Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s Rachel’s first day at her new high school, and she’s currently preoccupied with swiping back and forth on the homescreen of her phone. Applications slide back and forth with cheery persistence. Twelve minutes ago she’d given up on flicking around her message app – nobody’s going to contact her. The difference in timezone between here and England is too large, even if the acquaintances she’d made at hom—across the pond had been the sort to keep in touch. There’s nothing to do but sit here in the office and wait, as instructed. The room smells like tongue depressors and the cheap perfume the secretary was wearing when she handed Rachel her schedule and told her that her assigned student representative would be here any moment now.

Any moment now.

The time on Rachel’s phone ticks over to 8:52. Her phone’s at 55% battery. She’s going to die here.

And with that thought comes the thought that Rachel keeps trying to banish: she could leave. She could get up and leave right now, leave this school, leave the schedule in her pristine new backpack with labels like honors and IB and absolutely nothing that interests her. She could get on a train and go—

Where. Go where.

She slides her finger back across her phone. 0 new messages. 0 new calls. It’s 8:54 and Rachel has been sitting in this uncomfortable plastic chair since 8:30 and she wants to stand up and smash it into the floor over and over until it shatters. Until everything shatters.

(She wants to go home.)

(No she doesn’t. There’s nothing in England for her either. It’s more the tug in her chest, like a fishhook, pulling her towards an idea of home that doesn’t exist.)

8:55 and a bell screams. Rachel bites down on the inside of her lip as hard as she possibly can and thus crushes the urge to jump or flinch at the sounds of humanity stampeding through the hallways. She knows her first class is free period – at least, that’s what the schedule says – but she’s furious at her host anyways for not being here when Rachel needed someone to be here.

She could head out into the crowd on her own. She probably should. She’s sure she can find her classroom, but: she’s never known how to do anything besides following rules. So here she sits, angry and angrier. Outside in the hallways friends meet each other, grasp hands like lifelines in the middle of the faceless crowd. Rachel watches them through the window, holds her phone tightly in her own hands to keep from twisting them together.

8:58. The crowds dwindle, vanish. The secretary clears her throat at the desk. Rachel recrosses her legs, one over the other. Behind her, a clock ticks away idle seconds.

The door crashes open. This time, Rachel jumps almost a centimeter into the air. She levels her best glare at the door, meets the eyes of the person standing in the doorway. It’s a girl wearing overlarge grey gym clothes, a peeling logo of some sort of bird on the chest of her baggy shirt. She has a pile of blonde hair that looks barely attached to her head, wide eyes, big pink bags tucked above her cheekbones. There is sweat all over her.

Also, she’s holding a pudding cup.

Rachel’s glare sputters, dies out in the face of – confusion, mostly, a little bit of disgust. The girl blinks at her, fumbles in the pocket of her sweatpants – the pocket looks like it was cut out with a knife, ragged and sharp – and pulls out a piece of paper. Looks at it. Looks at Rachel. Moves the pudding cup to her other hand so she can point.

“You,” she says, “are Rachel?”

Say no, says a voice in Rachel’s head.

“Yes,” she says, voice strained.

The girl’s face brightens; a smile wriggles at the corner of her mouth, like a worm, but doesn’t settle. She reaches back into the pocket of her sweatpants as she lopes across the room. “I am Helena,” she says. “You are new! I was also new, once. So I will help you, to not be new.”

She makes it across the room in time to get what she wanted: she shoves both hands at Rachel. In one hand is the pudding cup. In the other: a plastic spoon, probably from the bottom of her pocket. Rachel sees lint on it, closes her eyes tightly for a second.

“I was told you were going to be showing me to my class,” she says, and makes a show of looking at the clock.

Helena’s brow furrows sadly at the rejection of the pudding cup before she also looks at the clock and her eyes go comically wide. “Oops,” she says, and unfolds the piece of paper. Sucks her lips between her teeth, looks at it. “Mand—” she wrinkles her nose at it, shrugs a little. “Room 104! Okay. Follow, Rachel. I will show you.”

“We’re going to be late,” Rachel says, but she grabs her backpack and goes. Next to her Helena cheerily rips open the pudding cup and starts eating it.

“Sorry,” she says through a mouthful of pudding. “I was going to leave! To get you! But we were playing sports, and the Jay-arr-oh-tee-cee boys make angry scrunchy faces when they lose.” She demonstrates. There’s pudding smeared around her lips. Rachel tries desperately to let her sheer disgust rise to the front of her eyes, but Helena is either blissfully ignorant or very good at appearing that way. She just takes another bite of pudding. Waves it in Rachel’s direction.

“Do you still not want?” she says. “Lunch is not for two hours, maybe. So long.”

“Yes,” Rachel says. “I can assure you, you’re welcome to it.”

It’s just the two of them in the empty hallway. Another bell rings and Rachel winces at the sound.

“Now we are late,” Helena says. She sucks noisily at the spoon before pulling it out with a wet pop and looking at Rachel. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I did want to get you there on time, I promise. Next time will go better, I think.”

“Perhaps I should find my classes on my own,” Rachel says through gritted teeth.

Helena skids to a stop, points at her with the pudding spoon. “No,” she says, the word angry and echoing in the empty hall. “I am supposed to help you and keep you safe. I will not make you be alone. Nobody has to be alone.”

She shoves the spoon back in her mouth, almost angry. She looks distraught. She’s going to hurt you, says a voice in Rachel’s brain, and Rachel ignores it. Instead she looks ahead in the hallway. There’s 104.

“Well,” she says, “you’re relieved of your duties.” She gestures at the door, slips around Helena before Helena can – oh, god, do something like hug her. She doesn’t turn around to see the look on Helena’s face before she opens the door and walks inside.

There are only seven people in Rachel’s higher-level Mandarin class, which doesn’t surprise her. Back hom—

Back in England there were ten, maybe twelve. She wasn’t expecting very much of this school. She scans the class anyways, looking for – something. Allies, rivals, anyone on her level, anyone she can crush. Mostly it’s just a collection of bored-looking teenagers. Only some of them meet her eyes. None of them have the gaze she’s looking for, eyes like scalpels. So she looks at the teacher instead.

The introduction is dull. The class itself, less so – Rachel’s always had an intellectual appreciation for languages. There’s a reason she’s taking two classes, testing in both. (Part of the reason: her mother’s voice, wrapped like silk around the razor blade of the word necessary. It’s necessary, Rachel. For your future.)

(Rachel hates the way her mother says future. The way it sounds, like dropping a pebble into a well and only hearing the lonely echo. The way it tastes on your tongue, cold and empty as dark water.)

She passes the time well enough, scratching characters in her notebook, letting her mind blank out and become only what it needs to be: a machine, input-output and nothing more. It’s a relief. It’s the best feeling Rachel knows: when you stop feeling worthless and start feeling nothing at all.

She’s jolted out of it when the bell rings. She hates the impulse to jump, hates it with a sharp hot pain at her breastbone. Around her everyone stampedes out the door and Rachel takes her time methodically putting her notebook into her backpack. Zipping her backpack shut. It’s time for lunch, and outside she can hear what sounds like every student in this building screaming. Inside her backpack is a hand-packed lunch from her father, and she knows he’s left her a note at the bottom, and she just wants to leave here and get on a bus and go.

She stands up. She slings her backpack over her back, opens the door.

Helena’s waiting for her in the hallway, eating what look like pork rinds from a bag. “There you are!” she says delightedly. “I looked for you in the crowd, but did not see. I am glad you are not squashed.”

“You didn’t have to wait,” Rachel says tightly. “In fact—”

“But now you are here,” Helena says over her, “and we can eat lunch.” She blinks owlishly at Rachel and then starts walking backwards through the less-crowded hallway, shoving her pork rinds into the pocket of her oversized coat. Apparently she’s found time to change: she’s wearing an enormous stained green parka, combat boots, layers of black and grey and green. She looks like moss, perhaps, or mold. Rachel doesn’t know why she’s following her. But she is.

Helena turns back around, sets a deliberate pace through the crowd. Despite herself, Rachel’s impressed: the girl looks like she’s going to fall over any second, but she moves through the crowd like a knifeblade. Rachel follows her easily enough, watching the jump and bob of her unwashed curls as they go.

There’s a set of double doors and Helena slams through them like a battering ram with a mission. Rachel looks around the room inside and hates, hates in a way that feels too much like fear. Her previous school hadn’t had a cafeteria. Her previous school had let her leave, at lunchtime, and she’d never felt any inclination to stay among the pack-language of crowded tables and overcooked meat. Now here she is. And here is Helena, loading up a tray with three ladlefuls of something that makes a glop sound when she pours it on her tray. Rachel stands in line behind her, hands folded together in front of her body as tight as she can. She looks around the room with something like desperation, hoping for – herself, maybe, a collection of girls who look like steel blades.

None emerge. All Rachel can see are tables that her brain labels AVOID AVOID AVOID in big bold letters – a collection of boys with shaved heads, wearing matching olive-green army uniforms; a group of people huddled around some sort of gameboard; some squabbling adolescents engaged in what looks to be a game involving tossing fries into the air and catching them in their mouths. The dregs of humanity, essentially. Also: the entire cafeteria smells like old meat and unwashed bodies. Rachel feels it again, that homesickness for a place that doesn’t exist. She turns back around.

“Do you need food?” Helena says, once she’s loaded her tray with…food…and Jell-O.

“No,” Rachel says. “I brought my own.”

“Clever,” Helena says, and dives back into the masses. Rachel follows, because she doesn’t know what else to do. Around they go, all the way to the back of the room where Helena drops her tray with a sigh on a mostly-empty table. There are only two other people at it: a chubby, nervous-looking boy and a redheaded girl writing what appears to be a letter. As soon as Helena drops her tray they both give her their Jell-O cups without looking up. Helena thumps down at the table, tears open one of the cups. Rachel sits down next to her, gets her bag. Rummages through it, finds a piece of paper labeled My dear Rachel, rips it into halves and quarters and eighths and makes a neat pile of it in front of her at the table.

Helena makes a gulping hlawf sound through a mouthful of Jell-O and gestures to Rachel. “This is Rachel,” she says to the table. “She is my yahnya.”

“Hey,” says the boy, beaming at her vacantly. “I’m Donnie, and uh – that’s Gracie.” Gracie keeps frowning at her page, doesn’t look up. “She’s a little – preoccupied.”

“She is writing a letter to her boyfriend,” Helena stage-whispers. “Her parents do not let her have a telephone, because the devil lives inside of it. And so she is Juliet, and Mark is Romeo with ugly hair.”

“I don’t think that’s how the play goes,” Donnie says.

“Good,” Helena says grandly. “I am better than Shakespeare. We are enemies. I will fight him, someday.”

“He’s dead,” Gracie says without looking up, “and you said you weren’t going to fight any more authors.”

“One more author,” Helena says. “There is much time in the year, Grace, and I want to fight.”

“No,” Gracie says calmly. She flips over to another page. Rachel has absolutely no idea how to contribute to this inanity, so she just unpacks her lunch and starts eating it. She keeps her sandwich in its bag, so no one can see that the crusts are cut off.

“So, you’re new here, huh?” Donnie says, poking at his…food…with a look of mild disgust.

“Yes,” Rachel says. She slides her phone out of her pocket, opens it up, cuts off feeling before checking it. No new notifications. Which is fine. Maybe she’ll download solitaire.

“What classes are you taking?”

She looks up, meets Donnie’s eyes. Blinks. Looks back down. Navigates to the application store, starts reading reviews for solitaire games.

“Man-drin,” Helena says. She dumps a Jell-O cup like a carcass next to her tray, moves on to the next one. “You have history four-b, yes?”

She’d forgotten Helena also had a copy of her schedule. She locks her phone, looks up. “Yes,” she says. This is a waste of time, breathes something in the back of her mind that sounds like her mother’s voice. These people are a waste of time.

“Is the teacher…adequate,” she says with a stab of something like spite in her belly.

“Ha, yeah, that means actually…paying attention in that class,” Donnie says awkwardly. Helena snorts, loudly, and Donnie scowls. His face goes bright red, the color of Gracie’s hair. “Shut up,” he mutters.

“I pay attention,” Helena says innocently. “I am not looking at anyone’s ponytails.” She sticks a spoonful of Jell-O – the second cup is yellow – into her mouth and grins around the handle of the spoon.

“I’m not – Helena!” Donnie hisses, ducking his head down and looking furtively around the cafeteria as if he’s hiding a secret that anyone in the world cares about. “Alison sits in front of me, okay, it’s not like I’m—”

“Who said Alison?” Helena says, very obviously having the time of her life. “No one said any words about Alison Hendrix, but since you have a bright red face—”

Gracie puts down her pen, rotates her wrist with a long exhalation. Rachel chooses to focus on her instead while Helena and Donnie devolve into an argument that seems to consist of Donnie loudly yelling stop and Helena making kissing sounds. At this point she’s desperate for any sort of alternative.

“Hi,” says Gracie, smiling awkwardly. “Sorry about – um. Donnie’s had a crush on Alison since middle school, and Helena…” they both look over. Helena’s started waggling her tongue. “Helena’s weird.” She lets out a little giggle, half to herself.

“You just got here, right?” she says, voice soft. “Were your classes okay?”

Gracie’s eyes are very wide and very sincere. Rachel’s mind moves rapidly from the realization that Gracie feels bad for her to a tangled string of ideas on how to take advantage of this, how to break her. Her clothing is cheap and her letter is likely achingly sincere and Gracie is made of strings that Rachel could pull. She could rip her apart. But it wouldn’t fix this school and it wouldn’t fix Rachel.

It would be satisfying, though. Short term.

“I wouldn’t know,” Rachel says, “I’ve only had the one.”

