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To say things were weird at Sunnydale High was a little bit of an understatement. On the day before freshman year, Willow’s mother stuck her head into her room and said something along the lines of, please don’t die and then ran off to another conference or meeting or something.
Jesse died and Xander got a little weird, a little thin in the cheek and wild around the eyes (maybe he was on drugs, she wasn’t sure) and she kissed Amy Madison at the Bronze before she could second-guess herself and then she cut her hair short and Amy dyed the ends purple and green and yellow with magick and they painted their nails white because black was so passé.
But she didn’t die.
She dreamt of china dolls all in a row on a train full of blood, it soaked through her platform Mary Janes and into her white socks and she fixated on how the stain would never come out.
It seemed a strange thing to worry about in the midst of a dream.
But then, there were stranger things.
Some other kids died and the principal may or not have been eaten by a group of seniors and there was a weird thing with the Halloween costumes one year and the next there was a chocolate thing and once a short guy with orange hair tried to hit on her in the hallway because despite being one of the few ‘out’ girls at school, she was still partially invisible – or he was oblivious, she didn’t care (she heard later that he was hanging out with that wild girl – Hope or Faith or Chasity or something - with dark lipstick and long curly hair that wasn’t even enrolled at their school but always hung out in the library with the British guy and Cordelia Chase and always seemed to be at the center of every Sunnydale controversy and had a very hot, very old girlfriend with blonde hair and a wicked smile) and sometimes classes were half-empty for seemingly no reason.
But she still passed Physics.
She dreamt of stars singing and it broke her heart and shattered her brain into tiny pieces, they fell into her hands like little red petals.
Roses, she presumed.
Poppies, a voice giggled manically in her ear.
“Who are you taking to prom?”
Willow peered up through her short, spiky hair that had fallen over her eyes and smirked at the couple at the soda machine.
Amy sat down on the other side of the table and rolled her eyes, “She’s trying too hard.”
Willow nodded, noticing out of the corner of her eye Faith and her posse running down the hallway in a blur, and then turned back to her History paper. She heard a ripping sound and then a large crash and the cafeteria started tittering with laughter. Her foot collided solidly with Amy’s shin, “That wasn’t necessary.”
Amy plucked a piece of cauliflower off Willow’s tray and shrugged, “I was bored, ‘Low. What? You gonna report me to Faith and her gang?”
Willow took Amy’s partially-finished Sociology homework off the stack of books between them and didn’t respond, settling in to make sure there was nothing written there that would get them expelled.
They were still alive. They still (mostly) attended classes.
That was something.
She dreamt of her own reflection, a younger and meeker version of herself, with long red hair and a clean face, in a white dress with lace cuffs and a silver cross on her neck and bare feet.
She looked down and her feet were bleeding.
Weird, she said. And then woke up.
“Do you ever just… wonder what they’re doing?” Jonathan plopped down next to her – like they were friends and he was allowed to talk to her.
Willow looked around in surprise.
He peered up at her, face open and honest and without guile or irony and then gestured to the group huddled near the library door.
Faith and her gang; the short guy with the orange hair and the exchange student from Jamaica or wherever and Larry-something the jock and the once-infamous Sheila Martini and Aura-who-used-to-be-a-Cordette and the computer teacher Miss Calendar. They all looked worried… or constipated.
Willow stared at him blankly, “No. I don’t.”
Jonathan visibly slumped, “Oh.”
Amy came up just as he’d slunk away, Faith’s gang of misfits long-gone to whatever dark corner of the library they hid in instead of going to class.
“What was the weasel doing? He bothering you ‘Low?”
Willow snorted, “Everyone bothers me.”
She dreamt of a pale face surrounded by dark hair turned up to her, she held the pointed chin in her hand and smiled with all of her teeth and with her other hand she coaxed long black lines onto closed lashes.
She didn’t want those eyes to open, to see her, she wasn’t ready. And so she painted a perfect, expert line as slowly as she could.
Around her, red petals fell from the sky and the scent of them made her dizzy.
They sat on the dirt-encrusted hood of an abandoned pick-up truck in the overgrown parkinglot outside a forgotten warehouse and looked up the stars. Amy picked up a rusty pipe and sent it hurling into one of the dark windows without twitching a muscle. The sound of glass shattering and falling made them feel alive and the power in their blood made them feel fragile and so they destroyed something already dead.
“Do you ever get just like… so bored, ‘Low? Like you could just scream and scream?” Amy lazily spun an old, deflated tire over their heads and the stars above flashed through and around it like a strobe light in a club.
Willow flung the tire away, it barreled through a wall and landed with a loud THUNK somewhere they couldn’t see.
