Chapter Text
851 Sycamore Street is a fenced two story-high beige and white house where only tame grass and fake plastic flowers grow, and every insect has long ago given up trying to set their minuscule feet on it, the echo of a full house with open doors on every room and five locks tightly holding each entrance shut, rendering it a way too sterile environment for any bug to bother unless forced. At least, Rhonda has the suspicion that they are forced, if the strategically hidden leftover of last night’s dinner the cockroaches are feeding off is anything to go by, right in the space between the bedframe and the old nightstand that used to belong to Buford and that now belongs to Kenny, forever confined to sharing a bedroom with his sister.
Rhonda places the now dead cockroaches and all the rotting food in a plastic bag, then the plastic bag inside the neighbors’ bin, making sure to screw the screen back for the window to look untouched again.
“Get down from there,” she says to the kid as she drags him from his perch on a chair and down to the floor. “They have wings, how’s that gonna help?” Then he gets that look that tells Rhonda he’s about to take off running and screaming, prompting her to put a hand over his mouth. “Grow up. I took them out, ‘kay? They are dead on the garbage.”
Rhonda waits for Kenny to nod before letting him go and tossing him some clothes for him to change into before turning to her own bed to examine the sheets in search of dirt and blood that she might need to wash in the bathroom sink before heading for school. She can’t find anything particularly incriminating. Guess running like hell is good to shake dirt off clothes that are good at disguising it anyway. Only the jacket shows itself dirty, she throws it under the bed before grabbing a clean one. A weak attempt at looking like she bothered to tidy up, and a more poignant attempt at stopping her brother from staring at the cuts on her skin. Those are going to be a bitch to get to heal without leaving scars.
“You didn’t shower,” points Kenny in a tone that would almost sound accusatory if not for the fact that he’s sitting at the foot of the bed, already dressed and curled up on himself while checking if the cockroaches are truly gone, his undone shoelaces tangling among themselves on the mattress.
“And that’s nobody’s business,” she replies, pulling on his legs to force him to tie his white sneakers with no cartoon characters and that don’t even light up, much to his disgust. “Not even dad’s.”
Kenny nods and Rhonda hands him his backpack, only missing the lunch she placed on the fridge for him to pick up after breakfast.
Rhonda does her best to shake the rest of the dirt off her clothes and washes the blood from her hands before going on with her day.
She tackles the stairs two steps at a time, the way her mother despises and her father encourages, sitting on his self-appointed seat at the kitchen table from where he has a clear view of whether or not Rhonda is taking the stairs on twos or ones, his newspaper just an excuse to not be spoken to, but to which his eyes return once Rhonda jumps the last two steps.
“Hey,” she says, the sizzling pan her only response. She rolls her eyes before correcting. “Good morning.” Walking to the counter as a chorus of replies appear, Kenny doing so as he steals glances at the cereal box peeking from the pantry, but knowing it’s not going to happen as soon as Rhonda hands him an apple to lull his sugar urges. It never helps and she often has to finish the apple on her way to school, ignoring the brown bits in order to set a better example since everyday Rhonda’s mother serves breakfast to everyone but Kenny.
Rhonda splits her breakfast with him, slices the apple when nudged, and starts the stove back on to make the other half of their breakfast.
“Did you see the dogs?” asks her father, folding his newspaper and beginning to eat.
“Dogs?”
“At school.” Which doesn’t explain much and leaves her staring. “Hope, your daughter is making that face again.”
“I swear, Ronny. How come we are the ones who know your principal was eaten by wild dogs? It’s all over the news.”
Oh. That.
It’s a stupid explanation, but Rhonda is not about to confess to a crime she hasn’t been accused of, let alone one that could lead her to fifteen life sentences at best.
Cannibalism, as bizarre as it still tastes, would bring her years of unwarranted media attention on top of increasingly creative forms of harassment that would end with solitary confinement she does not have the energy for.
“I thought it was a joke,” she says, because being alone is only comfortable for so long, only until those damned social needs kick in and one starts to yell and scratch at walls, going mute by the desperation for someone to talk to or even just watch, exactly like the people in her father’s tapes, the ones from work he wasn’t supposed to bring home but that he had shown Rhonda to teach her a lesson about yelling to be left alone before slamming her bedroom door. “And I thought it was hilarious; he did look like a pig.”
“The poor man was murdered.” Her mother. A tone of weariness decorating her voice even as she hurriedly writes on her planner and takes a bite of bacon. “Have a little respect for the dead, won’t you? You’d really benefit from it.”
Rhonda takes away the piece of bacon Kenny seems like he wants to eat.
“Shouldn’t have had such a dumb death.” Making her father snort as her mother shakes her head, lips turned a thin line, wrinkles decorating the space between her eyebrows.
Underneath her jacket, a spot on her left arm starts to itch, the spot left without skin after sleepless hours picking at it while trying not to move, trying not to make a mess she wouldn’t be able to clean on the bathroom sink, not unnoticed and unasked.
She had thought that getting back into the house would be the hard part, trying to unscrew the window screen from the outside without waking Kenny up. She found no cars on the driveway and her brother opening the door for her, wondering why she hadn’t picked him up from school. She ignored him, rushing him to bed and then laying down on her own, eyes on the ceiling and nails attacking her own skin until there was nothing but a red patch.
It took her nineteen minutes to create a skinless spot.
It should have taken her less than a second and been a deep straight line pouring a clean stream of blood, just as she did many times that day. She was suddenly unable to inflict it on herself.
She hasn’t looked at it, but it feels like a shallow wound even as it itches while covered with the jacket’s sleeve, so unremarkable it barely distracts her from her mother’s rant on how uncaring Rhonda is, along with her father offering her a high-five when she scandalizes her mother once again.
She’d rather have her father on her side for this one.
Not much an accountant could do to help if someone saw any of it.
Rhonda drives Kenny to the bus stop and her fingers curl tight around the wheel, watching the yellow ride disappear on the horizon, the image of Kenny’s hand poking from the window to say goodbye still fresh in her eyes once it’s gone, the sky a blank slate where she can see the strings that control her movements.