“Mandarin,” Gracie says, ducking her head in a sad approximation of a nod. “I tried German. I was – bad at it.”

(Rachel leans across the table. I have German tomorrow, she says. I excel at it. Ten years from now, when I am sitting at a conference table talking to someone important and you come in to serve me my tea, what language do you think I’ll be speaking in?

Do you think you’ll even be serving me my tea, Gracie? Do you think you’ll make it that far up the ladder?)

“Languages aren’t for everyone,” Rachel says, the words like splinters of glass in her throat. “I’m sure you must have other talents.” She lets the words ring slightly bitter, a little mocking, just enough to ease the sour taste from her throat. Across the table Gracie bites her lip, avoids Rachel’s eyes for a second. They both know, Rachel thinks, that she doesn’t.

Rachel can see the note on the table out of the corner of her eye. She wishes she hadn’t left it there. She can see the word hope in her father’s chickenscratch handwriting and she’s terrified that Gracie can see it too.

“You finished!” Helena says brightly, and Rachel tears her eyes away from love, and excel, and a piece of paper that just says prou. Helena’s looking at Gracie, and has started making kissing noises at her as well. “How long is this letter,” she says.

“Four pages,” Gracie mutters, ducking her head down and trying to crush her smile. Her face flushes.

Helena flaps her hand grandly. “Go, then,” she says. “Your puppy love makes me sick. Take it away from me.” She grins, her tongue poking out from between her teeth. Gracie sticks her tongue out – Helena sticks hers back – and Gracie shoves the letter into an envelope and piles her food on her tray.

“Nice meeting you, Rachel,” she says, smiling. Then she dives into the crowd. Next to Rachel, Helena finishes her food and piles the empty Jell-O cups on her tray. She looks over at Rachel’s end of the table, eyes scavenger-curious, and Rachel sweeps the pile of shredded note-paper into her fist. Doesn’t touch the rest of her lunch. She’ll throw it away on her way out the door, on her way home.

(Home.)

“Are you finished?” Helena asks.

“Yes.”

“Class, then,” Helena says, standing up and grabbing her tray. “This time we will not be late.”

Rachel shoves her lunch bag back in her backpack, looks at her schedule while Helena and Donnie exchange goodbyes. English, apparently. Then Biology. Then the day is over; she feels this should bring her some sense of relief, but it mostly just makes her tired. She pulls her backpack over her shoulders and follows Helena into the crowd. She doesn’t make eye contact with Donnie. She can smell the social death on him, the stink of failure like old milk; she can smell it on Helena too, but Helena is necessary to her and so cannot be abandoned. Donnie, though. Donnie she leaves behind at the table, and she follows Helena with her hands linked together. White-knuckled.

Chapter Text

It turns out Helena is – somehow – in Rachel’s English class. Rachel learns this when they reach the classroom and Helena charges inside without explanation. She stares at the closed door for a moment, blinking wildly, before more students charge into the classroom and she comes back into herself. One of them pauses to look at her as she goes in – it’s one of the girls from Rachel’s Mandarin class, only recognizable by the burn scar that distorts half of her face. Rachel feels the heat of her own eyes tracing along it and the girl twitches, ducks inside. Rachel rewinds her own memory and her brain whispers she felt bad for you and – the thought of being pitied by someone like that is more than she can stand. So she goes inside.

The classroom is loud and raucous, filled with students draped over their uncomfortable school-regulated chairs in order to gossip with one another. The girl with the scar has sat herself all the way in the back row, hoodie drawstrings pulled tight so that her hood covers her face. She’s the only person Rachel recognizes in the mess. She lets her eyes skip away from her, flit around the room. Two girls are gossiping with their desks pushed together, one of them with bangs and a ponytail – that’s Alison, then – and one of them with blonde hair that falls around her shoulders. Rachel considers, for a moment, before she sees – oh, god, a handmade friendship bracelet. No. Absolutely not.

Near the front is a loud argument between a tall, scruffy-looking boy and a girl with dreadlocks. Rachel’s already discounted them (dreadlocks), but she overhears you don’t know shit about being a dungeonmaster, Morrison and shoves the thought as far to the back of her mind as she possibly can. God. The girl in the next chair over, blonde hair up in a messy bun, looks almost tolerable – that is, she isn’t a part of the dungeon conversation – but her hand is laced with the hand of the dreadlocks-girl and thus by association she can’t be approached.

She keeps looking, even though she’s realized by now there’s only one empty seat.

“You were staring,” Helena says, when Rachel sits down next to her – when she approaches the desk Helena kicks her own backpack off the chair. It releases several empty chip bags with a sad sigh; Helena scoops them up and keeps talking as Rachel sits down. “They are all nice. Don’t worry. Nobody at this school uses their fists for fighting.” She smiles at Rachel, as if this was something Rachel had worried about.

“Really,” she says, the word a slow and disinterested drawl. Despite herself, she’s relieved: if there was a fight her careful construction would be demolished, heels smashed, face bruised. She has no illusions about this issue.

“Except the J-R-O-T-C boys,” Helena says. “They are like wolf puppies. Too many teeth. Too much yapping. But!” She points a bony finger near the front of the room, where Rachel can see a buzzcut and hunched shoulders. “That is Parsons. He is taking French. And also art. Him I like.”

“I fail to see how his choice in language matters.”

Helena’s mouth makes a perfect O shape. “They all take German,” she says. “All of the yappy dogs.” Her head tilts to the side. “Also you.” She looks like she’s about to continue her one-woman smear campaign against JROTC, but the teacher arrives. The classroom, grudgingly, goes calm; Helena sinks down into her seat, starts fiddling with her pen.

Rachel almost doesn’t blame her. The teacher looks the way Rachel would want to: tall and put-together, all high heels and immaculate eye makeup. Rachel puts her notebook on the desk, straightens it so the edge of it is perfectly aligned with the edge of the table. She feels the urge to sit up straighter, but: at this point, that’s not physically possible.

Up at the front Ms. Bowles takes role. A small mercy: there’s no song and dance about Rachel being new, just her name read off from the line. When she looks up Ms. Bowles is smiling at her, slightly, but she keeps going down the list just the same. Rachel looks back down. She can feel the weight of everyone’s eyes on her, burning, and she wants all of them dead. She wants to burn alive everyone who’s ever looked at her wrong.

At the front of the room Ms. Bowles has started discussing color symbolism, writing on the whiteboard with elegant flicks of the wrist. Rachel stays silent. She looks at the desk. She could own this room, she knows, if she’d had time to read the book they’re discussing. She could make everyone in the room hate her, make Ms. Bowles give her the sort of pained-pleased smiles that Rachel coaxed from all of her previous teachers. Well, you know the answer, but you needn’t be so vicious about it. She could. She should, probably. She’ll need recommendation letters soon.

She’ll read the book tonight. She doesn’t have this class for another two days; that’s plenty of time to dissect it.

She’s been taking notes this entire time on autopilot, and with a habit born of years of desperate competition tilts her eyes sideways to see Helena’s paper.

Helena is drawing an enormous scorpion storming through a city. Half the buildings are on fire. With her brow furrowed in concentration, she’s penciling in a tiny screaming mouth on some poor citizen.

Rachel goes back to the discussion.

As soon as English ends Helena is standing up, pulling food out of her backpack like she’s been starving to death slowly in the hour and a half they were in class. She slurps up an entire gummy worm and sweeps everything haphazardly into her bag. “Biology!” she says enthusiastically, hopping up and down a little bit. It’s true: that is in fact Rachel’s next class. She slides her things into her backpack, pulls it on, lets Helena lead her. She doesn’t really have a choice.

Helena offers her the bag of gummy worms. She declines.

“Do you cut open rats,” Helena says as they make their way through the hallways.

“Eventually, I’m sure,” Rachel says. Internally rolls her eyes and adds – grudgingly – “As it’s the beginning of the semester, I’m sure we’re just studying molecules.”

“I know those,” Helena says. “Itty bitty little pieces of you.” She beams proudly.

“I take it you’re not in Biology, then,” Rachel says, relieved.

“Noooo,” Helena says. “Physics! We drop things. Golf balls. Bowling balls. Eggs.” She looks at Rachel. “This I like.”

Before Helena can wax rhapsodic about the delights of dropping bowling balls, they arrive at the classroom. “Have many good times,” Helena says. “I will find you after this! And then you will be done for the day.” She smiles again. “Not so bad, no?”

Yes, Rachel thinks, but she doesn’t say that. Instead she lets herself into the room. It’s large and white to the point of sterility, lab tables made of big glossy slabs, a skeleton in the corner grinning unnervingly. Rachel sees what looks like a baby skeleton, a container full of – maggots? Some sort of worm. She doesn’t look too closely, just sets her bag down.

“Ah, you must be Rachel!” says the teacher. He’s practically vaulted his desk to head her way, grinning in a way eerily reminiscent of the skeleton over in the corner. He manages to stop right before he reaches her. Thank god.

“I am Doctor Aldous Leekie,” he says grandly. “I teach Biology.” He keeps grinning at her, waiting for her to be impressed. She isn’t. But she pulls a fake smile out of somewhere and says, almost sincere, “I’m very excited to learn from you, Doctor Leekie.”

“Good!” he says. “Glad to hear it.” Students start entering the classroom, energy visibly wilting as they pass the maggots. The girl with the dreadlocks is here, a few of the JROTC boys. That girl with the scar, again.

“Veera!” Dr. Leekie calls, and she jumps, tugs her hair around her face, heads over. Her hands are fiddling with the strings of her hoodie. Dr. Leekie claps his hands on Rachel’s shoulders – she can’t quite catch her shudder, his hands are cold and he smells like formaldehyde and he’s touching her – and waits for Veera to reach them.

“This is Rachel,” he says. “Now, I know we’ve had an uneven number, so you’ve gotten to work by yourself, but the two of you are going to be lab partners from here on out!”

Veera’s eyes twitch to Rachel and away from her, repeatedly. “I work better alone,” she says urgently.

“Nonsense,” Dr. Leekie says, “You and Niki worked so well together in Chemistry! Besides, Rachel’s new here, I’m sure you can show her the ropes better than anyone.”

Rachel and Veera frown at each other, but Veera nods quickly and Dr. Leekie’s hands drop from Rachel’s shoulders. He heads back to the front of the room.

“So,” Veera says, taking her seat. “You are Rachel.”

“And you’re Veera,” Rachel says dryly. “We don’t actually have to talk, you know.”

Veera peers at her through the fringe of her hair. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I just – I really work much better by myself. But I know. New schools are hard.”

The pity’s back in her eyes. Rachel bites the inside of her lip, hard, and gets out her notebook. “I’m fine,” she says. “Thank you for your concern.”

But Veera’s fidgeting next to her, and Rachel sighs through her nose, says, “Is there something else?”

“The people at this school are nice,” Veera says quickly, under her breath. “They didn’t have to be nice to me, but they were, and I – I have friends, now. So.” She’s tied a knot in the strings of her hoodie, unties it, reties it. “We are starting a new campaign, the Dungeons and Dragons club, and if you want to—”

Rachel can’t help it: she laughs, one sharp mocking sound. “No,” she says, “I can’t think of anything I’d like less, actually.”

Veera turns bright red and almost shudders – with anger or fear Rachel can’t tell. “Or you can burn your bridges,” she says, voice smeared with tears but still holding admirably to anger. “That’s fine too. I hope this school treats you well, Rachel. I hope everyone here is just as good to you as you are to them.”

She pulls her hood up, actually scoots her chair away from Rachel to the other end of her table. Rachel almost – for a second – feels guilty. But why should she? The idea’s laughable. This whole school is laughable. Veera with her pity and Gracie with her awkward soft advances and Helena, god, Helena worst of all. All of them should stop trying. They’re all a waste of Rachel’s time.

The two of them spend the rest of the class in silence, taking notes. She could really learn a lot, this semester, without anyone distracting her.

The bell rings, and Rachel shoves her way out the door as fast as possible. She doesn’t see a flash of blonde hair but she doesn’t push her luck – just keeps her head down, cuts through the crowd to the area in front of the school. There’s a car waiting for her, black and obvious; she slips inside, closes the door, says “drive” in a voice that sounds – to her – ten years older than it should be.

As they leave the school behind, Rachel watches all her classmates through the tinted window. They all look so happy. She wonders where they’re going, all of them with their arms slung over one another’s shoulders and their anecdotes shared with faces warped into masks of excitement. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t even know where they would go. Rachel folds her backpack to her chest and doesn’t say anything. In front of her the driver is silent, because he knows better by now. There’s no music. Just the car, carrying her home to her parents.

Oh, god, she’d forgotten to get rid of her lunch. She closes her eyes and rests her head against the window. Damn.

She doesn’t have time to figure out some desperate alternative before they’re at her house – crouched on the edge of a hill like a predator about to leap, glass skin and steel bones. It’s a monster of a mansion, and Rachel already hates it even though they’ve only just arrived. She murmurs a polite unfeeling thank you to the driver and then makes her way to the house. She keeps her hands off of the straps of her backpack with sheer force of effort.

The door’s locked. They didn’t unlock it for her.

The driver can see her, probably, having to fumble through her backpack for her keys and Rachel hates, Rachel is never able to stop hating, anger inside of her constantly eating her alive. She finds her keys. Unlocks the door, breathes in the smell of everything new and artificial. She can’t see her parents anywhere; maybe she can make it up the stairs and to her room and throw out her lunch in the trashcan in her room and lie down and cr—

“Rachel?” calls her mother’s voice from the back of the house, and Rachel smashes any other thought she might have had. She can’t afford it. She hangs her backpack on a hook by the door and calls out “Yes, mother, I’m home.”

