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There’s always been a darkness inside of her.
It creeps along her spine, blooms in her lungs and gives the air a metallic scent, slithers through her veins like a toxic sludge and stirs in her bones at the worst moments.
Audrey hates it. Of all the things about her that have been difficult to accept — her anger issues, her bicuriosity, her overwhelming need to feel when she absolutely shouldn’t be — the darkness has been the most difficult by far. And being best friends with Emma Duval (and having a pastor for a father) certainly didn’t make it any easier.
See, Emma is like this overwhelming beacon of light. She radiates goodness, has this own special kind of warmth to her, and everywhere she goes, she just glows. Sometimes, when Audrey touches her, she thinks maybe she shares that glow, if only for a couple of seconds. It dissipates quickly, though.
Audrey’s mother always called Emma an angel. And actually, it’s fitting. Very fitting. Because if Emma is the angel, then Audrey’s definitely the devil. The Lucifer to her Michael (or maybe some other angelic name, Audrey hasn’t been to bible school in ten years), the wings to her pointed tail. They contrast, they clash, but at the same time, they come together so beautifully for so many years that it usually doesn’t even bother Audrey.
There are moments, though. Like all of her thirteenth year, for example. That was the year of change and disappointment, the year when Audrey’s mother had given her the key necklace and received her first chemo port in Boston, the year that Emma’s smile first seemed to shine a little brighter and the boys seemed to whisper about her a little louder. The year she’d met Noah, but also the year Emma had denounced him as “kind of a geek” (she’d later apologize for that, but the words had done their damage at the time). And there’d been one month in particular that the darkness had really crept in, had settled just under her skin and rattled Audrey, terrified her, if she was honest. February, she thinks. Definitely a winter month, because she distinctly remembers the gray sky and the slight chill in the air, the dark mornings and dark afternoons, the weather that seemed to so perfectly reflect the darkness inside of her. She never liked winter after that month.
That February, her father had come home from church early one night to find Audrey sneaking out of her bedroom window to go to Noah’s house. Noah’s a year older than her, had been fourteen-going-on-fifteen back then, so her dad already hadn’t liked him. But to find Audrey sneaking out to meet him, especially in ripped jeans that he thought flashed just a little too much thigh — well, her dad really didn’t like that. He’d grounded her, of course, and immediately lectured her on “proper dress” and “treating your body like a temple, because God doesn’t like promiscuous girls”. The words had curled in Audrey’s ears and stayed there, a thick smoke settling over her brain for the rest of the month. Her father had always been distant, had always tried to shove his religion on her (maybe because he’d always suspected that she was unconventional, a girl who would refuse to conform to the standards that a leather-bound book had set for her), but that month, he’d been especially bad. That night was the turning point for him, the night he decided Audrey was too rebellious to be saved, though he’d left his Bible open on her dresser plenty of mornings, always turned to some verse about fighting against the darkness in you or “casting Satan out”.
Maybe he’d thought it would help her, in some twisted way. But it hadn’t helped Audrey. It hadn’t made the darkness go away. It just made it worse. That month, she’d swiped too many bottles of tequila from the liquor store to count, tried to persuade Emma to crash high school parties too many times, slept too many hours and cried too little. Audrey’d never felt like that before; she’s not really a crier, but she’d never before had the experience of wanting to cry, but instead just staring numbly at the ceiling or, worse, punching something till the physical pain overtook the emotional one.
It was scary, and Audrey couldn’t have been more grateful when the darkness seemed to retreat come March. And then, in April, Noah introduced her to the wonder of filmmaking. He’d had this little camera lying abandoned in a desk in his room for as long as Audrey’d known him, something he’d received for his twelfth birthday a few years ago but had never used, and that spring, he gave it to Audrey. “You’ve got an artistic eye, Audrey,” he’d told her. “I’ve always thought you might be able to do something with this. Might as well give it a try, right?”