Trees rest peacefully on the sidewalk next to her, untouchable.
She drives away.
⌂⌂
Xander struggles more than usual to get out of bed. He tries to stay asleep and pretends he can’t hear the alarm clock yelling at him from the corner it fell to last night after he dragged himself back home, muscles already complaining.
On a good day, going to school would be tedious, but not deadly. The deadliness comes from his own self-inflicted Shame, a capitalized Shame that is his new last name, with Avoidance somewhere along the middle.
His first name can stay Xander, it’s already embarrassing enough to be himself.
The thuds on the hallway get louder and he throws himself to the floor to shut the clock before someone gets the chance to burst in to make him do it. The steps retreat and Xander contemplates becoming one with the rug as his body recoils in pain.
He can’t begin to come up with an excuse and, if he had a wish, he doesn’t know if he would use it to undo everything or to make himself not care anymore. No good undoing something that could happen again, but isn’t not caring worse? He didn’t care yesterday, not until he had come back to his senses and became painfully aware of all he had done, half a mind to walk himself home.
The fog lifted and he ran away, ignoring the voice of a lady he vaguely recognized, who was calling for him to come back and hear her out. He didn’t want to hear, he still doesn’t, he never will.
Xander doesn’t need to, or maybe he just can’t deal with hearing some stranger explain how deeply fucked up he is, how he will keep messing up all his life, worse every time until the hole is too deep for anyone to save him. Yet again, the literal blood on his hands is there to remind him he’s not only a killer now, but a cannibal one, and that he drove away the one person who would have gladly helped him out, so maybe it’s too late already.
“Not the only one,” he mutters in the shower, watching the blood swim away. “Not the only one.” Because Jesse is alive, has to be alive, no matter how much he wants not to think about him right now, not because of what he would think if he knew, but because Xander can’t help but to blame him a little.
He has to blame someone who is not himself in order to get it together enough to drag his body downstairs and start gathering his father’s abandoned beer bottles, the smell from last night an annoyance he has grown accustomed to as he keeps returning them to the box they arrived in less than three days ago, and where they will travel back to the store to be exchanged for new ones, filled to the brim, ready to make Anthony Harris babble and yell.
The clinking of the glass is a distraction from the red that fills his mind. Red and thick and warm liquid that made him laugh and now makes him nauseous but that, at the same time, makes him think he could have come back home sooner, before it passed, he could have yelled and pushed and barely broken a sweat while winning for the first time.
What winning would entail is what stops him from indulging too much in the fantasy, eyes snapping back to reality of a brown-tinted bottle with some liquid still inside. He knows it’s mostly backwash, but he sips anyway. If the bitterness lets him forget a little, then he’ll get the appeal someday soon.
It’s not like his father hasn’t offered to share before, those times comprise some of the nice memories they share, even if they are tinted with alcohol as a bonding mechanism.
It’s up there with all the times they played catch as an excuse to creep on the younger-than-Xander neighbor.
He can pretend it was better than it was, that maybe there is a part of his father that is capable of wanting him around even if Xander keeps wondering how much easier life would be had he seen his father while hungry.
It’s possible it wouldn’t have made a difference, he seemed to be a coward who picked on people that didn’t deserve it, just his genes acting out, an inevitability.
Xander kisses his mother goodbye and she barely acknowledges him as he pretends to walk to school when his destination is anywhere but there, anywhere he can wallow on his misery and start to come up with an apology that sounds less like “I felt like it” even though that’s exactly what happened. He felt like ripping skin and poking fun and playing with people until they were less than a body. He felt like feasting on innocents pleading for their lives and bathing in pained tears and being everything he doesn’t want to be.
He felt good.
He felt powerful.
He felt in control.
He felt untouchable.
Now, he feels sick.
Sick and stupid for ever believing he could be something else than Xander Harris, something better than his blood, something of his own making and not something he was destined to be, someone else at the wheel, the roots of his family tree deciding where he should go, trapped on the same highway every man of his family has ran over everyone they love.
⌂⌂
If Rhonda closes her eyes, she can still feel the strings controlling her every movement, drawing a growl from her throat and turning dull nails into sharp knives, dragging her through scenarios where she’s done fighting.
If one were to look up, they would find not a monster as a puppeteer, but brown eyes that remain warm as ever, because puppets are nice and simple and funny, ready to play dress up and put on shows. Not one scraped knee, not one hair out of place, not one improper joke, not one wrinkle on her dress.
The same pull of the string led her through dark roads with euphoric leaps, turning teeth into maws that sank deeper than they should, with far more force than the one she has this morning while attempting to open a stubborn granola bar on her way to class, trying to recall where she saw scissors last, messing up her already messed up locker to find the watercolors she meant to take home for Kenny’s art project two weeks ago, and the newest first aid kit she bought the morning before going to the zoo.
The night before that, Kenny broke a vase and cut his hand while Rhonda had been busy putting away laundry. He was hellbent on hiding the evidence even though everybody would remember there used to be a vase in the hallway.
Rhonda tended to the wound and realized they were low on supplies, buying a new one before school the next morning. She had planned to take it home at the end of the day, but the plan changed. Her plans always change.
Maybe this time she’ll take it with her, and maybe Kenny won’t grow up assuming Rhonda won’t pick him up from school. It all depends on the pull of the strings, the ones that finally allow her to be strong enough to open the wrapper and taste oats, registering the flavor and comparing it to the one of human blood, the thought jumping around as she makes a mental list of what needs to be done, where most of the items revolve around remembering third grade math and science.
She’s halfway done eating when she hears hurried steps into the girls’ restrooms, Heidi followed by Kyle calling her name and attempting to go with her, immediately stopped and scolded by Mr. Beach, who pulls him aside and threatens suspension as Kyle stares blankly at him, then at Rhonda. She snaps her locker shut and follows Heidi to the stall she is locking herself in by force of one stubborn leg. A quick glance over the wall lets Rhonda know Heidi is writing in her diary at record speed.