“Come back here, we’re having tea.”

They are always having tea.

The house is enormous, and her footsteps echo as she passes through the entranceway, the grand hallway, the kitchen, the dining room. There, all the way in the back, her parents posed like a furniture ad on the stiff couches they will never use for anything but performance. The teapot is steaming between them. There’s no milk and sugar; taking your tea anything but black is – Rachel doesn’t know. Some sort of weakness, probably, not that her parents would ever say that. But she can assume.

She sits down on the chair by the couch and pours herself a cup of tea.

“How was your first day, Rachel?” asks her father. His voice sounds soft but she knows better. He’s the good cop. He’s always the good cop and she used to fall for it, used to bare her belly like the weaker animal. But it never works.

“Fine,” she says. “Mandarin was—” she pauses, just for a sliver of a second. To say good would be simplistic, oafish; to say difficult would imply that this school was not a waste but would also imply failure on her part. Easy would just allow her mother an opening to sigh about the laudable state of the education system. She gambles.

“—challenging,” she says. “But I’m sure I’ll adapt.”

“It couldn’t have been that challenging, could it?” Rachel’s mother says. “We did get you that tutor, last year.”

Here is the problem: there is no right answer, with Rachel’s parents.

Rachel lets out an exhalation through her nose – well – and takes a sip of tea. God, it’s strong. She doesn’t wince but it’s a close thing.

“Are you making friends?” Rachel’s father asks.

“I think it’s best to focus on my studies, at least at first,” she says smoothly. “I’m sure I’ll have time for extracurriculars further down the road.”

That makes her father frown but makes her mother smile, which is in and of itself a victory. Rachel pities next semester’s version of herself, who will be in nine clubs and will hate all of them. But what’s a college application without as much padding as possible? Useless. That’s the answer.

“Good for you, Rachel,” her mother says warmly. “I’d hate for you to get caught up in inanities. I’m so proud of your focus.”

Rachel smiles at her, lips pressed together. She takes another sip of tea – it’s so, so bitter.

She wakes up early the next morning, earlier than her parents – for once – and gives herself enough time to shower, hide the remains of yesterday’s lunch in the trash, and linger for a few moments over today’s. She could leave it. If she leaves it enough surely her father will stop packing it. But it’s ground to give, and she won’t give it. She takes the bag.

She arrives at school early enough that almost no one is there – makes it easier to find her German classroom, slip inside and take a seat. The German teacher raises his eyebrows at her but doesn’t look up from the book he’s reading. Fine. Rachel takes out her notebook and practices verb tenses until the door slams open with a bang (why does everyone in this school insist on slamming doors) and a pack of boys shoves its way in, laughing. That would be JROTC – if the matching buzzcuts didn’t give it away, their attitudes would. There is something of the army in them. The way they leer. The way they leer at her, some of them, before she sharpens her gaze enough that they look away. The one in the back winces at her, mouths sorry. It might be Helena’s Parsons; it might be Gracie’s Mark. Maybe it’s neither of them. They all look nearly exactly the same.

They fill up most of the seats, slamming tattered notebooks onto their tables. A few girls trickle in, take seats around the room, avoid the mass in the center. Rachel doesn’t blame them. She can smell the unwashed boy-stink from here.

One of the girls from her Mandarin class is here, hair up in a messy bun, texting someone. She looks up when she enters the room, sees Rachel, flicks her a quick salute and then grabs a seat with the ease of familiarity. There are empty seats next to her, Rachel could move, she won’t move, she doesn’t. A few other vaguely-familiar faces take seats. None of them a possible ally, not really. Rachel looks back down to her notebook and does not move her gaze from the notebook or the board until the bell rings.

The ringing of the bell means…unfortunately…P.E. Rachel doesn’t linger in the hallway, moves as quickly as possible, but wishes she could move at a molasses-pace so that she wouldn’t have to face the locker room. Of course, she doesn’t – she’s there and changed and out on the blacktop before the second bell rings. The gym shorts are baggy. The shirt is grey, the sort of grey you get after repeated washings even though it is brand new. She wishes she had a medical excuse to leave this class. Her father would never condone her leaving for any other reason – he thinks exercise is good for you.

The wind’s blowing cold off the blacktop, and Rachel huddles over by the edge and watches the buildings on campus like there’s something interesting in them. She can hear other students arriving behind her, but she doesn’t turn around.

Until someone says her name.

Then again: “You are Rachel, yeah?”

She turns around, and – blinks, flustered, for a moment. It’s Helena, but it isn’t. It’s Helena’s face and body worn more easily than she could have imagined Helena carrying it; smeared eyeliner, brown mane, crossed arms, expectant raised eyebrows. Of all the things to focus on Rachel can’t help lingering on the fact that this girl has pockets slashed out of her sweatpants with a blade, just like Helena did.

“I am,” she says, her own eyebrows raised in return.

“I’m Sarah,” says the girl who isn’t Helena. “Helena’s sister? Did she mention me, she won’t stop talkin’ about you.”

Rachel doesn’t know what to focus on there, the fact that Helena hadn’t mentioned Sarah in any capacity or the fact that Helena has apparently talked about Rachel nonstop although they have known each other for a single day.

“She didn’t,” she says. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” The words come out exactly as bored and artificial as she’d intended them to, which pleases her. Sarah blows out a breath through her nose, looks at Rachel like she smells a rat.

“Nice to meet you too,” she says, not sounding at all like she means it. “Helena’s yahnya. She’s bloody thrilled to be helpin’ you to class, you know. Made us leave early this morning so you wouldn’t be late.”

(Rachel had left even earlier.)

(It’s not that she was hiding from Helena, necessarily, it’s just that—)

“How odd,” Rachel says flatly. “I must have missed her on the way into the building.”

They stare at each other for a moment, old-fashioned standoff.

“She doesn’t have a lot of friends,” Sarah says quietly. “Mostly they’re my friends, and her little – weirdo parade.”

“And I know you don’t have any,” she says. “So don’t – fuck this up.” She looks visibly uncomfortable to be giving Rachel this version of the shovel talk, and her eyes widen with palpable relief when someone from the other side of the yard yells “Sarah, almost time to dodge some balls!”

“We clear?” Sarah asks, slanting her eyes back to Rachel. Rachel doesn’t say anything, just lets out a shaky exhalation through her nose.

“Good,” Sarah says with a mean sort of smirk. Then her face goes sharply kind, so sharp it’s almost a joke at Rachel’s expense. “Helena’d kick my arse if I let you wade through gym class alone, that’s how she picked up Gracie in the first place. Come on.”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Rachel says.

“Helena’d…kick…my arse,” Sarah says again, slower this time. “Not optional. Come on.” She sticks her hands in her pockets, lopes back across the blacktop. Rachel closes her eyes tightly and follows, before Sarah can lay a hand on her and move her by force. She doesn’t doubt Sarah would be able to. There’s something in the way she moves.

She can’t even escape the locker room and head to – who knows, some deserted classroom or another to eat lunch. Sarah’s somehow already changed and is leaning against the wall by the locker room exit, talking to a boy with a mullet; she looks up and gives Rachel a quick bump up of the chin as greeting before pushing off the wall and falling into step alongside her.

“Here to make sure you don’t get lost,” she says. It’s practically a threat. Rachel folds her hands in front of her, but before she can answer the boy’s fallen into step on the other side of her.

“Hey there, sheepy,” he says, grinning in a way that flashes a sharp silver tooth. “I’m Tony.”

“Holy shit, Tony, don’t call her sheepy.”

“Gotta stand out, Sar!”

“You could call me by my name,” Rachel drawls slowly, “which is Rachel.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Tony says.

“Ignore him,” Sarah says, “he’s a twat.” They jostle each other fondly behind Rachel’s back, Rachel’s own affectionate prison guard. They slam through the doors (no one in this entire school, evidently, is capable of opening a door normally) and into the chaos of the cafeteria. Tony catches an apple thrown at his head and gets caught up in yelling at the person who threw it, leaving Sarah as Rachel’s keeper. She navigates through the crowd with the ease of long practice and deposits Rachel neatly at the table in the back.

Helena beams toothily when they arrive, looking incredibly sincerely delighted and not like Rachel did her absolute best to leave her behind. “You found her!” she says happily. “I was worried.” She turns to Rachel. “Did you get lost? Did you find your roomings?”

“Yes,” Rachel says, “I managed.” Sarah shoots her a look but doesn’t say anything else – because before she can she’s interrupted by the tap-tap-tap of Helena’s hand on hers, insistent.

“Did you get lunch?” Helena asks.

“Helena,” Sarah says exasperatedly, “we don’t all need five bloody meals a day, yeah?”

“You have to eat, Sarah,” Helena says stubbornly, chin set, hand starting to curl with a hopeful tenderness over Sarah’s own. Rachel sits down at the table – she can acknowledge defeat – and rummages in her bag, pulls out an apple. Pushes it slowly across the table until it bumps into Sarah’s hand.

The two sisters stop bickering for a second and look down. Sarah looks at Rachel.

“You have to eat, Sarah,” Rachel says, letting her smugness drip around the edges of her words. Helena lets out a loud, wheezy laugh, bumps her shoulder into Rachel’s affectionately. (Rachel goes very still at the contact, stops herself from doing anything she’d regret.)

“See,” Helena says with equal smugness, “Rachel understands. Lunch is most important meal of the day.”

Gracie pipes into the conversation for the first time: “That’s breakfast, Helena.”

“They are all important.”

“Yeah, I’m out,” Sarah says, snagging the apple and giving Rachel an amused look. “Have fun, weirdos,” she calls over her shoulder as she goes. Turns around. Looks at Rachel. “Don’t get lost again,” she says helpfully, and takes a big bite out of the apple and winks.

Chapter Text

Rachel gives up on trying to shake Helena, especially since – as Helena points out, clearly delighted – they share a math class together. Helena spends the whole walk to the classroom chattering excitedly about the teacher, who she calls “Maggie,” and how kind she is and how exciting math is and all sorts of inanities Rachel doesn’t even pretend to care about. Mm, she says, and really, and goodness. Helena, again, either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care Rachel’s complete lack of enthusiasm. She’s a perpetual motion machine.

“In here,” she says, and pulls open the door. The woman behind the desk smiles at Helena as they enter, and Helena grins back. Rachel recognizes the JROTC boy (has no idea which one, but she recognizes him) and – oh, dear, Veera. She avoids eye contact. Besides, Helena’s tugging her to the front desk.

“This is Rachel,” she says. “She is very smart.” She says this with complete sincerity, considering she knows absolutely nothing about Rachel as a student.

Here is what she doesn’t know, actually: Rachel despises mathematics. Has for years. The one blemish on her otherwise-perfect report card. Failure, failure, and one she’d never tell anyone about – she’s Rachel Duncan, she does not fail things. She refuses. Had she told anyone at her previous school, she would have been torn to shreds; she has never ever been able to afford being anything less than excellent. That’s not going to stop being true, just because she’s here.

She doesn’t quite make eye contact with the woman who introduces herself as Ms. Chen; instead looks slightly to her left, enough so that Ms. Chen’s face blurs and wavers. She can see the semester already, and it contains every possible scrap of extra credit she can get. Her parents let her slump, slightly, through her first years, but anything below an A- is unacceptable now. She closes her eyes tightly for a second and then opens them. Takes her seat next to Helena, because why not at this point.

The bell rings. Class begins.

…it turns out Helena is terrifyingly good at mathematics.

She tries to answer every question; many of the other students are clearly napping, content to let her handle each problem lobbed their way. Rachel spots a girl in the back with bright red hair actually putting on noise-cancelling headphones and bobbing her head to her music. But Helena is quivering like a hunting hound, evidently having the time of her life. She and Veera get into a light bickering match about a problem; Veera starts smiling, almost, before she sees Rachel and the smile drops off her face. It’s fun. They’re having fun.

Rachel looks at the board, the way the numbers are practically Greek. Put it together, she thinks to herself, sternly. Make it make sense. Go! Do it, do it now, you have to—

But her brain refuses, blatantly. If sums were metaphors she could dissect them; if they were molecules, if they were foreign nouns, if they were anything but the constant chattering of x and y and limits and tangents. She slumps, ever-so-slightly in her chair, so furious at herself and the whiteboard and Helena and – all of it, so furious at all of it she can’t breathe. She’s going to be sick.

Next to her Helena’s scribbling at a worksheet, writing sprawling childishly all over the page. She’s already drawn another scorpion in the corner; its tail, waved into the air, looks as if it’s just about to sting.

Rachel doesn’t say anything in math class, doesn’t say anything on the walk to their next period either. Helena frowns at her, but doesn’t push it.

Rachel’s trying to convince her body to leave. She wants to leave. She wants to get on a bus and drive somewhere out into the city, let it swallow her. Head somewhere different than this, never come back. She could, she knows, if she could just get herself to stop walking to her next period; she could make it, if she could just take that one step.

But her body, stupid obedient machine, is following Helena to class. She listens to the click of her shoes on the ground. She considers crying, and vomiting, and instead does neither.

The rest of her lunch makes a hollow clang when she dumps it into the trashcan. Helena doesn’t comment on that either. For the best, probably: vicious words are lining up on Rachel’s tongue like bullets, as if she could ever be a gun. Were she to open her mouth they’d fire.

Instead she opens the door to the history classroom, takes a seat by the window. She can hear conversation behind her, but she doesn’t focus on it. She’d thought that – that – she closes her eyes, clenches her fists under the table. She doesn’t get it. She’d thought she would get it, but of course she still doesn’t get it. She can do every single thing she can to be perfect, jump through every hoop, but her stupid traitor brain will still—

Helena plops down next to her. Rubs the back of her hand underneath her nose, sniffs. Rachel hates her so much for the way she’d smiled. She’d called their teacher Maggie. The horrible unfairness of it all, that Helena – Helena, with pudding smeared around her mouth and her childish margin-doodles – has this thing that Rachel does not have. Out of anyone, for it to be Helena. Rachel looks out the window.

