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On Renee’s nineteenth birthday, she sits on the roof beside Andrew and says nothing for a long time. The sun is not hot on their backs but there anyway, beating down an omniscient pressure along Renee’s spine. It’s everything like the stupid poetics she’s come to resent about being a Fox, and it tires her today, delicate smile long tucked away. It could only be more apt if it were raining.
He passes her the remaining stub of his cigarette so she may have the last drag. It’s not exactly considerate, more a sensed thing, a need. Needs are something Andrew has always been horribly attuned to. It’s one of many somethings she is sorry for him to have to feel. She plucks the cigarette from between his offered fingers and passes him the match fold liberated from a biker bar she stumbled into three years before, inhaling and not thinking, or not thinking much.
He turns the fold over in his hands. On the back of the glossy card is an ornately designed cross and the words “in god I distrust” emblazoned in a loping script, all gold. Andrew sniffs at it and arches one eyebrow.
“Shut up”, she says, nudging him with her elbow as she strikes the match in her hand on the concrete floor.
“Quiet as a mouse.” He raises his hands and eyebrows in practised innocence. One foot lifts to kick the mass of black and white fabric coiled on the floor. “You ready?”
She smiles at him and drops the match.
The clothes go up with a whoosh that shakes through to her bones. They’re all old now, too old to mean anything but queasiness or regret. Some still have rips and tears, from things decidedly more dangerous than Exy racquets.
Still, they burn easy as anything. Renee sets her clothes on fire and with them her old life is swallowed down. She is a white canvass, used and washed clean.
Andrew dangles a cross over her face and her hands fly to her throat.
“You -”
“Dick? Asshole? Utter piece of human shit?”
“Maker of terrible choices and occasionally good fashion tastes.”
He fastens the crucifix back around her throat and doesn’t mind when she laces her fingers through his hair, but stops her wrist for show.
“Put out the fire for me, okay?” She kisses him on the temple and takes the matchfold from his hands, throwing it into the flames.
*
If Andrew and his gritted teeth are Andrew, then Dan and her spontaneous softness are inescapably Dan .
Sometimes (an odd sometimes, meaning often for a while then rarely for just as long) Dan climbs into Renee's lap when she's passed out on the sofa or curled up in bed and kisses the corner of her mouth. She sits there until Renee comes into wakefulness then tells her whatever it is she wants.
It’s soft clothes dragged off and tighter, closer things on. The sweep of dusky pink along her eyelids. The brush of lips as incentive.
Dan dolls her up so they sit like mirrors under the strobe lights and they dance together, twined on the dancefloor of whatever club they’ve snuck away to.
The other upperclassmen are there or they aren’t. The sequins of Dan’s hip-hugging skirt still send sunspots all over Renee’s skin. It’s easy to dance that way, together and alike and completely free. Sometimes her memories can slip away like this, nothing but motion under the lights and Renee is a blank slate of skin, not feeling anything but the moment and Dan’s glistening skin drawing in the brightness of the room. This is a show. It’s always a show.
When Dan tugs her off the dancefloor she drinks in the feline ripple of Dan’s muscles when she slinks toward the bar. It’s all there in her walk: The control of a sportswoman. The knowingness of a dancer.
Dan looks at her over the rim of a sugar-frosted glass and Renee can’t bear it. She dances her fingers over the lace bodice of the crop-top Dan spun her into and Renee can’t help but ask. “Why am I wearing your clothes?”
“Because, I want to be myself. And the more of me there are the easier that gets. I’m a people-person, Ney.” She trails her fingers up the inside of Renee’s wrist, tracing veins, then dips low along her waist. “Dance with me some more?”
She wonders what they look like, what she looks like, wrapped up so much in Dan their persons are inseparable.
Dan told her once she loves Renee like a sister.
But Dan’s sisters are more in deed than blood and more in necessity than anything else. Dan also kisses her open-mouthed for painfully long minutes as she teases out Renee’s hair, curling it between her fingers and tugging.
They fall asleep in a heap on Renee’s bed every time, a looped moment with how they begin; Dan curls up in her lap again, clothes discarded and their guards lowered down. Undone and unmade.
*
Allison’s false nails have ripped a hole in the plastic gloves that came with the dye so she’s bleaching Renee’s hair using an old pair of knitted ones that belonged to first Nicky then Andrew and now Renee, dying in her care and stained beyond salvation.