Noah had been right; Audrey’d fallen in love with the crappy little camera, and, after using it to the point of breakage, had eventually saved up enough money to purchase a better camera. And that was it; that was how she became the filmmaker, the girl permanently attached to the lens. Filmmaking maybe didn’t make her better, but it was a distraction. The darkness was just a tiny thought at the back of her mind when she was behind the camera. And Audrey loved it. Her drawers filled up with SD cards faster than she could organize them, and her father was just happy to see her more rebellious stage ebb away (although the rebellion never truly left her).
But Audrey has come to learn that happiness never lasts for long. And things changed after Emma left her for Nina’s group. Because Emma had been her balance. She’d absorbed the darkness, took it as it came and acted like it was nothing, would just laugh and throw another smile Audrey’s way. And without her, Audrey went totally off-kilter. Emma made her want to be good, but without that, who was there to tell her not to be bad? Her father wasn’t really there anymore; he’d given up on Audrey as a lost cause a long time ago. And Noah, well, he thought that Audrey’s darkness extended as far as maybe being a little too vicious with her kills in Call of Duty. He didn’t know everything Emma knew, hadn’t seen the things she’d seen. He couldn’t understand.
So Audrey let the darkness come in. It didn’t take over — the filmmaking still helped too much with that, and Noah eased the pain just enough in ways he didn’t realize — but it was there, and Audrey hated herself more than ever.
Meeting Rachel should’ve helped, but it didn’t. Because Rachel had the darkness in her, too. It was a different kind of darkness — a sorrow, a deep, lonely, I am ugly and I will never be good enough brand of sadness — but it drew Audrey in. It was beautiful to her, in a sick way, and she’d enjoyed the way that she and Rachel were so similar and yet so different. They were both dark, yes, but in different ways. Rachel had to let her darkness bleed out, or she’d shatter. Audrey kept her darkness bottled up, even though she knew that one day it’d make her explode. And it was twisted, and it was wrong, but Audrey had found comfort in it. Rachel was good to have after Emma. Because the thing about being best friends for so long with someone who’s so pure, so good, such an angel when you’re so not is that it starts to weigh on you after a while. Loving Emma was heavy. Loving Rachel was not.
She’d written Piper, and that should’ve helped, too, but it didn’t. Writing to Piper just made the darkness more prominent, left her feeling more bitter and upset. Meeting Piper didn’t help, either. She was bright, too bright, and looking back on it, Audrey knows she should’ve seen it for what it was, fake, but back then, it had just made her feel inferior.
Then everything started to happen, so quickly that it felt more like a movie, or one of those flip books, something that was being played right before her eyes but that Audrey wasn’t really having time to fully process. The video, it had brought out so much anger. And that night with Rachel in the car, Audrey almost let the darkness overtake her. If it hadn’t been for the other darkness sitting in the car next to her, the darkness that was just a little bit lighter, or at least light enough to take her keys and throw them in the brush — well, Audrey doesn’t know what would have happened that night if not for that.
And everything was just anger. The video was released, and Audrey was angry. Emma came back, and she was angrier. Rachel died, and Audrey was so angry that she thought she’d burst (to this day, she doesn’t know how she didn’t). And she spent that whole time comparing herself to Emma, contrasting the light and the dark like she had back when they were kids, except back then, Emma’s light had been a comfort. Emma’s warmth had soothed her, had taken away from the chill in her own veins. But by that point, Audrey had been in the dark for so long that Emma’s light just hurt her eyes.
And now, she’s killed someone. She’s done the darkest thing a human being can possibly do, literally ended a life (or, well, helped to end a life, she guesses, since Emma technically fired the fatal shot) — and Audrey feels nothing. Or maybe it’s not nothing, maybe it’s more like she feels so much that it all blurs together and ends up feeling like nothing — kind of like white noise.
The rest of the town calls her a hero for it, but Audrey’s father is ashamed of her. It’s a sin, he says. She killed someone. God won’t forgive that. “God is the only person who has the right to take a life, Audrey. Are you God? No, you are not,” he thunders one day. The words ring in Audrey’s ears for weeks.