“You can’t write that down,” Rhonda says after she’s done reading Heidi’s recount of what Kyle just told her wasn’t a dream.
As told by Heidi’s pages, he found her standing outside Flutie’s former office, frozen at the sight of police tape and trying to come up with an explanation that didn’t end in cannibalism.
Rhonda rips off the pages and goes to shred and flush them down the toilet. Heidi tries to fight her out of it, only managing to fall after attempting to climb on Rhonda’s back.
“I’ll write it again.” Hands fixing her curled hair and her white skirt.
“Grow up.”
The silence lingers as the paper turns into confetti and Heidi tries to fix the bits of ripped pages still glued to the binding of her diary, tearing them with delicacy and throwing them in the water while pretending she was always on board with it.
“You owe me a new diary.” Nose in the air and the petulant pitch she carries whenever her vocal cords remember there was a time she was the center of the universe.
Rhonda couldn’t be fooled into thinking Heidi ever stopped being so. Not when she has her back to the row of mirrors, flushing bits and pieces of paper with ink down a decrepit toilet while Heidi gets to rearrange the contents of her bag so the pressure will unbend the paper, books remaining in the order she will need them for class. Heidi doesn’t notice the way the world rearranges to her liking, she only bitches and moans about how her diary looks slightly uneven now.
“It wouldn’t be uneven if you had common sense,” Rhonda says. Every bit seems gone by now, but she’s tempted to throw the rest of the diary in so Heidi will try to choke her. “Not like you’re dumb enough not to know we can’t have the same dream.”
“I was surprised,” Heidi mumbles while tacitly agreeing not to write it down again, swiftly moving to become visibly disgusted with herself for having locked herself in the repulsive stall of the even more repulsive restroom that is probably never cleaned, her prissy ways letting Rhonda know that the hissy fit is over for today.
“Do you believe it?” Heidi asks her while drowning the germs inhabiting her hands under the faucet, scrubbing with more force than necessary in a way that Rhonda is sure would leave marks in anyone that is not Heidi, pink lines fading into flesh until the moment they stay.
Rhonda steps on cigarette ashes as she ponders a question she never thought to ask herself and that now makes her unsure.
What she knows is simple: Orla called it possession, then went into a long winded explanation as she tended to Ms. Calendar’s deep wounds. When Rhonda tore her eyes away, Heidi was looking around like she didn’t know where she was, her back bent forward and her hair a mess for longer than five seconds.
If Rhonda were to ask again, she’s sure Orla would remain firm in her assessment that yesterday’s events were a product of possession, and Rhonda’s conclusion would be the same she always reaches: whatever it was, Orla knew how to get rid of it. It should be enough whether or not they know for sure that they are calling it the correct name, and it should be enough whether or not hyenas sound like demonic entities to her.
But Heidi is looking at Rhonda with the same earnest expression Kenny started to subconsciously mimic after a few days of meeting Heidi, except her expression is worse because her glass eyes make her look so much more fragile, much more like someone to kill for.
“Yes,” is her answer. No amount of lying will make the itching under her skin go away, and it will certainly not chase away the doubt about reality that plagues Heidi’s mind.
“That’s a stupid thing to believe in.”
“Then stop fucking asking.”
Heidi rolls her eyes; Rhonda gets the urge to punch her. She knows Heidi is sitting on a high horse and thinking about how much of an insensitive brute Rhonda is just because she asked her to follow logic.
“You don’t have to snap at me,” Heidi says, turning back to the mirror because that’s all she believes: in fixing her hair and pretending she’s always right, basking in the deep seated knowledge that, no matter what she does or where she is, someone will always be there to kiss the ground she walks on.
There will always be someone who will make it so Heidi won’t need Rhonda around, someone more willing to overlook her flaws.
In a split second, Rhonda snatches the diary from Heidi’s bag, ripping more pages out, going for the ones with the stickers that denote reality, mind set to reduce them to dust.
“What are you doing?!” Heidi yells as she tries to take it back, hanging from Rhonda’s arm while pleading and crying she gives it back.
Rhonda keeps on shredding the paper because if there are no hyenas then she’s this way and Heidi should accept it while watching her lifeline being torn apart.
Heidi disagrees.
Kyle disagrees.
Kyle bursts into the restroom, takes Heidi off Rhonda then takes the diary off Rhonda’s hands.
“I didn’t send you to pull this shit,” says Kyle, standing in between of Rhonda and the pages Heidi is collecting in the hopes to save.
“You didn’t send me.”
And if he did, he couldn’t have made her, just like he can’t make her stay.
She gets free of his grip, then storms out, pointedly stepping on the exact page Heidi is about to take, barely missing her fingers instead of biting them off like she should.
It would serve her well.
⌂⌂
When Xander was eight, he looked through his bedroom window at night to see a pair of stray dogs fighting. He didn’t know what had started it, never looked for an explanation, too lost in the mess of teeth, nails, and blood, but he knew it wasn’t a good idea to try and stop a fight while bare handed, not a human nor an animal one.
The fight seemed uneven, large dog versus small one, lasting longer than he’d have imagined if he had ever stopped to imagine such a scenario. He got stuck on the word “unfair”. The way he knew nature to work didn’t matter, he ran down with the image of the hose in his mind along with an escape plan for if the water made them chase him, a tree he could climb.
It had been pointless as the fight ended before he could make it outside, the big dog gone while the small one let out his last breath under Xander’s gaze, puncture wounds bright on its neck as a neighbor told Xander to go back inside, a plastic bag ready to dispose of the body once all air was gone.
He knew there was no going back inside as tears started to pool under his eyes, because boys don’t cry, and little girls don’t live in his father’s house. Xander made his way to Willow’s house because he knew she wouldn’t care if he cried and would even pretend it never happened if he gave the tiniest hint of wanting it to be that way.
