steal six months of her life away and her two best friends.

And the only thing she can do is sit in it, Anne can’t bring herself to do anything about it. Because they're here. Can’t bring herself to do anything but stare at the desk and stare at the classwork instructions, watch the clock in the corner tick by minutes that bleed into hours and writhe in the restlessness the small voice in her mind reminds her isn’t rational. What was rational these days. Sitting next to an ex-best friend who tried to kill the only people (creatures?) who showed you kindness for weeks certainly wasn’t. 

Anne shakes her head to rid the electricity growing behind her eyes. She can’t do this here. She can’t do anything here. Okay, calm down. Anne takes a deep breath. You’re being dramatic. Why are you so riled up anyway?

She doesn’t know.

So she exhales coolly, fights her heavy eyelids, and tries to pretend the jittery feeling and the blonde girl sitting next to her don’t exist.

-

Jesus, did teachers do this on purpose? They must.

Sasha rubs the back of her neck with a bored glare towards the teacher’s desk. She was sure every teacher in the world wanted her dead. It wasn’t enough that they were forced to sit next to each other in Bio, but they had to work together on a Social Studies project here too? Were the six months they spent missing together not fucking enough?

She finishes the daily crossword to pass time. She checks the time. 30 minutes left in class. Fuck. Could she stall and play tetris? Playing tetris for half an hour without teacher intervention seems unlikely. Sasha groans internally. She might as well look over what they’re expected to do, even just to pass the time until she could get the hell out and pretend she didn’t also have to see Anne tomorrow for Bio. Plus if Sasha failed classes, they’d get her coach involved, and she really didn’t feel like dealing with the shitshow that comes with that.

Okay, Sasha regrets reading the instructions because now she wanted to slam her head into the table. It was a fucking video project. Goddamn it. It wasn’t just something they could do separately and splice into a shitass slideshow presentation. They’d have to actually work collaboratively. Fuck.

Anne probably figured this out earlier. It would provide a reasonable excuse for why she looks like death. Sasha squints a glance at her sneakily.

Damn.

Anne really does look terrible, Sasha feels bad for admitting it. Anne’s eyes have this undeniable sunken quality to them now that Sasha’s only ever seen when she had tennis tryouts and finals in the same week. Has she slept at all? 

Sasha coughs awkwardly to break the silence.

“Hey,” she tries to say as nonchalantly as she can. “Are you like… good?”

At first Anne doesn’t say anything. Then she turns her head, tired brown eyes meeting Sasha’s.

“At what?” Anne says flatly.

Sasha can’t help the muted joy that swirls in her chest at the recognition, even if she doesn’t deserve it. At least Anne isn’t so pissed at her she wouldn’t talk to her. Maybe Sasha also just misses her voice.

“I mean, are you okay? After the other day?”

Sasha hesitates.

“After that Bio lab?”

Anne’s eyes narrow in what Sasha thinks is a what do you care about Hop Pop sort of way and she turns back to the computer with a sigh. “What do you think, Sherlock?”

Shit. This wasn’t going well. Okay, switch topics.

“Uhh.. what topic do you want to do for the project?” Sasha tries.

“Does it matter? Do what you want.”

You always do what you want anyway, Sasha heard silently.

Shut down again. Admittedly that’s what Sasha was going to do. She feels a small surge of pleasure regardless of Anne’s snappy response because she really does prefer to choose these things. She cracks her knuckles. Okay, which one’s the easiest?

The teacher had given them four topic options to research for their video presentation— the first one was about some guy Sasha had never heard of before and didn’t care enough to find out, the second one was about small businesses, the third was about the history of tobacco, and the last one was climate change.

Sasha ultimately decides on the second one— “small businesses” was a vague enough topic they could do pretty much anything with it, plus they wouldn’t have trouble finding footage because there was an abundance of small businesses in their town. They’d have a lot of options. She almost went with climate change but it seemed hard to film footage for.

“Do you want to do it about small businesses?”

“Okay.”

“Um. Okay. Cool. Great!”

Fuck.

Sasha googled “small businesses” in their town and started going down the list.

“Thai Go”

Oh yeah, wasn’t that Anne’s parents’ restaurant? That would be nice. Anne’s parents love Sasha. Maybe they’d help her get on better terms!

The bell rung soon after that, and Sasha gathered her things feeling better for the first time in a while. 

Standing up, for a second Sasha thought she’d accidentally stepped weird or something because the whole world shifted. Black fuzzed at the edges of her vision and a dizzy coldness washed over her. What the fuck?

As the dizziness finally started to dissipate, she realized she was gripping the edges of the desk harder than she should’ve. She blinked. Anne was gone. When did she leave? She frowned. She shook her head to rid any black spots lingering in her vision. What the hell was that? she grumbled to herself as she walked out the door, not noticing Anne standing at the teacher’s desk across the room. 

The talk of missing assignments wafted through the almost-deserted classroom. Midway through, Anne glanced at the empty doorway.

Nobody would’ve noticed, but her grip on her chromebook was a little tighter than normal.

Chapter Text

“We’d have mashed potatoes, gravy, lamb—“

“Lamb?”

“Yeah, lamb,” Anne repeated, squinting in the afternoon glare from the boba shop window. “And collard greens and—“

Sasha’s Roman nose wrinkled in distaste. “You eat baby sheep?” 

Anne frowned. Peeking above her Nintendo Switch, Marcy watched the “SJMS” logo on Anne’s uniform wrinkle as she leaned forward. It was nearing their Thanksgiving break, maybe a week or two away from the official start of their week off. Pumpkins and foam spiders were slowly retiring from decoration in favor of turkeys and buckled pilgrim hats. Marcy always thought it was kind of weird how turkey became so synonymous with Thanksgiving when it didn’t have that much to do with the actual holiday; the real pilgrims probably ate venison or fish or something, but you don’t see people lining up at grocery stores to get a Butterball deer.

“No, that’s veal. Lamb isn’t from a baby. Veal is a baby cow.”

“A lamb is a baby sheep.”

“Okay, but lamb isn’t,” Anne insisted as Marcy wondered where this conversation was going, “And anyway, I wouldn’t eat a baby animal. Probably.”

“So you just eat sheep meat, then?”

“No, no, lamb is just the cut of meat. It’s like pork. It depends where on the animal you’re getting the meat from.”

Sasha leaned back in her chair, swishing around her boba tea. “Pork is pork, though?”

“Pork is the cut of the meat.”

The blonde girl frowned, leaning forward to place her boba on the table. “Yeah, see, that’s where you lost me. Any meat from a pig is totally pork. Bacon?”

Marcy had to agree with that one.

“Cut from the pig’s butt,” Anne commented.

Marcy snickered.

“Okay, now you’re just fucking with me,” Sasha muttered.

“No, I’m serious,” the other girl insisted. “It just describes a certain cut of meat.”

“You’re fucking with me, though. A lamb is a baby sheep. So you’re just eating sheep? A grown sheep?”

“That’s mutton,” Marcy murmurs without looking up from her Switch. 

“Lamb is different,” Anne said. “It’s more tender.”

“Because it’s a baby,” Sasha rolled her eyes.

“Not a baby,” Anne retorted. 

“So, like, a teenager then?”

Anne winces and waves her hand in the air noncommittally. “Technically.”

“Because that’s much better.”

Marcy would’ve seen Anne shrug, taking a sip of her matcha tea, if she weren’t trying really hard right now to reel a fish in on Animal Crossing.

If you asked Marcy what her favorite things about her friends were, she’d probably say Anne’s funny and Sasha’s cool— which wasn’t wrong. Truthfully, though, moments like these have always put Anne and Sasha in the top tier for Marcy, not that she had many others to compare it to; correction: any others. But that’s beside the point.

It’s because Marcy, here, doesn’t feel a pressure to talk, to fill silences as quickly as she can with spilling words and stilted humor— their silence isn’t itchy, it’s not something scratchy and uncomfortable. Sasha can sit on her phone, Anne can do the crossword, and Marcy can just be. 

Silence is a weird thing; most of the time, Marcy would say silence in conversations feels like judgement, social failure. You want to say something, and you might have an idea what, but the silence is so loud it’s intimidating, it’s deafening. Your words fizzle out on your tongue, get trapped somewhere in between your larynx and your lips. And you realize you don’t know this person well at all, and they’re simultaneously thinking the same thing. Or they’re thinking, wow, this person’s a weird, annoying loser who doesn’t know how to talk to people— and the worst part is that they’re probably right. Listen. Marcy would call herself skilled, or at least experienced, in quite a few areas of expertise without too much hyperbole. But even she admits that social interaction and interpersonal communication aren’t on that list by any stretch of the imagination. 

And it’s not for a lack of trying, really! Mostly. Okay, maybe sometimes she doesn’t try all that hard. Smoothing out your words with silk and pretending you’re not made of polyester, mimicking dialogue in the mirror ‘til you’re positive it’s the most natural thing ever said— it takes more effort than Marcy feels a conversation is worth. Way too much effort just for someone to think you’re only moderately socially awkward instead of severely. Effort she’d rather spend on playing Animal Crossing. Social ineptitude is the price you pay for happiness, I guess. 

Even if parts of it still bug her. An itch, just a small one, from the way other people seem to connect like legos, speak so fluently and perfectly. Like it’s the easiest thing in the entire world. It feels like Marcy has a natural tendency to somehow make people feel on edge, awkward, tense, just by being there. Like her anxiety can somehow be felt, reverberated against all the walls in the room even. But some people have a presence that just puts you at ease. Like they walk in and they’re so good at, I don’t know, being social? Making you feel heard and included? that it kind of evens everything out. And you ask them how they’re so good at it and they just look at you confused, like they’re not even trying. Like they were just born to light up a room rather than blend into the wallpaper.

Sometimes she doesn’t care. Sometimes it drives her crazy. Why does she have to try so hard to do something others do so easily? Talking to people? Having friends? Internships? Relationships?  She has the desire for these things, but no way to reach them. Like they’re all the way at the top of the cabinet, and none of the step stools or chairs she uses are ever tall enough to reach it. Is it by design or by coincidence? It’s all a mystery, and she knows it’s ridiculous and irrational, but it feels like everybody’s just keeping one big secret from her all the time. Not Sasha and Anne (most of the time) but classmates, cousins, heck teachers sometimes, anybody. Everybody. She might be dense, but she doesn’t miss the way people talk about her sometimes like she’s not there. Like just because she’s not talking, she’s not listening. Sometimes it blows her mind what people admit to you when they don’t think you’re a person worthy of being heard. She feeds it all to Sasha, of course, which does actually make it all worthwhile. The shock on their faces and the who could’ve known? Who could’ve told? when their supersecret makes its way around school makes Marcy feel like a superspy. She’s never had anybody connect it to her, so that must mean she’s a pretty good one.

Even if being a superspy means you’re the only person left without a partner or the last one to get picked in gym class. “It’s ‘cause you have the athletic ability of a wooden plank,” Sasha would say, and it helps.

But it’s isolating all the same. Being partnered up with the teacher because nobody looked to you as their first, second, or even third option. Faux smiles by pretty, popular girls with shiny hair and perfect teeth when they ask you if you’re a new student, because they’ve never seen you around before. And you can nod your head or shake it no, but it makes no difference. There’s no apology if you tell the truth, no recognition behind their eyes of a girl they’d been in the same class with since elementary. All you get is awkward silence, a muffled Hmm if you’re lucky. Marcy wonders sometimes if she disappeared in this school, if her teachers would be the only one to notice. Sometimes she’d like to, to just drop off the face of the earth for as long as she could stand and see if anybody even noticed she was missing.

Anne and Sasha would notice. She knows they would. They blow up her phone when she misses a day of school. But selfishly, Marcy thinks, who else would notice? Care? Is that egotistical? To wish for more recognition than you have? Honestly, Marcy would be happy if even just one person besides Anne and Sasha reached out if she dropped off the face of the Earth one day. Just one, hey, where’s Marcy? would suffice.

Wow, she thinks mutedly, am I this depressing of a person?

Sasha interrupts the noise inside her head she hadn’t realized had gotten so loud with the thwack of her gum spat out into the plastic lid of her now-empty drink. “Okay, let’s go to my house.”

“Have you had gum in your mouth this whole time?” Anne blurted. “Chewing boba AND gum?”

She just laughs with a Yeah?, much to Anne’s horror and disgust.

So they pack up their stuff and leave the boba shop, easily falling into their trio: Sasha’s in the middle, slightly walking ahead of everybody else, and Marcy and Anne walk together behind her.

The likely offender breaks their silence again. “Wanna have a sleepover?”

Anne kicks a rock. “Mmm, I don’t know if that’s a good idea?” she says uncertainly. “We have school tomorrow.”

“Why’s that a problem?”

“I have a test tomorrow.”

“What for?”

“Spanish.”

“Bah! Just come over, you can estudiando there if you want. It’s not a big deal, Boonchuy,” Sasha cooed.

“Puedes estudiar allí,” Marcy corrects.

Sasha nudges her shoulder. “Same thing,” she whispers.

“Not at all,” Marcy grins.

“But I never end up getting anything done,” Anne groaned. “Spanish is the only class I’m worried I might fail.”

“Aww, poor Anne,” Sasha murmured. “Too worried about her grades. Come on, you need a break. And you can do your studying at my house.”

“Okay,” Anne sighed, predictably. “You sure it’ll be fine?”

“One hundred percent.”

“Then I guess—“

Sasha smiles and claps her on the back. “I knew you’d make the right choice. Marcy?”

Marcy pretends to ignore the blush on Anne’s cheeks. She doesn’t mind having a sleepover, so that’s what she says.

“Hell yeah!” Sasha cheers, giddy.

As they talk about sleepover plans, Marcy feels her shoe loosen.

Looking down, she sees undone laces. “Guys, hold on.”

But as she kneels, the sound of their continuing footsteps indicates they didn’t hear her.

Marcy sighs, starting to untie the previous loose knot. She looks up to call for them again but stops suddenly.

For some reason, the scene in front of her pauses every thought in her mind.

Sasha’s arm is around Anne’s neck, and they’re walking together entranced in conversation. They’re laughing to each other. And suddenly, the path to them seemed longer than it logically should be, like they had moved much farther in a few seconds than Marcy could hope to reach in a few minutes.

And maybe, Marcy was being dramatic and thinking too much in fantasy, but there was an eternity in their footsteps, the certainty of a shared bond in the sync of their feet hitting the pavement. Kneeling down, white shoelaces tangled around Marcy’s fingers, she suddenly felt very childish. There she was, stopping to tie her shoe, and there they go on without her. It was stupid, she knew it was stupid, but she couldn't help but feel younger than she was, more jealous, more out of place. Maybe it was the funny way that staring at the girls in front of her, Marcy couldn’t remember the space between Anne and Sasha where she fit in. Was there ever one? Did she stand on the left with Sasha, the right with Anne? Could she go back to them, stand anywhere at all, knowing how normal it looked with just the two of them? 

Marcy had never really questioned her part in the group before. She never had a reason to. And this isn’t a reason either, she knows, just some weird timing and the bubbling up of insecurity. But it does feel weird, she guesses on principle, seeing your best friends seem like they’re having such a good time without you. It makes you question.

Those thoughts fleeted, like a mouse scurrying into a hole—back to wait for the right bait to sneak out again—as they (almost simultaneously) stopped to look back at her and wave.

“Marcy! You good back there?” Sasha called with her hands in a cone shape around her mouth.

Marcy snaps out of her trance, scrambling to her feet after tying the last knot. “Oh, jeez, sorry y’all!”

Then she was staring at the pavement again, flat on her face because she forgot to tie the other shoe.

Then the gray concrete shifts and folds, and Marcy realizes, not for the first time, that she’s in a memory. Her vision dissolves into darkness. The swirling memory fades into the back of her mind, where it came from.

Enveloping her body now is a strange sensation: if she had to describe it, it would be as wet. Like you tried to go swimming with jeans on, soaking yourself to the core and no matter how dry your skin managed to get, there was this wet, heavy layer on top of you. Kind of a sensory nightmare, but Marcy couldn’t exactly feel any of her limbs in this weird headspace, so whatever. She can’t see much of anything here either, which is interesting.

Except for the huge, yellow eye staring at her all the time.

She clears her throat (weird feeling when she can’t really feel it) to speak.

“So, are you actually real or what?”

She waits for something, anything. She realizes she’s given up on thinking it will respond- she’s not even sure it can, honestly. It doesn’t even have a mouth. But what else is Marcy supposed to do other than talk to her weird-ass mind hallucination? There’s not many others in here to talk to. Correction: any others.

Marcy, genuinely, has no idea where she is, which is strange because she usually feels like she’s got a decently strong grip on reality. She doesn’t remember how she got here. She doesn’t remember when she got here. The passage of time slips through her fingertips, and she can’t grip it hard enough to discern a minute from an hour to a week. Has it even been that long? This may be one of those crazy long dreams you get in a split second when you pass out or something. Not that Marcy thinks she passed out or something, but it’s possible she hit her head on the way back through Andrias’ castle. She’s always been a klutz like that.

She’s heard of this one story where a guy passed out for like, 2 minutes but had this crazy dream where 30 years had passed and he had a wife and kids and everything. Only to wake up and, nope, a stray ball hit you in the side of the head and you might have a mild concussion or something, but that’s it. Enjoy the knowledge of your wife and kids disintegrating into the recesses of your mind. That life you lived? Not any more real than a dream you had last week.

Marcy hopes it won’t turn into some traumatizing story like that. Her strange, maybe life/death experience is just playing back memories so far. And not even the bad ones. She doesn’t see any connection between the ones she’s gone through, just that most of them have Anne and Sasha.

She’s not even sure she’ll remember this when she wakes up. Maybe it’ll just be a dream. Marcy hopes so. Or she doesn’t. It’s kind of nice in here, save all the black sludge that seems to go on forever. Like what you see right before you fall asleep, except playing in a loop. She doesn’t mind it so bad. She’s always liked those last moments of fading consciousness, where reality feels moldable and optional. Like your world could fit in the palm of your hand, held together like putty by your fingertips.

She misses Anne and Sasha, but she thinks she could live off memories for a long time. She’s always been a fan of rewatching her favorite TV shows, after all. She could wait a while for a new episode.

——

Isn’t it weird how a place can hold a memory in the palm of their hand? That as soon as Sasha steps foot into what used to be her and Anne’s favorite café, memory floods into her mind like tea pouring into a cup? Sweet afternoons right after school when light poured through high glass windows, and pre-teenage girls sat at tables drinking bubble tea.

Unfamiliar bags stood out starkly under the same brown eyes that shined golden in the sunlight, which rendered her completely floored whenever Anne complained about “her boring brown eyes” because Sasha was certain she’d never seen anything as captivating in her life. The seedy distrust brewing behind them was new, too; who would’ve guessed that Anne could look at her like that? Certainly not the Sasha from eight months ago. Probably not the Sasha from three months ago. Hardly even the Sasha now.

It was hard to get used to, all of this.

Nostalgia was like a physical being— okay, she needs to shut up with the poetry. It’s just a dumb café. And they’re just stopping here right before they go do their dumb project in Anne’s family restaurant. Sasha stares at the menu while Anne orders. It’s exactly the same, save for one new addition: the Cremé Brûlée Brown Sugar milk tea. She doesn’t know why she thought six months would change much of anything. For some reason, whenever she’s gone for a prolonged period of time, she always thinks the most will change. Like she steps out and comes back and everything is unrecognizable. But most of the time, that’s not true, Sasha notices. Things change, but not absolutely. Not devastatingly so. Everything at their core stays the same. The same wall with a fresh coat of paint. Sasha’s mother is still the same woman after a month. Her dad is the same man after five.

It really sucks that she and Anne are one of the only exceptions to that rule she can think of. She hopes, like everything else, that Anne’s still the same person underneath.

-

Thai Go was usually closed on Wednesdays, so Sasha wasn’t surprised to see the place empty after Anne let them in through the back door. She was grateful that Anne’s parents happened to own a small business, not just for the convenience of their project, but because their food truly was incredible. She’d missed it– she’d have to come back when they were open.

The place was relatively small, with the whole building maybe taking up a classroom’s worth of space, even with the kitchen. The yellow wallpaper and Thai-themed wall decorations made the place feel quite cozy, though, like you were eating in someone’s house rather than at a restaurant— an atmosphere Sasha quite liked. She was impressed by how Mr. and Mrs. Boonchuy had made the most out of the small retail space and managed to make it as comfortable as it was.

That was the appeal of small businesses; they had a lot more freedom to personalize their business, to cater to themselves and their customers without worrying about corporate restrictions.

Remembering their assignment, Sasha stood awkwardly for a moment before deciding to set herself down at a booth next to the window. Anne followed suit, thunking her bag on the seat across from her and setting her half-finished drink on the table. She pulled out her laptop, admiring the bright pink case she’d picked out for it before Amphibia. At least a lot of her tastes hadn’t changed. She frowned at the black screen that persisted even after she pressed the power button. Realization smacked her on the forehead. Crap, I forgot to charge it last night.

She fumbled around in her backpack for her charger before realizing she left it in her room at home. She pressed the power button a few more times but to no avail. She pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration. “Crap,” she thought again, not realizing she did so out loud.

Anne looked up from her own laptop. “What?”

“Err– sorry. I just forgot my computer charger at home. I need to go get it.”

There was a pause. This was the second conversation they’d had together since they met up for this project, excluding their exchange of hi before getting on the bus. Sasha’s awkwardness just called attention to that. Great.

“It’s dead,” Sasha added while making a move to stand up. “My computer. So. Yeah. I’m gonna go get it.”

“Do you want to borrow mine?”

The offer seemed so natural that it registered late on Sasha’s ears. “Really?”

“Yeah, I mean, we have the same one. So you can just use mine if you want.”

Sasha flushed for no reason at all. “Thanks.”

It wasn’t until the two returned to silence that Sasha realized how much she missed just talking to Anne. They used to speak daily either through text, having sleepovers, or catching each other between classes. Now, weeks have passed, and gone are those late-night conversations, gone are shared bouts of laughter and remember-when’s.

Sasha missed her. Desperately. She hadn’t had many people to talk to these days. Sure, there was Hallie, and some other girls from her cheer team, and some other random, irrelevant people, but talking with them wasn’t the same as talking with someone who knows you, understands you. They’re acquaintances– Hallie’s probably the closest to what Sasha would call a friend, but even then, not really– and talking to them doesn’t feel fulfilling. It’s endless, mindless small talk. Sasha had never minded small talk until that was all she ever had with people. How are you? How was your weekend? Do you have any plans for next weekend? Blah blah blah. It feels like having the same conversation over and over with a hundred different people. These people don’t know Sasha. They make comments that she silently judges them for making, because Anne and— Anne would never make it. It ruined the illusion.

So, forgive Sasha for wanting something other than boring, awkward, uncomfortable silence with her long-term best friend.

“So…are your parents doing well?”

Sasha had no idea why that was the first thing to come out of her mouth. It’s possible it was because she was already thinking about Mr. and Mrs. Boonchuy because of their restaurant. Truthfully, she was curious– really really curious about what Anne told them, how they reacted, if she told them about Sasha and their unfortunate friendship break-up. So, maybe that’s why she said it. Maybe she wanted to live vicariously through Anne. Maybe she wanted to hear about parents who cared. Maybe she wanted to see if Anne’s parents hated her yet.

Anne looked hesitant to answer, and Sasha felt guilty for some reason.

“They’re good,” Anne said finally, tugging at the corner of her sleeve and averting her eyes. “How’re yours? How did they, um, take the news about where you really were?”

“I didn’t tell them,” Sasha said way too easily. “Didn’t think they’d believe I went to frog hell.”

Anne burst out laughing.

Lower-pitched than you think it would be, dorky, bright. Her eyes crinkled at the corners.

Sasha didn’t realize until that moment how much she had missed her laugh.

Sasha was never a writer, sucked at it, couldn’t write worth a damn— but she thinks she could write long, weaving poetry about this laugh. She could put Shakespeare to shame with the intricacy of her prose. But in short words, because, again, Sasha wasn’t a writer— Anne’s laugh was everything good in this world.

Sasha made a mental note to tell more jokes.

Anne’s laugh finally withered. She cleared her throat, clearly embarrassed. “Frog hell? That’s what you call it?”

Sasha was kind of embarrassed now, too. “Yeah. In my head sometimes. Sometimes out loud.” She winced. Corny.

“Yeah?” Anne whistled, leaning back. “Can I tell you something?”

Anything. “Sure.”

“I never told my parents, either.”

Sasha almost fell out of her chair. “What?”

Anne looked sheepish now. “Yeah. I haven’t told them about Amphibia. They still think I went camping.”

She didn’t believe it. Anne? The girl who told her parents everything? She didn’t tell them about arguably the biggest “everything” in her life? The fact that she didn’t go camping? The fact she has a whole other family?

“They still think you went camping?” she repeated, dumbfounded.

Anne breathed. “Yeah.”

Sasha believed her.

“You know,” she admitted, “I don’t feel so bad now that I know you didn’t tell your parents either.”

Sasha snorted, still reeling. “Anne, I don’t tell my parents anything. I think my dad still thinks I wear diapers.”

“I know,” she responded, tracing the indents on the wooden table, “but it still makes me feel like I’m betraying them, you know? I mean, I used to tell them everything.”

“Maybe this is good for you,” Sasha said. “Honestly, you need some independence.”

“You think?” Anne said softly.

“I do,” Sasha affirmed. “Sometimes it’s better to just figure these types of things out on your own. I mean, who knows how they’d react?”

If they’d even believe you, hung in the air. 

“Yeah.”

They fell into silence again, but for the first time in a while, it was comfortable.

That means, Sasha figures, it was only a matter of time before things went to shit. 

-

Pulling out her laptop, Sasha opened up to the assignment details. Anne had disappeared into the kitchen. The rubric was organized into three columns of grading. It was pretty ordinary, typical work for their English class.

She didn’t think much of Anne’s absence and the faint smell wafting through the air until there was a plate of Mrs. Boonchuy’s Thai fried rice set across from her. And an identical plate set steaming in front of her.

“Huh?” Sasha said intelligently.

“It’s fried rice,” Anne said, and if Sasha were looking, she’d see the faintest smile.

But she was staring wide-eyed at the plate.

Of course there was a catch.

She heard the snap of wooden chopsticks across from her and realized something.

She can’t refuse this. That would be disrespectful to Anne, who just took the time to make it for her, Anne just cooked this for her, as well as to her mother and pretty much the entire restaurant. She can’t spoon it into a napkin and then into the garbage, even if she might get away with it. It’s the principle, and Sasha’s morally ambiguous but that’s a line she knows she can’t cross, not here, not now when Anne just made something for her. 

So there’s the other option, the one she ends up doing more than anything else.

But she knows this place, knows there’s a key to the bathroom she doesn’t have, and it’s not certain Anne does either. That there aren’t any bushes around, no privacy within walking distance. That the sink clogs with the slightest provocation. And besides, a voice says quietly, you promised not to do that anymore.

So that really only leaves one option.

She loves their Thai fried rice. It would be a sin not to. She loves it too much, can’t afford to love it as much as she does. She’s not prepared for this. This plate, the conundrum, churns more anxiety in her gut than she’s had all day. She knows she’s got to suck it up, but even the thought makes her nauseous.

So she doesn’t think about it. She snaps her chopsticks and tries to eat slowly, pretending like she doesn’t feel like she’s going to die. And it works. Kind of works. Sasha feels like an idiot because she loves this stuff, but she doesn’t even taste it as it passes her lips and goes down her throat. Her mind is too busy crunching numbers. It tastes like calories. It tastes like numbers. Ones and fives and nines and so many zeroes, crushed up into a ball at the back of her throat and swallowed.

She had no idea if Anne said anything else. She hopes to God she didn’t. Sasha pushes her plate to the side when she can’t bear it anymore. Before she can do anything, Anne takes it silently along with her own and heads to the kitchen sink.

Sasha almost calls out for her to say she’ll wash them herself, but decides against it. I don’t really know if I can stomach looking at leftovers right now. She’s grateful to Anne for the moment she has to digest. She scrolls on her phone, ignoring the dull guilt that follows when she opens a particular app hidden in boring folders.

-

Sasha leans forward and cracks her knuckles, ignoring the fullness in her stomach that doesn't typically last this long.

“Okay, I think we should organize our presentation into three blocks. First for introduction, second for impact, third for conclusion,” she started, scrolling down the length of their document. “That way we can hit all of the learning targets.”

Anne sighed. “What if we did four blocks?”

Sasha raises an eyebrow. “Four?”

“We need one for questions, don’t we?”

Actually, she doesn’t know. Honestly, she wasn’t paying that much attention to the directions. All she knows is that she saw three sections on the rubric.

“I don’t see why we need to make a separate portion just for that?” Just stick to three, her mind added.

“Well, how do you suppose we fit—"

Sasha waves her hand. Everything will be fine. Just stick to what we need. “We’ll work it out, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

Anne frowned. "But shouldn’t we just—"

I’ve got it. I can do this. Don’t worry.

“Anne, relax, yeah? This is fine.” I can do it.

There was a pause for a moment. “Sure.”

Sasha should’ve noticed it then. The clipped reply. The tension in Anne’s shoulders that didn’t dissipate from that moment. The way Anne would stare out the window like she was trying to keep something down, turning her pen over in her palm. Anne’s tells shouldn’t have been easy to miss, easy alarms from years of practice, but either the time spent apart really did screw them up, or her mind was churning, burning through all her thoughts; flowing too fast to pick up on details but too slow to see the bigger picture. Too busy ruminating on a certain feeling in her stomach.

“Okay!” Sasha felt a surge of go, go, go, start. “While I take some pictures of the inside, can you start on the introduction?”

Why can’t you start it, Sasha? Why do you have to force Anne to do the hard part?

She hesitated, opening her mouth to change their roles, but Anne’s fingers were already typing, putting more pressure on the keys than necessary.

Wow. You’re not only a bad friend but a horrible partner, I guess. Why do you always have to offload all the hard work? Poor Anne. She’s going through so much and you’re just here, adding to it. You should’ve worked alone. You should’ve just done it. You’re just making everything worse.