Helena sighs, slumps in her chair. “Sarah should be here,” she mutters. “She is making skips again.” Rachel doesn’t answer that either, and Helena sinks a little lower. The bell rings. Class begins.

Life continues like this. Rachel resigns herself to Helena’s table, because no one else is going to approach her and it’s not as if she’s going to go crawling on her knees. Sometimes she watches the other tables. At Sarah’s table someone is always laughing. She never looks for long.

Are you making any friends? her father asks her, and she thinks: today at lunch Mark and Gracie held hands under the table and Gracie blushed bright red. Helena made kissing sounds and laughed. This is my life, now. This is what you’ve sent me off to.

She pours all of her vicious energy into her classes – it doesn’t take long for her English class to hate her, just as she’d known they would. Her copy of the book is still pristine, but she has all of the relevant parts nearly memorized. It’s easy. Sometimes Ms. Bowles smiles at her but that isn’t why she does it – she wants to rip everyone in the classroom to shreds, for not being kind to her. No. Wait. For – for being kind, for weakness, for something she can’t quite put her finger on but she knows she’s furious. So she cuts off other student’s arguments, rips holes in texts, makes herself a knife.

It’s so easy. She works harder at Mandarin, so that can be easy too. German. In Biology she cuts Veera off, voice bored and round, every time Veera is about to answer the teacher’s question. Watches the way Veera swallows and flushes and hates. Good, she thinks desperately. Good. That’s what Veera deserves, for thinking Rachel was someone to be pitied.

This is life. This is how it goes.

Until she’s on her way to Mandarin and bumps into Tony Sawicki, of all people.

“There you are, lamb-lamb,” he says, grinning again. Rachel chokes back an awful sound and snaps, “Do not ever refer to me by any sort of inane nickname, ever again. Are we clear?”

Tony’s eyebrows go up and he looks around the hallway, as if he’s waiting for someone he can look at and mouth did you see that? “Shit, girl,” he says. “Just bein’ friendly.”

“No,” Rachel says. “That isn’t what you’re doing.” They look at each other, and then Tony blinks and his cheer snaps back on.

“Anyways,” he says. “We’re ditching second period. Come on, Sarah told me to get you.”

“No,” Rachel says, and keeps walking to class.

“What – are you serious?” Tony says, following her. He circles her and keeps walking in front of her, backwards and effortless. “It’s not like we’re gonna sacrifice a la—anything to Satan or somethin’, shit. You gotta blow off some steam every once in a while, Rachel, or you’re gonna friggin’ explode.”

“I’m fine,” Rachel says through gritted teeth, which does nothing to disprove his point. “Thank you.”

Tony throws his hands up into the air and Rachel’s so busy feeling satisfied that he’s given up that she doesn’t manage to block the tiny little thought that crawls into the back of her brain and whispers: she’d wanted him to convince her. She’d wanted him to work for it, to want her.

“You sure?” he says, hands tucking into the pockets of his grimy jacket.

Rachel swallows. Looks down at the ground for a moment. Clocks her own nausea, the vague heartburn, the ever-present rage. She can feel the conclusion she’s screaming towards and she feels sick, giddy, like stories she’s heard about the point on the rollercoaster right before the drop.

“No,” she says, softer than she’d meant to. “I lied. Where are we going?”

“Tony wins again,” crows the boy in question as they approach the skatepark. The collection of students sprawled out over the concrete all turn to look, and someone whistles. It’s a long low sound that hangs in the air.

“Shite,” Sarah mutters, and slaps a twenty-dollar bill into Tony’s hand. “You owe me twenty bucks, Rachel.” But she’s smiling, a little bit. She almost looks impressed. Like she hadn’t thought Rachel would – but of course she hadn’t thought so, she’d put money on it.

“Earn it,” Rachel says blithely, and scopes out the rest of the crowd. The girl with the dreadlocks is here, head in the lap of the girl from before. (Today she’s wearing an enormous floppy hat.) She’s having an animated discussion with Morrison-the-shit-dungeonmaster and a chubby boy with glasses and a sheen of nervousness. Or sweat. Likely both. A few people are actually skating; Tony pulls a board out of god knows where and heads out, where he’s clapped on the back by a girl with long braids. The redhead from Rachel’s math class is out there too, along with a couple of brunettes she doesn’t recognize. Good god. Does nobody at this school actually go to class?

And under an overpass, by a wall, she spots a familiar head of blonde hair. Heads over there on an instinct she doesn’t name.

Helena’s crouched by the wall, in the dark, holding a can of spraypaint. Arching on the concrete wall above her is a spraypainted mural, all reds and blacks and bright whites. Rachel actually stops for a moment, just to look at it. It’s an angel, she thinks. Or a swan. Something with great white wings all slashed up with red and she can’t tell if it’s flying or falling and it hurts, she can tell, it’s in horrible pain. At the ends of its wings are feathers that reach like hands. Up and up and up, towards an empty space. It’s beautiful. Rachel doesn’t look at it for long.

“Did you make that,” she says as she approaches, and Helena blinks herself back to awareness and turns to look.

“Rachel!” she says, looking surprised and rocketing up to her feet. She makes a soft tsk-tsk sound with her tongue. “Did Tony corrupt you? Naughty Tony, with his shiny tooth and his skating parks.”

“It’s not as if you’re blameless, in this instance,” Rachel points out, walking closer so she’s standing next to the other girl. The air smells like paint fumes, dizzyingly.

Helena makes a pfft sound through her lips. “E-ess-ell,” she says, making a face. “I am knowing English. The class is bad. So we all come here instead.” She gestures vaguely at the collection of girls skating, almost hitting Rachel in the face with the spraypaint. There are certainly enough of them to be an entire class, albeit a small one. But she hadn’t realized how many people at this school must have English as their second language. And here they all are, not learning anything at all.

“You never answered my question,” she says, watching the girl with the braids flip into the air, laughing and hanging there with her arms extended for flight.

“Yes,” Helena says. “This is all mine. It is the only good thing I have ever made.” She stares at it, gnaws at her lips. “I am in art class, only we are using charcoals and watercolors. Too soft. Everything—” she gestures broadly with her hands, the spraypaint shaking ominously, “pffwft, like smoke. No.” She turns back to the wall, considers, adds a wriggle of black. Another feather pulls itself from the blank white.

“It’s lovely,” Rachel says, words soft from her mouth in a way she’s forgotten that – well. They’re soft. Sidling close up to sincere.

Helena looks at her, mouth twisted up at the corner in a warped sort of smile. “Thank you,” she says.

There is a bright red letter on the math test on Rachel’s desk and if she doesn’t look at it, it isn’t real. It’s not hers. Her nails are dug into the skin of her leg so hard that it hurts, pain vivid and sharp, but that’s the only thing that’s real. This isn’t real.

What will her mother say, when she sees. We gave you everything, Rachel, we’ve given you every advantage. And yet. Here you are. Failure, failure, failure—

“How is your testing?” Helena asks brightly, and Rachel flips the test over. She can still see the red pen slashes through the paper, like old scars healing. See me after class.

“How was yours,” she says. Stupid retort. She doesn’t want to know. But she looks, sees Helena make a clumsy A with her middle fingers and one index finger. She grins puckishly, eyes Rachel through the space. “Only numbers,” she says, like that means anything.

Only numbers. Only that.

At the end of class Rachel gives Helena some excuse that she believes and Helena trots out into the hallway without her. The class clears out. Five minutes until history class, if she gives a damn. It’s only her and Ms. Chen, sitting at her desk and marking papers. With her head bowed Rachel can see the tattoo on the back of her neck, a fish arcing out of the water. It reminds her of Helena’s mural, for some reason, even though the fish doesn’t have wings. She doesn’t know why she’s thinking about it.

“So,” Rachel says, and her teacher abandons the pretense. Sighs. Puts down her pen.

“You’re a good student,” she says, “but you have this—” she gestures, vaguely. “Block. Against the subject. I can put you in tutoring, but I don’t know if having someone else order you will fix anything. Get it?”

“What are you suggesting, then,” Rachel says, voice far too small.

“You and Helena are friends, right?”

Rachel makes a choked sound. Doesn’t answer the question. Apparently Ms. Chen takes that as a clear and enthusiastic yes, because she smiles. “Get her to help you. She really likes this, you know?”

For whatever godawful reason—

“Seriously,” says Ms. Chen. “You can think of it as homework if you want. Mandatory, kiddo. I’m gonna check back in with the both of you on Monday.” She points her pen in Rachel’s direction. “Listen. Sometimes having a friend explain things to you is easier than having a teacher explain it.”

The bell rings. “Shit,” Ms. Chen mutters, and then “you didn’t hear that.” She fumbles in her desk, pulls out a dusty booklet of late passes. Scribbles something down. By the time Rachel’s numbly pulled her backpack on and moved to the front of the room the pass is done, and she can reach out and grab it.

“I really think you can do this, Rachel,” says Ms. Chen. “I wouldn’t say that unless I meant it.”

“Thank you,” Rachel says dully, and then leaves. She’s still holding the pass. When she walks by a trashcan she throws it in and keeps walking out the door, out into the city until she can’t see the school behind her at all.

The aquarium is quiet, at this time of day, and Rachel stands in front of the glass and watches the sharks swim in circles around their tank. She hasn’t been to an aquarium since she was – small, smaller than this. When she was a child, and everything was brighter, and she hadn’t yet learned how to let people down. Her parents used to take her to one near Cambridge; her father would point out all the different fish, tell her which ones were tropical and which ones lived just on the edge of the country if you were willing to make the drive to the sea.

She’d never liked the sharks, as a child. Their eyes were too empty, too cold. Now she just watches them. They can’t stop moving or they’ll die. They have to go like this, pointless circles around and around and around. She reaches out and puts her fingers lightly against the glass. Right now, in school, everyone but her is talking about war – or. More realistically, they’re exchanging gossip. Donnie Chubbs is staring at Alison Hendrix. The redhead, Katja Obinger, she has her headphones back on. The chair next to Helena is vacant. She almost wonders if anyone’s noticed.

The teacher will mark her truant, but Rachel doesn’t care. She doesn’t care. All the world is hushed and blue, and the glass is so cold under her fingertips. Maybe she’ll swallow her pride and ask Helena to help her, to fix her, to take pity on her. Maybe she won’t. Nothing really matters, right now, all of it calm and settling on her shoulders like a mantle. She could stay here for hours. She could visit the reefs, and the lagoon, and the jellyfish floating like sacks of sky. All of it behind glass, and none of it able to hurt her.

She’s not even sure why she’s here, only that she needed somewhere to go. She needed to be somewhere where no one could look at her, where no one could see that she was Rachel, and a failure, and Rachel who is a failure. To be somewhere where other people exist – unthinkable. Instead she took a bus, came here. She wonders if her parents will get a notice. Could they? It’s not as if they have a home phone, not anymore, and her parents wouldn’t think to give the school their cell numbers.

They wouldn’t think they needed to. Rachel’s always been a model student. Rachel’s never stepped even a toe out of line.

And here she is, in front of the shark tank, in an aquarium empty but for a senior couple and a few chattering children over by the starfish. No one lingers by the sharks. No one ever watches them for this long.

She used to hate them. Now she can’t stop watching, all teeth and sandpaper skin. All dead black eyes. Nothing to ever touch them but the water.

She watches them for half an hour, maybe. They never stop moving.

“Me,” Helena says, wide-eyed, as they walk towards English class.

“Yes,” Rachel says, from between her teeth. Helena sucks her lips between her teeth and doesn’t say anything for a moment.

“I don’t—” she says, visibly hunching in on herself. “I have never helped anyone, before. Like this.”

“Ms. Chen seemed to think you were capable,” Rachel says blithely, which is another way of saying Ms. Chen told me to tell you to do it. Next to her Helena’s eyes go wide, and she nods to herself.

“Okay,” she says. “You can come over. After class. If you want.”

Rachel’s never seen where Helena actually lives. For all she knows Helena and her sister teleport to school every morning, or claw themselves out of holes in the ground. Despite herself, she’s morbidly curious.

And it’s not as if she’d invite Helena over.

“Fine,” she says, and that’s the last they speak of it. In English class she manages her frustration by eviscerating Alison’s opinions about the role of the family within their latest novel, and in Biology she – well. Isn’t as awful as she could have been. As she has been. She doesn’t know why, but she isn’t. Maybe it’s the way Helena had looked, outside of the classroom, like she didn’t quite know how to be something for someone else. Or maybe she’s just – tired. Whichever. It’s not as if Veera thanks her for it, so it doesn’t matter.

Helena is there outside of her classroom when she emerges, carefully picking all of the marshmallows out of a miniature box of Lucky Charms and placing each one very deliberately in the center of her tongue. The boy who is probably Parsons waves to her on his way out of the room, and she waves back before her tongue pops back into her mouth.

“Shall we,” Rachel says, and Helena’s tongue fwips back out to receive another delivery. She shakes the box at Rachel invitingly. By now it’s mostly just plain cereal; Rachel doesn’t dignify it with a response. Helena sighs with a sort of resignation and pulls her backpack on, gestures after her. Rachel falls into step and they walk out of the building.

As they make their way onto the sidewalk there’s a blur and then an oof as Sarah thumps into Helena. They play wrestle for a moment and then Sarah’s in their party, hands tucked into the pocket of her leather jacket, looking at them like they’re her kids she just set up on a playdate.