The nails still seem to scrape at her skull in a pleasant way. Renee hums. “How did you bribe Kevin into letting you fix your nails anyway?”
“I’m dealing with the family this weekend. I get a pass. Or I’ll break his precious fingers.” She laughs softly to herself and runs the wide-toothed comb through Renee’s hair. It’s only possibly a joke. Allison likes to win. Allison likes to be spiteful. In her hands, the two are frosted, rich complimentary colours.
Renee leans back into the gentleness of it, the moment somehow precious and delicate under her care. The dye is expensive and doesn’t sting her scalp the way it used to in bus station bathrooms and she would tip her dark head over until all the colour and all herself would bleach clean away. Allison’s perfume is the strongest smell in the room, or the world; bright over the bleach. Renee falls away as the most natural, betraying part of her is destroyed and Allison just speaks softly like she can feel the weight of this ritual.
Or else she feels the magnificence in the femininity and closeness of this.
There is a sharp point under every bubblegum pink, chanel-spritzed moment they share and the understanding sits uneasily but still inside Renee. Allison blasts the shower.
“Time to rinse, babe, this is stuff is a bitch to get out.” She shoos Renee under the water and gets back to massaging her scalp, water squelching through the wool of the gloves and drying the skin of her hands.
Renee exhales again in something similar but more careful than bliss.
“He used to like this.” Allison says it in the way one might say it rained this morning, or I bought a coat last Saturday but it didn’t quite fit so I had to rip it into twelve pieces and throw it outside for the birds. “He let me shampoo his hair. When we were off he’d go for days without bothering, until everything had gone slick and gross with all the grease, just so when he came back I would sit in the shower with him and wash it clean. How pathetically cute, right? Pathetic.”
She leans the lower half of her body into Renee’s, not defeated but. She sighs, as though comfort is transferable through any bodily touch and they both watch the last of the dye slip down the plughole.
*
Andrew has no desire to practise today. Renee has no desire to let herself out today.
They stare each other out. Draw matches. Renee’s is shortest. She breathes in one long breath and pads up, knowing. The guards feel like armor on her today, a thing sewn onto her body to entrap it. She is the man in the iron mask. She is Hannibal Lecter.
Hungryhungryhungry.
Andrew stands on the edge of the court with his knife in hand, carving into the hardback cover of some textbook or other, most likely Neil’s, maybe Nicky’s. Maybe hers. She steels herself, spine like liquid mercury and she unties the thing inside that controls her reflexes.
Andrew has his eyes trained on her, fingers wrapped loosely around the knife. Dan is coming towards her, gaze sharp and mouth drawn. Renee is doing the unthinkable. It’s safe.
It’s safe(ish).
Kevin comes barrelling down court, Allison tensed in waiting for him like a vengeful goddess but they all know it won’t matter, that his blood is slick with this court not the other way round. He jolts more through than past her and meets Renee’s look of determination.
Her breathing is easy, blood warm, nerves loose and sensitive. Her uniform feels like a rippling, second skin, capable of anything. Kevin blinks. She blinks back.
The noise of the shot rings through her body like an alarm, spinning around her heartbeat and singing, singing, singing.
She realises a moment later than the team that she blocked the shot. Everything about her smile is feral.
Andrew soars over and touches her knuckles, white with the way she’s gripping the racquet, nails pinching and ready to bloody the wood. He says nothing, matches their breaths. She shudders and drops the stick. “I’m out”, she says, everything on the earth shaking but her. “I’m OUT.”
Wymack yells something and Andrew yells back. Dan runs after her. Renee runs faster, stripping as she goes.
“It’s safe”, she says to the showers, voice echoing off the tiles.
“I know”, Dan says from behind her. “But you can slip sometimes, it’s okay.”
“No,” she says, naked and feeling scrubbed raw. “I can’t.”
*
Betty gives her hot chocolate and compliments the Wednesday Addams prep dress that her skin is clinging to, everything from her cross to her feet mimicking the preacher’s daughter.
Betty smiles. Renee smiles.
It’s the first lie, and remains the easiest. Or, remains the least blurry.
*
Allison sprawls out on the couch so there’s no room for the rest of them, hair tucked under a floppy hat and up in Marilyn rollers, toenails air-drying on the armrest. Renee, Dan and Katelyn sprawl out on the carpet and trade her nailpolish between them like currency.