As Xander walks aimlessly eight years later, his mind goes back to the memory of those dogs, trying and failing to brush away the sudden conviction that he has turned out to be the unfair dog, only a more twisted version of it, spawning from a world where the dog had friends to gang on the small dog with, a small dog that dies asking what’s wrong with the big dog, because this is a ridiculous escalation of their ongoing fight.
Willow and Xander have been fighting for almost a month, with her apologizing and him ignoring her words despite never placing any real distance in between until the day something in him broke and he decided to get himself new friends and hobbies like tossing people around and making Willow miserable at every chance he got.
He wasn’t thinking about the fight, he had just wanted to do it, felt like he needed to because she looked small and easy to break, not only in spirit.
When they fought at the start of the month, Xander said things he didn’t mean, anything that could hurt her so she would leave him alone, leave his house feeling down and remorseful. It had felt appropriate given the circumstances and she took every metaphorical punch without flinching, calling his bluff before trying to explain what she had meant by saying she hoped Jesse was dead.
No explanations mattered, she had said it and meant it.
She didn’t stop trying to explain.
He didn’t stop giving her the cold shoulder.
Yesterday was different.
It hadn’t been just about his sudden taste for blood and violence with lack of a real reason, but the fact that Willow had called him out for being a jerk and taking his anger too far. Xander had been hurtful again and didn’t mind that, this time, Willow didn’t seem to be taking the punches as well as before. He noticed the deep breaths and laughed about it.
Xander doesn’t know how the events compare but, if he had to guess, he would guess they are at the very least even now.
He still thinks Willow should leave him alone, no matter if it kills him. The big difference is that it’s no longer about anger, but about her safety. Willow is smart about most things but has never been wise about how many things she lets slide just because he did them.
He doesn’t know what will make him snap again, with even worse results this time, a version of the story where Willow is in the wrong place at the worst time.
His backpack is empty except for the battered notebook that has barely been used since being bought. Maybe it isn’t his. For all he knows, it just appeared in his locker one day and he didn’t question it. Integrating weird situations as fact is as second nature as eating, as normal as having a heartbeat, as easy as having a panic attack.
Today, Xander struggles to breathe correctly, heart threatening to break free from his chest, jaw clenched, walking through the halls by sheer muscle memory, steps directing him to Willow’s locker, ready to spout the first lie that comes to mind, but not eager to speak and be forced to let it into his lungs, to feel the walls become thinner and thinner, fighting to deal with oxygen, eventually exploding, failing at such a menial task.
He sees the door before he sees her, sorting books behind the brown metal that showcases Jesse’s face on it, a newly printed poster to replace the one that got wrinkly and vandalized in a few hours. It always happens after the novelty of the disappearance wears off, no matter how much anyone keeps searching and hoping. There used to be copies of the poster on every locker, now it’s just a few.
Jesse’s picture smiles at him from afar, Xander knows it’s his fault he has to see that photo every day, so much that he has memorized every pore and eyelash, it’s his fault and regret, the frustration following him closer than his shadow, yet he is selfish enough to want to risk one more friend to destiny, selfish enough to walk over to Willow and look at her instead of remembering he should be kept at a distance.
“Hey,” he says, pretending his mind isn’t drowning in helpless screams. Willow looks at him, a glimmer of hopeful confusion that punches him in the gut. She doesn’t speak. “How are you?” As if they were not past pleasantries.
Willow is chewing on the cap of a cheap pen and her fingers tap the bottom of the locker lightly, her eyes searching for something in his. Xander takes to fiddling with a button on his shirt that might be coming loose.
“Are you feeling better?” she asks, pen on her hand to be bashfully cleaned with a sleeve, then onto a pocket of her backpack. Xander is confused, he cannot pick a thing to be confused by first, but he’s willing to roll with it if they pretend nothing happened. “I figured since you—.” Willow stops herself midway, eyes over Xander’s shoulder, then on him, her expression becoming grey as she closes her locker and walks away with a murmur of: “I’m not doing this again.”
Xander can’t even consider to follow before he hears Kyle’s mocking voice behind him. Xander has the tempting notion of bashing his head against the metal.
“That was pathetic,” Kyle says, lollipop in mouth and dirty sneaker nudging Xander’s.
Xander wants to tell him to shut up and maybe trip him, to tell him to stay away from Willow and him, to force him to comply, anything to go back to a semblance of normalcy, no matter what normalcy would entail while Jesse is not around.
He wants to do a thousand things that all end with him going after Willow, but he stays there and holds his breath until he starts to get dizzy, a toddler throwing a tantrum while Kyle sneers and watches.
“You can’t kill yourself by holding your breath.” Standing next to Xander, who lets the air he has been holding go.
He knows.
Kyle forces an unopened lollipop into Xander’s fist. Xander throws it into the hallway and glares. Kyle laughs.
“Harsh,” he says and fixes Xander’s collar without losing his smile, then walks away and joins the dozens of people coming and going, hurried and happy and stressed and relaxed and every emotion he has ever known, all ignoring the candy, all kicking it around, all melting within each other as Xander stands and his own emotions leave his body, one after the other, flying away through his chest, leaving him empty.
Xander turns around and leaves, the little energy he had gone, left to endure the weight of aching limbs and an aching heart.
⌂⌂
There’s a lull in the school day that Rhonda and Kyle make last three periods. Nobody would mind their absences on a regular day, and now with the vice principal’s fear and inexperience at the wheel, everything is as chaotic as can be, with some students backseat-driving and others not even bothering to get in the car.
Kyle steals spray paint from the lackluster art classroom, barely needing to nod before Rhonda follows him out of school and into the real world, all the way to a newly vacated house that craves to swallow new flesh with every creak of the floors.
It’s a wonder people still move to Sunnydale. It seems like there’s always someone ready to be the replacement, just waiting for their turn to get out of the machine that fabricates happy families. They never look the same, but they always end up the same and the town’s population doesn’t seem to go down. Rhonda has to wonder if Sunnydale is a magnet for suicidal people or if it just has the right conditions for their conception.
Buford had the right idea when he put an ocean between himself and Sunnydale, then lost her number.