Sasha bit her lip. It’s fine.

These pictures just have to be perfect.

It was halfway through taking photos of the restaurant's interior that Sasha realized she had forgotten how much she hated taking pictures.  Click, click, click, click, oh, this one almost looks right-- no, never mind, it looks like shit now that I compare it to the million near-identical ones I took moments before. Fucking pictures and their goddamn tiny nuances that drove her brain insane. How could she choose the best one out of hundreds when they all look just slightly different?  

After God knows how long, she painstakingly ends up with a grand total of 4 photos that she finally deems good enough. If it took 237 pictures in her camera roll to find 4 that didn’t itch her brain uncomfortably, what should that matter? Sanity is overrated.

She goes back to their table to see Anne typing with a focused expression on her face. Her brown eyebrows are furrowed in concentration, the tilt of her spine in towards the computer, her curls resting on her shoulders. The faint squint in her brown eyes, the lopsided frown on her lips.  Despite everything else that’s changed, there are always irrelevant things Sasha shouldn’t notice.

She settles back into her seat, ignoring the way her hands shake. “Everything good?”

“Mm,” Anne nods in response.

Sasha hooks up her phone to her computer so she can transfer the pictures to their slideshow, and she opens it up just to take a peek at what Anne’s done.

For some reason, seeing four sections spikes more anxiety than it should. Fuck. I wasn’t clear enough.

“You put four blocks instead of three.”

Ah, shit, why does that sound confrontational?

“Hey, Anne, I think you put four blocks instead of three by accident.”

The girl snorts. “Wasn’t an accident.”

Nothing computes. Like throwing a ball at a wall and it just bounces off.

“We’re supposed to have three, we agreed on. Four is just too much work.”

“What, you think I can’t do it?”

Sasha shook her head, “No, that’s not what I meant, I-I uh, it’ll just be a lot easier if I just—,“ She blew out a breath. “Look, just let me do it, okay? It was a mistake to make you do this. I’ll just rewrite it.”

She made to start typing.

There was a heavy pause.

“You’re always like this, you know,” Anne said quietly, and Sasha’s ears rang from the sudden coldness in her voice. “Nothing I come up with is ever good enough for you.”

Oh shit. Sasha froze. “Uhh, that’s not what I—“

“Yeah, sure,” Anne sneered, and it finally dawned on Sasha that she really messed up somewhere. “You think I can’t do this.”

“It’s just that there’s a better way to—,” she tried to coax, but Anne cut her off, her palms pressing flat on the table.

“Why do you always think you know better than me?”

“I didn’t–”

“No, really, I wanna know. Everything you come up with is always better. We always end up doing what you want. That’s the Sasha way.” She snorted humorlessly. “Really, I wonder how you deal with me. Anne and all her stupid, stupid ideas.”

“I don’t think your ideas are stupid, Anne, I just—“

“Yeah, well, you could’ve fooled me,” she hissed. “Honestly, Sash, when’s the last time you took my idea or my advice on anything?”

“I…”

“What? You can’t remember? Or it’s just never happened before?”

Sasha floundered, her mind racing back and forth with a hundred different thoughts. She couldn’t think of anything on the spot, but she was sure there were times she’d taken Anne’s opinion. There had to be. But Anne seemed to take her contemplation as an answer, stiffening and glaring at her empty boba cup like it had anything to do with the tension that was now swirling between them. The world mildly tilted back and forth like it was on unsteady legs.

She opened her mouth to speak, but Anne’s eyes shot to her with such intensity and overt hostility, unfamiliar hostility, that she closed it again. There was another pause. Then–

“I can’t believe we got partnered together. Just my freaking luck.”

Really, Anne? Sasha felt a traitorous spike of irritation. “Hey, it wasn’t like that was my fault. I never asked her to put us together.”

“You know, I can’t think of a single thing that’s happened recently that hasn’t somehow been your fault.”

Sasha recoiled immediately. “Anne, in Amphibia, you know I didn’t mean–”

“I know damn well what you thought you were doing, Sash, you thought you were looking out for yourself. Honestly, part of me wonders if you’ve ever done anything else. Stealing the music box, lying to my face, threatening me, threatening the Plantars– it was all just for one of your own selfish, ridiculous plans to gain control of everybody and everything, which, by the way, how’d that work out for you? It’s not as funny when you’re not the only one scheming something, is it? That’s your problem. There’s you, there’s me, there’s Marcy–-” Sasha flinched, “--there’s everyone else, and it’s always you first, only you, always you. I hate that. I hate it.”

Sasha doubted she fully processed everything Anne said, which was sure to bite her in the ass later. Somewhere along the way, the room had begun moving faster, wobbling back and forth until it started to spin. Her heart beat like a bass drum in her ears. She reached her hands, palms sweaty, out in the dark. “Anne, we can do four column–”

“I don’t care how many we do!” Anne snapped, and Sasha flickered out of her haze at how close Anne’s voice sounded to breaking, like it was teetering on the edge of a cliff. “Don’t you get it? This isn’t the first time you’ve ever told me what to do, Sash! I told you that, didn’t I, that you’ve been pushing me around my whole life? Here you are, doing it again! Because you think I’m too weak, too– too stupid, I guess, to figure things out on my own, don’t you? Because you don’t trust me to do anything by myself? Because— because you think I’m completely helpless on my own? And I can’t do anything right?”

Sasha’s mind was reeling from the coldness in Anne’s tone, the bite in her words, the sadness weighing down her own chest from at the realization they had lost whatever was between each other just an hour ago, that she noticed too late the higher pitch to her voice, the expectant look in her eyes. But by the time Sasha opened her mouth to object, Anne looked like she’d already moved on. Like she expected the hesitation on Sasha’s part– didn’t care. Sasha doesn’t believe that, thinks it’s burying itself inside Anne’s chest, but she can’t find the words to reassure Anne, tell her none of that is true. Because part of it is true. You do think she’s kind of stupid. You think she’s better off with you deciding everything for the two of you. No. That sounds terrible. She’d never thought of Anne that way, had she? That’s not it. She just can’t–

Fingers tangled through brown curls and the brunette continued. “I can do my part in a group project, Sasha, I’m not stupid. Despite what you think, I don’t need your help for everything.”

But then Anne’s big, round brown eyes suddenly stared up at Sasha, and she was shocked at the hurt in them, shining in a vividness she’d hardly ever seen before. “Do– did you always…”

Anne swallowed. Words hang in the air, in the distance between them, in her throat.

And then they’re gone, the silent question trapped in Anne’s throat. The hurt in her eyes dimmed almost as quickly as it appeared, like blowing out a candle, replaced by something rigid and stiff, and whatever she wanted to say, needed to say, fizzles out in the space between them.

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” said Sasha, uselessly.

Anne’s face hardened. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

She stood up suddenly, making the blonde jolt, before she sighed with shaky breath. When she met her eyes, Anne had this sturdy look in them.

“Listen. I get what you’re trying to do, I think, I mean fr— God help anyone who knows what’s going on in your head, but all I know is that it makes me feel like crap. If this project is going to work, you gotta treat me like a partner instead of just somebody you can order around.”

Her face contorts. “I don’t know how easy that’s going to be for you.”

Sasha nods, like an idiot, because she doesn’t know what else to do. 

For a moment, they just stare at each other. Sasha notes the strands of hair that have fallen out of place and into Anne’s eyes. The girl doesn’t seem to notice.

Sasha can count the number of times Anne’s talked back to her like this on one hand. The last time this happened, Anne ended the conversation and their friendship in one fell swoop. Did they ever even reinstate it? A terrible thought forms. Was there any formal agreement between them that lasted farther than I got your back against Andrias?

The worst part is, she doesn’t know. There wasn’t anything like this in the police car ride to the station. Sasha was just rambling to the police officer the whole time and Boonchuy’s parents were already there, somehow, at the station and Sasha didn’t get any alone time with her then to work anything out. Not in the hospital, either. And she sure as shit didn’t have any deep, friendship-saving conversations with her in Biology, save for that one time Anne had a meltdown and Sasha didn’t make anything better.

And as she’s going over every interaction Anne starts to walk away, her laptop and her charger already tucked into her backpack from a motion Sasha doesn’t remember. Her mind screams to reach out, to say something as Anne approaches the door, literally anything. Some way of apologizing, reconciling.

But for all her goddamn social genius, she can’t think of a single thing to say to make it better. She wants to reach out, grab her shoulders and tell her she didn’t mean any of it, tell her that deep down, she thinks she’s much smarter than Sasha ever thought herself to be, that Anne was always better than her, stronger than her, in a way Sasha’s ego couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge. But would Anne believe her? Worse, would it be a lie, a deception concocted from the darkness rotting in her core, that hole in the very center of her? Would it just be another fake, another scheme, wrenching itself out of the twisted parts of her soul and making itself a home in her throat? Maybe she is a monster. Maybe everything from her lips has always been a cruel attempt to cement herself as better than all the rest. Sasha hadn't let herself consider it, but now she weighs the idea in her palms, moving it from one hand to the other like she's not sure where it fits.

A pathetic, writhing part of her, not dissimilar to the hole she feels in her heart, perhaps deriving directly from it, thinks of rice and oil. Of heaviness sitting in the pit of her stomach. Of fear.

And by the time her mind clears enough to call out Anne’s name, the ringing bell on the door has already sounded, like it's announcing to her that there’s no one to hear whatever sad excuse she can make for herself. She sinks into her chair, swirling out of her head.

That somehow went worse than she expected.

Which, really, she should’ve known better. Everything she’s done recently has only added to an abominably long list of fuck-ups, probably leading all the way back to her birth. How dense and naive she is for not realizing it. That everything, pretty much everything, she’s ever done has only ever served to mess things up. To make things worse. Has she ever done anything remotely redeemable in her life? Anything you couldn’t find malice and deceit in, hell, anything you could find even the smallest twinge of goodness in? It's funny, it's hilarious, because just like with Anne's question, Sasha can't find an instance, an answer. And that means there isn't one.

She’s spiraling. She knows she is. But the funny thing about spiraling is that even when you know you’re doing it, you can’t get yourself to stop. So she packs up her things, takes a bus home, and does the only thing she knows how to do: make things worse.

The first thing she does when she walks through her back door is slide her backpack softly onto the couch.

The second thing she does is find the biggest plate she can and smash it on her dining room floor.

It’s a process, finding the biggest one that’ll make the loudest crack. Well, she’s never actually done this before, so her judgement on that is probably a little lacking. She leans towards the heavy plates in her mom’s china cabinet. Pretty, decorative pieces that haven’t been used and won’t be missed, even though Sasha doesn’t really give a shit if they’re missed. Sasha could throw a bowling ball at every vase in the house and her mom probably wouldn’t notice a thing as long as Sasha took out all the broken pieces. Honestly, the only thing Sasha couldn’t do without a trace in this godforsaken house is destroy her mom’s precious TV or something else in her office, since that’s the only fucking place she seems to give a shit about. It’s tempting, that’s for sure. But she settles on a blue-painted plate, elaborate designs etched in white on the edges and some fancy bird, a dove or something, carved into the very middle. She was never one to give a shit about all the fancy china she’d inherit when her mom finally croaks. She’s already inherited enough bad investments from the woman.

She gently takes the plate out of its cupboard, carrying it with care to the dining room. She makes sure to wipe off any dust gathered on it, guaranteeing it’s shiny before she raises her arms above her head.

Snowflakes of white and blue ceramic dance in a thousand different directions. She’s never heard a symphony like the sound of smashing porcelain. The second the plate kisses the floor, the tornado in Sasha’s mind ceases, and all the neurons speeding back and forth stop and wait, just for a moment. 

The whole world seems like it’s waiting for something, and Sasha realizes she never checked for a car in the driveway. Her mother could very well be home. So she waits, too. She doesn’t know why she’s not frantic, picking up the pieces as fast as she can to avoid a lecture. She’s just staring at shards. Waiting. For a noise. For footsteps.

But it’s been too long and nothing stirs. So she takes a breath, calmer and smoother than she expects, like she’s breathing deliberately for the first time in a while. And gets on her hands and knees.

To pick up the mess she’s made.

Chapter Text

Anne wandered through the old thrift store on Bronwell Street.

It’s become sort of a habit these past few weeks. Her first visit to this particular alcove on Bronwell Street, she stuffed a janky music box into her backpack and broke every rule she’s ever made for herself by walking out with it. Her second visit was spent partially in tears, desperately asking the clerk for any sign of that same music box. Her third visit was spent searching the entire store for any frog-shaped crumbs, any potential magical partners to the music box. And well, when she didn’t find anything, that probably should’ve been it. There wasn’t any logical reason to go back after that. She’d asked the clerk about that box a thousand different ways, and each response was identical: it was never on our stock list, so we have no idea. Are you sure it was this store?

But Anne Boonchuy has become less and less of the logical sort. She threw logic out the window the second she met a frog that could talk.

So, yes, it has unfortunately become a trend for her to visit this thrift store once in a while (see: once a week). 

Honestly, she didn’t know what she expected to find. Other than old books and ornate pieces of furniture, there wasn’t much in this place. She was kind of at a loss for how it stayed in business because nobody ever seemed to buy anything; she was still looking at the same inventory week after week. And she was always alone, save for one worker behind the register.

She walked aimlessly, staring at miscellaneous pieces of junk collecting dust as they sat on shaky wooden shelves. She was waiting for something, maybe, for her to turn the corner and a music box or for any other kind of useful artifact to materialize and solve all her problems, of which she has many.

In other words, the search for Amphibia was drier than the Sahara. Every time the thought bubbles up, maybe there’s no way back, Anne has to beat it back down with a stick. Screw that. There’s no way. She can’t lose hope, not when Marcy’s still out there. Not when Sprig and Hop Pop and Polly are counting on her.

Her heart twisted painfully remembering her frog family. She hoped more than anything that they’re okay. The last time she saw them, Sprig had been thrown out of a freaking window. Those seconds of freefall were probably the most terrifying seconds of Anne’s life. Yeah, he was fine, she’d have Marcy to thank for that, but the whole situation was way too close to losing two people close to her that day. If Marcy hadn’t been there, Anne doesn’t know what she would’ve done– it was because of her bird that Anne was able to send Hop Pop, Sprig, and Polly off to safety before anything worse could happen to them. She doesn’t want to admit it but she doesn’t know what she would’ve done without Sasha’s distraction, either. There were a whole lotta maybes, missed opportunities where she could’ve made a different choice to lead to a better outcome– all in all, the one she got was crap, but it could have technically been worse. Despite Sasha being… Sasha here, Anne doesn’t know what she’d do if she was all alone. And Marcy…

Thinking about Marcy made her chest tight and her heart start to pound. She got them into Amphibia in the first place, and not by accident– information that still spun round and round in her head like it was in a microwave these past weeks. She couldn’t believe it. Well, she did, actually: that was kind of the problem. It didn’t make any sense in the moment, but as she’s had time to think about it, pieces slowly started to click into place. Marcy had always been a floater, stuck in her own head a lot of the time and immersed in any world that wasn’t their own. She and Sasha both had a problem with ignoring and escaping from their issues when they were too big to solve in an afternoon, a habit that just happened to turn rather literal for one of them. 

Rationally, Anne knows she can’t blame Marcy for what happened. It’s not like she knew the future– the box could’ve easily been a dud, and they never would’ve ended up in Amphibia in the first place. Rationally, Anne knows how stressful it must’ve been for her, how scary, how guilty she must feel about all of it.

And it makes everything that much worse. Because there’s a horrible coldness, a wretchedness snaking its way through Anne’s heart that she refuses to let herself acknowledge. It writhes in the depths of her soul, a darkness in the back of her mind that creeps up whenever she thinks of Marcy. 

She beats it away. Or when it gets really bad, she takes a page from the book of everyone else and just stops thinking about Marcy altogether. Which shouldn’t be as easy as it is because strangely, not many people have asked about her. Anne even thinks her parents have got to think Marcy is dead or something because they never bring her up first anymore, and whenever Anne does, they get all hushed and have this dark, sad look on their face. She thinks its even made its way to school because people, especially teachers, have stopped asking Anne about her despite the way their stares linger on Marcy’s empty desk. Maybe it’s got something to do with the police, or maybe her parents told the teachers and then the teachers told the kids that it’s an off-limits subject. 

Officially, she doesn’t think Marcy is listed as dead; just missing. But there must be something disheartening, on principle, about two missing girls returning from six months of being missing when three girls left. Anne doesn’t think Sasha is helping much with that suspicion.

Sasha gets all weird and tightlipped about Marcy. Anne’s seen it once or twice in Biology, where Sasha’s talking to someone else and she hears Marcy float by and glances over and Sasha is stiff as a door, not talking or making eye contact. She doesn’t think she’s heard the name Marcy from Sasha’s lips even once since they returned, not even in the ride to the police station. Anne has to fight the urge to start screaming.

Anne’s parents are not the type to send their kid to a counselor, not that they’re entirely against it— Anne just knows from the way they talk about relatives who went to therapy that they’re not exactly entranced with the idea of sending their kid to a shrink. It wouldn’t be the last thing they do, but they’d have to be pretty desperate. But Anne thinks it’s coming one of these days, where they’re gonna sit her down and really ask about Marcy. And maybe send her to counseling if she really is dead. Which she’s not. Anne does not think Marcy is dead. But she knows her behavior might say otherwise– admittedly, she doesn’t talk about Marcy all that much either.

Some of it is to avoid the horrible bundle of feelings that arise. Most of it is that she genuinely just does not know what to say. What is she even supposed to do when other people ask about Marcy? Yeah, she got impaled through the chest in front of me, but the sword was made of fire so her wound probably cauterized, and that means she’s fine, right? If she’s not explaining Amphibia to them, and she hasn’t been, then how on Earth would she explain that? That she’s pretty sure Marcy got gravely injured but she has a feeling she’s gonna be okay? That something in Amphibia is magical, otherworldly, and things that happen there happen under different circumstances than here? I mean, in their fight against Andrias, Sasha got thrown against a wall so hard it cracked and she’s still walking. So is it that much of a stretch that Marcy could find a way to live?

Maybe Anne’s in denial. She doesn’t know much about the stages of grief other than denial is one of them. She thinks that’s the only reason her parents haven’t prodded over Marcy yet; they’re trying to give her time to process. But she doesn’t think time has much to do with anything. Her feelings won’t go away in time. Marcy won’t come back in time. She has to make it happen, and the only thing time does is run out. She refuses to just sit down, twiddle her thumbs, and wait.

Hop Pop gripped her tightly, back then, wrinkled eyes staring into hers, as he made her promise to come back.

Her fingers run absently over the phantom touch lingering on her shoulders. She would come back. That was something she knew: she’d come back even if it killed her. Which, if she was being honest, it was kind of doing already.

She hadn’t slept well since… well, since that first night home. Every night since, she’d been staying up late researching other dimensions, inter-dimensional travel, amphibians, special powers— and she hadn’t learned much.

Most of the related stuff on the internet was utterly useless. Anne once spent the hours between midnight and three a.m. reading an extensive article only to get to the end and find out it was written just to sell some stupid pyramid scheme. She fell asleep at lunch the next day. 

Interestingly enough there were, however, a few Reddit posts that piqued her interest: some guy went on r/GhostSightings and said he found these runes carved on ancient pottery that made his furniture start floating when he said them aloud. But nobody in the comments believed him, predictably, when he wouldn’t send pictures of such runes, saying “they broke my phone, I’m sending this in the library” and he ended up deleting his account. Anne had no idea if that was true or not, but one detail he mentioned stuck out to her: his couch had been imbued with this blue, green, and magenta light when he repeated the runes. Which, honestly, could be nothing! It’s not like Amphibia owns the colors blue, green, and magenta, and it’s possible he just made it up based on their adjacency to primary colors. And there were other strange things about the post, too, like his weird comment about a celestial being that presented itself as his household iguana. Anne admittedly did not believe that part. But despite its lack of credibility, she didn’t forget the post. It matched up too well with the colors on the music box. It’s a bit of a shot in the dark, but geez, she’s not given enough to work with here.

It was with those thoughts in mind, as well as staring absently for about ten minutes at an old-fashioned clock on the shelf that vaguely resembled something Hop Pop owned, that her ears picked up on some kind of scuffle. She perked up, peeking around the shelf.

“…my fault that you don’t know where to put things!”

“I never—! Ugh, fine, whatever. God, why is everything always my fault, huh?”

“I wouldn’t have to blame you if you just did your job right in the first place! How hard is it to keep track of a single piece of paper?”

Anne was surprised to see two of the thrift store workers having some kind of spat; usually, only one person even worked at a time. She’d decided to stop eavesdropping and just let them be when she noticed something in the corner of her eye balled up in the corner. She frowned.

It looked like a piece of paper. Anne walked over to it, gingerly picking it up and starting to unravel it. She blinked.

This sure looked like a stock list. 

There were rows and rows of penciled-in objects, and she even noticed that old clock listed as “vintage silver clock” on shelf B5. She looked back at it; sure enough, there was a small B5 etched into the wood labeling that spot. She scanned over the list again, planning on just returning it since she had a feeling this was what those two workers were arguing about losing when she saw something that stopped her dead in her tracks. 

In faded pencil, right near the bottom of the list, it read, antique music player. Shelf A6. She almost didn’t see it because the writing had been erased and crossed over (not to mention the handwriting already wasn’t the greatest), but she’d bet on it, she could make out those words. Confirming, she checked shelf A6 to find that, yeah, it’s very possible the music box was in this spot when she came and stole it. It would’ve been visible from the window, which meant Marcy could point it out to her. Holy crap. She could cry. So she definitely wasn’t crazy, it absolutely was this thrift store. She had gotten the box from here. She already knew this, but seeing it written down, undeniable, made her heart soar in her chest after weeks of being told they’d never sold anything like it. They have record of it. That has to mean something, doesn’t it? Anne started to bubble with excitement. Maybe they have pictures, or—or they could tell her something about whoever dropped it off. She had something, now. And she was gonna sink her teeth into it.

The pair was still arguing. She decided to hopefully end their little spat by bringing them what had to be the missing stock list.

“…another job.”

“Stupid, you think this rathole would refer you? I wouldn’t push your luck. I started looking the second I got that email. I got no idea why you waited until now. You’re gonna be shit out of luck.”

Feeling awkward about interrupting them, Anne sheepishly tapped one of the workers on the shoulder, who spun around.

“Oh. Hi. Did you need something?”

She pressed the paper into the teenage employee’s open hand. “I think I found something that belongs to you guys.”

The employees looked at her with confused expressions until they opened the crumpled piece of paper and gasped. “The stock list! Oh my god, where did you find this?”

“It was laying on the floor over there.”

They brightened considerably. “Thank you thank you, thank you! Oh, wow, it would be a real pain to close without this. Thank you.”

The finality of that phrase wouldn’t register in Anne’s ears until the next day. She smiled widely. “No problem. Hey, do you think you could—“

But the workers had become lost in their own conversation again, the discovery of the missing stock list seeming to dissolve any tension between them, as they chatted vibrantly. Anne hesitated in her newfound invisibility. I mean, she’d gotten what she wanted, right? Confirmation she wasn’t going crazy? At least she knows for sure now that the music box had been here, that’s more than she had like, 20 minutes ago. She could work with this. She could just come back tomorrow. Besides, she did have a lot of homework she could be— should be— doing tonight.

So with that in mind, she turned on her heels and left the store, the bell jangling wistfully behind her as if it was saying goodbye.

The next day, Anne walked to the thrift store on Bronwell street with a purpose. She could hardly contain herself all day, bubbling with questions she would ask and information she might get. She was so excited, the dread that today was also the day she was meeting Sasha to work on their group project didn’t make her steps sluggish like it usually would have.

She pushed open the door, like always, stepping onto the cracked linoleum floor and making a beeline for the register. Except she didn’t. Because the door didn’t open. It didn’t even budge.

Anne frowned. She tried again. The door just rattled, but it didn’t open. It was locked? She checked the time. There was no reason they shouldn’t be open, so why—

Her heart dropped. It felt like someone dumped a cold bucket of water over her head.

It was completely empty. Every shelf, even the register was gone. She should’ve noticed the lights were off, too, before she approached, but apparently she’s blind on top of everything else.

She slowly stepped backwards, like she was in a dream. Like if she just went slow enough, didn’t break the illusion, she wouldn’t see what she knew she was going to see. 

She saw it anyway. In big, red letters that she should’ve noticed before she tried to open the door, it read

PERMANENTLY CLOSED

THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATRONAGE

Anne stared at those words for a long time, longer than she needed to read them. She stared at them even as people brushed past her, annoyed glances shooting back. She stared at them like she could unread them. She stared at them like they weren’t real, like they were just a facade that would fade away if she looked hard enough, saw past it, through it. She stared until her phone buzzed angrily in her pocket, and she stared at them as she slowly took out her phone. She finally broke eye contact with the sign to look at the caller ID and read two words rather than seven, although admittedly they weren’t much better: Sasha Waybright

She sighed. She accepted the call.

“H—“

“Can we go to the boba shop.”

So she wanted a sweet treat to make her feel better, sue her; something about boba was especially comforting and nostalgic.

That day, Anne and Sasha would meet at the boba shop before heading to Thai Go to work on their project.

That day, Anne would be held together by fragile strings, by an uneasy foundation that would collapse under any pressure. She would be painful to the touch, vulnerable like a piece of pottery that had just hit the ground but prolonged splitting into a hundred pieces. And to Sasha’s defense, Anne probably would have crashed anyway. Something had to give, but maybe it would’ve been later, when Anne could turn on the shower to hide the sounds of her own frustrated, exhausted breathing.

To her own credit, it’s possible she could’ve kept herself together that day if it had been anyone else. These days, Sasha’s face alone (or just a wisp of that blonde hair) had a tendency to make Anne feel like she’d just bitten into something unexpectedly bitter. 

Maybe it was both of their faults; Anne was carefully-made porcelain seconds from cracking and Sasha had very indelicate hands.

 —

There was something Hop Pop said once that Sasha thought was an apt description of how she felt at the moment: I feel like ten pounds of shit in a five pound sack.

He’d actually said, “I feel like ten pounds of crap in a five pound sack,” but she thinks he would’ve said shit if it weren’t for Polly. And Sprig. And maybe Anne, considering the way she says freak more than she says fuck despite being out of elementary.

Physically, she felt about as fine as she had every other day—which frankly, wasn’t very—but mentally, she’s sure this is how it feels to get run over. Last evening’s plate smashing event did not, unfortunately, cure her of any of her long-lasting turmoil. She’s dismayed, even though she really shouldn’t be: her tendency to fall into short-term dopamine traps was not new. The starry-eyed elation always tricks her into thinking this time, it’ll be different. This time, the bubbly feeling in her chest won’t be lost in the darkness when the sun peeks above the horizon. This time, this feeling will last forever.

Like most good things that cross Sasha’s mind, whenever it seems for a second that it might stay, the feeling plops itself down in a corner, draws its knees to its face, and disintegrates before Sasha can commit it to memory. She forgets the pattern. She falls for it again. Every single time.

She winced as she turned a page in her textbook. Something that also should've dampened the feel-good chemicals of last night was the fact that she had to pick up a lot of broken ceramic, which resulted in more than a few cuts on her fingers before she remembered the existence of a broom. And then she still had to pick up a few shards with her hands, anyway, because they had been blown into the cracks of her table. Man, she should really clear out a bigger space next time. Now she has all these slashes on her fingers that were deceptively tiny for their capacity to make Sasha grit her teeth. Her only reprieve is that they weren’t that noticeable after concealer, and, good lord did concealer make fresh scabs sting, but it would be a pain in the ass if anyone noticed and made some deal about it. She didn’t need more eyes. If there was some satisfaction from the sharpness of the pain sparking from every little movement, Sasha wouldn’t know— she’d never admit it.

Sasha didn’t really want to admit she’d smashed a plate and scratched herself picking up the pieces. Never mind the plate-smashing was intentional. Actually, even moreso that it was intentional; it was somehow 10x more embarrassing that way. She’d rather admit she was doing drugs before she admitted that sometimes she did weird, stupid shit while chasing a feeling that never lasted until morning. Drugs were explainable. Drugs were not as vividly embarrassing as having a tantrum by yourself in an empty house. Or they probably weren’t. Sasha has never done drugs.

Someone lightly tapped her on the shoulder.

She hated feeling like she was just having a tantrum, a childish meltdown about not getting the toy she wanted or having a bedtime, which is surely what people would think if she told them. They’d look at her like she was a little kid, naive and acting out for the fleeting rush of validation that came with attracting attention. Isn’t that what you’re doing? said a snarky voice, but she ignored it. She didn’t need to be sat down in a too-bright counseling room and be told about the wonders of meditation and journaling, about yoga positions that would surely cure the emptiness inside her that seemed to consume all else. She didn’t need the disappointed gaze from her mother, a this again ? while she sat staring at the floor, blood soaking through bandaids. She could do without the pitying stare from adults who didn’t know anything, too. She was tired of it. She was tired of everything.

Someone tapped her on the shoulder one, two, three more times, insistently. Sasha grumpily lifted her head from where it rested on her forearms, managing to grit out a “what?”

Hallie had this strange flighty look to her, chewing on her fingernails and glancing around the room. “Code red.”

“What?” Sasha asked flatly, her irritation building.

“Code. Red. She’s coming.”

“Who? What the fuck–”

That was apparently all the warning she was going to get before Coach Marly practically burst into the classroom. The burly woman zeroed in on Hallie and Sasha immediately. Actually, just on Sasha. Uh oh.

“Sasha Waybright. Can you come with me?”

Oh shit oh shit oh shit. Sasha looked desperately to her history teacher for support, for sanctuary, but he just looked at her with wide eyes and an unmistakable fear behind them. Bastard. 

She desparately looked around the room for exits, for escape, but found nothing. God damn it. Maybe she can feign passing out and dying right here. Or just pass out and die for real.

“Sasha.”

She thought of jumping out the window, examining all the drawbacks and potential obstacles. The window’s probably locked. Actually, definitely locked. Could she set herself on fire somehow? But she couldn’t guarantee Coach Marly wouldn’t use the fire extinguisher. Maybe if she hit her head really hard on the desk she’d die immediately. How likely was that?