The music on the speakers is angry. They are angry girls. There is a full bottle of champagne by Allison’s legs, an empty one by Dan’s.
“What’s the latest wager?” Allison leans down and brushes her fingers along Dan’s neck, like ownership, or affection. Something like that.
Dan looks up from the powder-blue gloss of her fingernails and leans back into the touch. “Nicky thinks you and Ney are fucking. Aaron bets we’re conditioning Katelyn to partake in bloodsports. Andrew actually agrees on that one. Neil thinks Renee is the only one who will make it out of here alive.”
“Neil thinks Renee is either God or Satan, he just can’t decide which.” Allison snorts in a way that betrays her blue blood, but doesn’t smile. Her eyes say enough.
Renee hides her face in her hoodie, feeling brittle. She closes her eyes and feels the room around her. There’s small bursts of sound to her left, shifting and movement. Before, she could have predicted who this was and what they were doing from the noise alone. She has been trying to unravel those instincts for some time, now.
Someone touches her cheek. Ultra-soft. “Allison, why the heck are your hands so cold?”
She twists and opens her eyes and Allison is right there, breathing so close to her each inhale is shared like communion wine.
“Why are you being shy? Afraid Josten might lose his heart to you?” She laughs and Renee can taste it.
“Enough, Allison.” Dan’s voice is pitched in the way Matt calls fierce mama wolf and Renee knows to be a historical cadence, used to protecting. Allison backs away but keeps laughing, even as she flops down on the sofa again.
Katelyn clears her throat. “Any bets on Aaron?”
“Matt thinks he’ll break your heart. I think you might break his.” Dan shrinks back to human proportions.
“I don’t believe you’d hurt anyone.” Renee breathes the words out of herself, clearing the tension like cobwebs from her lungs.
“Oh, darling, every girl hurts. It’s what we do.” Allison yawns, catlike. Katelyn throws a pillow at her, and she hurls it back with dealer’s quickness.
“Is that what we’re doing for fun tonight, fulfilling the straight male fantasy?” Dan blows on her nails, the colour bright like peony petals against her skin. “Are we not more creative than that?”
“Should we play a game?” Katelyn asks it with a nervous energy, cheerleader joy bubbling through the veneer of coolness she reserves for them sometimes. To feel less alienated, Renee supposes.
Allison flips the rim of her hat up and fixes her eyes on Renee, bringing the champagne bottle to her lips. “Ney”, she says, eyes bright as the glitter dusting her cheekbones, “I will give you a thousand bucks if you punch me in the face right now.”
“ Allison ”, Dan warns, stretching, ready to strike.
Allison is still smiling, though, eyes fixed on Renee’s. Flame-blue and slightly bloodshot. She’s been crying, Renee realises. There’s always something half-feral about Allison, and Allison in mourning is more volatile than ever.
“I won’t hurt you, Ali.” Renee looks at the champagne bottle then holds out her hand.
Allison passes the bottle and brushes her fingertips along Renee’s forearm. There are bruises there, fresh and luminescent. Andrew had not been gentle. She didn’t want him to be. “I just wanted to match”, Allison whispers, then snatches her hand back.
Bitch by Meredith Brooks comes on the speaker and Allison sings with so much tenacity Renee thinks she may force herself once again to tears. They keep painting their nails.
*
Renee sits in her bed wearing Dan’s pyjamas because they smell different to hers even though they use the same detergent. She’s breathing carefully. She’s saying her prayers.
The crucifix feels warm on her skin tonight, reflecting her desperation back at her. Slipping, that’s what it is.
Dan crawls into the bed beside her and kisses her exposed collarbone. Matt is in the other room tonight, keeping watch or letting them be. Renee keeps mumbling prayers under her breath.
“Ney, let’s sleep.” The breath is warm on the shell of her ear. “Ali is taking us shopping tomorrow. Your two-shirt wardrobe is causing her existential angst.”
Dan is so close it hurts. Renee breathes in when Dan leans up to kiss her and unfurls. Sleep comes.
*
Allison picks them up in the car, too early and dewy-faced. Her perfection is passed the point of slipping, now. Her world is full up with golden skin and rose blush. Renee thinks she looks frightening. Renee thinks she looks beautiful. Allison smiles at her and she knows she's caught.
Allison opens the door and leans all the way in until her mouth touches Renee's. It's terrifying, it's weaponry.
Renee kisses back.