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Kristen lies, spread-eagled, on the floor of the chapel. There’s a bird in some tree outside, calling at intervals. Evening sunlight streams through the windows. It’s peaceful. She wants to throw up.
Maybe she should get some beers—shitty ones, so she can down them in one go without guilt.
Riz is off doing his homework. There’s that, at least. Kristen thinks she’d have thrown up twice by now if he weren’t. The feeling of thoughts slamming against a brick wall over and over is enough to make a girl feel a little off-colour.
Life would be easier if she were like Riz. She sees the way his mom glances at her when she thinks Kristen isn’t looking. Sklonda clearly isn’t Kristen’s biggest fan, but that’s okay because she isn’t either. Who gets nauseous from trying to write an essay? But anyway. Riz is so smart and so loved, and Kristen wonders if she would give up everything about herself for that.
Kristen’s loved too, she knows. Her friends tell her—or some of her friends do. Fabian’s not the biggest on saying it. It’s different, though, isn’t it? Being loved by your friends and being loved like you’re the whole precious world? Being loved by a parent? Loved like a child?
The cold floor seeping through her tie-dye shirt feels like the ground between the pews she used to lie on, hiding to entertain her brothers and whatever other kid stragglers were there early with parents who decided Kristen was enough of an adult. She wonders if she’d be more like Riz if she’d experienced being one of the "finders"—if she’d experienced being a child. Maybe she’d have gotten her tears out then, and they wouldn’t spill when she tried to write anything longer than a paragraph, anything that needed planning. Fuck planning. She’s alive and moving, and she can’t breathe if it’s planned. She used to be fine with it—mostly, at least.
Kristen stares up at the gabled roof, the old imperfections that likely once were unnoticeable but that run deeper with each passing year. She wonders sometimes if turning her back on it all cursed her, made her age backwards somehow. A curse is easier to stomach. Poison can be thrown up.