Emma’s at rehab. Kieran’s wherever the hell pretty bad boys with possible PTSD end up. Brooke and Jake party their grief away, and Audrey could probably do that, too, but she doesn’t even have it in her to socialize. She spends her weekends curled up with whatever brand of alcohol she’s managed to get her hands on this time, drinking till her thoughts slow enough to let her breathe, till the vivid pictures of nooses and bloody hands leave her mind and she is effectively numb to the world around her. And maybe she could try to channel her trauma in a more productive way, or maybe she could try to find comfort in Noah — but no, that’s not even possible, because Noah’s dark now, too. Not as dark as she is, of course — she’s reaching Piper Shaw levels now, except without the dash of psychopathy — but he’s been touched by it, had death brush its fingers against his soul when Riley Marra bled out on that rooftop, and it’s changed him. He doesn’t make as many corny jokes now, and Audrey sometimes catches him just staring at the wall, lost in thought, and she knows his mind is filled with Riley.
She wants to be there for him, but her head is underwater, and she’s just fighting to survive now. The darkness is coming for her, has her in its grasp, and it’s so cliché, so expected of her, but Audrey does it anyway, tries to drink the dark away to the point where it starts to scare her. But the fear is much better, much easier to handle than the darkness, so she just tells herself to woman up and get over it.
Then Emma comes back, and things should be better, but they’re really not, because with the return of her old best friend also comes the return of psychological torture, the work of a new killer this time. Audrey is the target this time, and she can’t even tell anyone. At least when Brooke walks out of the auditorium covered in her boyfriend’s blood, she can talk to someone about it. (Audrey immediately feels guilty for even thinking that.) Meanwhile, Audrey’s got the deaths of so many on her hands, and if she says a word to anyone, people will start dropping like flies.
Audrey has to wonder if this killer has known her since birth, or at least long enough to know her for who she really is, because it’s like they know about her darkness. It’s like they know how it will kill her inside, the way that this torture invites the darkness, how the weight of her obligatory silence allows it to seep into every part of her and, eventually, become her armor. Emma’s lightness used to be her armor, the thing that protected her, but now Emma feels worlds away, and the very thing that Audrey hates has become her shield.
And Emma is also who Audrey’s trying to protect the most. She can’t find out that Audrey brought Piper to Lakewood. Not only will it destroy their friendship, but it will destroy Emma. It will feel like a personal betrayal to her, and it will eat her alive. Audrey can’t let that happen. So she protects her, and it’s ironic, really, because this must be the first time in history a devil has protected an angel rather than corrupted them. (Audrey’s father would have a good laugh at that one, if he remembered how to laugh anymore.)
It’s so much to bear, and even though she’s got the rest of the “Lakewood Six” (or “Lakewood Five”, rather) going through similar things with her, Audrey has never felt more alone. It’s too much to handle, at times. The day she holds the bookend over Noah’s head, she goes home and screams into her pillow, so loudly and for so long that she loses her voice the next day. “What am I doing?” she ends up sobbing into her bedspread. “This is taking over me.” After she finds the corkscrew in her bed, Audrey scrubs herself raw in the shower. The perpetual dirty feeling never leaves her. She is dark and she is dirty. She is nothing like Emma, and nothing like the rest of them. She is a devil amongst angels. Maybe she deserves this. Actually, scratch the maybe — she definitely deserves this.
And then it all comes to a head. She finds herself in the orphanage, still a little woozy, head throbbing, with a chain wrapped around Kieran Wilcox’s throat. Emma’s bloodied and covered in dirt, actual dirt, not the metaphorical kind, and she’s got a gun to his head. And Audrey’s hands are shaking, because she has a life in her hands, she could literally pull this chain a little tighter and suffocate him, or maybe pull it even harder and break his neck — and it’s terrifying, but also exhilarating. Which terrifies her even further, because she shouldn’t want to kill someone this badly. She shouldn’t be snarling at her best friend to just do it already. She shouldn’t be encouraging an angel to blow the brains out of another devil like her.
The darkness is a tornado around her, consuming her in it, and Audrey can’t see this ending any other way. Kieran can’t walk out of here alive. One of them has to do it, because he’s hurt them and dammit, he deserves to die. And Audrey wants it so badly that it burns, it’s like acid on her tongue and in her chest and veins.