She ran through a couple more sudden death scenarios before exhausting all the stalling time she had. She resigned herself to her fate. “Do I need to bring my stuff?”

“Would be a good idea.”

Fuck you, she glared at the teacher who was pointedly ignoring eye contact as she packed her things. Coward. She took one last glance at Hallie, who was giving her a forlorn look akin to a mother watching her son go off to war. She gave a slow nod, which Sasha returned. She would not forget her efforts.

Sasha trailed sluggishly after her cheerleading coach, who was now bounding down the hallway with a force that dared anyone to come in front of her.

Sasha tried to drag out the minutes in the hallway as long as possible, but ultimately, they both ended up in the empty gym. Coach had a table set up against the wall as well as two chairs. She made a point to gesture Sasha to one of them. Shit.

Sasha glumly took her seat, pulling out the chair as slowly as she could as if she could somehow drag the motion out long enough that they wouldn’t have time for the incoming conversation. With a grunt, Coach Marly disappeared into the staff kitchen conveniently adjacent to the gym. Sasha sat back, her eyes trailing up the wall.

Coach returned a couple minutes later with matching, steaming mugs. She made a point to shut and lock the gym doors behind her so the two of them were alone, with no possibility of eavesdroppers. Sasha closed her eyes, pretending she was sitting on the couch with Grime. They had just finished training, and the two of them were watching their troops out the window try and fail to do handstands. It was funny.

“Wake up,” said the voice that definitely wasn’t Grime.

“I am awake.” Sasha did not open her eyes.

“Did you want milk?”

“No.”

“Good, because I didn’t get you any.”

Sasha begrudgingly tore her eyes open, but it’s not like she needed them to know there was a steaming mug of the nastiest tea she had ever tasted right in front of her, with a matching mug in front of her coach. Why her coach insisted on that weird, old-fashioned tradition of making both parties tea whenever she sat them down for these meetings, Sasha did not know. She had never met anyone who actually liked Coach Marly’s tea.

The woman took a sip of the tea in question, her tastebuds obviously having hardened and fallen off by now because she didn’t spit it out immediately, glaring at Sasha to do the same with her own mug. Sasha just peered down into the murky liquid. It was supposed to be Earl Gray, but it looked (and tasted) more like swamp water. How someone could fuck up something as simple as tea was beyond Sasha’s comprehension.

But Coach Marly never started these things without Sasha taking her own drink, and she honestly just wanted this to be over as soon as possible, so she braced herself and took a small sip.

It tasted somehow worse than regular water. She didn’t even try to hide her grimace. That was all she was going to get. Coach Marly let out a satisfied hum anyway.

Her coach placed her mug on the table. “So. Are you going to tell me what that shit was all about?”

Language, old lady, she thought absently as she eyed the half-opened water bottle sitting on the floor, far too used-to the woman’s foul language whenever the two of them were alone. “I don’t know what you mean.”

She frowned. “Six months, Sasha? I didn’t know you were capable of living on your own that long.”

“I wasn’t alone.”

“Right,” her face scrunched up with a disgust she didn’t even try to hide, “you had… that tennis girl, what was her name? Kate? Something short and classic. Bella? Anna? I’m shocked she could stand you for that long.”

Sasha bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Her coach stirred her swamp water tea. “Oh, don’t act all surprised. We both know you don’t have a great track record of getting along with others.”

“You’re obviously pissed at me,” Sasha muttered.

The retort was sharp. “Language, young lady.”

“Sorry. Mad at me. You’re angry with me for leaving.” Sasha cut to the point. She was already tired of this conversation and her tea hadn’t even stopped steaming yet.

Her coach glared at her. “You think, Sash?”

Sasha started to count the tiles on the ceiling.

“Great thing you have the awareness to notice now, but you didn’t think of that before you left, did you? You think it was easy for me to just fill in for you? Replace you on such short notice? Do you have any idea the shit you put me through when you left like you did? All the stress? The rearranging? I had to reorganize everything, you know. You missed games, missed training– certainly missed tryouts, so I had to lead that myself. All of it. The whole season, Sash. You didn’t think about that?”

Sasha approached tile number 27. I was more focused on not getting eaten by herons. She held her tongue, though. It was better to distract herself and just let the woman burn herself out.

“Did you even think about what it would do to me? For one second, hey, just one thought, what it would do to the team? Those girls look up to you, Sash, you can’t just abandon all your responsibilities and run off with some… friends when it gets tough. It’s childish. It’s disrespectful. It’s reckless.”

Huh. There was a plastic ball in the rafters. How long had that been up there? Sasha wondered.

“I mean, God, I’ve seen some teenagers, I’ve been teaching them for sixteen years. Never have I seen one like you. I made you team captain for a reason, Sasha, you were smarter, had this fire in you, I took one look at you and said, oh, she’s meant to be a leader. But this? Never have I had a kid just… I thought you were better than that. I thought we were– I thought you were past this,” she said, running a stressed hand through her hair. “Acting out.”

Sasha didn’t have to look away from the rafters to see the expression on her Coach's face. She knew it well: the scrunched brows, the deep frown, the sinking feeling. The disappointment shining in downturned eyes. It wasn’t as shocking, heart-pumping, accusatory, as her Coach seemed to believe– it turns out that disappointment, like everything else, is something you can get used to. Disappointment fell into line with all the other aches in her ribcage, interlocking right beside regret like puzzle pieces.

There was one thing she learned in Amphibia: if you let enough people down, sooner or later they’ll figure out not to expect anything from you at all. It's smarter that way, to not expect, Sasha knows. It avoids wide, surprised stares, betrayal stark in every feature. It avoids betrayal altogether. Sasha really, honest to God wondered how it took most people so long to figure this out. Why have expectations of other people? Why invest in someone else and become victim to their whims, their volatility, their stupid decisions? Why put yourself in a position where, in the end, you'll always be either wrong or hurt? Or both? People are unpredictable, messy, and complicated. Their souls are full of ugly, selfish thoughts and writhing seas of contempt and resentment. Everything and everyone resents everyone and everything. It's part of being alive.

She almost felt sorry for the woman. This poor, silly woman, who didn't understand yet not to expect anything from Sasha, that any trust placed in her would be a fundamental error, one that presided on the hope that Sasha had some portion of trustworthiness or respectability or goodness. That she cared enough about offending the sensibilities of others that she'd change any of her behavior in accommodation for them. Emotions are purely fragile and irrational. Why on Earth should she cater to them, coddle them, especially if they aren't her own?

In the end, all Sasha's conviction leads to one truth: the sun sets at night, rises in the morning, and Sasha disappoints everyone stupid enough to trust her.

She noticed another ball stuck in the rafters, wedged inbetween the vertical poles of the ceiling's structure. She cocked her head. There were several balls, she noticed now, stuck in the ceiling in that same fashion. She had an image of black, thick flies trapped in an abandoned spider's web. Stagnant, left waiting for death that wouldn't come.

She wished someone would pop them all. She imagined that, their limp bodies devoid of air falling the thirty feet to the ground. The crack they'd make on the gymnasium hardwood. She frowned-- no, not a crack. More of a slapping noise. Nothing would break.

“What were you thinking, by the way?” She almost forgot her coach was still talking. “You realize they could make you repeat the year? I mean, I doubt they will, but they absolutely could. That was foolish. That was stupid. What would your mother–“ 

“I didn’t exactly run off on purpose,” Sasha corrected, swallowing, despite the sharpness in her coach’s eyes that said shut up . “That’s the thing about going missing, you know, you don’t always plan for it.”

“Bullshit,” her coach barked, leaning back, and frustration bloomed like a dangerous thing in the pit of Sasha’s stomach. “You knew what you were doing. You just didn’t care.”

You were looking out for yourself, Sash. Honestly, I wonder if you’ve ever done anything else.

Sasha flinched. “I really—"

“You can sit here and lie to me, Sash,“ Don’t call me that. “but let me tell you right now that you’re gonna have no luck.” Her coach scooted closer, her hot breath making its way across the table. “You might have some of your other teachers fooled, but I know what a little shit you are. Don’t think you can talk me off as easy.”

Averting her gaze, Sasha bit her tongue so she wouldn’t spit fuck you.

Coach leaned back, seeming satisfied with whatever she saw in Sasha’s expression. “Well, ‘s not like anything’s gonna change now. You’re not gonna tell me where you actually were, because I don’t believe that bullshit camping story, so I won’t bother. But you better come up with a more believable one to tell your team members when you come back to practice. Those girls look up to you. If they think you’re losing it, they’re gonna lose it.”

“Don’t know why you need me at practice,” Sasha grumbled. “You’ve been doing just fine, apparently.”

“No thanks to your ridiculous stunt,” Coach snapped. “You’re coming to next week’s practice. I’ve let you get away with this for too long. Friday, three o’clock. Sharp. One minute late and I’m calling your mother.”

As if sensing Sasha’s incoming protest, Coach narrowed her eyes. “I’ve given you time to get settled in, which, to be frank, is more mercy than you deserve. You’re lucky I haven’t already called her. You’re lucky you even still have a place on this team, kiddo.”

Sasha slumped, the fight draining out of her. It was true that she’d gotten away with skipping practice for longer than she anticipated. Her coach had been doing her a solid by not pushing this sooner, even if she wasn’t doing it for Sasha as much as she was avoiding dealing with the mess associated with her.

Her coach sighed, downing whatever’s left in her mug in one go and slamming it harder than necessary on the table. “They’d been worried about you, girly, you know, even after you came back. They think somethin’ happened to you and that’s why you’re not coming back to practice.”

Sasha grimaced. She’d felt the concerned gazes of her cheer team, too. “I know.”

Coach raised her eyebrow. “Oh, so you noticed? And you didn’t think you should try to clear any of that up?”

Sasha blew out a breath. “What am I supposed to say?”

“Fuck, kid, I don’t know. Is something wrong?”

“No,” Sasha muttered. 

Coach was silent for a second. She looked at Sasha with an unreadable expression.

“Just spit it out,” Sasha snapped.

 “You’ve lost weight.”

Like a camera flash, her heart stopped beating. A chill shuddered through her. She breathed again, taking more effort than usual. Her heart beat again.

“Yeah, getting stuck in the wilderness for half a year does that to you,” she gritted out.

Coach placatingly raised her hands. “Hey. Look, kid, I don’t— you come to practice next Friday, I don’t care about anything else. You gotta convince them .”

Sasha fiddled with her hands, picking at the scabs that littered her fingers. “Everyone’s overreacting. I’m fine. I’ve never been anything else.” The buzzing of the overhead lights seemed much louder; an incessant hum that, combined with the heartbeat drumming in her ears, made her want to scream.

“Okay, but listen. Let me tell you something.” The woman placed her hands flat on the table, as if for emphasis.

“I’m listening,” Sasha deadpanned.

“There’s a story I always got told as a kid. It starts with this pigeon in New York. Ugly, filthy things I tell you, but whatever, so, this pigeon flew in a flock of all the other pigeons. And one day, the pigeon falls. Or he gets hit by a bus. Or something else happens—he gets kicked by a homeless person, I don’t know—and he breaks his wings. Both of them. He can’t fly. Probably hurts real bad, too. But he doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t tell the other birds. Do you know why?”

“‘cause birds can’t talk?”

“Because the flock is on a rooftop.”

“How did he get on the roof if he—“

“They’re on a rooftop,” Coach insisted. “Anyway. The wind blows, and all his buddies are gearing up to fly. They’re puffing themselves up, they see something on the next rooftop. Whatever birds do. Before you know it, they’re flying. All of them land. Except one.”

Sasha snorted. “What, they left him behind?”

“No,” Coach said. “He died.”

“What?”

“He followed them off the roof. But his wings didn't open, obviously. So he just plummeted to the pavement.”

“Why would—“

“Do you see what the fucking point is? He lied to the others. He lied to himself. And lying is all well and good, you know, until it gets to your own head. And you jump off a roof because you convince yourself you’re gonna fly. That’s where it starts getting messy, Sash. When you go home and there’s no one else around and you realize you don’t know where your lies end and the truth starts. You wake up one morning and realize that somewhere along the way, you’d managed to convince yourself of all your bullshit, too, and now you don’t know where anything is; not the truth, not your memories, not your dreams— nothing. You lose it. Or you die. You jump.”

Sasha didn't get it. “Why are you telling me this?”

Coach gave her a look.“I just want you to keep it in mind.”

“What? Not to lie?” Sasha barked, feeling angrier than she thinks she should. “Thanks, Coach, but I already know I’m not supposed to do that—and I don’t, by the way— I haven’t lied to you! I didn’t even do anything to you. I haven’t— the team will be fine. I’m perfectly fine. I’m better than fine, I’d argue I’m doing fantastic, actually. Better than when I left.”

“Then convince them of that,” Coach spat back, standing up. “I was serious when I said that if they think you’re losing it, they’re gonna lose it. And then my whole cheer team goes off the deep end.” Coach sighed. “You think your behavior only affects you? When you’re on a team, everything you do has a ripple effect, you know. You mess up and it becomes everybody’s problem.”

You know, I can’t think of a single thing that’s happened recently that hasn’t somehow been your fault.

Sasha bristled. “I know that. I knew it when I became captain.”

Then, quietly, because she felt this pressing force in the air that told her she had to: “I don’t do it anymore.”

Coach collected both their mugs with practiced ease, looking at Sasha with an expression she admittedly couldn’t entirely read, but was surprised to have found something that might’ve been confused for sadness. “I told you, I’m not the one you have to convince.”

She disappeared into the staff kitchen.

Sasha was silent. Whatever retort she might’ve replied with had died in her chest. A suffocating spiral took its place. Stupid guilt clawed through her, leaving streaks of white-hot shame. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. She hadn’t done anything.

I don’t do it anymore.

And for some stupid reason, Anne’s words from the day before were bubbling, churning in her head.

Part of me wonders if you’ve ever done anything else.

I can’t think of a single thing that’s happened recently that hasn’t somehow been your fault.

Her chest tightened, dragging her down with dread. It was pooling inside her. There was a vast lake of despair. Swirling. Waiting. Just swishing around in the depths of her. Before she could sink like a stone, the gruff voice spoke again.

“...don’t know why you haven’t already.”

Sasha ripped her eyes away from the fold-out table she hadn’t realized she’d been staring at and squinted at the woman who, strangely, now seemed to be setting out gym equipment. “What?”

She cleared her throat, seemingly set on not making eye contact. “You could see the counselor. He’s supposta’ help kids like you. Might help you figure out what to say to the team.”

Oh. Sasha frowned.

More bullshit.

She didn’t need some quack telling her what to say. So what she missed practice for a while? Big fucking deal. Her team would get over it. They always did. Or now’s the time they should learn. People leave. They don’t always tell you. You can’t always predict it. They won’t always tell you when they’re coming back. Even if it’s weeks. Or months. Get over it. She’d dealt with worse. She’d coordinated battle plans. She’d had armies wrapped around her finger. A bunch of middle school girls was a walk in the park compared to what she was used to commanding.

“I’m not going to.”

She huffed, her mop of curly brown hair twitching with the movement. “You’re not even gonna think about it?”

“I’d rather have the entire cheer team beat me with rocks than sit through a conversation with the school counselor.”

The woman paused. “You don’t like him?”

“I don’t like his… kind. It's not personal. Can I go now? Please? I’ll be late if I don’t leave now,” Sasha shifted her weight on the chair back and forth as if to appear antsy.

Her next class actually didn’t start for another 20 minutes, but she wasn’t going to tell her that. 

The woman didn’t answer immediately, apparently suddenly preoccupied with whatever she was doing. Sasha wondered for a moment if she had forgotten Sasha was still sitting there. Maybe she should just slip out the door. The last thing she wanted was to enter another unavoidable conversation with this woman. God, why can’t everyone just let Sasha live? 

“Why don’t you want to see him?” Coach asked finally, right after Sasha mentally made her move to get up and leave.

Sasha’s irritation skyrocketed looking at the woman’s back. Was this an interrogation? What more do you want from me? “Do I need a reason?”

The woman turned around, her gaze raking over Sasha, who shifted uncomfortably. “I’d like one, kiddo.”

Oh.

Oh.

Oh fucking hell, there it was. Sasha didn’t know she’d been waiting for it this entire time until it was (literally) looking her in the face. That pitying stare. That fucking sympathy look from adults who claimed they were helping but just wanted to throw her into half-hearted counseling and make her somebody else’s problem. That was what she wanted to avoid. Coach Marly was exactly the type of person to give her such a stare. It was why she'd avoided practice. That, and she didn't feel like she could face her teammates head on. Coach asked questions, prodded with a sturdy gaze that Sasha didn’t trust herself to be able to answer without cracking her voice or getting really pissed off. And she hated that stupid look in her eyes.

“I already told you,” Sasha hissed, raising her voice, “I don’t like counselors. I don’t trust them farther than I could throw them. I don’t need some rando to prod into my life. I don’t need you to prod into my life, yeah? I don’t care about whatever you, from your oh-so-high wall of wisdom, think I need, because whatever it is, I can figure it out myself. I don’t owe you anything outside of practice.”

Sasha’s hands clenched into fists, ignoring the sting of pain from the cuts on her fingers pressing into her palm. “You want me to come to practice? Fine. You want to pull me out of class, ask invasive questions about my life? Freaking fine. Whatever. But you can’t force me to do anything— you don’t know what’ll help me because you don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.”

Sasha glared defiantly.

The only thing Coach did was look at her.

Stare with those stupid, ridiculous, sad pity-eyes. The kind you save for kicked puppies. For kids who dropped their ice cream. For abandoned cats left out in the rain. The kind Sasha didn’t need. The kind Sasha didn’t want. The kind Sasha didn’t deserve.

I can’t think of anything that’s happened recently that hasn’t somehow been your fault.

That was it.

Sasha boiled over, standing up abruptly and snatching her bag before marching over to the gym doors. She quickly stepped out, slamming them both behind her in a fluid motion. She stood on the other side of the doors for a second, heaving with breath.

For some absolutely incomprehensible reason, she wanted to cry. For some supremely embarrassing reason, she almost did, right there and then in the gym.

She dropped her head in her hands, raking her fingernails over her cheeks as she shuddered in breath.

I don’t do it anymore.

You’ve lost weight.

I don’t do it anymore.

I’m not the one you have to convince.

I don’t do it anymore.

Part of me wonders if you’ve ever done anything else.

I don’t do it anymore.

I can’t think of anything that hasn’t been your fault.

I don’t—

There are eyes watching her, people staring at her, all the time, all the time. They know. Everyone knows. Everyone knows. Her heart is beating so fast. Can Coach hear it? Can everyone hear it? She feels like she’s being watched, now, even at this moment, even though this hallway is empty and everyone is in class. Everyone is watching her, and everyone knows everything she’s done. She is raw and exposed to the entire world.

I don’t do it anymore.

She sucks in a breath. She scratches at her patchy, concealer-covered scabs. She steels her nerves. She gets her shit back together.

I don’t do it anymore.

(The ever-present voice in the back of her head whispered liar, liar, liar).

It ricochets off the walls. Liar.

Part of her wonders if she’s ever done anything else.

---

There was something strange about this vision.

It wasn’t a memory. At least, Marcy didn’t think it was. She certainly doesn’t remember ever seeing a place with this many… snakes? Pipes? It was way too fuzzy to accurately make anything in her surroundings out.

She frowned despite not having a physical mouth at the moment. She tried to reach out and touch something, anything, but like always, there was nothing for her to control. No neurons sending signals. No skeletal muscle. Just… void. 

For some reason, something about the Eye seemed brighter today. Sharper. Marcy had a feeling she was seeing something in more clarity. She didn’t know what it was.

There is a voice, somewhere. It’s far away, some sensory input in a place Marcy isn’t physically in. Garbled, deep, the voice sounds, she thinks, and scratchy, maybe. The words, if the voice is speaking words at all, don’t make sense. They slur, fragments of sentences bouncing around and jittering together. She can’t understand most of it, but one word sticks out. She might not have heard it right, might’ve confused it for something else. But it’s peculiar. It strikes a mental image.

Robots, she thinks she hears the voice say.

Chapter Text

“Hey,” Hallie nudges, poking a finger with chipped red nail-polish. “What’s gotten into you?”

Sasha barely lifted her head from where it rested on her arms. “What?” she says blearily.

The brunette frowned. The bright overhead lights poured in through Sasha’s squinted eyes. It bordered on giving her a headache. “You’re like, being super weird. Like, even more than normal.”

Sasha groaned, pushing her forehead back down to the pillow that was her forearms. “Shut up.”

“No,” Hallie insisted, “I mean it. What’s up?”

“I’m being totally normal,” said Sasha’s muffled voice. She closed her eyes and breathed in the dark, warm air. Why didn’t she do this more often? It was so nice to just block everything out.

“Dude, last year you said these desks were so disgusting you didn’t even want to put your waterbottle on it, and now you’re just touching it with your face?”

Nice, warm, dark. It’s nice and warm and dark in this little cavern she’s made. She teeters towards the edge of sleep, tempted to just close her eyes and fall into its sweet embrace– but there’s this agitating, grating voice that just keeps bleating in her ear. She squeezes her eyes shut and clamps her hands over her ears, but she can still hear it: a whining, shrill noise.

She whips up her head. “Hallie, can you stop that? God, your voice is way too high-pitched.”

Hallie had to turn towards her to make eye contact, which was a little weird, because Sasha could’ve sworn she was right next to her ear. The girl frowns, her eyebrows furrowing. “What?"

“Don’t ‘what’ me. Stop whining in my ear. It’s annoying.”

Sasha knew she was being aggressive and snippy, but jeez, can’t she just get a break? There were three more hours until school ended and she’d already had to go to Biology and face Anne this morning after their fight at Thai Go a couple days ago. Anne refused to look at her, as usual, which was great. It wasn’t like Sasha totally thought they were getting somewhere before Sasha had to stick her stupid nose into Anne’s business and trigger the fuse that blew up whatever rapport they had into a thousand miserable pieces. She just had to insist on taking control of everything.

And then Coach had to butt in with her stupid, steaming mug of horseshit, and that didn’t make anything better, because now she’s got more fuel for that train of guilt that just choo-choos around her head all day. And Sasha has heard Anne’s voice repeating in her head more than she’s heard Anne’s actual voice, even though that voice in her head has stopped sounding so much like Anne and now sounds suspiciously like Sasha herself, or maybe Sasha and a little bit of her mother, but, still, mostly Sasha. And everything sucks, and she just wants to put her head down and close her eyes but that noise is still blaring and it’s so high-pitched and annoying that she wants to start to scream.

“I swear to God, Hallie, if you don’t–”

“Okay, hold on, what?” Hallie sounded genuinely confused which rang a sort of dull uncertainty in Sasha’s head. “I’m even more worried than I was before. What is going on with you? Do you need, like, a defibrillator? Because I don’t know how to use one.”

The noise was so grating Sasha felt like hitting someone. “I’d be fine if you weren’t whining in my ear,” she hissed.

Hallie’s frown deepened, her eyes scrunching up as if Sasha were being completely and entirely unreasonable. Which just made Sasha angrier, really.

“What?” she snapped, “Listen, I’m sorry, but it’s literally so annoying, and I don’t even know how you’re still managing to make that noise while you talk. It’s totally freaky.”

“Sasha, I’m not doing anything.”

Her stomach did something weird. “What?”

“I mean, I’m not making any noise or whatever. I’m just sitting here.”

“Then what was–”

Oh.

Sasha listened. But the noise had stopped. There was peace again.

Huh.That was kind of strange.

Hallie looked at her like she’d grown three heads.

“...Sorry Hals, I don’t know what that was,” Sasha said sheepishly, fiddling with the collar of her uniform. What the hell just happened?

“It’s whatever,” Hallie muttered, shifting back to her seat. The concerned look didn’t waver, however, and Sasha could tell the girl was still looking at her from the corner of her eye. Sasha drew her eyes away. Great. More concern.

Well, it was quiet now. That was something of an improvement; she has more brain space to reflect on whatever just occurred. She narrowed her eyes in contemplation. When did the noise even start? She didn’t remember a sudden onslaught of high-pitched noise, it just… creeped up on her until it was blaring and all she could hear. She frowned. Now that she thought about it, why did she even assume it was Hallie in the first place? The noise was… electrical-sounding, like the subtle whine appliances made when you plugged them in. How was Hallie supposed to just make that with her mouth?

Sasha scribbled on a pink sticky note with a blue gel pen before sliding it Hallie’s way. Sorry Hallie, it read. I’ll buy you something.

Hallie saw it, then scribbled her reply. She passed it back. My favorite sugar mommy.

Sasha snorted, crumpling the note and tucking it into her pocket.

-

She had almost forgotten about the noise–simply because she had other shit to think about–by the time she was sitting in her second-to-last period of the day about two hours later. She was staring absently out the window, counting rows and rows of cars in the parking lot when it started again: that high-pitched whine.

She stiffened immediately and covered her ears with her hands, but it did little to stifle the noise. She groaned, leaning forward in her chair until her forehead touched the desk. Shut up shut up shut up, she repeated in a mantra. (It didn’t do much).

She shuffled back and forth in her seat and pressed her fingers hard against the outer cartilage the block the entryway to her eardrum. The noise wormed its way in. She distantly imagined throwing a vase like a bowling ball and watching it explode. 

It was definitely electrical in some way, or mechanical at least. Something tech-y. It reminded her of that one time her mom bought this fancy new portable stove; it must’ve been broken or something because whenever you turned it on it would just make this horrible shrill noise. Sasha thinks it was so high that her mom couldn’t hear it, because she kept using that awful thing no matter how many times Sasha told her it was making some ungodly screech and that it was probably busted. Her mother never heard it. She doesn’t hear much when it comes to Sasha.

She looked around the classroom. Everybody, save for the friend group that hung near the back and chatted incessantly all class, looked miserable but the average type of school-day miserable. No one seemed to react to the high-pitched drone that was filling Sasha’s eardrums. Hallie certainly hadn’t heard it.

Okay, she admitted reluctantly, maybe it was all in her head. Maybe she’s got sudden-onset tinnitus or something. Maybe she’s finally losing her mind. Maybe the talk with Coach was the final nail in the coffin that buried Sasha’s sanity six feet deep. 

When she thinks about it, it’s possible she could’ve lost her mind the day before that; her sanity shattered into a thousand pieces like blue and white china on her dining room floor. And now, she imagines, she’s walking around as ceramic shards stuck together with bright pink glitter glue, as if the display—as if anything, the voice that sounds like Anne says—could make her whole again. Maybe she broke months ago, in a moment of terror and resignation and almost a smear on concrete, and every moment afterwards has been stolen from life itself, life she was not meant to live and maybe life she hadn’t deserved to live, because the world may well be better off without her in it. Maybe she broke a long, long time ago, with bloody noises and auburn stains on white-collared uniforms, with the knowledge that something was noticeably, irrevocably wrong with her, a knife carving out a hole in her very center that would never heal, and would expand to swallow her one day. Maybe—

A shrill noise penetrated her eardrums, but it was blessedly different from the one she’d been suffering under for all day. Kids shuffled to pack their laptops and notebooks at the call of the bell, their chairs screeching as they stood up to leave. Sasha, though, sat there for a minute, staring at the blobs of color in the parking lot.

Like the realization was in the treeline on the edge of the lot, she distantly registered the noise had stopped.

-

She is not surprised the third time her eardrums are pierced by a horrible whine. She is only terribly tired.

The clock reads twenty minutes until 2:15. She only has twenty minutes left in class before she can get the hell out of this school (and hope the sound doesn’t follow her home), so she just grimaces and bears the noise. She’s beginning to brainstorm ways to stifle her ears if the devilish noise does follow her when she hears it. Sitting up in her chair, she narrows her eyes, and for once, listens.

Then she hears it again. A couple seconds later, again— the noise isn’t consistent, she realizes. There are small gaps where it stops and then starts again at seemingly random intervals. Instead of clamming her hands over her ears and repeating nonsense in her head to block out the noise, she puts her hands on the table and tunes in.

It stops. Then it starts again. Then it starts, and it doesn’t stop for a while. Then it’s starting and stopping quicker and slower again and even slower. And then it’s faster than before. Sasha squinted, tempted to stick her tongue out like a cartoon character in contemplation. She ignores her teacher’s attempts to bring her attention back to class until he gives up.

It definitely has a pattern to it, she notes. I just don’t know what it is or why it’s happening. Man, I’m not smart enough for this. Maybe I should call Mar— she cut herself off before she could finish, her thoughts growing quiet. A familiar somber feeling settled into her bones.

She pulled up a new tab on her computer, setting Solitaire aside for now. Noise patterns, she typed into the search bar. It came up with a bunch of images of TV static and weird retro grunge-y textures. Not what she had in mind.

im hearing this whiney noise what is it, she typed instead.

Tinnitus, the search result spits out. Sasha leaned back in her chair, genuinely considering it. Maybe she really did have tinnitus. The noise was gone now, but it was indeed this high-pitched ringing in the ears like the search results proclaimed. She frowned. But why would tinnitus have a recognizable pattern? That didn’t make sense. The results listed off that it can sound like wind in the ears, a roaring noise (which she thought sounded terrifying), buzzing, hissing, scratching, indeed, they really covered the spectrum. But nothing about a recognizable, persistent pattern.

It did say that it can be either constant or reoccurring, lasting a couple minutes. Her frown deepened. But it said nothing about it happening and then stopping and then starting over and over within the span of a couple minutes before stopping completely; again she thought of something she was trying to forget.

Actually, it sounded, she realized abruptly, like the noise of a hand-held machine in a video game she got forced to play, once. What did she use it for? She squinted. Then her stomach flips.

It was for radar, she remembers. To track the enemy’s movements.

Radar? Isn’t that the thing for dolphins or whatever? Or was that sonar? Sasha had no idea of the distinction between the two. She didn’t even know if either one was the right word. She didn’t care. Her mind was trailing down a different course of thought.

Not necessarily just tracking the enemy.