Never even met Kenny.
Not many people want to meet Kenny.
Kyle tosses her a can of paint and the house is splattered with colors other than red.
Kyle never asks about Kenny, his dislike for Rhonda’s younger brother runs deep, all the way to the first tantrum Kyle threw after she had to cancel their playdate because Kenny had cramps. Kyle jumped up and down like a spoiled child and Rhonda’s father banned him from visiting their home.
Family comes first, and Kyle didn’t have a right to act like that when Rhonda was being a responsible sister.
Kyle never asks about Kenny because Kyle never wants to talk about Kenny, and sometimes it feels like a blessing in disguise.
“How weird is it that humans taste like pig?” Kyle asks very loudly from the other side of the room, spray painting the least artistic rendition of a penis with a crooked frame around it.
Rhonda snorts.
He’s not subtle, not even in a way that could pass as trying to be, transparent in every intention in a way she would call charming if that was a word she believed herself able to use without it coming out as performative.
“Maybe he used to be a cop.” She paints aimless lines of black. “Tasted more like baby cow to me.” Four dots: black, white, red, orange. If only the arts department had other colors.
“Still not what I imagined.”
“You were wondering?”
Checkered patterns over the furniture nobody reclaimed, spray dancing among the tiny dots in the light coming from the window. A little bit of light to remind her of the strings that move her body, no matter how loose they feel right now.
Someone will pull on the strings any moment now. Rhonda doesn’t know how to get scissors for it, so she paints dead people whose names all start with the letter R.
Kyle tells her about how, last year, while he and Tor waited at the emergency room for a doctor to check the wood impaling Kyle’s leg, Tor had started going on about the way bones, muscles, and fat layer around each other “like the insides of a cake with skin fondant”. The conversation spiraled into cannibalism, they made people uncomfortable, and Kyle had been thinking about it since.
“Not daily… Stop stealing the color I’m using!” But she takes the can from his hand again. Kyle kicks her leg, Rhonda kicks back, weakly at first until it all rushes back and she wants to truly hurt him, to inflict pain while the strings aren’t tense.
The strings are never not tense. There’s always someone thinking of pulling them and it’s only a matter of when.
Kyle smirks, reading her mind and taking one step back. He barely looks before pushing a hammer into her hands, making her mind go blank, because her arms are suddenly weak, but the hammer is heavy, and Kyle is turning her around.
“Nobody’s gonna miss the furniture,” he says, pointing her to a table full of plates made of glass that weren’t there before.
It takes her a second, maybe two.
She pictures a million faces and swings to attack, wood flying, turned to pieces, old curtains turned to shreds. Kyle pushes more furniture down the stairs and every splinter is worth it when the strings stay loose. Never while she’s tucked away inside a crevice of time where she doesn’t have to care about anyone but herself, yelling as she goes, jumping on the debris.
The floor is dusty, and the ceiling fan would fall off if there was any electricity to turn it on, not due to time past but due to a bad installation job.
Hadn’t the presumed gas leak made the family members kill each other, then the fan would have murdered them, spinning unscrewed onto their throats.
“If we ate someone else, life would be solved,” she says, not naming names, putting it all somewhere other than her chest, eight years of resentment speaking for themselves while she turns herself light.
“Top of the list or only of the list?”
Rhonda doesn’t stop to wonder, immediately asking who he would add, but he has no one who would make a big difference when gone.
They close their eyes.
They get high on spray paint fumes.
They entertain the ludicrous idea of owning this home.
Before heading back, Rhonda buys Heidi a new diary and waits for her to finish her last class, all her savings morphed into the white book Heidi was eyeing the last time she shopped for one, unable to afford it, but now on her hands through a silent peace offering.
For a second, Rhonda’s body is her own.
⌂⌂
Xander walks aimlessly through the town while collecting rocks to put in his backpack, weighing him down as he makes his way to the slanted path that takes him closer to 870 Sycamore Street, closer to the house where Jesse’s shadow is cast the hardest, more and newer missing person posters on each light pole and tree and car as he gets closer. Both cars are on the driveway, they seem to always be there lately because life goes on for everyone except the ones whose lives spin around the one that’s missing, the ones glued to the phone and sending letters and making public appeals, the ones living in the house that looks the same but feels like decay.
Xander sits down in the middle of the road and stares at the window Jesse’s face used to greet him, split between the idea of letting himself fall asleep right there or climbing the window and slipping under the covers that haven’t seen his friend for months on end.
It’s stupid.
Trying to fix things by looking at an empty window he sometimes is aware will never have the right face again.
Normalcy is a botched concept, and the world is collapsing around him.
“Hey!”
His survival instincts return and urge him to run at the sight of his father on the sidewalk, his voice bringing Xander to his feet and his eyes to his shoes, the soles thin enough to start feeling rocks under him, but maybe is just the normal hyperawareness he feels around his father, who makes him follow him into the car with a comment to where they are going that sounds very similar to “diner” but that still puts Xander on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“What’s wrong with you?” his father asks. Not in the aggressive tone he uses whenever Xander does something displeasing, which is often, but one that still feels like a concealed gun.
“Pretty much everything.” As the houses pass them by.
His father hums and they fall into the customary silence of family members that float around each other rather than living together. Uncomfortable silence and staleness until they reach a diner that turns out does exist and they are actually sitting inside of, one in front of the other while they wait for their food.
His father pretends to be interested in his life: how’s school, does he have his eyes set on any lady, what are his plans.
Xander tries not to be monosyllabic, at the same time he sticks to answers that won’t detonate the bomb: it’s still hard, they all die, he barely knows his plans for the day.
That last one earns him a grin.
Xander puts a leash on his hopes before they fly high.
“There isn’t much to do in here anyway,” he starts, a long rant on how every Sunnydale path sounds boring ready for sharing, but his father beats him to it.
“What is out of Sunnydale for you?”
Xander doesn’t need clear words, he shifts on his seat and his hopes come down cut in half, just in time to make food taste like cardboard.
“Nothing, I guess.”