But then she sees it. There’s a nasty little glint in Emma’s eye. She’s going to do it. And the darkness cackles at it, but Audrey wants to scream.
Emma puts the gun down. The police stream in, and Kieran’s taken away in a blur of handcuffs and hissed Miranda rights. And Audrey sags under the weight of it all, because fuck. Emma was going to do it. Emma was going to blow Kieran’s brains out, like she’d told her to. She almost corrupted her light.
The guilt is overwhelming, but Emma mistakes it for lingering fear, and so she lets Audrey’s head fall on her shoulder and pulls her closer. And again, it’s ironic, because Audrey’s never heard before of an angel wrapping her wings around a devil.
Emma goes back to therapy after Kieran’s reveal, though not back to rehab (and Audrey’s happy about that, because, selfishly, she doesn’t know if she could handle it). Noah and Brooke go, too, and pretty soon Audrey’s the only one not in therapy. She has a moment of bravery and asks her dad, once, when the darkness doesn’t let her sleep and ends up scaring her too much, but he just scowls at her and says, “Therapy can’t help you, Audrey. What you need is to pray. Pray for forgiveness from God. That is the only thing that can make you feel better.”
It’s bullshit. Audrey’s been an atheist since she was thirteen, though her father doesn’t know that, so she just resorts back to her old method of drinking her feelings and punching the pain and darkness away. She likes to tell herself it’s working, and she believes it for a while, until Emma walks in one hot summer day and finds her, knuckles bloody and raw, collapsed against her punching bag and an empty bottle of tequila by her side.
“This is too much, Audrey,” Emma tells her, so gently that Audrey worries one of them will break, as she bandages her knuckles and throws the tequila in the trash. “This needs to stop. You need help — actual help, not alcohol and a workout — and I don’t care what your dad says. You’re getting it. I’m taking you to my therapist tomorrow, whether you want to go or not. You can’t keep going like this anymore.”
Emma follows through, and drags her there, practically kicking and screaming, the next morning. The first few sessions are pointless, and Audrey gets a long lecture at home when the insurance company calls her father with a billing question about the therapy — but the crazy thing is, Emma’s mom calls him when he finds out and convinces him to let her keep going, and it actually starts to work. She can feel the darkness inching away, its hold slipping, and Audrey hasn’t been this hopeful since she was a little girl picking daffodils.
That’s not to say she doesn’t have bad days. One week in particular, when it all almost gets to be too much, they’re lying on her bed, her and Emma, talking about nothing, and Audrey asks, “Em, do you think I’m gonna go to hell?”
Emma doesn’t get it at first. “What?” she says sleepily, still entranced by the old star stickers on Audrey’s ceiling.
“Do you think I’m going to go to hell?” Audrey repeats.
Next to her, Emma immediately sits up and stares at her. “What?! No! Of course not!” she says fiercely. Audrey scoffs, but this only seems to egg her best friend on, as the girl continues, “Audrey, you’re such a good person, you have no idea. You care, and you’re loyal, and amazing, and I love you so much, I don’t know why you don’t love yourself, but you should.”
Stupid as it is, it actually brings tears to Audrey’s eyes, and she finds a genuine smile forming on her face for the first time in a long time. How can someone so light think that someone like me, someone so dark, is so good? She goes to her therapy appointment the next day with a new kind of fire in her, a determination to fix whatever problems are still left inside of her to deal with. Because the only person who can fix her is herself. Emma can’t fix her; it’s not her job to fix her, but alcohol and a punching bag certainly won’t fix her, either. Neither will religion. Audrey has to fix herself, or at least try to — and so she does.
And in this process, she learns something: in the end, the darkness will never truly leave. It’s a part of her, and it’s a part that Audrey struggles to accept, but it’s something she can’t change, and so she has to learn to try to live with it. She’ll never be wholly light like Emma. She stays dark, just like the moon, and Emma’s by her side, her sun, through it all.
But the beautiful thing about the moon is that it reflects the sun’s light. It stays dark, and it doesn’t have to change that to be able to find light. Emma is the sun, and in the end, Audrey finds herself reflecting her light. Audrey is her moon. And that’s the kind of darkness she can accept.