She smelled something sticky sweet and dangerous in the air and it wasn’t Amy and it wasn’t the night and it wasn’t their magick; she slid off the hood of the truck and walked away without responding.
She dreamt of skin beneath her lips and fingers and tongue, pale as milk and cold to the touch. Skin that smelled a bit like dust and like decaying flowers and like pain, if there was such a smell. She bit into the pale thigh and hummed with frustration at her weak, dull human teeth.
She dared not raise her head to look into those dark eyes.
(It wasn’t time yet, the stars were still singing loud enough to turn her insides into something darker than the night sky and she needed time to adjust.)
She walked through a deserted park, stepping over the still body of a bloody child without hesitating, and listened only to the moon and the wind and not to the beating of her own fragile heart.
The stars sang.
She stopped wondering about her world right around the time she took Amy her homework and found two identical girls facing her. She killed one simply, with a flick of her wrist. Amy told her later that there was more, that her eyes turned black and that she smiled like she enjoyed it. They knew weird the way that movies and magazines proclaimed to understand what it was to be normal.
But they weren’t dead. (Not like the others.)
She dreamt and screamed with the might of it.
This can’t be a dream, she whispered to the dark head between her thighs.
Who said you were dreaming?
She woke up flushed and panting, her fingers reaching inside of her as if they could rip the secrets of the universe out of her lips with just the perfect touch.
On the swingset sat a girl in red with dark hair and dark eyes.
“I dreamed about you,” Willow said without preamble.
“I dreamed about you,” the girl smiled back.
She cocked her head back and looked at the stars. Willow did the same. The stars screamed their song and threatened to come crashing down to earth. Willow shook her head in warning (she could warn the night sky with her dark eyes and her short hair and her small, human heart).
The girl held out her hand and Willow put her hand (her burden, her power, her strength) into the small pale hand and they lead each other to a place where the stars couldn’t see.
She never dreamed as a child; closed her eyes and then opened them again as if only seconds had passed.
She didn’t dream now, with her dark-haired mistress. Or maybe she did, it didn’t matter.
They screamed to the night sky and kept the stars in place with the might of their clear voices.
“I thought you hated that scarf,” Amy ripped the purple silk scarf off Willow’s neck and tossed it aside disgustedly.
Her eyes rested on the two matching scars on Willow’s neck for only the smallest of moments before she grinned her wicked grin and someone across the room began gagging and a girl started shrieking.
“Maggots,” she winked.
That’s what they all were, the hub-bub of the school, their sweaty stinking growing teenage bodies longing for meaning and purpose and herding to and fro as if being part of a crowd would give them meaning.
The gang swept by in a hurry and Faith’s eyes flicked over Willow’s scars with a sense of knowing that mattered but didn’t matter. (She had ones to match on her thighs, on her stomach, beneath her left breast, behind her ear where no one could see.) Their eyes met and that was enough, they both knew everything they needed to know. Faith continued on to play hero and Willow lifted her legs up into her best friend’s lap with a happy sigh.
“If you don’t change your answer for number seven we’ll both be suspended,” Willow handed over the Psychology assignment.
Amy shrugged, “Vacation?”
“Disneyland.”
“Cool.”
She knelt between her lover’s legs and sipped and sucked and licked and felt whole and clean and dirty and used and bruised and alive and dead. She didn’t ask for a name or a meaning or a deed or a mission.
A hand grasped at her hair and pulled her up with a yank and it felt like a burden and like release.
“The stars sing of war,” the dark beauty said in her sing-song voice.
Willow rolled her eyes.
“Be my knight,” she whispered in a tone that suggested it wasn’t a suggestion or a request, it was an edict from a Queen.
Willow flopped on her back and reached her hands above her head, “Sit on my face and scream for me.”
They came together under the stars and it was bliss it was perfection it was hollow and it was thick as custard pie.
As they tore down the street in Amy’s father’s secretary’s car, a firetruck screamed in the opposite direction, lights flashing and siren interrupting Willow’s favorite song. She frowned and clicked the button on the dashboard to make the song begin again from the beginning.
Amy whipped her head forward and settled low in her seat, “Looks like it’s headed for the school, should we go… like? Help?”
They were the strongest fucking witches in all of Sunnydale. Proven it a time or two, when Faith wasn’t around or too busy with her own otherworldly drama.
“Nah,” Willow lifted one shoulder and dropped it heavily. What was the point?
“Think it’s your girlfriend?” Amy pressed a few miles out of town.
“Probably,” Willow changed the radio station and they sang along to something sticky-sweet and harmonized terribly and giggled all the way to Disneyland.
She dreamt of ashes and smoke.
Are you dead this time, she whispered to the head pressed against her shoulder.
I can’t die, was the answer. I live in your heart.
She woke up laughing.