“You guess too much, that’s your problem.”
And so it begins, the awkward dance of the waitress that maneuvers plates around a speech she’d rather not hear, too ashamed to be serving Xander Harris, but too courteous to openly cheer for Anthony.
“Come on, don’t look so glum. It’s constructive criticism.”
Xander smiles without committing to honesty, then takes a sip of coffee and wishes he hadn’t backed off from ordering juice.
Jesse’s dad always has juice for breakfast and, ever since Xander brought it up one time when he was twelve, it has been a point of contention between Xander and his own father, who keeps making remarks about how Martin McNally should start paying for Xander’s life every time juice is around.
The coffee is too bitter even with cream.
“You’re just like your mother, used to the universe solving everything for you. I never had the privilege of guesswork, I had to know for sure,” he continues, mouthfuls and mouthfuls of food loudly chewed in between sentences, not a second of silence nor time for Xander to interject as Anthony continues eating and retelling the story of his hard upbringing.
Xander has it easy.
He’s not truly poor, not in a way that counts, and his father is a nice fella whose hits aren’t strong enough to leave marks.
Xander has it easy.
He gets to have petty hangups like how loudly his father chews.
“…Like your uncle Rory. I warned him about taxidermy being useless to help him pay bills. If you’re gonna have a hobby, it has to at least be good to make you money.”
The chewing is pasty, and the swallowing is dry, if Xander weren’t used to it, he would have already lost his appetite.
“He got a client last week, I introduced them, but he wasn’t grateful enough to give me a cut. It’s fine. People will backstab you like that. That’s why you need to guess less to be somebody.”
Xander doesn’t do much besides nodding along and swallow the bitter insults he wants to spit out, washing them down with even more bitter coffee.
“I’m not angry at you for skipping school, Xander,” he says. “It’s fine if you’re not the school type. But you need to learn to be some other type of useful, not a mess up.”
Xander drinks coffee like he’s hoping he’ll burn or drown or both at the same time, he also swallows after barely chewing so he can either choke or clean his plate. Whatever gets him out of there the fastest.
“That was your friend’s house? That’s what has you down?”
Xander stops.
Xander looks at his father.
Xander nods.
The fact that his father knows anything about Jesse is news to him.
“Half of it,” Xander adds, trying not to choke.
“Fighting with the other one?”
He doesn’t have time to start to wonder, the surprise is enough to have his inhibitions come down, a wave of emotions pouring through his mouth without his permission.
“I don’t think she’ll talk to me ever again.” Not crying.
Crying would make his father grimace and yell. Xander doesn’t want to ruin the first meaningful conversation he has had with his father in years, no matter how vague he needs to be about what the fight is about.
He can’t mess it up when his father is listening to his maze of unfinished sentences and incorrectly used words.
“She said she can’t do it anymore,” are his last words before he shuts up and breaths.
“So?”
“What?”
“I don’t see what’s wrong.”
For a moment, Xander wonders if words have the meanings he thinks they have. What’s wrong… It’s clear what’s wrong.
“People leave,” his father says, plate clean and napkin thrown over it. “Get used to it.” Then he leaves.
He leaves fast without Xander right before the waitress comes back with a check he has no money for.
⌂⌂
The day after Flutie’s murder, Rhonda is acutely aware of the fact that she’s placing a whole lot of trust on people that could turn on her at a moment’s notice. Her secrets aren’t solely hers, and keeping her mouth shut doesn’t grant her any safety, having to bank it all on the flickering hope that the others won’t realign their morals overnight, hope that they have enough sense to keep it to themselves and only bring up the story they settled on.
“Only if they question you and only with a lawyer,” tells her Orla while Kenny makes himself busy by feeding Doctor Slipper in the kitchen. “They’ll try to tell you only guilty people get lawyers, but that’s not true.”
Rhonda nods but doesn’t entertain the thought for long. She keeps on digging through Kenny’s backpack to find his homework and write down the new topics she needs to add to his review list, ready to highlight the ones he will need Orla’s help for, despite the fact that Rhonda can still hear her attempts at reassurance.
“It wasn’t you, you don’t need to feel guilty.” Not understanding that guilt is not something she gets to feel, she just doesn’t. She’s more concerned with making it through Kenny’s lessons on decimals and the consequent tests she will have to help him study for when she doesn’t know how to make him understand.
Kenny has no issues learning, it’s the why he should learn it that stops him. He refuses to do anything unless he has a good reason to do it, digging his heels so deep he becomes one with the ground.
Rhonda used to be able to make him do homework just fine at the beginning, but it became harder as the years went by and she had to take up Orla’s offer to help, all while wondering if she should know the answers too. They seem simple enough, but when Kenny asks her:
“Why not a different number?”
Her answer is:
“Because that’s how it’s done.”
And that is not good enough for him.
It’s easy for Orla, sitting on the floor next to Kenny and saying:
“Because zeroes that are at the right of other numbers are a way to say there are at least ten things there.”
Like he was asking an obvious question. Kenny has no problem accepting it as a fact of life, moving on to his next question until he’s completely satisfied.
Rhonda writes down every answer in case he asks again once they review for tests, then keeps on writing summaries of what he’s been learning at school for the same reason.
It was one thing when Buford made her feel dumb, it’s the nature of eldest brothers.
Kenny shouldn’t make her feel that way.
Kenny goes silent as he solves the rest of the problems on his own. Orla tries to make Rhonda do her own homework with a glance and a tug at her notebook, Rhonda keeps it clutched because it’s not Orla’s job to help her little brother study.
Orla doesn’t reply, they have had this discussion enough times to know it’s better if Kenny is not around for it. In Rhonda’s opinion, it’s better if it doesn’t happen at all.
Every class that day started with teachers leading a minute of silence for the dead principal, words of sorrowful hope for the future falling flat on rooms full of kids that attended their first funeral before learning to hold their own head, the knowledge of the way Sunnydale works barely present since most of them have never known any different.