“Oi,” she says to Helena, “what’re you still doin’ here, meathead? Don’t you have a free period?”

Helena makes a sour face when Sarah says the nickname, but only says “Yes.” Her hands shove in her pockets. “But Rachel is coming over to Missus S’ house, and she is very good at getting lost.” The way she tosses off those last syllables makes Rachel think Helena knows, knows how hard Rachel tried to avoid her. But when she shoots Helena a look she is, as always, guileless.

“You didn’t have to wait,” Rachel says stiffly, imagining: Helena sitting in the hallway for two hours, deliberately eating one single marshmallow at a time.

“Of course I waited,” Helena says, brow furrowed in confusion.

“She does that,” Sarah says. The words are too quiet to be meant for Rachel. Helena and Sarah share a look, filled with some emotion Rachel doesn’t understand, and then they both go silent. Rachel certainly isn’t going to start up a conversation, and so the walk back is silent for a while. Just the sound of Sarah’s boots crunching through leaves, the occasional burst of sound as Helena leaps on a pile. The absence of speech.

“So,” Sarah says, “what’s this about, then?”

Helena makes a confused, wordless sound. Sarah rolls her eyes. “You’ve never had anyone over,” she says, voice still too soft. “Not anybody.”

Don’t say the truth, Rachel thinks at Helena with the sharp urgency of needles. She has thirty lies lined up on her tongue, but what if she says one of them and Helena doesn’t agree with it? Above everything she doesn’t want Sarah Manning to know, that Rachel needs – well. Exactly that. She doesn’t want her to know that Rachel needs.

“We are doing maths,” Helena says with admirable blitheness. She smirks at Sarah, lowers her voice to a ghost-story whisper: “Numbers.”

“Shaddup,” Sarah says, knocking her shoulder against Helena’s familiarly. “Just gettin’ you ready for the S brigade. You know she wants…” she trails off. The air’s silent again. What? What is it that she wants?

“I know,” Helena says quietly, “what S wants.” And then they’re there.

The house they arrive at isn’t at all what Rachel was expecting – it’s fairly large, solid red brick. The truck parked in the driveway has bumper stickers that say things like  BREASTFEEDING IS NOT A CRIME and ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVIST ON BOARD. She doesn’t know what she’d thought it would be. A cave, filled with gnawed-on bones.

Sarah bangs the door open – it’s unlocked – and drops her jacket and boots in a pile by the door. (No backpack.) (Rachel wonders if she even went to class.) “Oi oi, S,” she bellows, and then takes the stairs two at a time and crashes into her room. The door slams. Music starts playing. Helena makes a face at Rachel, like: what can you do. Then the face fades. She looks around, eyes twitching, shoulders hunched. She looks more like a panicked animal here than she ever has at school.

“Um,” she says. “Do you want anything to eat.”

“No,” Rachel says, voice leaking exhaustion. “Helena, I’d like this to be done.” The words could be hurtful, maybe, but rolling out of her mouth they mostly sound sad. Helena blinks, tilts her head.

“Okay,” she says. “Upstaircase.” She takes the stairs carefully, one delicate step at a time. Rachel follows. Somewhere, a door slams; footsteps climb up a staircase and Helena widens her eyes, goes faster. They don’t quite make it to the top of the stairs before a woman emerges from a door Rachel hadn’t spotted, laundry basket held against one hip. “Ah,” she says.

“Hello-Missus-S,” Helena says quickly. Her hands are clenched around the banister.

“Hey there, chicken,” Mrs. S says softly, like coaxing a wild animal. Her eyes light on Rachel, eyebrows go up in surprise. “Who’s this, then?”

“Rachel Duncan,” Rachel says. Shake her hand, whispers a voice that sounds like some awful mixture of her mother and her preteen etiquette instructor. But the woman who is apparently Helena’s guardian is too far away for Rachel to reach, and the idea of her hand dangling off into empty space makes her desperately sad.

“Siobhan Sadler,” says the woman below them. “Call me S.” She smiles, a little bit. “Glad to see Helena’s making friends. She’s had a tough time of it, haven’t you love?”

Helena doesn’t say anything. She has friends, Rachel wants to say. She does. They’re much kinder than I am. They aren’t using her for anything. Rachel can’t quite understand why everyone is so worried about Helena, and – she doesn’t understand why all adults are so fixated on the concept of them making friends. As if these friendships are important. As if they’ll last, once they all graduate. All parents should be like Rachel’s mother: focused on the practicalities. On getting the right grades, to get into the right schools, to—

“You want a cuppa?” Siobhan asks, looking at them with something between sadness and nostalgia, and Rachel says “No, thank you, we were just heading upstairs.” She doesn’t know why Helena isn’t saying anything. But she isn’t. She isn’t saying anything at all. So Rachel smiles in that way she’d practiced in front of the mirror until her face ached, and says “thank you,” and heads up the stairs. Helena jolts to life and follows her.

The music’s still blaring from the door on the left, so Rachel picks the door on the right. The room is heartbreakingly neat. Hospital corners. The bedding, the wallpaper, the chair by the desk, they all look picked right out of a catalogue and never used. In the corner by the bed there’s a photo of Sarah and Helena with their cheeks pressed close together. One of Helena and Donnie making faces. A photo strip of Helena and Gracie, looking hideously awkward. Everything else: pristine.

It doesn’t feel like Helena’s room at all. It’s like a hospital room, or a boarding house. Someplace you are sick and dream of leaving.

Helena hangs her backpack on a hook, neatly, and then turns around. “Sorry,” she says, voice muted and high.

Despite herself Rachel lets out a choked gulp of a laugh – she’d imagined Helena at her house instead, and the image hurts the inside of her throat like swallowing something sharp. “Please,” she says. “As far as parental inquisitions go, that’s hardly the worst I could have imagined.”

“She cares,” Helena says quietly. Her shoulders hunch. Rachel imagines slapping her, the way it would make her face flicker into light.

“Are you going to help me,” she says, “or not.”

And there it is: the flicker, the brightness, Helena’s eyelashes fluttering and her eyes lighting up. “Math!” she says. “Yes.” She grabs the backpack off the hook, collapses with it in the middle of her bedspread. From one pocket she pulls a silver-gleaming packet of Pop-Tarts; from another a notebook and pencil. Flips through the notebook wildly. Rachel catches a glimpse of more scorpion doodles – one of them has a word bubble attached to it that says in capital letters YOU ARE STUPID AND THEY ARE ALL GOING TO, but that’s all she sees before it’s gone. Helena lands on a page scribbled with equations. Scorpions march up and down the page, going to war with little stick figure girls in the margins. Helena sucks her lips between her teeth.

“Twice-differentiable functions,” she says, like a holy text, and then they’re off.

Chapter Text

Helena is an awful tutor: easily distracted, barely intelligible, seemingly incapable of understanding how Rachel doesn’t magically get all of these concepts.

Rachel keeps visiting her house anyways. She doesn’t really know why, but: once or twice a week she ends up on that horrible neat bed, trying frantically to find all values for x. It feels like bashing her head against a brick wall and trying to get through it. That is: like something impossible, something so impossible it hurts to even try. But she keeps pounding her head against the wall, smearing blood all over the brick. This has to work. If this doesn’t work her parents will find out and they can’t, they aren’t allowed. Her father’s face will wrinkle into something disappointed and her mother will hiss at her you should have told us months ago and the longer she waits to tell them that she – can’t – the worse it’s going to be. So they can’t ever know.

Sometimes the mental gymnastics of her family exhaust her. Especially at the Sadler (Manning?) (she still doesn’t know the logistics and is likely never going to ask) household, where Siobhan seems always ready to make tea and the whole house is filled with carpets and the sound of people talking to one another. There are photographs of their family on the walls – mostly a young Sarah with Siobhan, but a few photographs of Helena tucked away in frames.

The walls of Rachel’s house are blank of photographs. This should not surprise you.

It’s stupid of her to not admit the reason that she lingers there as long as possible, catches a ride back in Siobhan’s clunky old truck instead of the pristine cold of one of her family’s cars. She’s not allowed to be stupid, not with herself.

But she is anyways. She deliberately puts that thought into a box and shoves that box into the back of her brain, doesn’t think about it. She fills up all the boxes of her attic-brain with things she doesn’t need to think too hard about – the way Helena’s shoulder bumps into hers, or how Sarah’s casually inducted Rachel into her group in P.E., or how they flank her on the way hom—

—on the way from school to Siobhan’s house, nearly every day. She doesn’t think about it. She doesn’t think about any of it at all.

Helena and Rachel are walking to history class – Rachel’s trying to insist that World War II is important to learn about, but only half-heartedly, and she’s convincing neither of them – when there’s a sharp whistle from outside. Helena turns and sees Sarah, standing outside in the lawn. She waves at them sardonically. Helena trots over to the window, looks outside.

“Sarah,” she says, “have you been to class at all this year? I miss you.”

“You don’t have to miss me,” Sarah says, “let’s go, come on.”

“Where?”

Rachel hovers in the middle of the hallway for a moment, feeling stupid, and then decides to keep walking to class. Helena can catch up. It’s not as if Rachel needs to be a part of this discussion. It would be awkward if she lingered. Like she was waiting for an invitation.

They’ll be out there, somewhere in the sun, and Rachel will sit at her desk and learn about World War II – somehow, through the teacher’s impenetrable droning. She’ll find a way to learn. Like a challenge.

Footsteps pound through the hall and Helena’s there, skidding to a stop in front of Rachel. “Aren’t you coming?” she says, looking confused.

“Where,” Rachel says, feeling like a stupid echo of Helena only moments ago.

“Um,” Helena says. “We did not decide. Somewhere. Anywhere. Please, Rachel, what kind of pastukh am I if I leave you to fall asleep alone?” She leans in and whispers: “A bad one.” Her breath smells like sour candy.

Rachel bites the inside of her lip. It’s not the end of the world, she reasons to herself. It’s not as if she’d learn anything today – the teacher just goes over the textbook, anyhow, she’d learn more on her own after hours.

…and she wants it. She does. She wants to be outside, in this fall air that is so unseasonably warm.

“Far be it from me to make you a subpar…” she trails off, flips her hand around the air instead of attempting all those harsh syllables.

“Shepherd!” Helena says, grinning giddily. “Come, Rachel, we will show you adventure.” She heads towards a door marked FIRE EXIT in bright red letters and unconcernedly shoves it open. No alarm goes off. Rachel’s shoulders lower from where they’d jerked up somewhere around her ears.

Outside Sarah’s leaning against the wall, looking ten seconds away from dozing. She’s taken off her leather jacket in the heat, and her top bares her arms and stomach to the sun. As always, she doesn’t have her backpack. “There you are,” she says without opening her eyes. “Thought I’d lost you to World War I.”

“We are studying the second one now,” Helena says, flopping her arm over Sarah’s shoulders and tugging her along.

“Well, shit,” Sarah says, “don’t spoil the class for me. Didn’t know there was a second one.” Rachel huffs out an amused breath through her nose, despite herself, and Sarah shoots her a pleased glance.

“What’d Helena promise you to get you to skip class,” she says. “You can tell me, I’ll keep it a secret.”

“A hundred dollars,” Helena says without prompting. “I am going to sell your expensive stolen jacket. That is the price.”

“Piss off,” Sarah groans, “it’s my bloody expensive stolen jacket.”

“You stole your jacket?” Rachel says, and Sarah snorts and says, “Oh, shit, we’ve scandalized her.”

“No?” Helena says. “It was…a joke?” Sarah next to her is watching Rachel appraisingly, tense, like if Rachel says the wrong thing she’ll either leap and rip out Rachel’s throat with her teeth or run for the hills. Rachel realizes she doesn’t want her to do either of those things. Not really. She doesn’t know how to say that she’s fine with Sarah having stolen the jacket, she understands, not everyone has the obscene amounts of money that her parents have and never use. It would come off too much like pity.

“It doesn’t matter anyways,” she says. “Soon it’ll be my expensive stolen jacket.”

Sarah’s expression smoothes out into something easy. Rachel feels like she’s passed some sort of test, gets the ripple of joy she gets when she does something particularly clever.

“We could all swap coats,” Helena says. “I want a blazer.”

“God no,” Sarah says, “your coat smells like shit.”

“You’re jealous,” Helena says loftily.

“Of what.”

Helena reaches into her pocket and holds up three candy bars, a handful of crayons, and a smashed yellow flower. Wags them in front of Sarah’s face and drops them all back into her pockets except the flower. The flower she reaches over and tucks behind Rachel’s ear, tongue poking out of her mouth with concentration. Her hand drops before Rachel can say no, stop, I hate it when people touch me. And then she can see the flower in the corner of her vision, like a blurred-out sun.

“There!” Helena says. “Now you are the princess of skipping school.”

“Congratulations,” Sarah says dryly.

They end up someplace Sarah refers to as “Shite Beach,” throwing out her arms with sarcastic grandness. It’s nothing but dirt and weeds by a river that gleams bluish-green in the sun. They had to walk through a construction site to get here; the gravel rocked under Rachel’s heels, like tides.

There’s a fire pit, and Helena pulls a lighter out of the depths of her pockets and manages to get a fire sparking. God, it’s warm. Helena and Rachel dump their bags a safe distance from the sparks. Rachel sits in one of the cheap folding chairs discarded by the fire pit; Sarah takes the other, and Helena drops by the pit and stares into the fire.

“Marshmallows,” she says.

“No,” Sarah says.

The river winds through the golden weeds on the banks. Rachel finally pulls the flower out of her hair, twirls it in her fingers. She knows that this wasn’t worth it, in the abstract; if her parents asked (if her parents found out – if they knew – if they—) she wouldn’t be able to explain it to them. But there’s something golden here, if she can just figure out what it is. If she can just reach it.