Radar worked in intervals of noise, quick beeps yelling at you as you got closer while long absences of a beep indicated you were moving farther away, like a game of hot & cold.

Whoever was tracking her wasn’t just finding out where she was; they were trying to get close to her.

She shivered despite the classroom not being cold at all. She clenched her hands into fists and tried not to freak out.

The government? They’ve finally—

No, that didn’t make sense. The government would’ve known her name, her address, and from there her school and they’d know she was in class right now. They didn’t need to track her to find that out, they would’ve just shown up. Then who—?

Probably Andrias, she figures, now anxiously tracing the letter M on her keyboard. He did say he was gonna take over Earth or whatever. Maybe he’s trying to get rid of us because we know what he’s up to?

She looked at the floor, counting the tiles. The untied laces of her white sneaker stared back at her. She scowled. She’d wanted to wear her Mary Jane’s today, but she couldn’t find them in her closet. She settled for sneakers. It was another thing that was off today. She tugged at the laces with her other shoe instead of tying it.

If all that was true, it meant it was only a matter of time before Andrias found them. In person.

She leaned back in her chair. She needed to tell Anne. She tapped her foot incessantly. She knew she had to tell Anne. It was Amphibia-stuff (well, very likely Amphibia stuff). Anne needed to know. No matter what spat they're in now, Amphibia stuff came first. It was about their safety.

Sasha knew that. But her legs felt heavy and solid when the final bell rang, and she stilled in her seat for longer than she needed to. She drifted through the hallway, eyes fixed to the floor, to Anne’s classroom. Her feet listlessly planted themselves down right next to the door instead of entering.

There she lingered, each passing second ticking a warning that she was running out of time to corner Anne in the classroom, and when the last grain in the hourglass fell, and Anne walked out of the classroom in a sea of other students, Sasha did not reach out. Sasha watched the brown head of curls sway back and forth, dissipating into the crowd. And it was then, when they had fully congealed into the crowd, that she finally found the strength to move. 

She found those curls again in the wave of students waiting for the bus.

Sasha sucked in a shallow breath through her teeth.

There was no more time to procrastinate, she reminded herself. She had to do this.

Okay, oh God, this was it. Her palms felt clammy. Should she just run up and say hey girlfriend, how you doing? No, no, that didn’t work last time. Anne just looked at her like she’d wanted to punch her through a brick wall, okay, okay, just think of something. It’s just Anne, she reminded herself. Just Anne. Just say something.

Hey, by the way, Andrias is tracking us down with some kind of radar and I don’t know what to do. Do we hide? Run? Change our names? Fight? You’re the one with weird blue powers, do you think you could take him on again? And, by the way, do you still hate me? Can we fix things? I’m sorry I’m a pile of broken ceramic and I cut you on one of my edges— I don’t know how to be anything else.

Sasha wished there was a manual for how to talk to ex-best-friends about personal magical dimension safety concerns. But she didn’t, so she had to go with the old-fashioned way: awkward in-person interaction.

“Hey, Anne,” Sasha whispered, walking not beside but behind the girl. “Can we talk for a minute?”

The problem, one that through all her worrying, Sasha did not anticipate, is that Anne did not stop walking. 

“Anne… psst!” she tried again, with more urgency in her voice this time, hoping it would convince Anne to turn around.

The girl said nothing. She didn’t look back. She didn’t stop walking. If Sasha didn’t know better, she’d think the girl was walking even faster.

Damn it, Anne.

She really didn’t want to have to touch her. Not because she’s like, a germophobe or something, although she totally could be one, but she didn’t have any issues touching Anne, she just knew the girl would be even more irritated with Sasha if she attempted physical contact. And she just really needed Anne to listen right now.

“Anne!” she whisper-shouted while trailing behind the girl in what must’ve looked like an incredibly pathetic manner, like a paparazzi begging for one last shot.

Anne must have blocked out all Sasha-related audio because she’s still, okay, speedwalking to the school bus. At this point Sasha wouldn’t be surprised if she did hear and was just willfully ignoring her. 

Now she had no choice. She metaphorically rolled up her sleeves. Sorry, Anne.

“Hey, Anne,” she reached out to tug the girl’s sleeve while still in a somewhat jog-walk, “can we t—?”

But it was that moment Anne must’ve decided against the cold shoulder routine because she whipped around, her eyes blazing in Sasha’s direction. “What!?”

Sasha was so startled she recoiled immediately as if she’d been burned, taking a step back.

Or, well, she tried. But the foot that was supposed to hold most of her weight on the step back did not move from its position. Fuck, Sasha thought with wide eyes as she stumbled backwards. I never tied my fucking shoe.

Sasha was on the way down and catching a scenic view of the sky when suddenly, she was jerked back up with a force way too strong to be the wind. It was way too powerful of a grip to be a person, either; it felt like someone had reversed gravity (violently) and now she was lurching forward at a rate too fast to course-correct. The SJMS logo on Anne’s shirt barreled towards her at an uncontrollable speed and Sasha prayed Anne would still listen to her after this.

Someone yelped; Sasha hoped it wasn’t her. They both went down unceremoniously.

The world felt like it was spinning for a second as Sasha’s brain righted itself.

She was on the ground now. She hissed, registering the pain flaring through her leg from the impact.

Surprisingly, the ground wasn’t as hard in all spots as she thought it would be. It wasn’t until someone groaned under her that she realized she was on top of someone. “Oh my God, Anne, are you—”

“Yes,” she snapped. “Just get the heck off of me.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” Sasha rambled as she scrambled to her feet. She extended a hand to Anne, who was lying face up on the pavement, but she just gave her a disgruntled look before sitting up by herself.

Sasha swayed back and forth awkwardly. “Hi.”

Anne just sighed, pushing her hands to her knees and using the motion to stand upright. “What do you want.”

Sasha fingered the collar of her uniform and averted her eyes for a second before bringing them back. “I want to talk.”

For a missable second there was a flurry of emotion fleeting across Anne’s expression, her eyes widening and her lips parting slightly, before her face shut down. In real time, Sasha watched the surprise and something she couldn’t discern fade into cold, unforgiving steel.

“You chased me down and tackled me just to talk? ” she demanded.

“Um. No? Yes? Sorry. I just needed to catch up to you.”

Anne rolled her eyes. “Yeah, okay. By slamming into me.”

“Hey,” Sasha insisted, “that wouldn’t have happened if you were going slower.”

“Oh, so you think it’s my fault?” Anne rumbled dangerously.

“No, God, why do you always— I just—“ She blew out a breath and began to run a hand through her hair. “I’m not blaming anyone, I’m just saying a fact that if you had listened to me the first time I called, none of this would’ve happened.”

“I didn’t turn around because I didn’t hear you,” Anne snapped, crossing her arms, “you know, the whole world doesn’t revolve around you.”

“Well, it clearly does to you because you started running away when I tried to talk to you like I’m some sort of villain,” Sasha retorted.

“Well maybe you are one,” Anne replied with no hesitation, “I don’t want to talk to you, Sasha.” 

Sasha winced. That one stung a little. A lot. That hurt. “That doesn’t mean you have to— fucking, run away from me!” she cried. “God, Anne, can’t you put your issues aside for one second? I need to tell you something!”

Anne gestures her hands wildly. “I wasn’t running from you, I couldn’t care less about you, I was trying to catch the bus, idiot!”

As if those words manifested the bus into existence, their heads whipped up towards the pick-up line.

School busses really do have a strange design. The ripped up leather seats inside, the weird windows that open too little in the summertime but open too much in the winter, the banana yellow color, everything.

Said yellow, leathered interior school bus was now pulling away from the curb, its doors closed. Anne and Sasha watched it drive to the stop sign with disbelief. It turned onto the road. Anne slowly turned to face Sasha, who stared back with a mortified expression.

“What was it that was so important that I needed to miss my freaking bus, Sash? I’m listening.”

Everything seemed stupid now. Sasha deflated. 

Why would Anne care about a noise only Sasha could hear? All of this was just speculation she came up with in class. For all she knows, it really is tinnitus and she’s drawing made-up conclusions and wasting everyone’s time and freaking herself out for no reason. She exhaled.

“…I heard a noise,” she said sheepishly, red creeping up her face. “And I think, uhh— I think Andrias might be after us.”

Emphasis on think. And wow, didn’t that sound childish. I heard a noise. What a joke.

Anne narrowed her eyes, but she looked surprisingly alert. “A noise? What, did Andrias just call out to you in the middle of the school day?”

“No, no, ah, it was more like, a ringing? Like a high-pitched whine, actually,” Sasha said dumbly, fiddling with her fingernails. “It sounded mechanical, and well— I noticed a pattern in it. It sounded like—“

But Anne was looking at her incredulously, with furrowed eyebrows. “A high-pitched whine?”

“Yeah,” Sasha confirmed. “I’ve been hearing it on and off all day.”

Anne was quiet, but there was this look spreading across her face. “I heard that, too,” she said.

“You did?” Sasha jumped.

“Yeah,” Anne admitted. “Once near lunch, once in the second-to-last period of the day, once in the last period. It only lasted a couple minutes each time. I figured it was tinnitus, but tinnitus has never sounded like that before to me.”

“Oh, thank God,” Sasha said immediately, “I thought I was crazy.”

Her shoulders sagged with relief; she hadn’t lost her marbles quite yet! That’s a triumph.

Anne went quiet again. “You’re not. I did hear something weird.”

That begged the question: why didn’t any of their classmates hear it? Why was it just her and Anne? Unless someone else heard it but didn’t react? That sounded odd, and unlikely. If the class as a whole didn’t hear it, why did they?

As if Anne could read her mind, she said, “Nobody else in my class heard it, I’m sure. It was too much of a painful noise for the entire class to just ignore. Someone would’ve reacted. But nothing.”

“So, just us two?”

“Seems like it,” Anne sighed.

“Great,” said Sasha. She danced back and forth on her heels before muttering out, “You know, I think it’s because of that… thing we have in common, Anne.”

“What?” Anne said abruptly. “Amphibia? You can say it, Sash, it’s not a curse word.”

Sasha recoiled, leaning back on her heels. “Yeah,” she said, drawing out the y. “Hey, I think it’s like, radar or something. If you listen, it starts and stops at intervals that sound a lot like radar. I think—“ she dropped to a whisper and leaned in closer, “I think Andrias is trying to find us. Here. On Earth.”

Whether he’s succeeding in that is another question, and one they might figure out fairly soon.

“That’s not possible,” Anne gaped. “Here? But how would he—“

“You remember the whole ‘oh I’m an evil dictator who’s trying to colonize the entire universe’ bit he did? He has the box, Anne, and hey, listen, from the sound of it, he’s already waited long enough to take over this place,” Sasha said, “Honestly, I’m surprised he hasn’t tried something like this sooner.”

Anne just stood there for a second with her jaw on the floor. Then, tentatively, she closed it, hunching her shoulders and drawing up her hands over her eyes, letting out a long breath. “Stupid,” she muttered.

“What?” Sasha said, alarmed.

She dragged her fingers down her face, stretching her eyebags and revealing the pink of the inside of her eyelid.

“I should’ve known this was another Amphibia thing,” she said finally before letting her hands drop from her face. “I should’ve put that together. I don’t— I’m not getting enough sleep, I don’t think.”

If the dark purple rings, deep like bruises on her brown skin (that also seemed to lack its usual vibrancy), were anything to go by, Sasha would agree.

Sasha hesitated for a minute. Then she took a leading step forward, past Anne, and to the abandoned curb where she plopped herself down, her feet flat on the asphalt.

Anne watched her with confusion. Then she made some sort of decision: she followed, thudding herself down on the curb a couple feet away. Sasha faintly registered she was almost exactly where Anne sat on that day she ran out from Biology class.

They both sat there for a minute, unspeaking. The open sky stared down at them, an expanse of bright color. In the distance, if you really looked, there was a jumble of clouds all together, darkened in turmoil and looming in warning of a storm just over the horizon line. Their distance rendered them immovable, stagnant blocks of cement and a day or two would bring them closer, make due on their threat of rainfall, press their tears onto the world. But for now, there were no clouds; all that was prediction, grief for the future. Right now, there was no cry from the sky, no gray expanse. Right now, the sky was just blue.

Anne put her head in her hands.

Delicately and carefully Sasha spoke as if the girl she meant to hear it were a tulip, ornate and beautiful, apt to wilt with the slightest breeze:

“Why can’t you sleep?” she asked.

Anne said nothing for a minute, her brown eyes reflecting pale azure. If you looked close enough, there was a spark of teal sleeping just below the surface.

Then, quietly, “Marcy,” she said, her voice choked like the name was physically painful to say.

The blonde stiffened. Then she, too, hunched over herself, like the name was physically painful to hear.

“I just— I don’t know what to do,” Anne croaked, the words rushing out like water after the cracking of a dam. “I’ve tried—I’ve, geez, tried everything, I think—there’s nothing. There’s just nothing, you know. Hardly anything online, and well, when I thought I’d found something, I’d lost it: the old thrift store, you know, the one, just closed. I found something in it the day before it closed. I was gonna check it out the next day. Stupid.”

Sasha gasped. “Oh, Anne, I’m sorry. When was this?”

Anne dropped her hands from her face to fiddle with the seam of her uniform. “I don’t know,” she sniffled. “Like two days ago.”

Sasha blinked. The day of their group project? A lone puzzle piece in the back of her mind finally connected to another.

Anne kept on. “I’m just tired. I’m tired of no good news. I’m tired of sitting at my desk. I’m tired of lying in bed all night and just hoping she’s okay; it’s killing me, the not knowing. I’m trying to have hope but it’s hard. People can’t live on hope, Sash, not forever, Marcy can’t live on hope. It’s not realistic. I need actual results. Although,” she turned to face her, a half smile plastered on her face. “maybe I should switch to denial. It seems to be working for you.”

Sasha flinched. “I’m not—“

“You’re not making anything better, you know,” Anne interrupted, turning back to the asphalt, her eyes empty and sad. “Just pretending none of this ever happened? Not working.”

Anne kicked a rock, skidding it across the pavement.

“You can’t even say her name, can you? I thought you just didn’t, before, you know, in class or whatever, when people asked. But now I’m wondering if you even can. Do you think of her, ever? Marcy?”

Sasha stayed quiet, not out of defiance or offense, but because she wasn’t sure she knew, either. That was number three on the list of things She Did Not Talk About. And, typically, she was not supposed to think about the things She Did Not Talk About.

“Whatever,” Anne continued, waving it off. “Not like it matters. You’re such a freaking liar, you know; everything is fine— that’s what you say anytime anybody asks— everything is just fine. But you’re a bad liar, you know—or a good one, I guess—because sometimes I think you actually believe it. How funny is that? That everything is fine? Sasha’s the one in a maze of her own lies, now. Now you know how everybody else feels.”

Sometimes I wonder if you’ve ever done anything else.

But her voice lacked the usual snark; her tone held irritation but little malice. Honestly, if anything, her voice sounded… sad. She spoke with the cadence of a deflated, slightly annoyed balloon.

Sasha opened her mouth to speak, but no words came to her lips– a sort of strangled noise fell out. She swallowed.

Then, she managed, “I think we should talk about your powers.”

It was Anne who stiffened this time.

Sasha watched an ant on the sidewalk crawl into a crack in the concrete. “It was you, wasn’t it, who pulled me up when I tripped? That was hella strong, you know. Literally sent me flying. It felt like you reversed gravity. Gave me, like, vertigo.”

The ant disappeared from view.

“I didn’t mean to,” Anne muttered, “It just… happened. I didn’t even mean to use my powers.”

Sasha leaned back, pulling her gaze away from the crack in the sidewalk that now lacked the intrigue of movement. “Do you have trouble like that often? With— with controlling them, I mean. Has this happened before?”

The girl leaned forward, tilting her head back in her hands. “No,” she admitted. “I don’t— I don’t know what was different this time. It just happened.”

“I guess not sleeping great really is getting to you, then.”

Anne stared at Sasha out of the corner of her eye. “Yeah,” she said in an odd voice.

“Well,” Sasha whistled regardless, “if you’re not planning on getting more sleep any time soon, we should start to work on training your powers so they don’t slip out when you don’t mean them to.”

“Training?” Anne echoed.

“Yeah,” Sasha motioned with her hands. “You know, like using them to hit a test dummy or pick up some bags of flour, that type of stuff. Get you, like, used to them. That’s totally a movie thing. Montage stuff. Awesome.” She cocked her head. “Have you really not thought of doing that before?”

“When you stay up all night, you kinda lose the motivation to do things during the day,” Anne confessed, her gaze fixed on some divet on the pavement.

Boy if she didn’t know that. Jeez. She didn’t realize it had gotten so bad. Sasha gave a sympathetic look, her voice softer when she spoke again. “Well, we can try. If you ever feel tired, or— ya’know, you just don’t want to, ‘s alright, I get it. We can always reschedule for another day. Practice makes perfect.”

“Yeah,” Anne mumbled. Sasha hoped the girl knew she was being genuine.

She checked her phone. “Oh hey, wait, the late bus should be coming in a couple minutes.”

“Really?” Anne looked around.

They were the only students left in the bus line.

Sasha began to meticulously dust off her skirt. “Yeah, I guess we talked for a while. Hey, um, how about tomorrow, after school? Do you wanna start training then?”

Anne paused for a second. “Yeah, I guess,” she answered, eyeing the blonde somewhat suspiciously. “Okay.”

“Okay!” Sasha clapped her hands together.

“Well, I’m gonna get going. See you, Anne.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

Sasha turned around, taking a few steps. Then she stalled suddenly. “Oh, Anne?”

“Yeah?” Anne called, not facing back.

“I’m… sorry,” she blurted, the words thick like they didn’t fit right in her mouth, like sorry or any other condolences always did, “About the Plantars. You must miss them.”

A cool breeze fluttered past, rustling Sasha’s blonde hair and trying to carry it along on the wind. The blue sky imposed on the two of them.

Sasha almost just left, just walked away back into the school and waited for her driver to come pick her up without Anne’s company but for some reason, she felt she had to say something. The Plantars were a huge elephant in the room. Elephant in the parking lot. The words just tumbled out. Did she really care? She wasn’t sure; it just felt like it was swirling in the air, swishing around in her stomach and filling her with this strange guilt or concern or something else— the fate of those frogs. They were fine, likely fine, almost certainly fine, more fine than the rest of them, but she knew rationality didn’t really factor in when someone you loved was in danger. Aliens or monsters or enlarged amphibian specimen, Anne loved those damn frogs. It was plain to see.

“Oh. I… yeah. No one to blame. The whole thing happened pretty fast,” the girl said without turning around.

“I wish they were here.”

For some reason, the words—I wish they were here—made Sasha flinch as if she’d been struck. “Okay. Yeah,” she managed, unwarranted and selfish hurt rippling throughout her chest. Instead of me, echoed like the ring of a gong. “I just wanted to say that. See you.”

And with that, she walked away.

Five minutes later, the late bus pulled into the lot. Sasha watched from behind a pole as Anne ascended the steps into the mouth of the bus. Then she pulled out her phone and dialed her mother’s driver.

“Hey, I missed the bus,” she said into the speaker as she eyed the yellow thing rolling around the corner. “Can you pick me up?”

-

In a perfect world, Sasha would be in the bathtub, bubbles all around her as she watched her favorite TV show on her phone. That was a delightful way to spend an afternoon. But as it was, she was standing in the decrepit junkyard behind the railroad tracks rapidly tapping her foot as she waited for Anne, who was bordering on being twenty minutes late. 

They’d made plans to start training Anne’s powers yesterday over text, which Sasha didn’t see as an issue until five minutes after their planned meeting time and Anne had not shown up. Maybe she should’ve called after all.

I mean, yes, Sasha would begrudgingly admit she is a bit of a stickler about timing, but is it so wrong to just hope that the other person would arrive at the time they agreed upon? Why even make a plan if you’re not going to follow it? Like a lot of things in this world, Anne’s persistent tendency to be late to everything is something Sasha could never, ever understand. Sasha has to be on time for everything, from her evening check of all the locks in the house to the hour and a half she sets aside to take a shower because she spends most of it picking the raised bumps of acne on her back; punctuality is important. She’s this close to just having a hysteric breakdown and smashing every TV in the junkyard with a metal bat when, near half an hour after their set time, she finally, finally, sees a head of brown curls in the tree line. Her poor foot finally gets a break from all the restless tapping.

“Took you long enough,” she couldn't help but snap at the approaching figure. “What, did Mommy and Daddy not—“

She stopped.

“Sorry, sorry,” Anne apologized, her arms full of… something? Packages of something? Um, hello? There was something about the coloring that made Sasha feel strangely at ease. “I’m sorry, Sash, I just got caught up and the bus didn’t—“

“What is that?”

Anne cocked her head and turned it back and forth on a swivel. “What? What’s what?”

“What are you carrying?” Sasha asked pointedly.

Anne stared at her like she was missing something very obvious. Which, to be fair, maybe she was, because something didn’t make sense here. She took a closer look, squinting her eyes at the packaging that seemed more familiar with every second—

Oh.

Oh.

“They’re… Oreo’s?” she said quizzically, like the word didn’t suit the scenario.

“Yeah?” Anne set down what must’ve been around fifteen or sixteen individual packages of Oreo’s, the type that only had two to a pack each, onto an old dresser that looked only mildly filthy. “I didn’t think six months was long enough to wipe your memory of one of America’s greatest snacks.” 

“No, no—“ Sasha started, “I mean, why did you bring them here?” She squinted. “And why the individual kind? Would’ve been cheaper, and more environmentally friendly, I might add, to just buy the regular pack.”

The towering, lopsided pile of individually wrapped Oreos seemed to agree.

Anne shrugged. “What if we got hungry? Sometimes I just need a snack, okay. And this,” she picked up an individual wrapper, “you’re right, it’s really not environmentally friendly, like whatsoever, lots of permanent plastic here, but the regular packs weren’t where they usually are in the grocery store and I was already late. So I panicked and bought all these.”

“Is that what you do when you panic? Buy an ungodly amount of individually wrapped Oreo’s?”

Anne crossed her arms. “And if I do?”

Sasha placatingly raised her arms. “Not judging. Just… observing.”

They had a standoff, staring at each other. Finally Anne muttered, “They were on sale for buy one get one free,” and looked away, her voice drenched in defeat. “I bought eight.”

Sasha stared at the pile. “And got sixteen.”

“Yes,” Anne said slightly miserably.

Sasha leaned on the nearest piece of junk that didn’t seem like it was going to fall over at any second. “You know, I’m genuinely impressed you made it all the way here, actually.” 

Anne groaned. “It was not an easy task, you know. Lots of effort. And picking up Oreo’s.”

Sasha couldn’t help it. A smile tugged at her lips. “What made you think we were going to eat thirty-two cookies in an afternoon?”

Anne looked sheepish and blush had started to creep up her cheeks. “I don’t know, just in case.”

Sasha burst out laughing. Anne’s face grew as red as a tomato. “Shut up.”

“Sorry,” Sasha said, through continued laughter because unfortunately, she was not sorry at all. “I just…” she trailed off as though she were contemplating something.

“What?” Anne snapped, falling hook, line and sinker.

“Oh! Sorry, Anne, I just…” Sasha appeared as sheepish and awkward as she could possibly muster. “I wish you bought the Golden kind. The original just doesn’t taste right to me— I dunno. You might have to eat them by yourself.”

She watched Anne’s face fall into a blank confusion before horror twinged her features.

“Just kidding,” Sasha said, her grin wide and mischievous. “I’ll eat them,” she added.

Anne’s face morphed into a kind of puzzlement before realization dawned and she scowled, red heating up her features once more. “I don’t even know why that got me. You’ve never liked the vanilla ones.”

Sasha just laughed, more lightly and freely than she had in a while. Anne was still miserably gullible. Tension was still thick in the air, but it had dissipated just a little.

“Okay, we’re getting started now,” Anne ordered in a stern voice, the redness of her cheeks betraying her.

“Yes, ma’am,” Sasha said, holding up a brief salute.

“I’m literally 13. Don’t call me ma’am, it’s weird.”

They began to search the junkyard, pouring over piles of tattered clothes and forgotten toys for anything they could use. In ten minutes they had curated quite the collection of utterly useless objects from the junkyard: a microwave with no glass on the door, two beer bottles (they had had a third but Sasha accidentally broke it), a smooth tire, and a refrigerator. The refrigerator wasn’t actually part of their lineup since neither Sasha or Anne could lift it, but it was close enough to their spot that they included it.

“Okay,” Sasha started now that they were both just blankly staring at their efforts.

“This is all just a bunch of junk.”

“That’s the point. You throw around a bunch of garbage and it doesn’t matter if you smash it all to shit ‘cause it’s just garbage, anyway.”

“Well, what if I don’t want to touch a bunch of garbage?”

“I didn’t think you were a germophobe, Anne, that’s usually my thing. Don’t tell me you’re nervous.”

“Am not.”

“Are too. Come on Boonchuy, let’s see that magic,” Sasha cooed.

“But what if–”

“Who cares about ‘what if’? You won’t know until you just do it. Rip the blue bandaid off.” Sasha made an accompanying gesture.

Anne still hesitated, her eyes darting around the junkyard and lingering on the treeline. “Someone could see.”

Sasha tried her very best not to roll her eyes. “Anne, we’re in the middle of nowhere, and someone is definitely going to see if Andrias comes barreling through a portal in the middle of Los Angeles. We need to make sure you won’t accidentally blow up a building and then pass out if you try to use your powers on him.”

Anne glared. “I would not.”

Sasha shrugged. “How am I supposed to know that? Last time you really did pass out.”

“I didn’t blow anything up,” she retorted.

“You could very well be capable; you beat me twice, you know, without the powers. Although I would like a rematch.”

“I wouldn’t have to beat you if you weren’t running around like a madwoman with some evil plot every five seconds.”

Something in Sasha’s mind clicked. “Yeah?” She lowered her voice.

“I’d do it again, you know.”

“What?” Anne hissed. “Lose?”

Sasha stalked closer. “You know back at Toad Tower I was right.”

“Like frog you were. You’re just somebody who always wants to get their way and most of the time, you’re mean about it. You were being a jerk back then, and for no reason,” Anne retorted sharply, but took a step back.

Sasha took a step closer. “I don’t take crap from people, you know, there’s a difference. And how’s it my fault I see things how they are? They were weighing you down.” Still are, she thinks for a second, but Toad Tower flashes in her mind and she knows they weren’t the one holding Anne’s hand off the side of a building.

The brunette stilled. She squeezed her eyes shut. “I know what you’re trying to do,” she gritted out. “And you’re a jerk.”

“For what? Telling you what you don’t want to hear? Because it’s the truth; I don’t regret any of it because I was right."

Anne twitches. Come on.

“You know what, Anne? You’re a lot more freaking gullible than I thought.” Fuck it. Why not? “Some… creatures help you out and all of a sudden you’re more bonded to them than to your actual human friends and family? That really was insane, huh? I don’t know why I let that go.”

Anne glared, and Sasha noticed her hands had balled into fists at some point. Good. “Don’t bring them into this. They’re good people.”

Sasha spits the final blow. “They’re not people at all, Anne, they’re just frogs. Just slimy, gross freaks you’ve become attached at the hip to— and for what? To replace your real family? To replace your real friends?” To replace me, Sasha added silently, “Like what the hell, Anne? You think you can just blow off everybody because, oh, hey, I have these guys now—and they’re not even real people— they’re just frogs, sticky, nasty—“

“As if you are any better!” Anne screamed, and in a flash of blue sparks Sasha thought, eyes wide, that she was going to hit her. But instead she stormed past her, marching towards the fridge— in one fluid motion, she tore the freezer off it, detaching wires and pulling apart metal. She practically hurtled it towards the ground where it landed with a dull thud.

She stood there, heaving, unnatural blue coloring the roots of her hair, her eyes a bright, burning teal.

For a moment they just stared at one another, electricity flowing like rivulets in the air between them.

Then Anne slowly turned to face the floor, and before Sasha could do anything, promptly threw up.

Sasha’s plan, like most of her ideas it seemed, ended in catastrophe.

-

Anne gargled, spat, and refilled her hands with sink water for the fifth time.

“You done yet?”

Sasha contemplated leaning against the tiled wall but thought better of it and shuddered. “I think the Sonic employee might think we’re weird if we both stay in here for much longer. It’s a single stall, you know.”

“Just one more time,” she said, her voice dripping with misery.

She gargled her last handful of water mournfully for an extra couple seconds (for good measure) before spitting it out in the sink. She finally reached for the paper towels instead of the faucet.

“Ugh, well that sucked,” Anne moaned. “I really wish I could brush my teeth or something. Blegh.”

“Hasn’t been thirty minutes,” Sasha said idly.

“What?”

Sasha jolted and flushed. “Nothing,” she said immediately.

Anne raised her eyebrow but otherwise dropped it. Sasha mentally kicked herself.

“I think the worker is totally gonna think we’re making out in here,” Sasha said.

-

“That was very unpleasant,” Anne shuddered.

“Yes,” Sasha agreed with a shivering glance behind them. “I could’ve sworn that guy was about to yell at us.”

They were in the parking lot of the store next door now, having barely escaped the Sonic with their dignities intact; it had been the closest bathroom to the junkyard, so they just bolted to it without thinking.

Thankfully, Anne’s blue powers—they really needed to come up with a name for those—had faded, the cerulean strands in her hair mostly gone by the time they showed up at the door. Her eyes were still faintly teal, though it only showed when light hit her eyes at the right angle.

Sasha kicked a broken piece of asphalt. There was something brewing in the air, pressing down on the two of them. She hesitated before deciding to just rip the bandaid off about her earlier plan right now. “Hey, Anne—“

“I’m sorry,” Anne blurted.

Sasha gaped, her apology dying on her lips.

“I mean— uh… listen. You were being a jerk. I won’t let you off for that. What you said about the Plantars was horrible and I won’t just forgive you even though I know what you were trying to do, that still wasn’t cool, man,” Anne fidgeted with her hands, pawing at her cuticles.