Rhonda rolled her eyes and didn’t become amazed by the stupidity. It was like all those teachers thought they would have been immune because they had no more life to live. She would have rather been taking a test or pretending to read about some war or atoms or whatever class she had been taking.
She eventually tuned out. Rhonda is sure she didn’t miss much at all, grief and confusion making words be so slow and time so fast everything ended and started in the middle of the same breath.
Teens skip their obligations at the first disruption to their routines, teachers know so, doing the same in ways that won’t affect their paychecks. Orla knows it too, allowing Tor to sulk in his bedroom all day and not even bothering him with the little stack of notes Heidi and Kyle managed to put together so he wouldn’t have to be a failure, as if one missed assignment is the determining factor or as if Kyle has ever cared about academic achievements.
They just wanted something to do.
Rhonda could feel their nervous energy all day beside her at school, electricity on their fingertips as they wrote down what they could remember from their previous class while missing another, discussing and asking for Rhonda’s input, mocking her for not wanting any involvement, saying she forgets everything so fast because of “mommy brain”, then going back to scribbling as she doodled nonsense on her desk, pressing her pen hard enough for the lines to remain carved after some student has to clean them as punishment for something not desk related.
She offered to drop the notes at Orla’s and considered herself helpful.
The sentences are botchy at best, and she’s not entirely convinced that they are accurate. For all she knows, Tor is better off without them, but Orla looks them over anyway, pacing to the kitchen as she tries to make sense of the words, waiting for any hint of responsibilities to throw in Rhonda’s face.
“I guess nothing is urgent,” Orla says once she comes back, exactly five almonds in a little closed packet placed on the table for Kenny to devour while she checks his work. “You should take a nap, Rhonda.”
Kenny lets out a mocking gasp.
“That’s illegal!” he announces in a very failed attempt at a scandalized whisper. Orla interrogates Rhonda with a glance.
“It’s a real law,” Rhonda answers, reaching for the bag of almonds to examine before allowing Kenny to eat any. “It was passed after little shits kept refusing to sleep at night.”
“You don’t sleep either!”
“I can do what I want because fuck you.”
Orla watches the conversation like one does a game of ping-pong, waiting for one of them to miss the ball.
In the end, she still wants Rhonda to take a nap.
“The couch hasn’t stopped turning into a bed,” she says with an unnecessarily conspiratory tone. Rhonda hums a response and goes back to overthinking elementary school study plans, eyes drifting to the bedroom down the hall time and time again, its door only opening for the few seconds that it takes for Slipper to go inside and out, mostly to eat and demand Kenny to fulfill the petting tax, then go back to resume his guardianship duties.
The door is a portal to non-existence, silent and engulfing.
The notes she’s writing get messy and blurry, making her start again once she notices she mixed up the delivery dates. She does it again in the next page and now she’s wasting paper just so her father won’t grill her if he decides it’s the perfect day to pretend to care, needing an excuse to take something away from her.
The door stays silent.
Kenny’s teacher asked to arrange a parent-teacher conference, Rhonda told her she’d ask. Mrs. Dalton smiled, pretending to believe her. Rhonda is trying to time it in a way her parents won’t notice, in case Kenny is in trouble, which would mean she’s in trouble too.
She pulls out the sheet where she wrote down her parents’ schedules for next week, hopes it won’t change.
She can meet with Mrs. Dalton tomorrow if she skips last period.
The door stays closed.
Rhonda never crossed out the square for “defrost dinner” and the budget for Kenny’s groceries is already tight. She devises a plan to give him her dinner and she hopes to get hit by a bus.
The door is closed, and Rhonda moves to the other side of the couch so she can pretend Tor’s bedroom isn’t real, but she knows the door is there, the door is closed, and she has to vacuum the car because she found skin and hair on the backseat.
⌂⌂
Xander stumbles home at five pm, bag filled with more rocks he picked up after having to wash dishes to pay for his father’s meal, legs aching from both soreness and new exertion. There’s a low volume voice in some corner of his head that insists physical activity is the solution to muscle pain, he thinks he heard it in one of his mother’s former business ventures, the comment thrown around in one of the tapes. It doesn’t sound right, it doesn’t feel right, but maybe he should have given up a few rocks and not made it harder for himself.
Less self-imposed weight would surely help the pain more, maybe it would even help his confusion upon hearing cheerful chatter from the kitchen as the water runs. It’s the cheerfulness and the voice that soon joins the one of his mother’s that has him go back on his steps.
“Kyle?” But Xander has the answer in front of him, drying up a plate and passing it to his mother. Xander thinks he hears a greeting and some explanation about a school project, but he’s not truly paying attention, feeling dazed and naked due to the everything of the situation, from the unexpected visitor to his mother smiling while sharing housework.
“…doesn’t even live here but started helping,” his mother says. “I never get help.”
Xander frowns, something creeping from his gut and into his chest.
“I help. Every morning.”
But his mother already has her back turned, moving on with her day. The dishes will stay shiny as long as they don’t eat.
“Nice meeting you, Jessica,” Kyle says. Xander’s frown deepens, not even his father calls her by name. “Homework.” Kyle drags Xander by the shirt onto the hallway and then to his bedroom.
If Xander felt naked by Kyle’s presence in his kitchen, having him in his bedroom makes him feel tied to a table about to be cut open. He follows his urge to shove things under the bed, where they’ll get covered in the dust bunnies that should be paying rent any time soon.
“Does Jessica know she’s in a pyramid scheme?” Kyle asks, walking around and peering around his corkboard.
“Don’t call her that.” Xander tries to keep an eye on him as he makes sure anything embarrassing is under the bed, anticipating having to shove himself in there too. “What pyramid scheme?”
“Mary Kay.” Kyle moves to snooping on the desk. “Some woman tried to recruit Heidi last year. I didn’t know Orla could make people cry in fear, it was hot.”
Xander tunes out the rest of the non-thrilling story, looking around for anything else that could be used against him.
The air is knocked out of his lungs in a second.
Kyle is holding Jesse’s missing person poster, the one Xander always sets aside so he can make sure to always have one to photocopy.