“You like it here?” Sarah asks, and Helena and Rachel both look up, look at each other. Helena gives a cartoonish, overlarge shrug and gestures to Rachel. Rachel bites the inside of her lip to keep from letting any laugh slip through. Sarah’s given no indication who she’s referring to – her eyes are closed again, and she’s radiating feline contentment.

Does Rachel like it here? Does Rachel like anything? She doesn’t know, not really. More things she can’t reach.

“I don’t mind the company,” she says slowly. Pauses. “It smells like sewage here, though.”

“Smells like shit,” Helena says gleefully.

“I meant—” and Sarah does a big, swooping hand gesture that somehow encompasses the beach, the school, the city, the kitchen where Helena dumps three spoonfuls of sugar into her tea and Rachel still hasn’t managed to consider taking hers anything but black. Not without feeling afraid.

“I answered your question,” Rachel says quietly.

Sarah opens her eyes and looks at her, considering. Her gaze flicks over to Helena. The two of them stare at each other for a moment and Rachel watches the way their faces twitch and change shape; it’s strange, how they don’t look anything alike even though they are exactly the same. It’s like they’re having a conversation without words. One she isn’t privy to. It ends with Helena smiling devilishly, and then they both consider Rachel for a moment before Helena looks at the fire and Sarah looks out at the water.

“Are you going to murder me,” Rachel says, “because I’d appreciate advance warning.”

“No,” Helena says, “I do not do that anymore.” When Rachel looks at her she widens her eyes and blinks owlishly before reaching for a stick to poke the fire with.

“Surprise,” Sarah says, “we brought you out to the river to dump your body in it.”

“Oh,” Helena says. “We are very clever.”

“Mhm.”

Rachel’s eyelids drop and she manages to lever them back open with force of effort. “You can sleep,” Helena says, without looking away from the fire. “There is no hurry.”

“’s not like we’re goin’ anywhere,” Sarah says, words sun-slurred.

“Mm,” Rachel says, “if I’m not back by the end of the school day my driver will notice.”

“But you’re comin’ home with us, yeah?” Sarah says, sounding surprised that Rachel would even consider anything else. Rachel’s eyes open. She’s been at the twins’ house two out of four days this week. Her parents will be suspicious, soon.

“If you’ll have me,” she says.

“Yes,” Helena says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world.

Rachel doesn’t quite remember the process that led them both to Sarah’s room instead of Helena’s, but here they are – the three of them, Sarah and Helena sprawled on Sarah’s bed and Rachel sitting in the desk chair.

“Don’t remember the last time I went to English class,” Sarah says. “We were readin’ – uh – Hamlet? Othello? Macbeth? Helena, are any of those things we read in English class.”

“I don’t know, Sarah,” Helena sighs. “Why are we always reading Shakespeare. I hate him.”

“He’s one of the greatest poets ever born,” Rachel says, not looking up from the German homework she’s half-heartedly working on. “I don’t think hating him is an option.”

Helena makes a loud raspberry to that, and Sarah laughs and says “Amen” and then “ah, shit” as her stomach makes an embarrassingly loud growl.

“Sarah,” Helena says with a mother’s worn-out patience, “did you eat lunch.”

“Helena,” Sarah says in the exact same tone, and then pauses. “Shite. No?”

Helena groans and smears her hands down her face. “I am dying,” she says grandly. “You are killing me with your hate of food. My sestra, she starves to death, and I die with her. Juliet and Juliet’s sister. Um. Bernice.”

Helena writhes on the bed and Sarah’s laughing, enough to shake them up and down slightly on Sarah’s black bedspread. It’s homier, Sarah’s room, than Helena’s. It feels like someone lives here. People have written in Sharpie all over the walls, different handwriting, TONY AND SARAH ARE HOT and BETH IS HOTTER and song lyrics and a piece of writing Rachel can barely read, coiled into a tight spiral. Behind the twins, near the headboard, Rachel spots a pair of stick figures holding hands.

Sarah’s stomach growls again and Sarah slumps. “Shite,” she says, “gimme a candy bar.”

Helena looks at her jacket, which is in a pile by the door, and sighs. Looks at Rachel, pleadingly.

In response Rachel reaches into her bag and tosses her uneaten lunch onto the bed. “Eat a sandwich,” she says dryly, “for once in your life.”

“Hey, cheers,” Sarah says, and digs into the bag like a hungry animal. Rachel goes back to staring at her list of nouns. God, she can’t remember anything. She doesn’t know when all of this slipped her mind, but—

She hears the sound of crinkling paper and she looks up, sudden and horrified. God, there’s a note. How could she have forgotten that there would be a note. She can’t move.

“Aw, shit, that’s sweet,” Sarah says, and Rachel is going to be sick. She leaps up from the chair in a sudden desperate gesture, snatches the note out of Sarah’s hand and shoves it into her bag. Shoves everything into her bag and has her backpack on her back and her shoes on and she’s on her way out the door and she’s saying it under her breath, low and too close to a sob, “It’s not, it’s not, it’s not,” and Sarah and Helena are staring at her like she’s a bomb that’s just gone off.

Rachel’s fumbling with the doorknob when there’s the sound of bedsprings and Helena’s hand is around her wrist. “Wait,” she says, and behind her Sarah’s saying, “it’s alright, you’re alright, Rachel? I’m sorry, okay, you’re fine—”

“Let go,” Rachel says shakily, “don’t touch me.” Helena’s hand on her wrist is very warm. The air on Rachel’s skin is cold, when she lets go. Rachel drops the doorknob.

“You don’t understand,” she says. “You don’t get it.” But she doesn’t know how to explain it – not to Helena, who sometimes jumps whenever Siobhan moves too quickly or to Sarah who moves like she’s only waiting to put her fists up. All of her problems sound childish. What does she say? He doesn’t love me, not really, he loves the idea of me? He likes telling people that he has a daughter, that he cuts the crusts off her sandwiches, but after the age of ten years old he stopped ever coming to say good night or coming into my room at all and once I asked him for help with my homework and he just raised his eyebrows and said you should really understand that by now and his copy of The Island of Doctor Moreau has all the parts about making monsters underlined and—

She’s sat down on the edge of Sarah’s bed and is reading, numbly, the writing on the wall. HAD A HANDLE ON IT / MY LIFE, I BROKE IT! LIVE FAST DIE YOUNG and she looks away again.

“I know I don’t,” Sarah says. “I can try, if you want me to.”

“We are very good listeners,” Helena says. Rachel closes her eyes, tightly, thinks about telling them. She could. Right now.

“I think I’d like to go home,” she says instead. Pauses. “I’m not angry,” she says softly, because they should know. “It’s just – best that I finish my homework at my desk.”

“Of course, Rachel,” Helena says. Her voice is soft, and Rachel can’t bring herself to hate Helena for it.

The next morning Rachel has her driver drop her off someplace nonspecific and walks over to the twins’ house. Lingers nearby until Sarah leaves, and then knocks on the door.

Helena opens it with her hair in a towel and hardboiled egg yolk smeared around her mouth. “Hello, Rachel,” she says with a sideways tilt of her head.

“Skip gym class,” Rachel says. “Come with me.” I’m sorry, she thinks, but doesn’t say it out loud. She thinks it comes through anyways.

“Okay,” Helena says quietly. “Let me brush my hairs.” And she opens the door, lets Rachel in. Siobhan isn’t there – Rachel doesn’t know where she goes, what her job is – and yet the house still doesn’t feel as empty as Rachel’s home does when her parents are there. She walks into the kitchen, stands in front of the fridge. There’s a couple drawings pinned to it, SARAH written in a child’s messy scrawl. A grocery list, Helena’s handwriting taking up most of the page. A scorpion drawing at the bottom has a speech bubble coming from its mouth saying something that’s been heavily crossed out.

“Where are we going,” Helena says, from so close behind Rachel that Rachel almost jumps. Helena’s wearing her jacket; her hands are stuffed deep in the pockets.

“Can you catch the bus from anywhere near here?” Rachel says.

Helena crouches by the tropical reef with her fingers drumming on the glass like the fish can feel it. Rachel stands in front of the glass, watches the fish, watches Helena’s reflection in the tank. She doesn’t know why she’d brought Helena here, only there are things she can’t say and things she can’t explain and for some reason this place feels like an apology and an explanation both. 

“I did not know about this place,” Helena says, voice hushed like she’s in a church. “I did not know there were this many fish in the whole world.”

“I’ve only been here once,” Rachel says distantly. But I wanted to show it to you.

“What was your favorite part,” Helena says, and Rachel brushes her fingers over Helena’s shoulder and start walking. She can hear Helena getting up and following her.

The shark tank is absent of visitors again. The sharks haven’t stopped moving since she’d left. They won’t stop moving until they die.

“Sharp fish,” Helena says.

“They’re not fish,” Rachel says, and Helena says “I know.” She doesn’t look away from the tank. Her head’s tilted to one side like she’s trying to understand, and Rachel wants her to understand at the same time she desperately doesn’t want anything of the sort.

“Do they make you sad?” Helena says.

“I don’t know.”

“They make me sad,” Helena says quietly. “When do they sleep?”

“They don’t, really,” Rachel says, folding her arms across her chest and watching two sharks glide over and around one another without touching. “Half of their brains sleep at a time. They are always awake. They never stop moving.”

There’s a silence and then Helena says, voice round and easy:

“Do you want to talk about your family. Is that why I am here.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Rachel says, in a voice that makes it clear that there is and she just. Won’t. That she can’t. Look at the sharks, she thinks. She doesn’t know what she wants Helena to see in them. But she does. She wants it.

Helena nods, a bob of the head, and folds her lips between her teeth. Pulls them out again. “One thing,” she says, “and then I want to put my hand into the tidepools.”

Rachel gestures with her hand: go on, then.

“You aren’t a shark,” Helena says. “Your skin is not made of teeth, and if you sleep you will not die. I know,” and she holds up a hand, cutting Rachel off before Rachel can even think of saying anything, “you are thinking oh, Helena, what do you know, I am Jaws, grr, but someday I think you will need to remember that someone told you. That you did not have to be this. So I am telling you. It is okay, to be a person.”

She sighs through her lips, sending them flapping. “Okay!” she says. “I do not like speeching, it makes me hungry. Tidepools now.” And she waddles off towards unerringly towards the unmarked path to the tidepools.

Some hollow, tired part of Rachel thinks: what do you know? What do you know, really? Maybe she’d lied to herself. Maybe she never wanted Helena to get it, to look at the tank and see such a transparent cry for – something. But she did. And now Rachel doesn’t know what to do, not really.

But she follows Helena anyways.

Chapter Text

The sun is setting, burning the sky in bright streaks of color and tinting the world gold. Helena’s boots clomp against the sidewalk, Rachel’s shoes clicking counterpoint. She watches their shadows stretch in front of them in the sunset-light. Helena’s still talking happily about the small child she’d befriended while they were downtown, a little girl who had tagged after them for a good fifteen minutes – much to the bemusement of her mother, and much to the bemusement of Rachel.

Helena had held her hand the whole time. She’d looked both ways when they’d walked across the street. Slowed down her pace so that the little girl didn’t have to run to keep up.

Rachel wouldn’t have thought to do any of that.

But it doesn’t matter, not really.

There was a review in biology class today, before the exam two days from now. Rachel wasn’t there. Rachel was downtown, letting Helena talk her into splitting a cookie from a cafe they’d wandered by. She should feel bad, that she’s missed another class, that she’s missed – god, how many classes this week? Downtown today, that strange grungy concert with Sarah the day before, two days before that a huge group heading back to the beach by the river—

But none of that matters, either. None of it, none of it, none of it matters, not with the setting sun dripping lazy gold all the way down everything in sight.

They’ve reached Helena’s house, and Rachel follows Helena in and upstairs so she can collect her backpack from the floor of Helena’s room. A pile of wrappers has drifted over to her backpack since the time she dumped it there this morning. She remembers when this room used to be neat.

“Stay,” says Helena from behind her, while Rachel hunts for her phone to call her driver. Rachel holds perfectly still for one moment, two, and then looks behind her to see Helena standing nervously in the doorway.

“For dinner,” she adds, hastily, fingers fidgeting up and down the frame of the door. “Miss-sus S said you should. Because. Sarah is not back, and she made too-bloody-much-for-one-teenager-even-one-with-your-appetite-chicken.” She sucks her lips between her teeth after the rapid recitation. Her fingers don’t stay still.

Rachel hasn’t talked to Siobhan, not really. Rachel doesn’t like other people’s parents. She doesn’t like seeing what new expectations they have for her.

“I,” she says, and then thinks about it: getting back to her house, microwaving whatever is left over, eating it alone at their enormous brushed-steel dining table. The glow of the halogen lights. The empty house. Rachel’s parents never ever coming home.

“Alright,” she says.

The dinner table is small – Helena’s legs keep banging into Rachel’s under the table, no matter how much Rachel pulls back – and made of scratched wood. Where Rachel’s sitting, someone has with great determination set out stabbing their fork to make a pattern of the holes. She doesn’t contribute to the pattern. She eats silently. It’s good food, homey: meat and potatoes, a Yorkshire pudding that sends something desperate and nostalgic squirming down her throat. The dinner table is – abnormally silent, for this family. She assumed there would be food fights.

Next to her Helena is with single-minded focus wolfing down as much food as she can. Rachel wonders if she’s going to vomit.

“So,” Siobhan says as she cuts her meat with a wicked-looking knife, “I feel like I’ve practically adopted you, Rachel, but we’ve barely spoken, have we?”