“But… I didn’t mean to lose it like that. I guess your plan did work— you got me to use my powers, I guess. “And,” she sucked in a breath, “admittedly, I’m not as scared to use them anymore. It was kind of like… dunking myself in cold water?” She scratched the back of her head. “So. Thank you for that, I guess. I’m sorry for breaking the fridge. I didn’t really think it would just cleave off like that, to be honest.”

Oh, fuck you.

Sasha just stared at her incredulously. She couldn’t believe her ears. Anne was apologizing? When it was Sasha’s dumb plan in the first place to push her into using her powers? When it was Sasha who antagonized her into it when she wasn’t ready?

Sasha was pissed.

She literally made her puke. That’s not cool. Why’s Anne being so casual about this? The girl hadn’t even been particularly mean, and even if she was, Sasha deserved it, anyway. She knew she deserved it; her plan had gone off the rails. Stupid Sasha who’s reckless and mean makes yet another mistake; it’s become part of a larger trend over the years. One day, when Sasha’s mistakes have piled to the size of mountains, she’ll die in them, suffocate in their avalanche of regret— and she knows that others will look, point their fingers, and say She had it coming.

Truthfully when Anne yelled at her, she felt something: something she’s only felt in small releases, in impulsive decisions at opportune moments, what she’s been chasing like a dog to its own tail, ripping out her hair and taking midnight walks into bad parts of town and Things She Doesn’t Talk About: she will never admit it aloud, not to herself, not to Anne, not to God, not to her mother or her father or her coach, but when Anne screamed, for a moment Sasha stared at approaching fists and blue rage and felt this rushing, overwhelming relief.

It was as if the word finally had overtaken every fiber in her body, every nerve and blood cell screeching hit me. Make it hurt. She knew it, not intellectually, but intuitively, instinctually, that she deserved retribution not just for that moment but every other too, every scheme and plan, every cruel word and crueler action, she deserved it like paper deserved to wither under water. Collapsing under the weight of all her poor decisions would be the only outcome she’s ever earned by her own merits, and she felt a sort of calm at the approaching fist that only comes when you know something that’s about to happen is for the better.

But then Anne passed her. And then Anne broke a fridge. And Sasha splintered, too, like split wire.

She shook her head rapidly as though it jolted the unease and the confusion out of her mind. She was all queasy inside, guilt blooming like mold in cheese. Even though apologies were strange on her tongue, she pushed past it, past the fear that if she started to apologize she’d never be able to stop.

“Hey, wait, no, no,” she insisted. “Listen, none of that was your fault, okay? That was me. Like, all me.”

“I was trying to rile you up on purpose because… because I just wanted to get you a foot in the door, but that wasn’t cool— you weren’t ready. And I shouldn’t have pushed it. It was me,” she gritted her teeth at this part, “I’m the one who should be sorry, Anne.”

Sasha hated the way Anne’s eyes grew as wide as dinner plates at that.

“Okay,” Anne replied, her eyes still big and glossy like a deer’s when a car stops for them.

They both just stood there: the car and the deer.

Sasha wondered if Anne could see the mountain of her mistakes when she looked at her; if she met Sasha’s eyes and knew one day she would be buried in them. 

“I’m gonna call my mom,” Anne said.

“Yeah. Okay. See you tomorrow?”

Anne coughed. “I will definitely see you tomorrow. We need to work on that project— the due date’s coming up.”

The anxiety radiating off the girl was palpable. Because Sasha is a bitch, she figured that was kind of funny.

“Okay. Same place?”

“Can we do a cafe? I don’t think Mom and Dad’ll close the restaurant tomorrow.”

Oh. “Yeah, of course.”

“Cool.”

“Cool.”

Sasha pulled out her phone and dialed the number of her mother’s driver. “Hey Mom,” Sasha said into the phone. “I’m in the Walgreens parking lot. Can you pick me up?” She hung up without an answer.

Anne’s mother pulled up first.

“Hi, Mom, thanks again,” Anne greeted as she climbed into the car.

“Hi, Mrs. Boonchuy.”

The woman looked at her plainly. “Hello, Sasha,” she said, before rolling up her windows and pulling away from the curb. The car disappeared around the block in the next minute.

Soon after, as Sasha’s ride parked beside her, she remembered something inconsequential. She told him to wait a second. She walked into the treeline.

When she returned she dumped sixteen packages of Oreo’s into the backseat like the scattering of giant, rectangular blue pills. She didn’t trust them to still be there when they went back to the junkyard. And she didn’t want Anne to have wasted her money as she must’ve, in the chaos, simply forgotten about the snacks or had just given up on them. There was this tickle in her gut like a part of her brain figured she was lying about why she actually took them, but she paid it no mind: some part of her was always lying.

The driver gave her a strange look that was probably for many reasons. She glared at him. He said nothing.

They drove away, leaving the fridge with the detached freezer and broken beer bottle behind in the junkyard.

Somewhere on the outskirts of town, a piece of alien technology receives the order to continue.

Chapter Text

Numbers are stupid.

Numbers are part of a made-up language. They’re ridiculous mouth noises and chicken scratch on paper melded together and slapped with semantics. Nobody knows what a number is, really. It’s artificial— you don’t ask the trees the number of leaves that speckle their branches, the zebra how many black stripes it has, but Sasha really wants to ask how many numbers fit into the drinks at this random café. 

“I think I know what I’m getting,” Anne declares, and there’s a horror growing in the pit of Sasha’s stomach because that means she has to get something, too.

Sasha is in a café next to her ex-best friend, prepared to work on a group project together after surviving six months in the wilderness, and she is standing there gaping at a menu like a totally normal person.

Fuck. How am I supposed to know what to buy? The menu doesn’t have calories. There are no pointless numbers etched small into the corners of each item, so Sasha is scrambling like a chicken with its head cut off to find something to order. 

“Do you know what you want?” Anne nudges with her elbow, and Sasha swallows the urge to ask to leave and go to a different café, like Starbucks or something. Why did the two of them have to go to some family-owned place instead of Starbucks, anyway? Sasha’s memorized her Starbucks order and how many numbers fit in it like it’s embedded into the very curves of her brain. There’s no scrambling there, just a smooth interaction and transaction like these things are supposed to be.

Fucking focus. She mentally kicks herself for standing there doing nothing for as long as she has.

“Yeah, yeah, I do,” Sasha says convincingly, “just give me a minute.”

Anne frowns and says “okay” before leaving Sasha to join the line for the register. Sasha is blessed that there’s a line because that means she has more time to stall. She narrows her eyes and stares at the menu like she’d be able to tell how much milk they poured or how much sugar they used in each drink by just glaring at it.

The menu stares back unblinking.

There could be a million different variations of each drink. She could order a tea and they pour buckets of sugar into it. And she’d drink it and she wouldn’t know. It’s like gambling, but she doesn’t want to gamble, she wants to know how many calories are in the fucking drinks.

Numbers are stupid, but numbers are safe. Predictable. Controllable. Hell, Sasha would say they’re comforting: you know exactly what’s in something based on how many numbers it has. But she’s in a lawless land, here. Any small drink could do her in.

Anne moves closer to the register in line.

Fuck. Just pick something, idiot. Pick something.

It’s fine, it’s fine, she repeats in her head as if that would make it true. As if everything isn’t unknown and shit and full of fucking calories these days because they have to put sugar in everything and Sasha doesn’t even know anything like how many ounces they think a serving is or— or if they’re dumping creamer in her coffee like it’s milk, or they’re pumping syrups in there that she can’t taste, or a million other equally terrifying things. Anne had wanted to go to this place but Sasha should’ve said no, should’ve— insisted they went somewhere else, somewhere she knows has calories on the menu. And it’s at this moment she blinks, and the world seems different, sharper.

Am I really freaking out over fucking calories? 

She blinks again. And again. Jesus christ, I’m not anorexic or something. She straightens her back, combing her fingers through the wisps of hair that fell loose from her ponytail.

But the thoughts, the anxiety, still buzz like an angry bee in the back of her mind.

Anne makes it to the front of the register and Sasha realizes she should get in line too if she doesn’t want to seem like a weirdo who’s still looking for something to order.

“Can I get a caramel macchiato, please?” Anne asks, her voice smooth and utterly normal.

And Sasha hates herself, hates herself, absolutely despises herself that her first thought is to calculate how many calories she thinks are in that. As if it matters. As if Anne cares. As if anyone except her and her stupid brain gives one single shit. She is alone in a vastness of knowing, of expecting, of predicting— she is alone adrift in a sea of numbers and calories. She is on a raft, miles from shore, miles from someone who could understand her, who would.

She’s a terrible person, truly, too. She’s a horrible, awful person, and she’s everything bad everyone has ever said about her. She hears Anne’s order and predicts how many calories are in it and she judges. She does mental math and thinks, really? You’re going to drink that?  Like an asshole would say. Like her mother would comment when Sasha picked up her plate for a second serving. Really? Don’t you think that’s too much? Fuck, fuck, fuck. She is everything wrong with the world. Cold dread pools in her toes, in her limbs, in her stomach. Terrible, terrible.

Her palms sweat as she files in closer to the register. She scans the menu again for the hundredth time, skipping over the caramel macchiato, and mentally prepares.

“Can I have an iced latte with almond milk?” she says sweetly when it’s her turn, trying to make it seem easy, as if she hadn’t been internally deliberating over the choice for the last five minutes.

The barista punches keys into the register. “With almond milk?”

“Yes,” Sasha smiles.

“Will that be it?”

“Yes,” her smile strains.

“Okay. That’ll be $4.59.”

She pays. She takes her order ticket. She glances at it.

Order 229. An odd number. Her hands are cold and sweaty at the same time.

Anne frowns, now sipping on a caramel macchiato that Sasha has thought far too much about. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she breathes, and tries her best to actually calm down. Oh my God, girl, get your shit together. “Yeah, I’m— sorry, it’s just warm in here.”

“True,” Anne agrees, and Sasha thanks God it was a believable excuse. “I think it’s all the machines, or something.” She unwraps the straw of her drink. “Thanks for agreeing to come with me here, though. I know it would've been better to hang in my parents’ place, but the store’s open today.” She shrugs.

“No problem. We can get stuff done here, too.”

They stand there. Sasha shifts from one foot to another. She looks at their shoes. What now?

Their shoes don’t touch. They are always several steps apart, Sasha realizes, never quite coming close enough to stand side by side. Not best friends, just… something else. It’s something she knows in her gut irrevocably, unconditionally, unchangeably, but she stares at the distance between their shoes for longer than a moment.

“Meet me at the table when you get your order,” Anne says and begins to walk, because Sasha never feels comfortable breaking silences or starting anything between them anymore. “Okay,” she says, but Anne is already across the room.

“Order 227. Vanilla chai,” the barista announces.

Probably around that many calories, comes to mind immediately. And then, fuck me. I hate myself.

“Order 228. Double shot of espresso.”

Oh.

Sasha feels really dumb. Why didn’t she just get that? She feels like the dullest person in the world. It’s so obvious now. Espresso has no calories. Duh.

Oh, great. Now her order is next, and her order definitely has more calories, and everyone is going to know that she’s fatter than the last person who ordered. Look, look at me, I’m the glutton here, her order screams. I got a latte but with almond milk, not because I’m lactose intolerant, but because I’m watching what I eat— “for obvious reasons” everyone is thinking– God.

“Order 229. Almond milk latte.”

Everyone’s watching as she takes it. “Thanks,” she says miserably. 

Everyone’s judging. Everyone knows; knows what, she’s not sure; she doesn’t know exactly what she’s keeping such a secret, she wonders as she scans for Anne’s table. That she doesn’t want to eat anything unhealthy? That she’s on a diet? That’s not such an odd thing. So why does she feel like she has to hide it? Why does it feel like something she has to dig her nails in to keep it in, squeeze the word “diet” and hide it close to her heart to make sure no one finds it?

Stop looking at me. You don’t know anything about me.

The strangers watch. They know everything about her.

She slides into the booth next to the window that Anne’s picked out as nonchalant as she can muster. “So?” she prompts, trying to clear the thickness in her throat.

Anne raises an eyebrow. “So.”

“Let’s get to work,” she flexes her fingers.

Sasha misses the way Anne’s gaze lingers on her drink, on the label, on the way it stays half-full until it’s tossed in the garbage. She is far too concerned with the eyes of everyone else.

—

Sasha fights, she really, truly does, to not roll her eyes after Anne fails for the sixteenth time to pick up a metal trash can. But a girl is only so strong, and Sasha has not trained her strengths in a month too long.

“You need to stop being scared of it.”

Anne pants, tensing as she turns towards Sasha in the alleyway. “I’m not scared.”

“Anne,” Sasha groaned, “we’ve been here for what, three hours? Five hours? Since we finished up our project in the cafe? And you can’t even activate your powers enough to carry something I could pick up no problem?”

Anne lends a hand to the red brick of the alleyway to catch her breath. She shoots Sasha a scowl. “One hour, actually. And we didn’t finish it. We still need to come back at some point to work out that last section.” She frustratedly taps the rim of the trash can. “And it’s not as easy as you think. This is heavy.”

Sasha frowns. She fights, again, not to roll her eyes because two eye-rolls within a minute has the capacity to piss Anne off. So she settles for a saunter toward the trash can.

With a quick and controlled intake of breath, and a decent amount of effort, she lifts the can as though it were weightless. She raises her eyebrow at Anne, who is looking at her like Sasha just picked up a car. She sets it down and it doesn’t even make a sound as it hits the pavement.

“I told you,” Sasha said, “This is light work, Anne. The problem isn’t that you can’t do it, but that you need to stop being scared. You won’t blow up a building if you let a few blue sparks fly.”

“I remember it was you who put that idea in my head,” Anne jabbed a finger resentfully.

Sasha waved her hand dismissively. “I put a lot of ideas in people’s heads. The point is that you need to get out of your own head and take control of your own power instead of letting it control you.”

“Ya know,” she emphasized, “like a weakling ?”

Anne looked like she was about to bite back with something but seemed to think the better of it, picking her hand off the wall. “You're not gonna get me to use my powers that way again.”

Fuck. Well, after sixteen failed attempts, it was worth a shot. When Sasha had no snarky reply, Anne sighed.

The depressing aura of the decrepit alleyway seeped into their bones. The noise from the other day had returned briefly early that morning, but only for a few seconds. Then it was zip, radio silence. Sasha hoped that was a good thing, but in the way you hope school’s going to be canceled even though you know it won’t be; anxiety hung over them like a thick blanket. She broke the silence because Anne didn’t seem like she was going to. “What exactly are you worried’s gonna happen?”

Anne shot her an annoyed look as if to say there are a million things to be worried about.

Well, Sasha was curious about what Anne thought was gonna happen when Andrias finally caught up to them but at the same time, that conclusion seems fairly obvious considering what happened last time they crossed his path. So she asked about something else instead.

“I mean, if you use your powers,” she clarified. “What do you think’s going to happen?”

Anne scoffed, clicking off her phone (which was playing Instagram reels on mute), and turned towards Sasha. “What, so you can make fun of it and say how dumb it sounds?”

“No,” Sasha contended, “I’ve just heard that, sometimes, when you say what you’re worried about out loud, it can help you contextualize your fear in the real world; saying it aloud can make you realize it’s irrational, or out of your control, or whatever. Your brain distorts things like that, spins stuff into something bigger than it is if you keep it in there.”

Anne looked at her incredulously.

“What?”

“Where’d you learn that?” she wondered. “‘Contextualize’? You sound like you’re quoting a textbook or something.”

Sasha scratched the back of her neck, which was suddenly feeling quite warm. “You know… I picked it up.”

Particularly, she did not want to say that she picked it up from her old therapist, who she didn’t realize until now that she was unintentionally quoting. Fuck. It’s not Sasha’s fault the woman had some good advice once in a blue moon. Anne and Ma— Anne never knew about that little piece of Sasha’s history, not that she ever needed to. Might as well not bring it up now.

Anne still looked at her with raised (amused?) eyebrows so Sasha fought the urge to roll her eyes again and shrugged, staring down at her phone’s black screen. It blinked, reading 4:32pm. Sasha squinted. One hour since they started. She sagged against the red brick.

Anne muttered some form of “this is it” as she stalked over to the trash can. Sasha watched as she spread her feet shoulder-width apart and squared her shoulders. She reached around the can. 

After a sequence of increasingly strained attempts, the end result was that the trash can did not lift off from the floor. Anne dropped her arms and let out a frustrated groaning sound. “Ffffffff—-“

“Fuck?” Sasha offered.

“Frog,” Anne corrected with a grunt.

Sasha was about to quip back when a glimmer of light caught her eye. She cocked her head.

Right in the back of the alleyway, in front of the dumpster but behind the splintered wooden plank, there was a glimmer of light caught on something. 

She frowned, taking her weight off the wall and staring down the alley.

What part of a dumpster is shiny?

She squinted. She blinked. The glimmer was more slightly to the left. She blinked again. It was even more left.

Fuck. Something is moving. “Anne?” Sasha called nervously, “I think there’s something—“

And then like something out of a horror movie, red glowing orbs suddenly shone out from the darkness– and long, thin legs stepped out from the shadows.

“What the fuck.”

“What the frog,” Anne uttered at the same time.

They now gazed upon a tall figure; spider-like limbs sprouted off a skinny base, metal claws like a hand protruding from the smooth end of its arms that were so elongated they were almost touching the ground; a sleek, curved turquoise horn(?) jutted out from its forehead that framed two bulging red eyes that were bore lifelessly into the two of them.

But the strangest, creepiest part was its toothy gold mouth, far too big for its face, carved into a grin that appeared almost cartoonishly sadistic.

“Are you… friendly?” Anne inquired cautiously, and Sasha almost facepalmed, because everything about it, from the way it hid in a dark alleyway to its fiendlishly smiling face screamed friendly.

Sasha was about to tell her so when a sudden wind rushed by her face– and then the world was stars and stripes. Or just stars? People usually just saw stars, but this is America: Sasha saw the American flag behind her eyes. She groaned, her hand reaching to her head that just smacked forehead first onto the pavement.

She blinked until her vision was no longer patriotic, and it was then that she registered the scream in the background and the ache burning up her side.

“Sasha!” it yelled, sending goosebumps rolling up her arms. She whipped up her head, wincing only slightly at the way the world lurched. “Anne? What–”

And she thinks time stopped for a moment, that second she locked eyes with Anne; because when she landed on Anne cornered by that creature, her eyes brimming with fear and desperation, Sasha ceased to breathe or think. She didn’t make a decision or weigh out her options; she was gripped by fierceness and fury that was so vivid that the movement of her body felt mechanical, her psyche controlled by the urge to move, move, move. Get him off. She didn’t remember the in-betweens from her on the ground to her slamming the creature over the head with a wooden plank. If she had, she would maybe have conceded that it was not the best idea.

She panted, staggering back, her hands clutching the wood that splintered on impact as adrenaline rushed through her. The creature twitched, stepping away from Anne in a glitchy way, somewhat reeling from the plank that was just crashed over its head. “Look at me,” Sasha hissed as viciously as she could, not paying attention to the way Anne’s jaw hung open, not particularly thinking about anything. She had plenty of time to think, though, as her body slammed up against a wall in a matter of seconds. Not the best idea to just hit it with a flimsy piece of wood. Well, he’s looking at her now.

Cold metal claws pricked into the soft flesh of her arms as the creature pressed her up against the brick of the alley, wrapping its arms that were now even longer around her whole body. She stared with wide eyes. The figure was otherwise unnervingly still, like it lacked the habit of breathing; it was pristine and shining in places that should not shine, its body oddly proportioned and sharp and perfectly curved like it had been carved or had popped out of a mould. And the eyes: they were radiating an artificial–probably completely friendly–red glow.

“I-I think it’s a robot, Anne!” Sasha yelped, trying in vain to pry its arm off of her. She glanced over at the girl, who she realized with dismay had been trapped by the other arm with her back turned to Sasha and her face pressed up against the wall.

“What?” Anne freaked, horrified. “Like Frobo? But Frobo was never like this. This stupid thing–” Anne grunted, “I can’t see a thing. It’s got me pinned.”

“Fro– who? You named that thing?” Sasha called incredulously.

“Yeah, duh– he was our friend! I was surprised Hop Pop let Polly keep him, honestly.”

“Of course it was Polly,” Sasha muttered. “Wait- didn’t he get destroyed by Andrias?”

“Yeah,” said Anne sadly.

Good riddance, Sasha avoided saying. She had no idea why Anne had to make friends with everything under the sun. She winced at the sharpness of the thing’s claws, fearing it would draw blood if it kept up its grip. “What do you want from me?” she spit at it.

But the creature just stared at her almost curiously, its leering grin still wide. She blinked a couple times in succession to get something out of her eye. A droplet landed on her hand as if it had just started to rain.

“What? Are you frozen or something? Do you need to be turned off and on again?” She beat on the metal, her fists coming down in rapid blows, but it seemed to do very little. And then something dropped on her hand again, and she finally tore her eyes away from the robot to look.

A glob of scarlet red stood out her knuckle like a rose petal. She looked towards the blue sky. She looked towards the robot.

And lastly she gingerly swiped her hand across her face-- and warm wetness drenched her fingers. She blinked out of her eye what she now knew was blood, leaking from somewhere near her eyebrow.

Oh, fuck, from the fall?  She starts. This is such bull-

A blur of teal cuts her thoughts short.

-

“You named that thing?”

“Yeah, duh,” Anne hissed with no real bite, far too scared to be annoyed at Sasha’s speciesism right now. “He was our friend! I was surprised Hop Pop let Polly keep him, to be honest.”

She heard a muffled, “Of course… Polly…” from across the alleyway. Then, “Wait– didn’t he get destroyed by Andrias?”

Anne’s heart twinged at the memory. “Yeah,” she grieved into the brick wall she was facing.

She felt so bad for Polly. She wasn’t sure how much of the robot itself was conscious, but she knew Polly really thought he was.

She wondered how much Polly was aware about of her parents’ passings. If she had developed ideas around death at her age. If Hop Pop would need to explain Frobo’s death to her. Knowing Polly, she’d insist he could be rebuilt-- Anne hoped that was the case, for her sake. Oh, Polly, she lamented, missing her and the Plantars even more now. She could really use their help with this, and with, well, with everything else, too.

Sasha was instigating the robot, of course. “Are you frozen or something? Do you need to be turned off and on again?”

Anne grunted, trying to squeeze herself to at least be facing forward and have a view of the fight rather than of the wall. The robot had entangled her in its metal arms and slung her to the side, trapped, like she was a spider’s second prey set aside for later. She hissed, gripping the arm with both hands in an attempt to use it as a sort of leverage to turn herself around. Thank frog, it worked– she managed to rotate herself in its grip to face the rest of the alley. And she caught a view of the scene in front of her.

For a second, Anne forgot everything.

She forgot the robot. She forgot her anger. She forgot her fear and confusion and the resentment bubbling in a boiling pot inside her skin. She forgot the electricity. She forgot her tiredness, her sleepless nights spent staring at a computer screen, the anxiety and worry buzzing all day long about a girl no one talks about anymore. She forgot the days spent at the thrift shop, she forgot the moonlit nights where she tried to find Amphibia among the stars, she forgot music boxes and betrayal and nights spent in tears. She forgot Anne Boonchuy.

She remembered a girl who screamed at cockroaches, who refused to lick raw cake batter off her fingers, who liked Mean Girls and action movies and hated tomatoes because they were too slimy and wet, who stood up for you even if you didn’t deserve it, who would carry you to the ends of the Earth if you asked. She remembered blue eyes and pretty smiles and soft blonde hair cascading past shoulder blades, she remembered cheerleading uniforms and parties with pizza and ice cream cake, she remembered running with shopping carts in parking lots and lounging in boba shops. She remembered impromptu movie nights and laughing until she couldn’t breathe, she remembered warm hands on her back when she sobbed past words, she remembered bunched eyebrows when she scraped her knee, she remembered softened looks in cerulean eyes that almost sparkled if you looked at them at the right moment.

When she finally turned herself around, she saw that girl pinned by a huge robot against a brick wall, little rips and tears all over her, future scabs littering any exposed skin, and bright red blood spilling down her face like rainwater.

To say the truth, it looked wrong.

Like Anne could blink and the sight would disappear, dissipate into thin air, because there was no way it was real. Things like this don’t happen. But then Sasha moved and

And the metal arm that had been pinning her to the wall shredded like tissue paper, and she was slamming into the robot with blue sparks flying at her fingertips before she even processed it. And it was real because the robot catapulted towards the dumpster, leaving a dent in the metal as it smashed into it.

Anne panted, bringing her hands to her stomach as a wave of nausea racked through her. She stumbled to a nearby trash can, clutching it with both hands to steady herself, her hands trembling and buzzing from the energy coursing through her veins. 

“Anne!” a voice that should be familiar exclaimed breathlessly, “Wow, that was awes—“

But then there was a pause, and when the voice returned it was rippled with concern. “Oh, woah, hey. Are you okay?”

Anne squeezed her eyes shut, gripping the trash can like it was the last thing holding her to the Earth. She managed to nod in the general direction of the voice. “Yeah, just—” she coughed, “not used to that.”

“Hey, geez,” Anne felt a presence join her next to the trash can. “You really went nuts, Boonchuy, I can’t believe you saved my ass. I’m gonna have t–”

And then Anne suddenly cried, “Sasha! Sasha, oh my God,” forgetting her nausea in an instant and whipping around to cup the blonde’s face with her hands because this was Sasha. A stone dropped in her stomach as she fully took in all the blood. “Dude, dude, oh my God, are you okay?? Can you hear me? Can you see anything? Hold on, good lord, I’ll call an ambulance.”

She let one hand fall from Sasha’s face to reach shakily for the phone in her pocket, but the zipper wouldn’t unzip properly. Her hand was too sticky. She realized, horrified, that it was drenched in Sasha’s blood. Nausea hit her again like a freight train and she fought the urge to scream.

Sasha stopped her hand reaching into her pocket by holding it with both her own. “Woah, what? An ambulance? For what? Anne, are you seriously okay?”

“Sasha, you’re literally bleeding from your head right now!” Anne shrieked, feeling her eyes brim with hot tears. “Oh my God, oh my God, what if you’re going to die? This is not normal!! This isn’t—“

The world had begun to swim and then colors blurred together like vegetables in a blender, green peppers and tomatoes and carrots all whirring to make a tornado of color that made up what was supposed to be her surroundings. She could hear a voice that was familiar but unrecognizable, trapped behind a glass wall, shifting in and out of focus.

There was a pounding, pounding inside her head and she worried it was blood, blood that was pouring down her face and filling her ears, blood rushing so, so loudly it stifled most everything else.

She felt someone squeeze her hand gently, the sensation muted and faraway like she was in a dream.

“Take a deep breath, Anne. Fuck,” she heard like her head was underwater, “Focus on your breathing. You’re okay.”

She was drowning in an ocean of blood.

“How am I supposed to—“ she gasped out, the oxygen getting stuck somewhere in her throat rather than making it to her lungs because her lungs were full of blood, blood, blood, “you… oh my God—“

“Anne,” someone said, “you need to breathe, okay?” She didn’t remember anything about breathing. “Can you hear me? You’re gonna pass out if you keep hyperventilating like this.”

Is that what she was doing? The world seemed to be moving so fast and she was only trying to catch up to it. The blue magic had died down but she still felt this adrenaline, this hum under her skin that threatened to electrocute her to death and leave her body in an alleyway. Body. Sasha was dead, surely. She pictured blood pouring like molasses. A corpse falling limp. What was she supposed to–

“Hey, hey, I’m right here,” someone said firmly. “I’m not dead and I’m not going to die. Everything is fine. Really.”

Anne’s eyes widened at the voice she finally registered, again, as Sasha’s.

“I’m okay, Anne, really, everything is okay now. You even got rid of the robot, man, that’s amazing. You threw it all the way across the alley in one punch?? That was awesome. Remind me not to betray you again. Okay, bad joke, but I’m—“

Sasha stiffened as Anne abruptly threw her arms around her; she didn’t hug her so much as cling to her like a koala. “Anne?”

Anne’s shoulders heaved against Sasha’s jean jacket like it was a life preserver in the middle of the sea. And this, she knew, was dangerous, more dangerous than being adrift, more dangerous than the threat of sharks and jellyfish, of killer robots and giant amphibians, of drowning. And so she had just figured the inclination to step away when she felt soft hands tentatively reach for her back.

And then she couldn’t make herself let go.

Slowly, deliberately, she found it easier and easier to breathe. Sooner than she thought, her chest began to rise and fall at almost regular intervals.

“Thank Frog you’re okay,” she shuddered out, not caring that her wet face pressed into Sasha’s jacket because the blood spatters almost certainly ruined it anyway.

“Yeah,” the girl whispered, and Anne shivered at the sound, “you too.”

They stayed standing like that for a minute. When it seemed they might let go, they began to sway instead; slowly back and forth they went, like two trees clinging to each other in a windstorm, their branches entangled with one another. They hugged like nothing bad had ever happened between them, and the past didn’t feel like it usually did, pressing down on them like persistent rain— it just waited, silent in the corner of the alleyway, and for once, it finally felt like the past. Like all that mattered was right now, and, God, it hadn’t been just right now in so long— it had always been what happened at Toad Tower, what happened at Andrias’ castle, what happened to you, what happened to us? But now all Anne could think about was Sasha’s perfume: a sweet scent that reminded her of boba tea. It enveloped her in a cloud of comfort and none of the rest, the ugly and the painful that often dominated their interactions, came to mind. She breathed in, and if she closed her eyes, she could pretend they weren’t in middle school, weren’t almost fourteen, she could pretend they were just girls sitting and laughing, sipping sugary drinks on high chairs, and nothing bad had ever happened to the two of them. Frilly, hopeful futures tempted her brain, ones she hadn’t let herself dream of in a long time, spinning her into lives she hadn’t thought she was still capable of hoping for. The two of them had been unstable recently—or maybe for longer than either one had originally thought—their relationship frayed and thin like a telephone wire, but it wasn’t until right now, her fingers sinking into soft blonde locks as she pressed her cheek against Sasha’s jean jacket, that she’d seen what she’d been lacking, felt it, smelled it. And a muffled part of her sunk like a stone in the pit of her gut, thinking it unusually cruel that they would return to distance and silence after this. Three words danced to be voiced on the tip of her tongue, a four letter word tickling the roof of her mouth and singing in her throat. The only problem—the problem she faced in these opportune, vulnerable moments—was that there was more than one word on her mind.