If he’s being technical, Kyle is holding one of the hundreds of pieces of paper spread around town, one Xander could easily obtain anywhere. If he’s going by instinct, Kyle is tarnishing Xander’s last connection to Jesse, dousing it in gasoline and starting a fire on Jesse’s ticket back home.
Xander doesn’t know how he does it or where he gets the boldness from, but he walks slowly, grabs Kyle’s wrist, and makes him let go with a glance, careful not to ruin the perfectly preserved paper.
He puts it back in between the pages of the sturdiest book he owns, then the book in his neatest drawer.
“Why are you here?” Xander asks. “And don’t say homework because I don’t think you know what that is.”
Kyle grins, Xander’s skin crawls.
“What? We were friends yesterday.”
“Which I’m trying to forget.”
He will starve if that means he doesn’t have to remember, but Kyle seems eager to do so, walking like he’s familiar with the room but examining everything like there’s something hiding in the lamp's shade.
“You’re becoming a loner then?” And just before Xander goes to argue, Kyle speaks again. “You don’t have friends unless you have a Ouija.”
Xander’s body reacts before his mind processes the words, skin turning cold and heart stopping its beating, if only for a second.
“He’s not dead.” But it comes out as the pathetic cry of a child who refuses to accept the way the world works. He has never welcomed the thought; he’s not going to start now.
Kyle goes on as if Xander never spoke.
“And the other one… Didn’t you tell her to kill herself?”
And Xander feels like he’s been chained to the bottom of a pool, waiting for his insides to explode after being flooded with water when he gasps for air. It never happens because the pain is his punishment for trying to forget.
He swallows, attempting to push down the crying child that wants to break free.
“Why are you here?”
And Kyle looks at him like he knows he has Xander figured out.
“Coordinating stories, dumbass.”
Xander sits and listens, sits and memorizes, sits and obeys.
⌂⌂
Rhonda doesn’t fall asleep that night. She’s stuck in the security footage of herself tossing and turning in bed, trying for a comfortable position but coming to the conclusion that she truly can only sleep on her back. At least, that used to be the case. Tonight, lying on her back makes her feel like her soul could fly away from her, leaving her body an empty shell for anyone to use.
Too late to worry, but attempting to change her habits beats the pulling in her chest, strings taken over by a faceless figure that doesn’t resemble anything at all.
Kenny snores in his bed, pushed up onto a corner since he was five and they reached the compromise for his constant refusal to leave the bed guardrails behind, as if he always knew that growing up would make things harder, clearer. While asleep, he looks his age, and Rhonda likes not being able to see his eyes.
Brown eyes used to mean something different before Kenny was born. Less twisted, less confusing.
Rhonda felt the shift coming before it happened, she just thought it wouldn’t be quite this way.
She had thought it would be gone in the morning.
Then it came again and again and again.
She was disappointed once she realized they hadn’t stopped by her house while hungry and possessed.
The idea harasses her and she tries to smother herself with a pillow, then remembers it wouldn’t be fair.
Rhonda steals milk and garlic from the kitchen, then runs until she reaches the park near the elementary school. The tube slide is empty until she gets inside, snuggled against bad graffiti no one will see.
She doesn’t sleep, but she rests.
⌂⌂
Tessa was the one who took Rhonda to the park all those years ago, her parents always too busy for her and Buford always nose deep in a sea of patients. Work took priority over Rhonda, but Tessa always brought her flashcards to the park, mumbling under her breath while pushing the swing until she’d notice Rhonda trying to listen.
Tessa started to study out loud, filling Rhonda’s mind with legalese as they walked hand in hand towards the playground, where Rhonda stopped listening but kept looking over her shoulder towards the bench before doing something new and cool.
That week was all about using slides backwards, climbing to the top through the slippery part, the sides of her shoes getting tinted with bright red paint, and her hair sticking up with static as she made her way through a tube slide where she was suddenly unable to keep moving forward.
There was a kid with a flashlight, doing his best to stay on the same spot as he rubbed a crayon against the plastic, forcing the poorly made wax mural to stand noticeable where nobody would ever see.
It was stupid.
“Move!” she ordered, keeping her grip was getting harder, but she held on, convinced that she could do it for longer than the other kid, who refused to obey her. “You are not playing right! Move!”
“Nuh huh.”
“Move!”
Same words over and over again until she could feel her palms turn red.
“You draw ugly and you’re ugly.”
“You too.”
And they would have kept going like that for hours if not for the miniature avalanche of bright rocks that passed them by to distract them just before a third kid tackled them in a mess of limbs and screams as they slid down to the ground, a black rock stabbing her leg before the blonde kid hurried up to cradle it in his hands, going on about how cool it would be if her blood on the rock summoned a dragon.
“Dragons don’t come out of rocks, idiot,” she said.
The comment only elicited a shrug and a nonchalant “okay” from the kid as he took his backpack off and tossed every rock inside.
Rhonda kicked him on the shin.
“Don’t throw rocks at me!” Which made the brunette kid laugh and Tessa run from the bench and ask for everyone’s stories, forcing them to speak in turns.
Rhonda was happy to get to speak first, not so much when she was asked to apologize for kicking Tor.
“It didn’t hurt,” he said.
“It did!”
“Yeah, you cried,” lied Kyle. Rhonda accepted it as long as he was backing her up.
“Do it again! It didn’t!” But Tessa stopped her.
It ended up not making a difference once they were left alone and out of sight, kicking each other, and helping Kyle finish his crayon vandalism even days after the fact.
“Don’t rely on them too much and keep your secrets,” her mother told her every day before school, hellbent on how making friends would help Rhonda learn to recognize liars, spending extra time chatting with other moms, digging information on every Hauer and DuFours she could get through gossip and subtext.
“You should learn from that,” her father told her often before bed. “Your brother never learned his way around people, now every sob story has him closer to bankruptcy.”
It became one of the things she memorized without fully understanding.
Buford was doing fine.
Years later, Rhonda is also doing fine.