Rachel goes stiff at the word adopted, suddenly loses her appetite. She puts her utensils down. “I’m afraid we haven’t,” she says lightly. She folds her hands in her lap under the table, twists her fingers together where no one can see.

“How’s school treating you?” Siobhan asks.

Rachel’s train of thought stutters, stalls, billows black smoke. She doesn’t know how to answer. She doesn’t know what Siobhan wants from her. She doesn’t know how to balance what Siobhan wants – whatever that is – with what Helena, still ominously silent, expects from her.

“Academically speaking,” she says slowly, gambling, “the transition hasn’t been overly rough.” There’s a pool of juice under the meat. She feels sick. Was that what Siobhan had wanted? She can’t tell. She imagines picking up the fork and stabbing it into the table, over and over and over again, not stopping until the feeling goes away, jabbing through the table, carving the wood into pieces and then if that didn’t work the chair, then the window, breaking and ripping and screaming and breaking—

“I didn’t mean grades, chicken,” Siobhan says softly, and Rachel is picking up the plates and hurling them at the wall, one by one, what did you want from me then what do any of you want from me, why can’t you just tell me, why can’t you just say: this is what I want, this is how I know you have failed me, I’ll line it up for you and you just have to stay on this side of the line. It’s easy, sweetheart. Black and white.

There’s silence. Rachel rewinds her memory and realizes Siobhan had been talking. I know the girls have taken you under their wing a bit, Helena next to her looking her way and shooting her a smile stretched wide by her mouthful of food, on and on, until: I hope you’re happy here.

Rachel’s throat aches and aches. Siobhan hopes she’s happy here. When is the last time someone hoped she was happy here.

“I am,” she says, and it’s not until the words fall out of her mouth that she realizes they are almost – almost – almost, somehow, true.

Siobhan drives Rachel back to her house, and Rachel watches it loom over the hill and lets out the smallest possible breath through her nose. The lights are on. Her parents are home. Her stomach rolls over and over and over.

Siobhan stops a block or so away (the way Rachel has told her to do every single time she has driven Rachel home) and cuts the motor (which is new). Rachel turns and looks at Siobhan, who’s watching her in the slash of streetlamp-light falling over her face. She looks like she’s about to say something. If she says anything about family Rachel is going to start screaming and she will never, ever be able to stop screaming. She looks away, blinks, swallows. Fumbles for the lock on the car door in the dark.

“Chicken—” Siobhan starts, and Rachel lightly says, “Don’t, please.”

There’s silence. Siobhan unlocks the door. Rachel gets out of the car, takes her backpack, and walks towards her house in the dark. The sound of her footsteps is very loud. She can hear the sound of the motor starting back up but she doesn’t turn around, doesn’t look back, doesn’t put a name to the feeling that’s pushing insistently at her lungs and waiting to be noticed. Siobhan’s truck drives away. Rachel takes her keys out of her backpack and unlocks the door to her house.

She can hear the sound of silverware clinking in the dining room and she can imagine it: her parents, sitting close together at one end of the table – but not next to each other, not across, only adjacent – and reading separate journals. The room silent.

(I hope you’re happy here, Siobhan had said.)

“Rachel,” calls her mother, “is that you? You’re home quite late.”

Rachel’s fingers twitch on her backpack handle; for a moment she isn’t sure whether to put it down or to hold it in front of her like a shield as she enters the room. In the end she does the sensible thing, and leaves it behind her. Enters the dining room.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I’d assumed you would be working late tonight.”

Rachel’s father looks up from the paper he’s reading and stares at her blankly, like for a moment he doesn’t remember who she is. Then he focuses. Ah, Rachel. He opens his mouth, but Rachel’s mother speaks first.

“I hope your extracurriculars aren’t going to keep you out this late,” she says. “I’d hate for this to become a habit, you arriving after dark.”

Rachel doesn’t answer. Some sick hard knot in her stomach whispers: wouldn’t it be nice, if this was a habit. “I’ll be in my room,” she says, and pauses, and adds: “Good night.”

She goes up the stairs to her room. Behind her she can hear the low susurrus of conversation between her parents; she catches her name, the urgent breath of that a, and tells herself that nothing about that makes her want to cry.

Rachel falls into a dull daze of Mandarin homework – it couldn’t have always been this hard, didn’t it use to be effortless, why can’t she remember anything, where has it all gone – when there’s the sound of a glass-shatter gunshot that has her leaping into the air in one of the most undignified displays she’s ever seen. She looks wildly around the room – nothing.

Then another pebble hits her window.

No, she thinks to herself, like that will make this moment – unexist. Yet another rock hits the window. Rachel waits for it to collide and spin away into space, and then shoves her window open. Pauses, in case of more rocks. Leans out.

Helena, standing on the ground below her house, waves at her cheerily. Behind her Sarah does that same chin-bump up. Rachel can see a blonde head that she’s fairly certain is Shay, and – Gracie and her boyfriend, surprisingly. She looks at Helena and very firmly shakes her head.

Helena makes a face at her. She holds up another rock insistently. Next to her, Sarah reaches out and plucks the rock from her hand, shakes her head and looks back at Rachel. Points very clearly at Rachel, and then down to the ground. You: here.

Rachel shakes her head again. Gracie untangles herself from Mark to hand Helena a piece of paper and a pen. Helena scrawls a note on the paper, wraps it around another pebble, and holds it up.

Rachel pinches the bridge of her nose, and steps back from the window in time for the pebble to come sailing merrily through. She unwraps the paper.

ARENT YOU LONELY COME WITH US ADVENTURE!!!!

Rachel sends her a text, because she is not an idiot.

>Some of us need slp.
>YES BUT NOT YOU
>I saw u 4 hrs ago.
>YES BUT
>Where r u even going.
>COME FIND OUT

Hot days bleed into cold nights, and Rachel can feel the chill seeping in from outside even as she makes her way down the stairs of her house. It’s an enormous white edifice in the dark, moonlight on snow, the house from a fairytale waiting for the snow queen to wake up. It’s so empty. How is it always so empty?

She locks the door behind her, and when she turns around Helena is there. She doesn’t look washed-out under the moonlight; she looks horribly, terribly alive. “Hello,” she says in a hissed stage whisper. “You came!”

“How did you find my house,” Rachel says back in a normal tone of voice, and Helena starts walking backwards towards the rest of the group.

“I have your paper!” she says. “With your classes, and your home, and your telephone number.” She taps her temple once with her finger, and then they’re in the scattered group of moonlight-soaked teenagers. The streets are quiet; the lights are dark. It feels like they’re the only people who have ever been alive.

“Oi,” Sarah says, and Rachel’s irrationally annoyed with her for also looking perfectly at home in the nighttime-light. She moves too easily.

“Do you have any idea where this caravan is headed,” she says, wrapping her arms around herself in the cold.

“Cosima’s house, probably,” Sarah says amenably. “Shay ‘n Cosima’ll snog for a bit and the rest of us’ll need to drink or somethin’ to get over that. Then…” she trails off, shrugs a shoulder.

“Oh,” she adds, “don’t take anything Shay gives you.” She looks over, acknowledges Rachel’s mildly baffled silence, adds: “Not ‘cause it’s – drugs or shit, just, her parents are bloody hippies and they’ve got shite taste.”

“I like it,” Helena says from Rachel’s other flank.

“Bullshit.”

“You are bull shits.”

Rachel neatly exits this scintillating conversation and ends up, in an ironic convenience, walking next to Shay. Shay smiles at her, flips her fingers in a wave Rachel’s certain she’s seen Cosima directing at Sarah more than a few times. Shay rummages in her oversize bag and pulls out a bottle that glints green in the dark.

“Absinthe?” she says. Rachel doesn’t dignify it with a response. Shay sighs, shoves the bottle back in her bag. “Yeah, figured,” she mutters. “Don’t know how I’m even gonna get rid of it.”

“Helena,” Rachel offers.

“Haven’t actually talked to her,” Shay says back. Rachel feels her mouth open to say something, and she realizes it’s going to be something almost kind. The words wrap around her tongue, and she swallows them. God. Shay’s looking at her with something curious and entirely too kind in her eyes, and Rachel folds her arms tighter around herself and doesn’t say anything in response.

“I’ll go see if I can shove it off on her, though,” Shay says. “Thanks…Rachel, right?”

“Yes,” Rachel says. Rachel Duncan, but she doesn’t say that. The silence lingers. Shay peels off, and Rachel is walking alone. Behind her she can hear Shay’s voice wheedling, Helena muttering something, their voices flapping around each other like hawks and crows.

“You’re shiverin’ like hell,” Sarah says, suddenly beside her like she’s always been there. “Don’t have any jackets in that house of yours?”

“I was afraid if I lingered Helena would find larger rocks,” Rachel says. She looks over. Sarah’s giving her another one of those looks, like Rachel’s done something Sarah approves of. Part of Rachel wants to bottle it and keep it forever. That mostly makes the other part of her furious.

“You want my jacket?” Sarah says. “It’s yours, yeah? You won it.” She grins, a flash of teeth, tongue poking between the sharp points of her canines.

…

It would be warm.

“No,” Rachel says, “thank you.”

“Shiverin’ in silence,” Sarah says, “seems more like you.” She doesn’t seem particularly offended. They wind through the streets. The group must have had to come far out of its way to head to Rachel’s house. That thought makes something in her chest sore, the idea of Helena insisting I know where she lives, we have to come get her, she’ll come with us. She puts that thought in a box and shoves it to the back of her skull.

Ahead of her Mark calls “Cosima,” and Gracie – attached to him by their joined hands, their shared whispers, something knotted tightly between them – turns around, presumably for Shay. She looks lovely like this, holding Mark’s hand, happy, moonlight-silvered. She looks lovely.

Rachel watches Shay head towards Cosima’s house, texting on her phone, and hears the sound of Helena bouncing up next to her.

“Uck,” Helena says cheerily. “Kisses.”

Rachel agrees, but doesn’t say so. The three of them watch Cosima drop out of her window, meet with Shay, kiss her in the gold light from the porchlights and the silver light from the moon. Mark tucks Gracie’s hair behind her ear and whispers something that makes her giggly shyly. Helena sighs, and nudges Rachel in the thigh with something. Rachel looks down, looks back up at Helena.

“Absinthe?” Helena says.

They end up at the skate park again – Rachel and the twins, Mark and Gracie, Cosima and Shay, scattered members of the Dungeons and Dragons club (presumably nocturnal) and Parsons. Parsons and Helena are, with great determination and many packets of sugar, making their way through the absinthe bottle. They’re collaborating, drawing something on a pad of paper; Rachel sees a man with a scorpion tail and looks away. She’d only had one sip of the absinthe and it lingers on her tongue – the taste is herbal, bitter, strange. She sits on the edge of the bowl and tries to read the graffiti scrawled on its edge. Something in binary, presumably courtesy of Veera – she is at this moment painstakingly spraypainting something else on the other end of the great concrete chasm. Rachel wants to know what it is, but she doesn’t want at all to go over there and ask. Instead she slips into a sort of night-daze, watches the spray of black paint over wall.

She snaps awake to Parsons sitting next to her. He waves at her, an awkward flop of the hand, but doesn’t say anything. She wonders if he knows her name. She doesn’t press the issue. Parsons studies her, opens his mouth, huffs a breath between his teeth, and then looks away. Instead of saying anything else he puts his fingers into his mouth and lets out a piercing whistle, like a hawk cry. She hears a return whistle; moments pass, and then Mark sits down next to Parsons. He and Gracie split – with a sorrow like a couple being separated for some great war – and Gracie sits down on Rachel’s other side.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hello, Grace,” Rachel says. “How are you.”

“Good,” Gracie says. “Good.” She’s smiling again, soft and warm, chin ducked down to her chest. God. God, this makes her happy. Rachel looks away, back to where Veera is moving on to painting some sort of bear. Her eyes meet Rachel’s, and something familiar in them makes the both of them look away uncomfortably.

“How are you?” Gracie says.

Rachel considers the question. When she can’t find an answer boiling in her chest or tucked under her ribs, she just lets out a breath through her nose and doesn’t answer.

She can feel the weight of Gracie’s eyes on her. Everyone expects something. The problem is finding what they need you to be, and then being it – or performing it well enough that they think that’s what you are. God, she’s tired.

“I’m,” Rachel says, and then tilts her chin in a direction away from the crowd. Gracie scoots to the side so Rachel can stand, and Mark and Gracie close ranks around Parsons again. Parsons has his chin tucked in the hollow between Mark’s shoulder and throat. Rachel feels: sharp, and sharp, and sharp. She folds her arms around herself and looks around the barren concrete world, looks at all of these people all draped in moonlight.

There’s a staircase in the corner of the park, concrete stained with scuff marks from failed tricks, metal railings gleaming sharp silver angles in the dark. Helena and Sarah are sitting on it, not touching. Sarah’s saying something, but neither of them are looking at each other. Rachel wouldn’t interrupt – not something like that, not that sort of moment. If she was a bett—a different person, she would go over there and wrap an arm around Helena’s shoulders but she isn’t that sort of person, she never would be, she couldn’t be. Instead she walks over to Helena and Parson’s abandoned sketchpad, just to look like she was walking somewhere with some sort of purpose.

It’s left open to the page Rachel saw when she left: a man with a scorpion tail. There’s a full-on scorpion scribbled in a familiar style, a speech bubble with familiar letters over its head: YOUR FAMILY ABANDONED YOU! THEY LEFT YOU TO SUFFER!

The half-scorpion man is punching the scorpion in its mandibles, sending it flying, speech bubble trailing behind it like a comet’s tail. Over his head: NO THEY DIDN’T. I AM NOT ALONE.