And that was the danger. So when she felt that urge to speak she said nothing at all, because if she were to open her mouth, truly she wasn’t sure which word she’d say. 

Something warm dripped onto Anne’s forehead, which definitely killed the mood.

Anne shot her eyes open in alarm and took a step back, untangling their arms in an abrupt motion that clearly startled the other girl. “Sasha, we seriously need to do something about your head.”

“Yeah?” the girl replied, her eyes distant and hazy. She brought a hand from the wall to her forehead and made an o with her mouth as it came away red. “Oh, yeah. Why’s this still bleeding?”

“Dude, I hope you realize you could have brain damage right now,” Anne deadpanned.

“I’ll just add it to the pile of all my other damages,” Sasha shrugged lazily.

Anne’s Sasha-related irritation returned with a vengeance. Moment over.

“I can’t believe you,” Anne sniffled, but she wasn’t crying anymore.

Sasha smiled, and Anne hated how much it made her feel better.

“We need to at least clean it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Anne scowled. “I’m only 13. Don’t call me ma’am.”

Sasha leaned against the wall she’d been pinned to not long before, her head lolling to the side. “Okay, Anna Banana.”

She rolled her eyes. She checked her phone, looking up directions. “Stay there, Sash, I’m going to be right back.”

“You got it, Tennis,” Sasha said with that big, stupid grin, flashing her a thumbs up.

Anne stomped out the flutter rising in her chest and began to march in the direction of the nearest CVS, her ears reddened at the tips.

-

“You can’t go easier, Boonchuy?” the blonde winced, squeezing one eye shut as Anne swiped the gauze over it.

“Nope,” Anne replied, popping the p. “Your face has gotta get cleaned. I’m getting rid of all this blood.”

“It doesn’t even hurt that much,” Sasha muttered, visibly flinching away at the rough material. She picked at an imperfection in her skirt. “It was just a small graze. Grime told me head wounds bleed a lot, especially if they’re superficial.”

“Well, I don’t care,” Anne said flatly. “You could still get an infection. And you still lost a decent amount of blood, whether it was superficial or not. And you scared the crap out of me, so don’t do that again.”

A small smile played on Sasha’s lips. “Ah, so that’s where this is coming from.” She flexed her fingers, seeming to admire her nails. “I didn’t know you cared so much. Don’t you hate me?”

“I’m still mad at you,” Anne hissed, putting away the once-white gauze that was now caked with blood. “But I’m being mature and not bringing it up right now.” She brought a new one to Sasha’s face to soak up the rest of it.

Admittedly, Sasha was right about the superficial cut-bleeding thing— all those rivers of blood were traced back to a small horizontal graze right above the eyebrow. It would scar, but it likely would hardly be visible in a couple months.

“Right,” Sasha replied to something Anne had forgotten saying because she was still smiling in that stupid way that made Anne feel all queasy inside. God, screw million-dollar smiles. Goddamn attractive people. “You were always the mature one.”

Anne startled. “Shut up.”

“No–” the blonde winced as gauze pressed up against her wound, “I mean it. You were,” she said softly.

There’s a pause. She doesn’t know why, but she says it.

“I was just the dumb one,” Anne mutters, the words tumbling out before she can reel them in. “We got Marcy, with all A’s, and Sasha, who doesn’t even have to try to get everything she wants, and me. Just Anne, who studies and gets bad grades anyway because I don’t ‘apply myself’.”

She keeps rubbing the gauze on spots she knows are already clean. Sasha is certainly staring at her now but she’s not going to stare back. Screw it.

“Anne, what?” Sasha sounds so confused that it makes Anne regret blurting. “You’re getting bad grades? Why?”

“I don’t know,” Anne grits in frustration. Why did she have to start talking about this? “Just forget it, okay? It’s not a big deal, or whatever.”

“But you’re so–”

“What?” Anne doesn’t meet her eyes. “I seem so put-together?”

She tosses the gauze in the garbage and slams the lid before standing up suddenly. “Well, I’m not,” she snaps. “I’m dumb and stupid— and— and, well— I can’t get my stuff in on time!” She laughs even though nothing is particularly funny.

The silence is like nails grating on metal. Anne squeezes her eyes shut.

Shame pools in her gut. “I’m— listen, just forget about it, okay? I shouldn’t have said anything.”

She doesn’t know why she did. Maybe it was the stupid trash can. Maybe it was the junkyard. Maybe it was the thought, fizzing from her failures, that, hey, I can’t do anything. Can’t save Marcy, can’t prevent them from getting trapped on Earth, can’t get back to Amphibia, can’t turn her work in on time, can’t stop Sasha from getting covered in her own blood, can’t pick up a goddamned trash can in a stupid alley. Can’t stop being mad at someone who didn’t mean to hurt her. Can’t stop wanting to forgive someone who really did mean to hurt her. Can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t speak.

Can’t stop the comfort that floods through her when a warm hand lands on her back.

She keeps talking, because she can’t stop doing that, either. “I can’t— I don’t do my assignments, Sash. I’ve got miles and miles of makeup work I should be doing to fix everything, to let me graduate, to make up all that time away. You know Bio? I haven’t done any of the makeup work. I have the papers, I just— I need to do them,” her voice drops to just above a whisper and she begs herself not to cry again, “but I don’t. I stare at them. And I can’t do them. And I don’t know why I can’t.”

Her eyes dart around the alley, lingering on the shadowed entrance to the dumpster that she blasted the robot into. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. This is a bad time—“

“No, no,” Sasha hushes, her hand coming to rest on Anne’s shoulder, “hey, it’s never a bad time for this.”

“For what?” asks Anne miserably. “Me complaining again? When you just almost died?”

“Hey,” Sasha said firmly, “I didn’t almost die, Boonchuy, that’s like an insult. It’ll take a lot more than some smiling tin can to kill me.” Her voice grows softer in that way that makes Anne want to start bawling. “It’s never a bad time to talk to me about stuff. I still care, you know?”

“Yeah,” Anne sniffles because, Frog damn it, she’s starting to cry again. She sits back down again, and she thinks it’s because Sasha moves her hand back to her back that she just starts talking.

“I just— I don’t know. School is just… well, school. And school always makes me feel stupid. Like I’m supposed to be smarter than I am and look at things and understand them but I just don’t. Like I’m the only one in a room full of people who’s listening and everything but just doesn’t get it. I go to class, I study, I prepare, but it feels like none of it matters. I still get a C on the test. I get a 7/10 on the assignment. I get told I’m not trying hard enough.”

“And the worst part is that I am trying. I can’t even tell myself that oh, it’s fine, I wasn’t even trying that hard anyway, because this is my best. So what does that say about me?”

That I’m just not good enough? That my best is someone else’s worst? That I’ll never be anything more than Anne, that girl who doesn’t apply herself? That I’ll watch Sasha and Marcy– and really, everyone else– run into their futures, their successes, and I’m just here dragging my feet behind them? That they’ll run so far ahead that I can’t see them in the distance anymore?

That they won’t stop to look back at me?

There’s quiet for a moment. Then, “This is cheesy,” Sasha mutters, “but you doing your best proves you’re better than all the rest of those losers who just show up and don’t care. You put the effort in, and that matters, trust me, it does. And listen, Boonchuy, you’re not dumb. I know I joke, and whatever, but you’re— you’re… I’d follow your lead, if that’s what you wanted, because I know you’d make the right choices, okay? You’re smart when it matters. School is just an exercise in following rules and bullshitting. And I happen to be quite good at the second one, and that’s really the only reason I get better grades. It really means nothing, you know. A’s, B’s, C’s, we all end up in the same coffin.”

“I just feel like there’s something wrong with me,” Anne whispers, because she might as well get it all out now, wrapping her arms around herself. “Don’t you think so, too?” trickles out like a drop from a faucet.

There’s a moment of silence that feels like a shotgun echoing in her ears. Then she feels Sasha shrug. “So what?” the girl says in a bored voice, like she’s looking at her nails, like the question wasn’t even worth thinking about.

She blinks. “What?”

“So what if there’s something wrong with you?”

“I don’t know. There’s not supposed to be something wrong with me. I-I should be able to do these things,” Anne stammers.

“Who says?” Sasha retorts. “Your counselor? Your English teacher? The thing is, Anne, everyone’s got something a little wrong with them. Even, and I know this is hard to believe, even me. And because I’ve got shit wrong with me, you know what? I don’t care that you’ve got shit wrong with you. And no one else should, either, because they’d be a damn hypocrite.”

Sasha gently runs her fingernails over Anne’s shoulders. “And, if you ask me, in the grand scheme of things, I think not understanding middle school isn’t the worst thing to have wrong with you. You’re just fine at everything else.”

Anne considers Sasha’s words. She lets them spin around her brain, nest in the corner of her thoughts. Of course Sasha’d say something like that: hey it’s not just you, the whole world is broken. She smiles to herself.

Maybe it is.

“You’ve got shit wrong with you?” she finally repeats, smirking.

By the tone of her voice, she knows Sasha’s grinning too. “Really hard to believe, I know.”

“Well,” Anne says quietly, leaning into Sasha’s side. “That makes two of us.”

That night, Anne watches the sun dip under the horizon.

She looks at the pile of untouched work, biology worksheets and pre-algebra littering her desk.

With a grand sigh, she picks up a pencil. And with great effort, writes her name on every single one.

It’s better than nothing, she tells herself when she’s finished.

And maybe it is.

-

Sasha is humming as she unlocks her front door, a sing-song tune dancing from her throat and her interaction with Anne replaying in her mind. She opens the door, pulling it the rest of the way with her hip. She stops abruptly, the song dying in her throat.

Her mother sits on the couch, a ghost haunting her house.

“Hi, Mom,” Sasha grits, her mood easily soured, sliding her backpack onto the floor.

“Oh,” her mother says, distracted by something on her phone. “Hi, dear.”

It is the only conversation they have. Sasha stomps up to her room before her mother can say another word.

Not that she would. Her mother barely speaks to her anymore, and that’s just fine with Sasha. She actually cannot remember the last time they had a full conversation. Is that bad? she wonders. Maybe it is.

Sasha couldn’t care less, anyway. Her mom doesn’t ask whether she’s had dinner, so her stomach growls as she lies down for bed.

She thinks about those evenings where her mother would check on her and she’d wake up to a cracked-open door and a cool breeze wafting through her room. How she wakes up every morning and stares at the closed door, like she’d been waiting for something as she slept.

She closes her eyes, and counts the calories from the drink at the cafe for the thousandth time instead of counting sheep.

Numbers are stupid, but as she falls into a restless, dreamless sleep, numbers swirl like smoke inside her head.

Chapter Text

Sasha wakes up on Wednesday morning feeling like she’s on fire.

She’s freezing one minute, like she’s been left outside overnight, and then it’s like all of a sudden, when the sun hits her, she’s been set aflame– sweating and red-hot like a campfire.

Eyeing the morning sunlight with great distaste, she immediately knew she didn’t want to go to school today.

She groans, rolling over to check the time, fire sparking up her arms as she moves them.

She almost jumps out of bed seeing the clock. The universe seems to want to solve her problems (for once) because it’s already an hour after school has started.

Great. So the only possible benefit of her mother being home has just been flushed down the toilet. She didn’t even wake Sasha up.

Anxiety seeps like tar through the ridges of her brain. Should I go?

She’d only miss first period if she leaves now. Then there’s the issue of I’d have to ask Mom for a ride, and wow, that thought stopped the whole going to school idea short, snuffing out the burning anxiety in her stomach with a cold weight.

Her limbs are hot and heavy like lead, every movement taking astronomical amounts of focus. Sleep prods at her insistently, persuasively, like it knows she’s not cut out for living today. She stares at the ceiling.

Fuck my life, she thinks contemplatively as she feels the dull pangs of an oncoming headache come on.

She misses yesterday. For a brief moment there’s a flicker of brown eyes in her memory, and she reconsiders going to school. There’s hope in her chest. She sits up straight. Mom. Anne. Mom has to drive me. But Anne. But Mom has to drive me. But Anne— but Mom.

She groans and considers walking to school, but if she can hardly get out of bed how is she supposed to walk three miles to school? She highly doubts the school bus is still running, and her mother’s driver only starts working in the afternoon.

Besides, she’s not sure she could get out of bed, anyway. She has sandbags tied to every limb.

The war in her mind settles with a quiet victory on the going-back-to-sleep side.

She slumps back into bed. Sleep takes her immediately when she closes her eyes.

-

She’s in the middle of a sunny street, her feet planted on the yellow double line. Leaves from barren trees litter the road like fallen soldiers.

She squints in the sun, feeling like an ant under a magnifying glass. In its gaze is an unavoidable question.

She shakes her head like she’s been practicing. She starts to run, her Mary Jane’s clicking on the concrete.

But the street never turns a corner, and the trees are too empty to offer shade.

She runs from the sun itself, her bare feet plodding on the road.

The sun doesn’t move. It lets her run like a cheetah would let a zebra. Her legs begin to tire. Her lungs start to protest.

The sun remains in its place in the sky. Horrible, suffocating rays bear down endlessly on Sasha’s back. She runs.

But the thing about the sun, though it’s so far away it’s almost intangible, is that it sees her. It sees her when she wakes, when she walks, when she runs, when she’s sprinting as fast as she can down the middle of the street. It watches. And it never really moves, not like the Earth does: the sun is still and waiting, like a bird of prey, like a lion or a cheetah on the savannah.

And it bears down that persistent, unavoidable question: what are you waiting for?

-

She wakes to sunlight shining directly in her eye, the brightness overloading her dream.

She squeezes her eyes shut, but it’s still far too bright to fall back into sleep.

She grunts as she finally pulls herself out of bed: it’s only slightly easier than it was this morning, which seems like a scam considering she slept like four more hours. Sleep is a scam made up by mattress companies to sell more mattresses.

To her dismay, she meets her mother in the kitchen.

“Hi,” she says grumpily.

Her mother replies with her head sticking out of the fridge like Sasha wasn’t even worth the bother of looking at her. “Oh, hi dear. How are you? Did you need something?”

Sasha’s eye twitches in irritation. She eyes her mother take out two brown eggs and a red pepper, setting them down on the counter with an urgency that almost makes her anxious the eggs would break. It pisses her off. Her mother is always in a hurry.

“No, I don’t need something,” she bites, hoping it conveys you’d be the last person I’d ask if I did.

Her mother frowns. “I’m making an omelet for lunch. What’s with the tone?”

“I don’t have a tone. I’m just talking.”

She can’t see it, but she knows her mother’s frown deepens.

She stands there awkwardly like she’s out of place in her own home. Eggs crack into a sizzling pan. Quick chopping noises fill the room and then stop suddenly.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at school, dear?” her mom finally asks.

“Yeah, something like that,” Sasha agrees. “Good on you for waking me up.”

There’s a moment of silence.

Her mother scoffs, and it pisses her off more. “Oh, please.”

“What?” Sasha feels like her head is full of angry bees.

The frenzied chopping resumes. “You’re almost 14 and you still need me to wake you up for school in the morning, dear? You don’t think you’re past that?”

“I’m surprised you even remembered my age. Considering.” Sasha can’t help it.

The chopping stops. Finally.

Her mother glances over her shoulder— not even a full turn— and looks at Sasha with an incredulous expression. And what pisses her off more is that it’s not even angry; it’s just a stupid fucking are we doing this? face that she’s seen a hundred times before growing up. She hates it.

“Sasha. Really?” she says, and Sasha also hates that her voice sounds tired, as if her mother has anything in this world to be tired about. “It’s noon. Don’t you think it’s too early for this?”

“Too early for what?” she bites anyway, twirling a lock of blonde hair around her finger disinterestedly.

Her mother turns back around, the action bringing Sasha’s blood to a simmer. “We’re not doing this right now.”

“I’m not doing anything. God, you just want to have a problem, don’t you?”

“Attitude,” her mother warns.

“I’m not even doing anything,” she scoffs taking a step toward the kitchen table. She picks up an apple, examining it with a thoughtful gaze. “I don’t have an attitude.”

She waits. It’s not long before the chopping board contents are emptied into the pan. Steam rises and pops, swirling into the underside of the microwave just above the stove.

Her mother sighs loudly, exhaustedly, and it stirs Sasha up again. Can she not even be bothered to respond? To talk to Sasha? Is having a conversation so much of a fucking chore?

“You didn’t even notice,” she mumbles, her eyes glazing over the apple and fixating on some tree in the distance. The leaves are blurry, green blobs oversaturated by the dominating sun.

“What?” Her mother asks. “I can’t hear you. Speak up when you’re talking to me.”

“I said you didn’t even fuckin’ notice shit,” Sasha snaps. She digs her fingernails into the red skin until it punctures and juice flows up under her nails. “You don’t even care.”

She sighs again, and Sasha almost snaps again. “I don’t know what is wrong with you today,” her voice dripping with a tone Sasha’s grown to understand means you’re pushing it, “but I’m not dealing with it. Make your own lunch. If you’re going to keep acting like this, make your own dinner, too.”

She plates her food and leaves, closing the door behind her.

“Great, cool! Almost like I’ve been doing that every night anyway!”

Sasha stands alone in the abandoned kitchen, tears welling up uselessly in her eyes. “You didn’t even notice I have a bandaid on my face and I’m covered in bruises. More like what’s wrong with you.”

Sasha has no idea why she still has this pointless hope for something to change. Like one of these days she’ll meet her mom and it’ll be the same woman she remembers before the divorce, like they were switched in the night a long time ago and one of these days they’ll just switch right back. It doesn’t compute in her mind that the two are the same woman: it’s Before and it’s After. It’s Mom and it’s Mother. It’s someone who cared and it’s someone who doesn’t, and the why and how doesn’t matter, apparently, to everybody except Sasha. 

She wipes her eyes with the palm of her hand, tossing the ruined apple into the garbage. Its red skin peeks out from under her fingernails and she eyes it like a hungry animal; she shakes her head a little violently to vanish the thought. The cuts on her fingers from picking up shattered porcelain have long since faded into scabs, but they’re still noticeable if you look closely. She manages to hide them under the cuffs of her jacket, but this morning she strolled into the kitchen with rolled up sleeves.

“I’m going back to my room,” she says to the empty kitchen. No one responds.

Sasha goes back to her room as promised, drops into bed, and sleeps for three more hours.

-

When she wakes for the third time today, she finally checks the clock.

It’s almost four in the afternoon. School is over. She presses the palms of her hands into her eyes until she sees stars.

She feels like a dead fish, bloated and floating stagnantly.

She checks her messages and raises her eyebrows when her eyes scroll over the barrage of unread texts in her inbox.

[Today, 8:57am]

[Hallie, 8:57am]: dude

[Hallie, 8:57am]: are u herrreeeeee…!!

[Hallie, 9:10am]: omg u are totally skipping

[Hallie, 9:10am]: how dare u

[Hallie, 9:11am]: leaving me like this

[Hallie, 9:11am]: smh

[Hallie, 9:21am]: hope ur ok though

She frowns, scrolling through the messages with bored taps. She clicks off Hallie’s contact. She’ll respond later. Probably.

She hesitates before tapping on the contact labeled Anna Banana . 

She re-reads the messages from the day before for the thousandth time.

[Yesterday, 7:25pm]

[Anna Banana, 7:25pm]: you made it home safe?

[Anna Banana, 7:29pm]: What you said today really helped. I just wanted to say thank you

[Anna Banana, 7:35pm]: and maybe we can train again soon? let me know at school tomorrow

Her finger hovers over the reply she never sent.

[Sasha]: hey anne, thank u for asking im good, are you okay?? and of course if you ever need anything im here ok? and

She glances at the newest messages, unease building.

[Today, 8:40am]

[Anna Banana, 8:40am]: i have smth exciting to tell you today

Her stomach sinks like the Titanic. Fuck.

[Anna Banana, 8:41am]: im actually struggling not to type it out lol, i’ll meet you at lunch? im gonna sit by the posters lol

[Anna Banana, 11:58am]: hereee, come quick i don’t wanna be alone

She squeezes her eyes shut. Oh God.

She opens them for the text she knows is coming.

[Anna Banana, 12:20am]: Are you here today

[Anna Banana, 12:29am]: you could’ve told me

Guilt slams against Sasha’s head like a giant steel hammer. Fucking shit. Why didn’t she check her messages?? God damn it. She was literally awake at the time, wasn’t she? Why didn’t she just pick up her phone?

She wants to bash her head into the wall. She was talking to her mother when Anne texted. If she hadn’t picked a fight, she would’ve went back up to her room sooner and checked her messages.

She feels like she’s drowning; her lungs fill with icy-cold burning water. The burning sensation from this morning returns and she feels like she’s on fire again, every bruise aching like they’re screaming.

She just took three steps back with Anne after taking one step forward. They hugged and everything felt okay for once, but of course, Sasha had to ruin it. Like she does everything. Like she ruined Percy and Braddock, like she ruined Grime, like she ruined one of her best friends in the entire–

Sorry, she types with shaky fingers, but it doesn’t feel like enough. She deletes it. I’m really sorry, Anne, I just wasn’t

What is she even supposed to say? Sorry, I just wasn’t able to get out of bed even though I’m perfectly fine? That she doesn’t really know why, but sometimes she wakes up and feels the entire world press down on her like she’s at the bottom of the ocean? Like getting up and brushing her teeth is a Herculean task, much less going to school, and everything is just too loud and too bright and she just wants to lie in bed like a dead body? That she’d rather just stare at her ceiling all day? It’s such a sad excuse she can’t even make herself type it out. 

Boohoo, Sash, some people have real problems! that insistent voice that sounds suspiciously like her mother drawls in an itchy voice. And if you weren’t a total bitch for no reason and picked a fight with Mom, you would have read the texts and not left Anne hanging. Jesus, you’re a mess, aren’t you? You just had to pick a fight because you were upset about someone not noticing your dumb face. Grow up, Sash, not everyone is going to notice every little thing about you. You’re pathetic and it’s embarrassing.

She literally caused her own problem; she can’t believe she picked today to have another pointless argument. Her mother just makes her so incorrigibly upset, like she’s a pot full of water on the stove and her mother’s face alone makes it overflow.

She doesn’t know why she wanted her mom to notice, like that would improve anything about anything. The woman’d just mouth off about Sasha needing to be more careful, or whatever, and go back to stirring her fucking eggs. She doesn’t know why the fact that her mother didn’t notice Sasha looked any different feels worse than that, somehow.

The wound above her eyebrow itches. She feels the sun bare down on her back like it’s watching her, like it knows she’s going to slip up. Like it’s just sitting there, waiting for it with a smug expression.

She bites her lip until her mouth tastes lightly of copper.

The sun waits behind her blinds.

-

“Hey,” Hallie demands as she saunters right up next to Sasha in the hallway, “why weren’t you at– oh, shit, what happened to your face, dude?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Sasha grumbles, feeling only slightly less exhausted than the day before. Everything is a little too loud, tinged with a blurry, saturated edge.

Hallie goes quiet, which would worry Sasha if she gave any shit at all about what happens today. Everything is muted and somehow blaring at the same time.

“Hey,” she murmurs a little softer than normal and Sasha can’t help but notice how oversized her uniform shirt is, like she’s wearing it three sizes too large. And she thinks about how little Hallie cares about it, about anything. “Are you okay?”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it,” Sasha hisses. “I’m fine. Get off my dick.”

“It’s just you–”

“What?” Sasha stops abruptly in the hallway, seething. “I’m what?”

“...you don’t look okay,” Hallie finishes, fixing her owlish brown-eyed gaze right above Sasha’s eyebrow.

When has she ever been okay? In the past seven months, when has anything ever been “okay”? How many times has she laid in bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering when things will be “okay” again? The question itself is frankly insulting, like Hallie has any right to judge her.

Hallie just doesn’t know when to quit. Who is she to give a shit about Sasha? To pretend to care? Hallie Davidson doesn’t care. That’s who she is. She’s late to school most of the time and somehow finagles her way into leaving early; her uniform hasn’t ever properly fit her, her hair is a mess, and she generally just gives off the aura that she doesn’t care about anything. God knows how she’s even able to stay on the cheer team, or how she got in in the first place when Sasha’s on the verge of being kicked out despite the fact that Sasha cares about how she’s perceived, cares about school and how she looks, cares about staying on the team. She cares so deeply about how she looks and how she’s perceived that it’s almost desperate. Her head fills with bees, thousands of them buzzing around in angry circles. 

There’s a pot of boiling water in her head, in her chest, and droplets drip down off the sides.

She digs her fingernails into her palm.

“And you look like you need to fuck off,” she snaps harshly, and she doesn’t stop at that either, the words rushing out of her mouth like a river, “Jesus, when will you ever just leave me the hell alone? Go fix your dumbass uniform–do you have to make it so obvious you can’t fucking afford one that fits?-- instead of bothering me with your whiny ass questions. I’m goddamn sick of it. You don’t know me. We’re not fucking friends. You’re just some girl on the cheer team. Act like it.”

She storms off before Hallie can respond or react, stomping through the halls and not letting regret start to creep its way through her thoughts.

Everything is too loud. Why would it be her fault for just telling people to be quiet, especially Hallie, who pretends and pretends like she doesn’t care what people think– but she does, she does, because she must?

Because Sasha can’t imagine not feeling like there are a million eyes on you the second you step outside, criticizing and judging you for what you wear or what you look like or how much your stomach sticks out in that top. So she judges, too, so what? The whole world is fucking judgemental. Why’s it so bad when she does it?

Jesus christ.

-

Everything is fine. Sasha feels like she’s one step away from the boiling pot of water in her finally just tipping over and burning her alive. But everything is fine, she reasons.

Except it’s not, because she’s staring down the hall at the classroom in the corner that reads 215, anxiously shifting her weight from one foot to another. She checks her phone. Class started five minutes ago. She wonders if that’s enough time to miss Anne entirely. (It’s not).

Hope is almost lost and she considers just running out the front door when she spies the biology teacher turning the corner. Her eyebrows raise. He’s late, too.

She remembers when she bumped into him once and blew his papers everywhere, and how he didn’t chew her out when she accidentally swore at him. How he let her go after Anne when she ran out. How he seemed to care.

Her mouth curves into a smile.

“Oh–!” she says preemptively, making a wide turn around the corner at the same time her teacher walks by.

Like last time, papers fly everywhere like white birds.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry!” Sasha apologizes, trying her best to make it sound sincere. She bends down to pick up the papers that are now strewn everywhere. Tears come to her eyes without a fight.

“Ah–” he says, “what are you doing out of–”

She looks up, making fleeting eye contact. She averts her eyes and sniffles loudly, desperately grasping at the fallen papers.

He falters. “Sasha?” he asks. “You don’t need to–”

“No,” she sniffles, and she almost laughs at how real it sounds when her voice breaks. “I-I bumped into you, I’m such an idiot, god, I’m sorry.”

“What?” he says, alarmed. “Sasha–”

“It’s just,” she whines, “I… sorry, I shouldn’t.” She wonders if she’d be able to give herself a papercut on purpose. That’d up the ante.

She sees him crouch down in her peripheral vision, frowning and obviously listening.

“It’s just…” she swipes at her eyes and brushes off no tears on purpose, “I-I just got the call, um, my… my grandma just passed away.”

She watches his brows furrow. His mouth turns into a hard line.

“Sasha,” he says, and his voice is so concerned it makes her tears run harder for reasons she doesn’t understand. “Do you think you can stand up?”

“Y-yeah,” she sniffles. Her legs wobble, but she makes it up.

He stands up as well. He puts his hands on her shoulders. “I’m so sorry,” he says regretfully, sadly. She knows she should feel bad for this, but she doesn’t. “I’ll write you a note to go home, okay?”

Her heart soars and she almost yells fuck yeah but stops herself, because she’s supposed to be grief-stricken right now. “T-Thank you,” she sobs.

He scribbles on a random slip piece of paper. His eyes are mournful when he hands it to her and the emotion ridiculously seems genuine. As if Sasha actually matters. As if he actually cares. “Take care of yourself.”

“Thank you,” she says, taking the slip with a silent yes!

Just as she goes to turn around, she glances back at the classroom.

She makes eye contact with a certain brown-haired girl peeking through the doorway. Her heart drops. She turns as fast as she can and speedwalks down the hall.

The teacher watches her the whole way, a sad expression on his face.

-

It’s harder to turn off the waterworks than she expected. “Shit,” she mumbles, and to her annoyance her voice breaks. She stands outside waiting for her mother’s driver, “Stop crying, you fucking idiot.”

She slaps her tear-streaked cheeks hard enough to make them sting. Her eyes finally stop watering, and she sighs.

She looks at the sky. The air smells like it’s going to rain.

-

Thunder claps and echoes through her hallways, lightning illuminating her bedroom in brief flashes as she counts her cash listlessly, one bill after another.

She hisses in dissatisfaction: she only has $200. That’s hardly enough for a shopping trip. She sighs and curses the world. Her one healthy coping mechanism isn’t gonna last for long. She calls her mother’s driver.

“Hello?” the older man grunts. “Who is this?”

“It’s me, Mom’s kid. Anyway, can you pick me up and take me to the mall?”

“Which one?”

“Um. I don’t know. There’s really only one mall around here. Just take me to the closest one.”

“No,” he grunts, “I mean which kid is this?”

What?

Sasha sits in dumbfounded silence until there’s a rustling on the other line.

Mom has other kids? Since when?

She knows her mom has a boyfriend so it’s not exactly a surprise, but the knowledge sits heavy in her chest: it makes her uneasy, and she’s not sure why.

“Sasha,” she answers uncomfortably.

“Oh,” the man sighs. “Fine. I’m on my way.”

“Thanks,” Sasha says, but he’s already hung up. She stares at the ceiling.

There’s a cobweb in the corner she hasn’t noticed before.

-

40 minutes later, Sasha is flat broke. There are indentations on her scabbed fingers from carrying so many shopping bags.

Thunder rumbles in the distance, the storm seeming farther away now that she’s under the glare from the mall’s overhead lights. The building is humid, though, the air heavy.

Her jean jacket was heavy, too, but she regrets taking it off. She’s wearing a pink tank top with a little bow on it, which is adorable and showing that off is definitely not the problem, but it’s her arms.

She hadn’t really gotten too good of a look at them recently, but after the cashier gave her a wince when she checked out, she peered down: purple and blue bruises pepper her forearms, collecting in matching fat violet stains on either side of her upper arms. From the freaking robot, she guesses. And getting thrown around in general.

She wasn’t stupid, she knew she had bruises– she could feel them every time she moved– but she hadn’t really clocked that other people would notice them. When her mother didn’t, she fumed and all, but figured they weren’t actually that big of a deal. 

Apparently, bruises worsen in color after the initial injury. Yay! So the red turned to purple and the purple turned to blue and now she’s mottled in ugly spots. Great. And people do notice them. Unfortunately. Strangers keep giving her this pity look that she hates.

Sasha cannot stand being pitied so looking like a ragdoll bums her out. She sets down her shopping bags and settles into a mall chair, pulling the jacket from around her waist and tugging it over her arms and shoulders. Her arms are now just another part of her body that’s hard to look at.

She slumps into the faux leather seat, clutching her empty wallet and counting the beats between each clap of thunder.

One, two, three, four, five, six… fifteen, sixteen… one, two…

Despite her lack of cash, she decides to take one last lap around the mall before calling her mother’s driver to pick her up. What else is she going to do, sit at home and pretend she doesn’t see the text messages from Anne (and surprisingly, from Hallie, too) piling up in her inbox?

She veers into a random store, examining the shelves of jewelry and clothing she can’t buy. And like a golden lightbulb, the idea pops inside her head.

She blinks and shakes her head, but the thought doesn’t dissipate. She frowns. In fact, it only seems to grow stronger and seems more and more like a good idea.

She glances down at her shopping bag, at the pile of lacy tops and blue jeans, and notes that there’s a lot of room near the top. She peers around the store to find it mostly empty, abandoned likely because of the storm. She wonders.

Thunder cracks. She looks down at a particularly eye-catching necklace on the shelf: it’s delicate, a wiry chain connecting to a pale pink stone encased in gold. She looks around again.

She spends another couple seconds peering around the store thoughtfully before she pulls out her phone and starts blabbering.

“And then I said– jeez Louise, girl, you’re going to wear that?” she yaps into the phone and after a moment, makes her way towards the store’s exit.

Adrenaline pumps through her veins, her heart beating faster and faster as she approaches the gate. Thunder cracks loudly, intermingling with the sound of her Mary Jane’s clacking on the linoleum.

As her foot places in the entryway of the store, she glances behind her. There’s a girl, an employee, at the register. She looks bored.

She turns the corner immediately as she exits, clacking a fair distance away. When she’s clear of the store, she sets her bags down on the table. “I’ve gotta go, sorry girl!” she says apologetically, bringing the silent phone down from her ear and pressing randomly on the bottom of the black screen.

She peers into the bag. A gold necklace with a pale pink stone gleams back up at her. She smiles.

By the time the mall closes and the storm clears for the night, she’s got four more purchases sitting in the bottom of her H&M bag and a delightful airy feeling in her head. 

-

Sasha walks into school that drizzling morning feeling better than she has in days. Truthfully, her excursion last night really did bring her mood up. She doesn’t have to see Anne today, because Biology and Social Studies were yesterday, so she doesn’t have to worry about a thing.

She sees Hallie in the hallway and smiles broadly, waving ecstatically. The girl looks very confused for a moment but then her face brightens and she smiles, waving back. She calls something that Sasha doesn’t hear, because all of a sudden the world stands still.

Anne’s eyes have never looked so piercing staring her down a school hallway at 7:30 in the morning.

Sasha falters. What the fuck? Why is she here? Anne should be in class. Anne never skips class because her parents would cause a fuss and– and Anne stalks towards her.

She just stands there dumbfounded for a second until she realizes that hey, Anne seriously looks like she means business. And she remembers all the missed texts and calls and classes and her body turns as if the motion is automatic, and she is walking right out of the school’s front doors.

Light rain patters on her jacket. She hopes no one is watching her because she honest-to-god hides behind a goddamn pillar. She bites her fingernails, going completely silent when she hears the front doors open. She forgets to breathe.

She hears Anne’s sharp intake of breath, like she’s about to call out–

“Anne Boonchuy!”

They both stiffen.

Sasha hears the jangle of keys on a ring and the clack of dress shoes walk up to the school’s entryway.

“What are you doing, young lady? Class started already.”

“Uhhh–” Anne freezes, and Sasha actually feels bad. “I don’t know, um… trying to get some fresh air?”

The teacher scoffs. “Well, you can get that when the day’s over. Come along.”

Sasha can feel Anne’s hesitation. “But–”

“No excuses! You’re lucky I don’t write you up for trying to skip. Goodness, the day just started!”

Sasha thanks God for what must be divine intervention. She hears them both walk back inside, the doors shutting closed behind them.

Well. I could stay out here until the afternoon when I can call Mom’s driver. She winces at even the idea of staying in the rain until then. Her hair is already getting tangled. She sucks in a breath and after waiting a couple more minutes, heads back inside.

Might as well go to class. She’s missed quite a few.

Throughout the rest of the day, Hallie tries to get her attention a total of three times. Which would be odd, except it’s really not. She has this eager look on her face that slowly transforms into a kind of worried grimace after each failed attempt to talk to Sasha. The first time she just calls for her in the hallway during passing period, and Sasha pretends she doesn’t see or what her. The second time, it’s in the cafeteria and Hallie is patting down a seat next to her, which Sasha promptly also ignores and heads straight to the bathroom to avoid her. The last time, Hallie just walks into Sasha’s class, which was frankly terrifying. Thank goodness she sits in the corner of the room so she was just able to hide behind her seatmate until the teacher chased her off. Hallie has always been clingy; Sasha brushes it off. It makes sense she would want to reconnect with Sasha after their “fight” the other day.

Sasha closes her eyes. It was less of a fight and more of her just letting her anger get the best of her.

Honestly, she doesn’t care. Not really. She’s just kind of annoyed Hallie was able to rile her up like that, and the girl wasn’t even trying. 

She just can’t stand the world sometimes. If it wasn’t Hallie, it’d be someone else. And besides, Hallie’s a big girl, she can handle a few mean words.

Her head is buzzing. The world feels dull.

She’s thinking about the mall again as she packs up her school bag at the last bell.

A prickly feeling at the back of her neck settles in as she walks down the school corridor. She turns around, frowning, but the halls are bustling with students who are cheering for it being Friday and she can’t see a thing. She lets it go, busting open the entryway doors.

It’s still raining lightly, a persistent humidity.

She sighs, going for her phone.

She doesn’t even have time to react when a hand grabs her firmly by the collar and pulls her backward.

She almost screams, a yelp escaping her.

The girl spins Sasha around like a ragdoll.

The scathing look from earlier today was nothing compared to the glare Anne gives her now.

“Anne–”

“Shut up,” she hisses, pulling her to the side before dropping her collar like it was on fire. “What is wrong with you?”

I don't know what's wrong with you today.

She stiffens, unable to help the irritation that sparks in her gut. “What?”

“What is wrong with you,” Anne repeats, her fists clenching and unclenching. “You miss my calls, you miss my texts, I wouldn’t even care if you just missed school but you didn’t tell me , and jeez I had something to tell you, but the worst part is afterward you just completely ignored me! You skipped class, Sash, just to avoid me? Are you kidding? What did I even do wrong? You ran away from me this morning.”

“I didn’t run,” Sasha mutters, looking down at the concrete.

“You didn’t run?” Anne sounds incredulous. “Oh, really, you’re telling me this morning I didn’t see you run out the front freaking doors and hide from me?”

Sasha starts to say something but Anne just shakes her head, shutting her up. “Come on,” she says firmly, grabbing Sasha’s wrist. “Let’s find somewhere and we’ll talk.”

Sasha has the distinct feeling that she is not going to like this conversation.

-

She was right: she does not like this conversation.

Well, if sitting at a picnic table in silence counts as a conversation. She can just feel that Anne’s pissed off. It’s like there’s this mechanical drone in the air, a pitch too high for her to hear but she can just feel it. Tiny, almost imperceptible blue sparks emanate from Anne’s form.

Anne doesn’t look as bruised as Sasha is. Her arms have a couple, but she’s glad that she seems to be doing a bit better.

“So,” Sasha says, and cringes. “What did you want to talk about?”

Anne just glares.

She twitches. “What, you dragged me out here and now you can’t talk?”

“I’m more surprised by the fact you want to talk to me , now,” Anne retorted.

“Not like I have a choice,” Sasha mutters, and regrets it because of the way Anne’s face scrunches up for a brief moment before it hardens.

“Do you have to be forced into talking to me? I really thought we were getting somewhere, the other day. I just want to know what the freak happened, dude, I just– did I say something wrong? Did I do something wrong?”

“No, no,” Sasha says immediately, guilt pooling in her stomach. “I just–” She lets out a frustrated sigh. It’s not your fault; it’s mine . “Sorry. I just… I don’t know. I missed your texts and then it was hard to face you.”

It sounds so stupid out loud. God. She wishes she had a better reason.

Anne just stares at her. “Well, why’d you skip in the first place?” She hesitates, then adds: “Was it because of me?”

“No! It wasn’t you, I just…” Sasha searches her mind. “...wasn’t feeling well.”

Well, that is the truth. It doesn’t sound as severe as she means it, though.

“Well, why didn’t you just tell me?” Anne prompts, and Sasha genuinely has no idea how to respond to that. She just shakes her head, because I don’t know. Because it wasn’t just a one-off thing where Sasha just got sick one day and then got better the next. Because admitting she didn’t feel good would lead into well, actually, sometimes I just get like this, and she knows that’s a poor excuse for a reason and Anne would push. And it would become “how often do you feel like this?” and she would have to lie, because she always has to lie when it comes to things she Doesn’t Talk About; that’s the whole point. And she doesn’t talk about those things because every time she does, she ends up in a doctor’s office or a therapist’s office and there’s an adult staring at her like she’s a fish in an aquarium and they ask questions like “what’s wrong with you?” and she stares at them because she doesn’t know, has never known, and probably will never know. And her mother is disappointed in her-- not like she cares-- and everything is just worse.

And there’s something moving in the pit of her stomach, wriggling and writhing around, a small thing, and it says: you don’t talk about them because you can’t.

And that’s not true, she knows it’s not, because of course she can. Of course she can talk about all the little wheels in her that make her go and what she thinks and what she does. It’s just always more trouble than it’s worth to talk about what’s bothering her. Why would she do something if it just leads to a worse outcome? Why talk if she ends off worse because of it? It’s not like every morning she wakes up and she can’t move, it’s not every day she wants to bash her head into the nearest wall because everything is so horribly loud, it’s not everyday she–

Sasha blinks. Someone is snapping in front of her. “Hello?” she registers Anne saying.

“Oh– sorry,” she apologizes. Anne looks at her with an irritated expression.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asks again.

“I–”

Her phone buzzes in her pocket. Grateful for the distraction, she whips it out. “Sorry,” she says sheepishly at Anne’s glare. “Hello?”

“Jeez, I thought you’d never pick up! Where are you?”

“What?”

“I said, where are you? We’ve already started but if you’re outside, we can wait a minute. Are you smoking or something?”

Dread seeps through her. “What do you mean?”

“Jeez, Sasha, are you thick? I’m asking if you’re at the fieldhouse–”

She hangs up.

“Who was that?” Anne scoffs. “One of your other friends you’ve ignored?”

“What time is it?” she panics, ignoring Anne.

“What? I don’t know. Like three-thirty?”

“No, no, I mean what time is it. Seriously. It cannot be after three.”

Anne scrunches up her nose. “Well, Frog, Sash, I’m not a freaking clock, it was just a guess–”

Sasha feels like she’s about to explode. Her head is starting to spin.

“You’re the one with the phone,” Anne scoffs, gesturing to Sasha’s hand.

Right. Sasha glances down. She has a phone in her hand. Phones tell time. Phones take calls, take texts–

She clicks on the screen and reads 3:15pm and realizes she has four missed calls: two from Coach, two from Hallie. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck–”

“Sasha, what?”

“Shit, shit, shit.”

“Okay, sure, don’t tell me.”

She stands up. “I have to go.”

“What?” Anne is immediately upset. “What do you mean, we haven’t even–”

“I have to go,” Sasha repeats. “Now.”

You’re coming to next week’s practice. I’ve let you get away with this for too long. Friday, three o’clock. Sharp. One minute late and I’m calling your mother.

One minute late and I’m calling your mother, Coach Marly said in that nasally voice of hers.

“Sasha,” Anne hisses. “You are not doing this to me.”

3:16pm. Fuck Coach Marly. Fuck Sasha. Fuck everything.

She genuinely did not mean to miss it, she just– she just forgot. She swings her legs out from under the picnic table as fast as she can, grabbing her bookbag when a hand wraps around her wrist.

She panics. “Anne, stop it!”

The grip only tightens, and Sasha finds herself unable to move from the picnic table.

“Anne, I said stop! Let go.”

“No,” she grumbles waspishly.

Sasha stares at her. In a split second, she’s bending down and baring her teeth in a quick motion.

In a second, Anne yelps in pain, whipping her hand back. Sasha’s free from her grip.

“Did you just bite me?” Anne whispers, horrified.

“Sorry,” Sasha says sheepishly, then turns around. And starts bolting as fast as she can towards the school.

Pebbles crunch under the soles of her shoes as she runs, wind blasting through her blonde hair and threatening to undo her ponytail: she feels a few strands come loose.

“Sasha!” she hears from behind her.

Something hard and heavy slams into her back, sending her stumbling towards the ground. This time, Anne doesn’t catch her. She lands on the ground with a painful smack , concrete crashing into her. She groans, rolling over onto her back when that same hard, heavy weight lands on top of her.

Anne straddles her like she’s an escaped farm animal. She glares down at Sasha with burning teal, and Sasha shivers. “What the fuck was that for?”

“We need to talk, ” Anne hisses, digging in her heels to the ground. “I’m not letting you run away from me again.”

“Yeah, but did you really need to push me over?” Sasha mutters.

Anne just glares. “You’d run otherwise.”

Sasha can feel every second passing with building urgency. Her heart pounds.

“Maybe I just don’t want to talk to you right now, you ever think of that? I got important shit going on, alright?”

Anne looks like she could tear Sasha’s head off. “And I’m not important?”

Sasha blanches. “No, no, that’s not what I–”

“I’m not important to you, Sasha? That’s what this is? I’m just not worthy of your precious time? What, are you going to meet the president?”

“No, I just–”

“Then what is it? ”

“I have cheerleading practice, okay? And listen, this one is really–”

Anne barks out a laugh, sending a shiver down the blonde girl’s spine. “Cheerleading is more important than your best friend in the entire world?”

“No, but I’ve just missed a lot of it.” She scoffs, her voice becoming thick with irritation. “You’d know a lot about missing work, so I don’t know why you’re so mad about it.”

Anne stares at her like Sasha just killed Sprig in front of her. “Are you kidding?”

Sasha’s panic and anxiety from missing practice bleeds into anger. “No, Anne, I’m not!” She gestures wildly. “You miss work and shit all the time, now you’re mad I want to actually do something with my life?”

Anne has the gall to look stunned as if she didn’t just slam Sasha to the ground and is actively preventing her from going to the only practice Sasha really can’t miss. Her coach has probably already called her mother, but if there’s a chance she can just show up and smooth things over…

She grunts in frustration, because of course Anne is here to ruin that, to ruin any chances of Sasha fixing her fucked up life. Of course you don’t want me to be happy. First you leave me, abandon me, and now you’re trying your best to fuck things up for me? Her fingers tighten into a closed fist. Nothing she could’ve done would’ve warranted this, this kind of crazy sabotage! Betrayal courses through her veins, blaring in her head like an alarm.

“I know I fucked up, okay? In our friendship, whatever– but it’s not like you don’t know anything about fucking up, Anne!” She sits up abruptly, pushing the other girl backwards. She brushes the dirt off her skirt. “Don’t tell me you’ve never made a mistake before.”

Anne’s eyes glint with teal flames, her steely gaze unwavering.

“I’m starting to think my first mistake was meeting you.”

She stands, leaving Sasha reeling on the concrete. Sasha searches with grubby fingers for something to say, to retort, to bite back. Hurt ricochets through her chest like a bullet in a ribcage. She smiles.

“Don’t you think your next one was Toad Tower?” she says, biting her lip through her grin.

Anne scoffs. “Don’t you start with that. You apologized.”

Sasha cocks her head. Anne thought she meant something else. Whatever, she can work with this, too. “Maybe I lied. Maybe I don’t give a fuck about your stupid frog family.”

Sasha stands up now. “That’s what you wanted to hear, yeah? You’re so easy to read, Anna Banana,” she says sweetly. “You know, I wish Andrias dropped—”

The world is flashing color. Brown and blue and teal whir through her vision.

Stars flicker briefly in her vision as her head smacks up against the bark of an oak tree, fingers gnarled into her collar. Her vision blackens so much that she realizes she doesn’t remember the last time she’s eaten. Sasha slowly turns her head to look at Anne, startled by the stark fury brewing on her face as she holds Sasha up.

She knows she should apologize, knows this is too far, too delicate a balance for her to stomp through, but her anger doesn’t dissipate, not immediately or completely; it cracks defiantly like white-hot fire after a splash of water.

“Shut up,” Anne yells like it’s being ripped up from the bottom of her throat, her hands curling into fists that grip Sasha’s collar. “Stop talking! You know how much I care about Sprig.”

“Yeah, more than me, I bet,” Sasha mutters under her breath.

“What are you mumbling about?”

“I said,” Sasha says pleasantly, “you care about him more than your own family–”

“We already talked about this,” Anne hisses. “I don’t know why you keep trying to piss me off.”

And I don’t know why it’s working remains unsaid.

Horror stirs mutedly in the pit of her stomach as her hands claw into the back of her mind for something else, something stronger.

“What about us, huh?” she snarks, caring about how much it stings, how much it hurts, how much it pisses Anne off. “You wanna know what I think?” She almost laughs, her voice bordering on hysteria as she cracks out: “I think you care more about Sprig than you do about Marcy.”

Anne stares at her. Stop it, stop it, stop it winds around her skull. It sounds like a little girl in her head banging on the walls.

“What about you?”

“What about me?” Sasha pushes.

“This is the first time you’ve even said her name.” Anne stares.

“And?” Sasha prompts like a kindergarten teacher.

“And it’s in an argument. Is that all she is to you? Fodder to hurt me?”

Sasha clicks her tongue. “What is she to you ? Something to fuel your savior complex? Oh, if I can find a way back to help Marcy, Marcy, Marcy, as if you’re not just trying to get back to Amphibia so you can reunite with your frog surrogate friends. Funny you think you can save Marcy from Amphibia,” she says, and leans in to whisper, “because you couldn’t even save her from Andrias.”

Anne’s hair bursts into flames.

Sasha stares at the strands like a moth to a lamp, her ears glazing over Anne’s yelling about how she did the best she could.

The best she could?

The best she could?

When she was the only one close enough? When was she supposed to protect them? When she was supposed to protect them?

That’s what really gets Sasha about all this. About that night.

Flashing blue lights. A growing pain in her side. Everything is too bright, too loud. She feels like vomiting. There is a blurry, glowing white orb of light. She screams at herself in her mind-- or maybe out loud-- she can’t remember. She can't move. Her body isn't listening. Something is shooting past her, small rocks bouncing past. Something else is moving, something screaming, when--

And then the moment unblurs into perfect clarity.

-

Sasha groans, rolling over.

“Sasha!” she hears Grime call, but the voice sounds far away.

She stumbles to her feet, ignoring the flashing blue lights and focusing on the pain rioting through her back.

She sees Marcy scuttling near the box as Anne hushes the Plantars into a hallway. Her fingertips reach out, her eyes growing wide at the box.

“Give me that!” she cries, bounding over towards the girl on the ground.

“Sasha?” Marcy blinks, too slow to stop Sasha from ripping the box out of her hands.

She opens it, and immediately (unlike the last time she tried to open the box), the portal snaps open. She watches the white abyss with wide eyes.

She starts to run towards it but trips on some rock or other, slamming face-first into the ground. The music box clunks to the ground, sliding away.

Anne is faster, though, and she’s in the portal before Sasha can even look up. “Marcy!” she cries from Los Angeles. “Come on!”

Sasha notices movement out of the corner of her eye and for a moment considers Andrias, but she’s too busy focusing on getting up and getting to the portal to pay it too much attention. She’s too busy trying to get herself out that she hardly notices (but she still sees it ) the glowing sword, and Andrias’ huffing breath.

“I just need to–”

And there’s a buzzing silence.

Sasha stumbles into the portal, and only once she’s in does she look back.

-

She can’t hear anything anymore, not Anne’s screaming or the jangling of keys in the distance, because the only thing in her head is a pounding, burning thought: you let Marcy die.

She’s not talking about Anne anymore; she doesn’t know if she ever was. Nothing about Marcy was ever about Anne. 

Everything about Marcy was always about Sasha.

She saw Andrias, she heard him get up, and she did nothing. She didn’t warn Marcy. She didn’t stay back and distract him, so Marcy could get into the portal. She was only thinking about herself. Like she’s always done.

Sasha was supposed to protect them. That night was just a culmination of her utter failure to do so, building onto the broad, continuous foundation that Sasha herself is just–

“You’re an asshole, Sasha!” Anne yells, her nose almost touching Sasha’s.

An asshole.

“Yeah,” she says.

“What?”

“I said–”

“Ladies?”

Both girls whip their heads around.

The teacher looks back and forth between the two of them with a tired expression. “What is this?”

Anne drops her immediately. Sasha leans into the tree bark so she doesn’t just fall, a writhing mass in her stomach and in her brain.

“I’m so sorry,” Anne starts blabbering, her voice thick with panic and residual anger. “We didn’t mean–”

And part of her stares at Anne with anticipation, with barely-contained excitement that borders on ecstasy. The sting in the back of her head from the tree isn’t enough. It’s hardly enough. It doesn’t quite the chaos in her head, doesn’t shut up the part of her that’s rocking back and forth in the corner hoping everything since Anne’s 13th birthday has been a dream.

“You didn’t save Marcy,” Sasha chokes. “Because you’re a coward. And your best isn’t good enough.”

She closes her eyes. Part of her really wants Anne to just hit her with all she’s got. Maybe that’ll knock everything that’s broken, that’s wrong with her, back into place.

But the blow doesn’t come. She opens her eyes. Both the teacher and Anne are looking at her with this weird expression on their faces.

“What?” Anne whispers, and Sasha has no idea why her face looks sad instead of angry. “You really think that?”

“What?” Sasha says, but she almost can’t hear herself.

“You know it’s not your fault, right?”

There’s a ringing in her ears. “What?” she repeats.

“You said you didn’t save Marcy, but how could you? Andrias was so much bigger than us, all of us.”

“What did I say?” Sasha asks dumbly, though she thinks she already knows.

“You said you didn’t–”

“Ladies,” the woman says, and it’s like both Anne and Sasha remember she’s there. “I think we better talk about this inside, yeah?” She motions.

“Okay,” Sasha says, and her vision darkens as she rights herself off the tree and starts to stalk towards the school. In doing so, she nearly stumbles on a branch she didn’t see, but she catches herself right in time. 

She doesn’t look back until she’s already inside.

Chapter Text

Anne Boonchuy has never had particularly good luck.

Not with grades or inherent talent, comedic timing or wit, the smoothness and grace required to ace a conversation. She couldn’t make someone swoon or cry through words, couldn’t paint a picture someone could stare at for hours, couldn’t play a song on a guitar. Someone’d maybe chalk all that up to practice: you can’t do it because you haven’t tried. It’s all practice, practice, practice. Nothing to do with luck. 

Anne cannot count the number of times she has practiced something, tried something, only for it to amount to nothing. She’s tried ice skating, rock climbing, playing piano, drawing, painting, crocheting, jewelry-making, hell, even dumpster diving with Sasha once, and nothing has ever stuck. Except for tennis, and who cares if you’re good at hitting a ball around? (Then again, who cares if you’re good at drawing? Or rock climbing? Or making friends? Or doing anything in your free time?)

Someone still might say it’s got nothing to do with luck, being good at something, but Anne would call bullshit. Marcy was born with the aptitude towards science and just learning in general, Sasha with the gift of effortless coercion and a tongue as smooth as an ice rink, and Anne with, what? Tennis, only after years and years of playing? Is that all she is? All she’s good for?

But that’s neither here nor there; that’s a can of worms she’s not going to open, because the conversation is about luck. And Anne, if she was born with any aptitude towards anything, was born with particularly unfavorable luck.

“Marcy, I’m going to kill you,” Sasha growled, her voice dripping with disgust and fury. “You stole my carrots.”

“I stole your carrots,” Marcy repeated cheerfully, appearing completely detached from the whirlwind of threatening emotion radiating off her blonde friend. Anyone else would’ve been scared still, terrified of the Queen of the Playground, but not Marcy. Never Marcy. “If you want them back, you’d better catch me!”

One of the earlier instances of her poor luck occurred on the battlefield of fourth grade: the blacktop.

“Marcy!” Sasha yelled, beginning her chase like a lion on the savannah against a hyena who stole her prey.

“Guys,” Anne called helplessly, like she always was in those days and the years that followed.

“Anne, tell Marcy ,” emphasizing the -cy with an irritated drawl, “to give me back my–”

A baby carrot, orange and fresh from the packaging, slaps against Sasha’s forehead with a slightly audible thunk.

The blonde stops as if stunned by a weapon. She slowly draws her eyes up, disbelieving. “You did not. Just hit me. With a carrot.”

A projectile aimed right between her eyes, an orange blur whizzed in the air.

“Ouch!” Sasha yelps as she’s struck by another one, reeling back as if she’s been shot. “Marcy,” she groaned and complained.

Anne frowned, wondering (not urgently) if she should get a teacher to stop the one-sided assault. She pondered, tapping a finger to her cheek as she weighed the consequences of incurring either Marcy or Sasha’s wrath while Sasha continued to yelp as Marcy pelted her with carrots. Who would be better to appease in this situation? Marcy would be disappointed if she got a teacher to come help, while Sasha would rather Anne herself go in to help than call a teacher to do it for her. Sasha was never keen on the interference of teachers in personal spats.

Last time, Anne ended up picking Sasha’s side, so she’s leaning towards helping Marcy throw as many carrots at Sasha as possible. She’s gotta keep it even, right? Help Marcy, then help Sasha, then help Marcy. Help the butcher kill the lamb then help the lamb’s mother escape the butcher. The cycle of appeasement, where both parties leave not succinctly as the victor or the loser, but some combination of both that lets Anne keep both of them in her life. A friend to all, that’s who she is.

“Marcy!” she calls with her hands in a cone shape around her mouth. “Come here.”

“Oh, thank God,” Sasha sighs presumptuously, her shoulders sagging.

Marcy jogs over, her face guilty. She looks at Anne like she’s expecting a lecture, but Anne just smiles as she takes the bag of carrots. “Sasha!”

“What?” she turns, her guard down.

Anne still looks back at the memory with a sort of puzzlement you experience when you have no idea how something happened, despite being there. All she remembers is throwing the carrot, aiming for the middle of Sasha’s forehead, and the next thing she knows Sasha is screaming on the ground.

Sitting in the principal’s office, she managed to piece together this: she threw the carrot. Instead of her forehead, it hit Sasha’s eye. Shocked and maimed by the attack she didn’t see coming, Sasha trips. Sasha twists her ankle as she falls. Boom, no more fun and games– Anne ends up as the sole perpetrator, not wanting to sell Marcy out for starting it. And that is one of the first stories of her abominable luck.

She would say the most current and recent story is the one that led to her now, sitting in the principal’s office much like that instance in fourth grade, waiting in awkward quiet for the principal to stop typing.

“Sorry ladies, one sec,” the woman says with a concentrated frown, obviously not pleased at the intrusion to her vital after-school work. “Just let me finish up.”

Anne considers which response would be the most appropriate: an “it’s all good” or saying nothing. She ends up letting the silence stretch on, thinking it another distraction to Principal Murphy’s precious work to speak. Sasha doesn’t say anything either, far too occupied by staring at her shoes to notice anything around her. Which isn’t really like her, Anne notices unhappily, as if anything that has occurred in the past couple days has been like Sasha Waybright.

The girl sighs, clenching her fists into her skirt. Who is even sitting next to her, now? Sasha never used to be this… outwardly combative? Sure, she’d never been the type for honest conversation, but outright running from it? That was weird. Sasha operated in the subtleties, resided in the delicate balance between telling you something and letting you figure it out for yourself. And the Sasha that Anne knew didn’t run, not from anything.

Anne just wanted to freaking tell her about a lead she found: a vase, sitting innocently in a museum display. And when she didn’t respond, well, how else was Anne supposed to talk to her? It just happened to be her crap luck that she somehow picked the worst possible day to have that conversation because apparently Sasha had the world’s most important cheerleading practice (as if she didn’t attend every single other one) and then, of course, their chase and subsequent fight brought them close enough to school grounds that a teacher noticed them. For all the schemes her and Marcy and Anne pulled, Anne really didn’t like getting in trouble with authority. The other two always seemed unbothered by it, like an accusing look or a stern lecture washed over them like light rain, but Anne always felt transparent under the stare of somebody older. Like they looked at her and they knew she didn’t know who she was or what she was doing.

She wasn’t really looking for clues at the time, when she found the vase.

She was bored, quite frankly. She missed Amphibia and the Plantars like an amputated limb, but that was nothing new. Sasha hadn’t responded to her message yet (not that she ended up doing so) so she was desperate for a distraction from the unresolved tension ruminating in her mind. Go to the museum or the tennis court or the pool or something, her parents said when they noticed her wandering around the house like a ghost with nothing to haunt. So she did.

Staring hard at the vase, at the inscription that looked miraculously similar to Amphibian text, a lightbulb went off in her head. She went home that day with renewed determination and optimism, telling her parents it went well and being honest about it.

Hesitating in the doorway, she opened her mouth for a moment before closing it again. She doesn’t know if it’s out of gullibility or some other weakness of hers, but for the first time in a while, she wanted to break down and just tell her parents everything. 

She knows she shouldn’t tell them. Why would they believe her? She’s not sure she’d even believe herself. And Sasha didn’t tell her parents, Sasha always had better ideas about things, so why should Anne?

But there’s a part of her, sitting in the principal’s office in a silence only punctuated by the clicking of fingers on a keyboard, wondering why Sasha isn’t immediately smooth-talking her way out of this. Why she’s just sitting there, her eyes blank and unseeing, her face pointed towards the floor. Why she didn’t ease Anne’s and the teacher’s concerns with a swipe of the hand, a practiced smile, as soon as they sat down.

She comes to a striking realization, then, dumbly, like it’s been a piece of paper sitting in front of her face this entire time but only now does she decide to read it: Sasha doesn’t always know what to do.

It shouldn’t be surprising, shouldn’t be a revelation, because the knowledge must’ve been creeping around somewhere in her brain, because she knows everybody stutters and everybody feels lost, but she’d never pictured Sasha ever having any indecision. It just wasn’t who she was: you’d look at her and go, oh, that’s a girl who knows what she wants. Anne had been jealous of that— someone who didn’t blank when you asked what they wanted for their birthday, someone who finished About Me worksheets in five minutes rather than fifteen, someone who could go on and on about their future plans and how many kids they’re gonna have and where they’re gonna live and who their friends are. She’s probably still jealous, because after everything Anne still doesn’t know who she sees when she looks in the mirror. For once, though, she’s considering the possibility that Sasha, despite all her demands and her itemized list of wants and desires, stares into the mirror at the end of the day and sees the same thing.

She’s looking at the girl and there are things she hadn’t seen before woven into her jean jacket, bound in her tight ponytail, hidden under the bandaid above her eyebrow, camouflaged like cracks in a marble pillar that you thought were just part of the patterning.

And Anne wonders, in the clicking silence, just how long those cracks have been there. 

Or how long it’ll take for them to bring the whole pillar down.

-

Sasha would probably be anxious right now if she didn’t feel like she was about to keel over at any minute.

Being in the principal’s office, for arguing and almost getting into a physical fight with a friend especially, should be nerve-wracking. She knows she should be thinking of some way to get out of this, to escape.

She counts the tiles on the floor and spends her energy trying not to throw up on them, instead.

“Okay,” the principal says after what could’ve been an eternity or just five minutes. “What do we have here?”

Her tongue feels heavy and twisted in her mouth, like she’d accidentally swallow it if she tried to talk. She stares at the principal who’s name she cannot be bothered to remember.

The silence lapses on. The principal raises an eyebrow and looks between the both of them. “You guys were arguing and screaming at each other just a couple minutes ago, now you’ve got nothing to say?”

In the corner of her eye, Sasha sees Anne shift uncomfortably in her seat. Shit. A light clicks on. She shakes her head. She hasn’t been paying attention. She tries to swim through the fog in her brain. If she wants this interaction to go smoothly, she’s gotta start saying what this woman wants to hear.

“I—“ “Miss—“

Sasha and Anne start at the same time. Oops. Sasha glances over at Anne, who looks like she’s on the verge of shitting her pants. It brings her out of her head. 

Jeez, Anne, Sasha can’t help but scoff fondly, not like we’re actually gonna get in trouble. You’ve got me.

Though considering she’s spent the entire interaction thus far zoning out and trying not to either pass out or throw up, she can understand Anne’s nervousness. 

“Miss,” Sasha starts again, and considers clearing her throat. “I think there's been a misunderstanding.”

The principal raises her eyebrow, forming lines in her forehead. “Considering Mrs. O’Keefe saw one of you holding up the other against a tree, I’d like to take a crack at knowing what that misunderstanding is.”

“I got my hair stuck in the tree,” Sasha waves off before Anne can say anything. “It was dumb,” she laughs, “I was leaning up against it and realized I couldn’t get free. I screamed ‘cause I thought I’d have to cut my hair off and then Anne screamed because I screamed and it was just a mess.”

She’s aware that Anne is staring at her now but she doesn’t stop talking. “Glad I didn’t have to cut it, though,” she says sweetly, saccharine. “Being the cheerleading captain and all, my hair means a lot to me.”

She twirls a blonde lock around her finger for emphasis. 

Principal Murphy raises an eyebrow but offers no further objection.

“Okay,” the woman finally says after a critical look. “Since neither of you are hurt, assumably, I can let this go.”

Sasha stands up.

“But do be aware, Mrs. Waybright,” and Sasha feels a sick sort of anticipation, “that missing as many practices as you have is grounds for terminating your position on the team.”

Sasha freezes.

“Marly tell you that?”

“Coach Marly,” Murphy corrects. “We’ve had conversations.”

Vague. Okay.

Sasha waves a hand nonchalantly, feeling ice creep its way through her veins. Nausea swirls in her stomach. “Whatever.”

“What is that?” Anne points out abruptly, and Sasha startles, forgetting Anne was there for a second. She turns her head to find her staring at Sasha’s hand. Her eyebrows are pressed into a line.

“What?” Sasha says, confused, turning to look behind her.

“Did you get those from the tree?” Anne’s expression is horrified.

She looks back at her hands, at the dull pink scabs slicing their way across her fingers. Realization hits. “Oh. No, no.”

There’s a faint wrinkle in Principal Murphy’s face, up near her eyebrows. “Did you hurt yourself?”

Sasha stalls at the question, the words like a cold bucket of water dumped over her head. She stops her eyes from blowing wide and forces herself to stay calm. “These are old,” she says with as much indifference as she can muster. “Got stuck in a rosebush. Stupid thing got me while I was gardening.”

Principal Murphy seems to accept that, leaning back in her chair with a satisfied, if not indifferent expression. Sasha scratches her hands uncomfortably under Anne’s heavy gaze, her eyes still having not left Sasha’s hands. She covers them under her sleeve. “Well, I hope we figured everything out here. I’d hate to leave so soon but I have a ride waiting for me, unfortunately.”

Anne looks like she wants to say something but Principal Murphy nods, leaning her head towards the door. “I expect not to see you two in my office again.” She grimaces at her computer screen.

“Right, right,” Sasha smiles apologetically. “Sorry.”

Sasha steps outside, Anne not far behind her. As soon as she’s out of the office, she starts speedwalking to the exit, her Mary Jane’s clacking on the concrete.

“Sasha, wait!” Anne calls, and it sounds like she’s out of breath.

She doesn’t stop. She walks even faster, not slowing until she’s breached the school gates. She takes a tentative step out from the cover of the school’s overhang.

At some point between them getting caught and them leaving the principal’s office, it had rained. The concrete was dark grey, almost a soggy black in the dim lighting of the lingering rain clouds.

“Sasha!”

Sasha whips around. “What?”

“I just—“ Anne catches her breath for a moment. “Wanted— to talk to you.”

“Well, I don't want to talk to you,” Sasha says waspishly. She turns back around and starts to walk away. “Bye.”  

“Sasha, stop!” 

She does, begrudgingly.

Anne takes a deep breath. “What’s all this about? Huh? You missing cheer? That’s not like you.”

“And how much about me,” Sasha spits, breathy, the words venomous, “do you even know at this point? You’ve ignored me since the day we got back.”

“Sasha,” Anne presses gently, “I really don’t want another fight. I just want you to tell me what’s going on.”

She sounds so sincere that it makes Sasha pause.

“Why?”

“What?"

“What does it matter?”

“Um, you’re my friend and obviously I’ll care if there’s something bothering you?”

“I haven’t been a very good friend lately,” Sasha mutters, kicking a rock. Or ever. 

“I’ve found I’ve made some mistakes, too,” Anne admits softly. “I just don’t want to fight anymore. I miss you, Sash. And you know that I care.”

Tears threaten to brim in her eyes.

The words are warm, syrupy and honey-sweet, and all Sasha wants to do is swim in them, let herself close her eyes and be submerged. She wants to believe it more than anything. But like everything else good in her life there’s this aching, terrible sinking feeling, like she can feel the warmth getting sucked up by the black hole in the center of her chest and swallowed.

Sasha was sharpness and jagged edges. She was volatile and prone to exploding in the kiln like doomed pottery. She was not, in any way, soft and smooth and delicate in the way that she knew Anne deserved— she was not easy to handle or to swallow, she was covered in broken glass that jutted out in every direction. If you reached out to hold her, she’d cut you bleeding dry without even blinking because sharpness was just what she was, her principal characteristic. And pain was something she’d never wanted Anne to feel, not because of her, not because she’d somehow tricked this girl with warm eyes and soft hands that Sasha was somehow worthy of being held. It would be a deception too sinful even for Sasha’s repertoire. She could be conniving, yes. And rude and bold and audacious, and selfish— she was selfish to the highest extent, because she was prone to sabotaging, traitorous thoughts, ones that she knows will lead to suffering, but ones she carries out anyway— but nothing she has ever done would compare to letting Anne, sweet, forgiving and soft-hearted Anne, be cut by her thorns, her jagged edges, and maimed by them.

She was selfish to a horrible, cruel degree because part of her, the sticky, stupid, irrational part that lived on stolen glances and fleeting touches, on ruminating about futures that could never be hers because they were too soft and doughy and lacked the serrated edge Sasha has carried all her life, that part of her wanted someone to look at her and hold her anyway. To kneel with her on the dining room floor with a dustpan to help her pick up her broken pieces and glue them back together, knowing she was always a hair’s breadth from shattering again.

The worst part is that she knows, she feels it like it’s a physical thing in the pit of her stomach that’s always been sitting there undisturbed, even after hanging off buildings and watching brown eyes contort into cold betrayal, she knows it like she knows her own name that Anne would do it if she asked. Anne would put her in the kiln knowing she was full of air bubbles, would kneel on broken glass to pick up the pieces of Sasha’s soul, would risk blood and sweat and tears and everything if only Sasha looked at her and said she wanted her to.

And she knows, like she knows the sky is blue and the world is spinning and the grass is green that Sasha could never, ever deserve it. 

So she hardens her expression, balling her fists until her fingernails dug into flesh and beyond like it would somehow quell the voice in her head that’s shrieking like an alarm, the heartbeat racing in her ears.

She stared at the weeping willow tree in the distance as she said, “I don’t want to be friends anymore.”

Anne doesn’t say anything right away. Part of Sasha wants to crawl out and take the words back.

Then: “What?”

It feels like she’s on a sinking ship.

“I don’t want to be friends anymore. I don’t think it's working out. I need a break from you, okay, Anne?”

It’s done.

For a moment Anne just blinks slowly in her peripheral vision, like she can’t comprehend what’s happening. Like she’s not here, not seeing or hearing, and Sasha wishes she weren’t, wishes she was dreaming.

Sasha’s gaze breaks away from the willow tree and glances at her phone, at her driver’s contact. He should be here any minute; she’d sent a text. 

“I’m leaving,” she states.

“But… you…” Anne finally croaks, her eyes wide and disbelieving.

Then her next words come out quick, sharp, like a strike from a snake, “You’re running away? Again? Really, Sasha?”

Sasha glances back.

“That’s just what you do, isn’t it,” Anne sneers, but the longer it sits in the space between them the more her voice deflates, “Have me thinking you’ve changed. Jeez. I should’ve known.”

She breathes and the sound hitches and it somehow makes the air heavy, like strong humidity.

“Frog, I’m gullible. I really believed it this time, like you’d give a crap about anybody else,” and it’s supposed to be mean, harsh, cutting, all the things Sasha had imagined in this moment— relieved, maybe. Angry, betrayed. Anne’s supposed to look at her with wild eyes and curse her out, spit on her or punch her or— or, Sasha doesn’t know what else, because that’s what she would have done: get pissed. Break something.

But Anne trails off like she’s run out of energy to speak, like the words are stuck in her stomach, like they’re not enough, and they both stand there.

Sasha just stares at the trees, at the sky, at the concrete, to pretend she’s anywhere other than here.

Her driver finally rolls around the corner, pulling up feet away from her on the asphalt. She waits for him to stop so she can get in. 

It’s supposed to be triumphant, relieving, but Sasha doesn’t think she’s felt worse in her entire life.

Anne says nothing, like the quiet before a jumpscare in a horror movie, as Sasha climbs into the passenger seat of the car. She flits one last stolen look behind her.

Anne’s eyes are blue, shiny with tears, as she whispers, “I wish Marcy were here instead.”

Sasha hears it, though she shouldn’t be paying attention.

Me too, and all the things Sasha doesn’t say back echo in the silence as the car pulls off the curb.

She stares at her hands, ugly red scratches mottling them like cracks in ceramic, and feels something small, something worn and deep inside her soul that she’s never paid much attention to before because it has always been the quieter of her emotions, the softer part that’s easy to ignore when everything else is flashy and sharp, it sinks like a stone in the middle of the ocean.

She imagines it falling into an inky abyss, swallowed by the hole inside her. 

Pinocchio and the whale.

-

Sasha almost calls out I’m home when she steps inside and shakes the water off her backpack, closing the door to the sudden rain that had come back with a vengeance on the way back.

She meets her mother in the kitchen again. She doesn’t think it’s possible to feel any worse, so she doesn’t care.

“I got a call from Coach Marly,” is all the woman says, her gaze fixed on chopping vegetables.

Cold.

Not angry. Or even inconvenienced.

Coldly her mother sighs, deeply, in a way that often made Sasha feel remorse for existing. The kind of exhale of breath, staggered and exhausted, like Sasha had done something that provoked so much disappointment and dissatisfaction that it could not be expressed in words; she had done something that ached like a dull wound, that made her mother tired. And somehow the silence afterward, though Sasha is plenty used to silence, digs its way through her ribcage farther than any harsh word or punishment, and settles in her hollow chest.

“I didn’t know you had other kids,” she says, thinking back on the conversation with the driver.

Her mother looks up at this, turning around with a surprised, almost incredulous look. Her blonde hair is impeccable, not a strand out of line.

“Where do you think I’m off to all the time?” she says, like the sentence means nothing.

And it sounds wrong, like an out of tune guitar. 

“I thought you were at work.”

Her mother scoffs like Sasha’s playing a joke on her, like she’s picking a fight. She chops an onion into small pieces, quick stabbing motions. The timer on the toaster oven ticks. “Sash, you know I haven’t been to the office in years. Not since I started working from home, anyway. I don’t know if that old building’s even still open.”

Chop. Tick, tick, tick.

Something heavy and metal and hard as a rock feels like it’s banging itself against Sasha’s head like a gong. “What?” she says, but she’s not in the kitchen anymore. She is seven years-old in her bedroom, and she is waking up to a slightly cracked door and a muted realization blooms in the pit of her gut.

Mom didn’t close the door, but she still checked on me, she thinks happily, the knowledge warm in her chest like it’s been microwaved, as though it dissolved the countless nights she spent alone. Now, though, in that memory she’s focusing on the breeze, the waft of cold wind that woke her up in the first place. She’s focusing on how she followed it to her mother’s bedroom, the door also cracked ajar. 

Tick, tick, tick.

“I thought,” she stumbles through her words in the present like she’s blindly clawing through the forest. “You always came to check…” she trails off.

“What?” Her mom blinks expectantly, and everything becomes clear for a moment.

The wind. The door.

Oh. Sasha opens her eyes for the first time.

Her mom wasn’t checking on her.

Her mom opened a window.

The draft opened the door.

Sasha feels distantly like she’s falling, spinning in circles like a skydiver without a parachute, falling into a void. This shouldn’t break her, she knows, because she should be used to this. She should have known. I mean, if her mom didn’t care enough to make her dinner or stay with her when she’s sick, why would she care enough to check in on her after coming home?

Why would she care when she’d already replaced Sasha, anyway? Who would give a shit about the whereabouts of your seven-year-old daughter if you had several others from a marriage you actually wanted? It all made sense now.

Sasha stares at her mother’s back as she continues to chop, chop, chop, and the timer keeps ticking, ticking, ticking, all the energy leaving her body like sand leaving a beanbag.

Dulled sparks flare in her stomach, in her lungs, warming her brain instead of setting it on fire.

One thought in particular stands out, a coherent thought in the whirlwind: she doesn’t blame Mom. 

All of a sudden she’s bleeding from a wound that was never stitched, never mended– has been open and trickling scarlet drops for such a long time it has created a pool of blood beneath it. 

She is a little girl in the backseat of a white Lexus sedan and you are hard to love is repeating in her head like a malfunctioning alarm clock.

She is half-naked in a hospital gown and a man in a white coat is telling her softly, with a gentle tone that only comes from complete resignation, that she’s a rotten liar.

She is spending her birthday in an empty house, rereading the same text of apology over and over like it would make Dad change his mind.

She is on a grey faux-leather couch and rubbing at indents of acrylic nails long since faded, wondering if the woman with hot breath and wild hair was right after all.

She is hanging from the highest height she’s ever been, her cheek an angry red, and for the first time in her life she understands she is dead weight.

She is watching her best friend lie limp like a sack of flour on palace floors, and she is seeing her reflection in the flashy sword sticking out of her abdomen.

She is waiting at the police station for someone that would never come.

And she feels it as certainly and vividly as she would if it were physical and grabbing her by the throat at this very moment, pressing finger-shaped bruises into the sides of her neck: she is not lovable.

It’s doubtful she ever was.

Everything she has done in life has been an elaborate dance, a waltz of lying and ordering others around, to hide from this simple fact: Sasha Waybright is not a beautiful, loving, compassionate, or particularly deserving person.

Something inside her shatters like a bowl on the dining room floor. It echoes in the hollowness of her chest, reverberating off the walls of her ribcage.

One second she feels thick with novocaine, her limbs heavy and disoriented. And then she’s splintered, broken, fractured in fragments and she’s all over the carpets and the tile and there are so many pieces of her that she cannot begin to pick herself up, cannot bring herself to even glance her reflection in the shards, because she is a girl in pieces, in a hundred, in a thousand, in a hundred thousand pieces.

She slams her backpack on the floor, slams the kitchen door, and slams the door to her bedroom. 

She flings herself onto her bed, unable to stop the barrage of tears that spring to her eyes as whimpered sobs escape her lips. She clasps her hands over her mouth and shoves her head into the pillow, muffling the sound of her useless screaming.

Heaving sobs wrack her frame, her scabbed fingers a leaky dam against the incessant, uncontrollable crying pouring out of her like it’s never going to stop, never going to end, and she ponders with a terrifying thought that it might not. She thinks about showing up to school tomorrow with tears streaming down her face, thinks about showing up to her wedding and being unable to say her vows because she can’t stop bawling, thinks about dying when she’s 80 and she still can’t stop crying. She thinks about dying from dehydration before she makes it there. She thinks about dying.

Every inhale is painful, every full-body shudder like an electric shock from a cattle prod. She cries like children do, contorting their faces and dedicating their entire bodies to the emotion, lost to it like a ship would be in the middle of a storm: Sasha sobs like a little girl who wants her best friend.

And it hits all at once that she doesn’t have one anymore. That she never will, because she’s fucked it up like she’s fucked up her body and her mind and the people around her, and she knows this, she feels it, it’s why she broke it off, but that knowledge, the feeble sense of control, does nothing to dull the edge of the knife that feels like it’s plunging into her chest and twisting. Because she’ll never hear Anne laugh again. Because she’ll never share boba with her again, never giggle under the covers as they watch a cheesy movie, never smile at inside jokes only the three of them understand, and it’s like another slap in the face that they don’t have inside jokes anymore.

Marcy’s gone, Anne is too, not dead in the same fashion but Sasha’s holding the knife all the same, and her hands are caked in red and her face is grey with ash and she’s telling herself it’s for the better but she doesn't really believe it because she doesn't feel any better. There’s this insurmountable loss of what could’ve been, what was, and it crushes her, it cuts her open and guts everything out of her in a way she’s never felt before, because each realization is something new, something else to mourn. 

She’ll never be the first one Anne calls, she’ll never be the person Anne finds in a crowd, she’ll never be the person that makes the tension ooze out of Anne’s shoulders when she walks into a room. It’s stupid things, menial things, that gets her, too, memories now buried under six feet of gravel: Sasha will never sleep at Anne’s house again; she’ll probably never see her parents again, even. She’ll never drink out of her water bottle when she forgets her own, she’ll never trade Halloween candy, she’ll never have late-night calls where they both get pretzels and giggle about nothing, she'll never look at her at the same time Anne looks back and the words Sasha's never been able to let go of will never leave her mouth.

Someone else will make her laugh, hold her hand, love the way her eyes look like molten gold in the sunlight, love her, and Anne will forget, will get over the momentary heartbreak and pass over her memory one day like it didn't mean anything.

On a sunny day she'll pass Anne in the hallway and realize she's changed her detergent, because she doesn't smell like lavender anymore, and she won't know when she changed it or how long it's taken her to notice, only that Anne doesn't smell like Anne-- she smells like someone else, someone older and pine-scented, like a stranger Sasha will never get to know.

It's grief, the inevitable kind of sadness.

-

She must’ve fallen asleep eventually, her head pressed into the pillows, because at some point she wakes up and the world outside is dark.

Her skin feels raw, hot to the touch and carved, hollow like a pumpkin on Halloween. Tears no longer flow in rivulets down her cheeks but she still feels like she’s crying, in a way: that the tears aren’t coming only because she’s run out of water.

She peeks outside, moving the blinds to one side, and notices the absence of a white Lexus in the driveway. Then she shakes her head, feeling silly, because what does it even matter?

-

The clock on the toaster oven reads three fifty-five in the morning when Sasha throws it into the pool.

The cerulean electrical sparks pitter out into nothing, swallowed by the darkness of the night.

-

Sasha is driftwood.

She’s floating stagnantly, waywardly, on a turbulent sea. Up and down she goes, vulnerable to the monotonous passage of the waves. Up and down, over and over. The sky is near-black. The water is dark green, sludgy and full of seaweed. There is no moon, but something pale blue reflects off the sea. 

It’s the wrapper of an Oreo, floating adrift.

Sometimes, though she’s sure this means she’s faking it, she plans it. She patiently walks down each aisle in the grocery store, tossing any item that catches her eye into her overflowing basket. Or she orders delivery, scanning through all the options and clicking them into her cart, ignoring the rising number at the bottom. She’s giddy, on top of the world, flitting around from one aisle to another and basking in her infrequent freedom, her eyes darting wildly at the world of options. Or she’s dull, mechanical, scrolling through takeout menus with listless fingers and staring at shelves with deliberate, unfeeling purpose. It depends.

Planning usually comes with experience, though, and it’s not how it started. How it started is how it happens this time.

She breaches the doorway of her home at some time past seven in the morning because it’s bright again. There is this hunger, brewing under her skin, something wild and deep and ravenous.

She ignores the intensity of it. She notices a blue wrapper out of the corner of her eye. She walks over to it. She hesitates. She takes it. She stares at the packaging, Anne’s sixteen individual packs of Oreo’s. Before she processes the decision, she’s tearing open the plastic and shoving both cookies in her mouth at once. She wants another one even before she’s even finished chewing. This is the first red flag.

A wave comes and breaks over the driftwood. There is silence. The wood is submerged for close to ten seconds before it bobs back up to the surface.

She’s still thinking about eating that second package when the last crumbs of her first is gone. It’s like she hadn’t eaten the first one at all– it did absolutely nothing to satiate her. But that’s not so strange, is it? To still be hungry? She reasons that’s entirely normal. It is, sometimes.

Okay, she says, just this time, and takes another package, her movements mechanical. Everything is okay. There is nothing wrong, because the itch will go away after she finishes the second. The ravenous feeling will subside. Food will fix her.

The itch doesn’t go away. She licks her fingers. She looks longingly at the empty packaging. She is empty, still. She is hungrier than she was before. She is ravenous. The hunger is overwhelming, flowing from her stomach to consume the rest of her. If she could just eat, everything wrong in the world would be righted.

In no time at all, sixteen empty packages of Oreo’s lay like corpses on her kitchen floor. She can’t remember what they tasted like.

There is another crash of water, and the driftwood is submerged again.

She opens the fridge. She closes the fridge. She opens the fridge again and takes the cheese from the second shelf.

Another thirty seconds, and the driftwood floats to the surface again.

It starts off slow, like this, with a decreasing amount of time between each swipe into the pantry or peek into the fridge. For some reason, no matter how much she swallows, she doesn’t feel full. In fact, she thinks that after every bite, she feels hungrier and hungrier. She has a cavern inside her. Stupidly, at this point, she thinks that the hunger she feels can be satiated by just one more bite.

In a moment of clarity it becomes clear how many wrappers, Oreo’s and granola bars and peanut butter crackers, are accumulating around her now, gravestones of impulsivity and gluttony. Her stomach is full, bordering on discomfort. But still. She is hungry. She is so hungry she can hardly think. The noise in the back of her head is so loud, beeping and buzzing and shrieking. This is when some animalistic part of her makes a decision, pieces clicking together with an audible snap. Some part of her says fuck it. 

A violent wave crashes down. The driftwood isn’t seen for more than five minutes.

Now she’s sticky fingers in the back of old cabinets, clawing for forgotten granola bars and stale graham crackers. She’s plucked strawberry leaves and wrappers of chocolate bars in the microwave, she’s the sleeve of her uniform wiping ice cream off her chin. She’s handfuls of kettle-corn popcorn, fingernails full of rotisserie chicken, messy scoops of shredded Mozzarella cheese. She’s back in the pantry, again and again, scouring for anything sweet or salty or sour.

She eyes the box of pasta she swipes out of the way to reach the dry goods holed up in the back of the pantry. She picks up the box, staring at the squiggly shapes. She hesitates. She sets it back down. No, she chides herself, too much.

She eats three more granola bars and a pack of nuts before she dumps the entire box in a pot on the stove.

But the eight minutes it takes to cook is unbearably long. She shifts from one foot to the another, antsy. Her stomach is no longer just full. It whines in protest. It feels heavy. She feels heavy. If she thinks about how heavy she feels she’ll realize she feels revolted, too. Truly and absolutely disgusted. Horribly guilty. She wants to stop. More than anything, she wants this sick, hulking feeling to go away.

The driftwood reappears on the surface. It bobs. And it seems like it might not go down again. There is this sturdiness, now, that’s building. This firmness.

The beeping of the stove timer is another wave, stronger, crashing down.

There is salt. And then butter. And cheese. And more cheese. Then, there’s pepperoni. And hotdogs. And her stomach is so full, it’s brimming, it’s almost pouring out, it’s stretching farther than it should be stretched, and it hurts. But she doesn’t care. It has never stopped her before.

She has never been more glad in her entire life that she lives alone eight months of the year. So she eats alone, too, and the only one to witness her shame, to see what a monstrous, horrible gluttinous creature she is, one that can’t stop even though it hurts like her stomach is exploding, bloats like a dead body at sea, she’s melted plastic and ice cream cartons choking up streams by the highway, she’s the smog in the air and the oil in the sea sopping and dripping and clogging throats of sea turtles and poisoning rivers, she’s the waste that bubbles up from sewage grates during a rainstorm, and the only one who knows, who sees, is herself. And there is not much you could tell her, stupid, sad, ridiculous Sasha, that she doesn’t already know about herself. Solitude is the only mercy the universe has ever given her. She thinks not one person could stand the nauseating, polluting sight of her.

When a wave bears down again, the driftwood drowns with it.

-

The porcelain white bowl judges her.

She’s staring at her own reflection in toilet water. That’s pretty vain, isn’t it? Narcissus would probably do something like this. She doesn’t really know much about Narcissius, though, so maybe he wouldn’t. Somebody had a Greek myth phase at some point, she remembers, and that’s how she knows of Narcissius. He is selfish, she knows, and he stares at his reflection in the water a lot. They’d be a perfect match.

Her stomach aches, rolling in on itself and forcing out small hiccups. She’s stopped eating only because the pain has become overwhelming. So she’s in the bathroom, clutching the toilet seat, trying not to think about anything at all, but failing, because her own face is staring back at her. She is waiting for her stomach to finally heave and relieve all the pressure.

But it doesn’t. The blaring nausea subsides, and she realizes she’s not going to puke. But now she’s staring into toilet water, and there’s a prickling, familiar sensation at the back of her mind.

She blows out a breath. She winces as she leans away from the toilet seat. She’s sweaty, bloated, covered in stains from milk and chocolate and strawberry juice, clutching her stomach. She closes her eyes. She thinks of eating more to fix it all. The wave of nausea that overtakes her tells her it’s not worth it, for once. She opens her eyes. It is unbearable. But she can’t eat more. She knows it’s done.

There is only one thing left to do: she has to make this feeling go away.

For some reason, she always starts trembling at this part. Once she’s made her decision and begins to go through the motions, her body reacts like it knows what’s coming. Honestly, it should be relieved, but it’s not. It’s terrified. It’s anxious. Her fingers start to shake despite the warmth of the water she rinses them under. 

-

In thirty-five minutes, she’s brushing her teeth and picking garbage off the bathroom tiles. You’re supposed to wait thirty minutes after throwing up to brush your teeth, she remembers reading once, a long time ago. It’s to protect your enamel, she knows.

She cleans. She throws everything away. When everything is spotless, when she’s scrubbed pots and forks until there’s no sign of crusted food, when she’s vacuumed cereal off the floor and wiped crumbs off counters, everything is done.

Everything is done.

She is aching, teary-eyed, and bloated, but it’s done. There is nothing else.

The toilet water is too cloudy to serve as a good mirror. She doesn’t look in the actual mirror as she brushes her teeth. She ignores the sight of her from the vanity. She pulls on an oversized t-shirt and baggy sweatpants to camouflage her body.

When she lies down for bed that night, stares into the ceiling fan and the cobwebs she’s yet to get rid of glare at her from the corner, the secret is that she still feels insatiably, insatiably empty.

Brown eyes plague her thoughts as she falls asleep.