She ends up standing underneath Helena’s angel again, although she can barely see it in the dark. It’s peaceful under the overpass. Dark, quiet, still, like a well full of dark water. She lingers close enough to the light that she can see all of her—all of the others, but doesn’t approach any of them. Just watches the lines make feathers.

“Do you want to help,” comes Helena’s voice from behind her, and there she is: hands tucked in the pockets of her coat, shoulders hunched. When Rachel’s gaze lands on her she pulls a hand out of her pocket and gestures at the half-full cans of spraypaint scattered beneath the wall. “You can make a part of it. If you want.”

“I would ruin it,” Rachel says quietly.

“You wouldn’t,” Helena says, the words simple, like they’re true. Rachel doesn’t answer her. The silence is full of the sound of Helena stepping closer, closer, until she’s right next to Rachel. They’re both looking up. Rachel wonders what Helena sees. She wonders if they see the same thing.

Helena inches closer, slowly, like a nervous feral animal trying desperately to be tame. Her side presses up against Rachel’s. Her coat is very warm, and thick, and there’s something in the pockets sharp enough to press up against Rachel’s hip. Rachel holds herself very very still and does not move. Every single piece of her is at war with itself, screaming at her to run, whispering at her to stay. She doesn’t look at Helena. If she doesn’t look, this isn’t real. Helena is so warm. It’s like she’s the most real thing in the world, standing there with the warmth of her side easy against Rachel’s. Like nothing else in Rachel’s life has ever been real.

Slowly Rachel unfolds her arms, reaches into Helena’s pocket, finds Helena’s wrist and clasps it tightly for one horrible tender moment. Then she pulls her hand back again and tucks it up against her ribs. Helena leans a little bit more of her weight against Rachel’s, just a little bit more, like she’s testing how much she thinks Rachel can hold. Rachel stays very still, and lets her.

Chapter Text

“So?” Sarah says to Rachel one day as they sit in the bleachers by the track, watch the actually-motivated students run in desperate wheezing circles. Sarah’s gaze is locked on her friend Beth, who’s actually keeping a steady clip around and around. Every now and then Sarah yells some sarcastic encouragement and Beth flips her off without slowing down.

Rachel would have been down there, probably, a few months ago. She hates that version of herself. Pathetic and wheezing. Desperately chasing something she’s never going to get.

“So,” she says, the syllable a slow drip from between her teeth.

“Are you coming?” Sarah says. “This Saturday.”

Rachel gives her a blank stare and resumes looking at the track. Scott has almost fallen over, and Krystal has hopped off the bleachers to encourage him.

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” she says bluntly.

“Wait—” Sarah says. “Bloody hell, Helena didn’t even tell you.” Rachel turns, blinks confusedly. The last time she’d seen Helena, Helena had told her she’d hit a baseball straight into the face of one of the JROTC boys. She’d then run away from Rachel, cackling, pursued by a relentless pack of same-faced teenagers. She hadn’t mentioned anything about the weekend.

“I’m afraid she didn’t,” Rachel says.

“Beth’s parents are gone again,” Sarah says, looking back at the track. “So she’s throwing a party. Pretty sure the whole bloody school’s gonna be there, it was Helena’s bloody job to tell you.”

Rachel’s never been to a party.

Well, she has, but – they’re the sort of mixers her parents throw, where classical music plays over the speakers and her father’s coworkers leer at her and splay their warm sweating hands over the small of her back to show her around. The kind of party where she isn’t someone’s daughter but just another object to be admired, like the vase on the side table. This is Rachel. She’s going to be valedictorian. Isn’t she beautiful! Look at the sculpting of her hips, the perfect smoothness of her lipstick. We never taught her to do that, you know. She learned all on her own.

Sarah has apparently taken her silence to mean something other than what it is, and she sighs. “I mean, not – everyone,” she says, and Rachel doesn’t have to look to the side to see that Sarah is running an exasperated hand through her hair. “But if it’s Beth’s party we’re all gonna be there,” (we, Rachel thinks, with something warm—) “and Beth’ll invite Alison ‘cause they were – Girl Scouts together or whatever, and Alison’ll drag along all of her blondes and that means Niki and Niki means Veera and Veera means the bloody D ‘n D club and…yeah.”

“If Helena didn’t tell you maybe she didn’t tell Gracie,” Sarah mutters to herself. “Maybe for once the bloody army arseholes won’t come crashing.”

Rachel has a paper due Tuesday that she hasn’t started. She hasn’t even started it. She’s just been – god. She doesn’t even know what she’s been doing, the way all of the days have been sliding between her fingers like sand.

“I’ll be there,” she says. “I’m thrilled at the prospect of drinking from a keg.”

Sarah barks out a laugh, loud and pleased. “First off,” she says, “never say keg again, holy shite. Second off, nah. Beth’s parents have a liquor cabinet.”

She turns and grins at Rachel, sharp-toothed. “They’re gonna have whiskey.”

Rachel lies to her parents. She says her community service group is doing a special event, and – she doesn’t know when she started telling them she was doing community service but she did, she told them, and now it’s just another lie to carry on her shoulders. School is fine. Mandarin is easy. I’m in seven clubs. There’s no need for you to worry.

Cal Morrison picks them all up in his truck, seven teenagers crammed into the backseat and the truckbed with no seatbelts on. Rachel sits smashed between Helena (always Helena) and Scott in the backseat. Helena’s bony elbows dig into her ribs, which is terrible, and on the other side Scott sits and positively radiates fear. Rachel wonders what Veera has told him. Rachel wonders what Veera thinks of her, what she would say.

They ride over, hitting every single pothole on the way. Sarah, who has apparently permanently claimed shotgun in Cal’s truck, flips the radio to a pop station (to unanimous groans) and Helena starts bellowing along the words to some inane synth confection Rachel doesn’t know.

And then everyone’s singing – even Sarah, although she sounds wry about it – and there’s an energy in the car. Rachel doesn’t understand it, really. She twists her hands together in her lap and tells herself it doesn’t make her horribly, terribly sad.

Then they’re there, and she can put that in a box and forget it. They all pile out of the car. The bass in Beth’s house is thumping, enough to make Rachel’s heart shake into rhythm.

“Drinks!” Helena yells delightedly, going to sling her arm over Rachel’s shoulder before reading something in Rachel’s body language and thinking better of it. Her arm flaps around awkwardly before she pulls herself together, folds her hands behind her back and takes enormous gangly steps around Rachel. “Are you ready to be drunk, Rachel?”

“Are you,” Rachel says, instead of answering.

“Yes,” Helena says, very seriously. “Much drinking. I will be king of beer pong.”

“She’s not lying,” says Scott from where he’s popped up next to Helena. “Dunno what they’re teaching you in physics, but I kinda want to switch science classes.”

“Everyone in Biology is weak,” Helena says, with the immediacy of someone who’s parroting someone else’s words without knowing what they mean. She turns and looks at Rachel, widens her eyes. “Except you, yahnya.” She pauses. “And Parsons. And also Grace.”

“And…” Scott says, but Helena’s running ahead of them to open the door and hurl herself into the party’s sharp-toothed mouth. Rachel has absolutely no desire to be left with Scott, and so she speeds up enough to lose him.

The room is dark, and filled with bodies. Everything smells like alcohol and nervous sweat. Rachel doesn’t know where to go – certainly not to the space that’s apparently been cleared out for a dance floor; she sees a girl she’s fairly certain is Niki practically rutting against a girl Rachel doesn’t even recognize, and – oh, that’s tongue. She looks away. Heads to the kitchen. She hadn’t planned on drinking heavily, but her stomach’s tied in knots and the omnipresent feeling is lurking: if she leaves herself alone with her feelings too long she’ll just be sad, or furious.

In the kitchen she runs into Beth, of all people, leaning against the wall with her eyes shut. When Rachel passes through the doorway Beth’s eyes flicker open and she watches Rachel without moving for a moment before blinking, rapidly, and pushing off the wall.

“Hey there,” she says. “Welcome to the bar.”

Sure enough: there are various half-empty bottles of alcohol littered all over the table. No whiskey; in her mind Rachel pictures Sarah grabbing the entire bottle, tipping it down her throat with a laugh.

Rachel doesn’t even know where to start, but thankfully Beth’s grabbing bottles and a cup and mixing something together. When she hands it to Rachel their fingers brush together, lightly, and because of that Rachel takes a gulp from the cup without even looking at it. It burns going down, but what doesn’t.

“Wow,” Beth says, “you just dive right in, huh?”

“Apparently,” Rachel says, voice a dry burned croak. She takes another sip. It tastes…like alcohol, sharp and stinging. There’s an aftertaste she can’t quite reach. She takes yet another sip.

“This is your first rodeo, yeah?” Beth says, and Rachel nods. “Cool. Just to let you know we’re all gonna end up in the basement at some point. Spoilers. If this shit gets too much you can head down there whenever, I’m pretty sure Mika set up Mario Kart sometime this afternoon and just…hasn’t moved.” She sounds fond. Rachel doesn’t ask who Mika is, or how she’s been here since this afternoon if the party’s only just started.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she says dryly. She has absolutely no intention of going to play video games.

“Stay safe,” Beth says, pouring herself an enormous cup of something or another and knocking it back. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Use condoms. Uh – shit. I don’t know, have fun.”

Rachel takes that as the dismissal it clearly is, clenches her cup, and wades back out into the fray.

So it’s not that she’s drunk. It’s just – that – it’s not that she’s drunk. She just keeps refilling her cup so that she doesn’t have to talk to anyone, and the burn’s spread out through her throat and trickled into her limbs and she mostly feels warm. Her eyelids keep drooping. She’s leaning against a wall and staring at the dancefloor, watching the way Sarah’s pressed up against Cal, how her fingers are running through her hair. The deep red light of Beth’s lamps trace along Sarah’s neck, her collarbones, the space between Cal’s neck and shoulders. Rachel can see them gleaming off of Krystal’s teeth, the curls of Danielle’s hair. Cosima and her girlfriend are kissing, lazily, bodies twined together. Rachel’s leaning against the wall with her arms folded around herself. She pours the rest of her drink down her throat – Sprite and tequila, she’d run out of options – and decides it’s best she remove herself before she does anything stupid. That’s smart. That’s smart of her. She shouldn’t – be here.

She opens one of the back doors and there’s a staircase down; the air that drifts up is cool and dry and Rachel already feels slightly brighter than she did. She takes the staircase down.

At the bottom of the stairs there’s a pile of beanbags and a squashed green couch. In the middle of the couch is Veera. She’s playing Mario Kart. Rachel has no idea why the fuck Beth called her Mika, and she’s distracted enough by the flashing lights and bright pings of Mario Kart that she ends up stumbling down the rest of the stairs with a series of thumps.

Veera flicks her eyes to Rachel but doesn’t pause the game. Rachel feels horribly clumsy. It’s her shoes, probably. She kicks them off; they fly a few feet, hit the wall, fall to the floor. They were so expensive. Her mother is going to kill her. She’s started giggling, doesn’t know when or why.

“You’re not supposed to play that alone,” she tells Veera, and manages to make it to the couch. She sits on the other end of Veera, because Veera hates her.

“What?” Veera says, without looking away from the game. “Do you want to play? Do you want to pick up a controller, and run me off the road?” She sends a red shell with particular viciousness into Princess Peach’s cart and speeds around her.

“I’m sorry,” Rachel says. Well: slurs. She can’t quite get the words out, but it’s very important Veera know she’s sorry. “I’m so – I’m so awful. Why am I so awful, all the time. Why – do I do this.”

“I don’t care, Rachel,” Veera says.

“No,” Rachel says. “You have to, you have to know I’m sorry, I won’t ever say this sober, ever, and you have to—” she pauses, swallows down a bubble of vomit. “I hate this, I hate myself, but I don’t hate you, you’re smart and you care about things. You’re going to win this ridiculous video game and you deserve to.” She closes her eyes, feels the room spinning around her, opens them again. “And I’m going to die alone. You know it. I know it. You should at least know I’m sorry.”

Veera sighs, and pauses the game. “Rachel,” she says, sounding like she’s either going to laugh or cry, “has anyone ever said that you are a very melodramatic drunk.”

“I don’t get drunk,” Rachel says. “I don’t do that. My parents would hate me.” She covers her mouth with her hand. “My parents hate me. You hate me. Everyone hates me.”

“I don’t hate you,” Veera says. She looks down at her controller, winds the cord of it around her fingers. She looks like she’s going to say something else, but she just sighs and shakes her head. Her lips fold between her teeth.

“Yes,” Rachel says, pointing at her seriously, “you do.”

“You’re very paranoid,” Veera says. She looks at Rachel, doesn’t look away. Rachel doesn’t know why she thought the scar made Veera look ugly. It doesn’t. She’s very pretty.

“You’re very pretty,” she tells her. Veera looks like she’s about to choke, unpauses the game and goes back to playing it. Rachel watches her for a while.

“Can I play,” she says softly, and Veera pauses the game again.

“Fine,” she says, and hands Rachel a controller.

People start heading down the stairs after about four rounds of Rachel getting royally trounced at Mario Kart. It turns out her lack of previous experience, mixed with her sudden lack of hand-eye coordination, is not the winning recipe for steering Rosalina around the track.

“Wow,” Sarah says, announcing herself with a laugh as Rachel drives right off the edge of a cliff, “you’re shit at this. Can’t believe.”

“You’ve never brushed your hair,” Rachel mutters, “you aren’t allowed to judge me.”

“Wait,” Sarah says, “hold on, are you – are you drunk?” She turns to Veera. “Is she drunk?”

“Yes, Sarah,” Veera says, leaning around Sarah to see the television screen, “she is very drunk.”

Sarah drops onto the floor next to Rachel’s legs. “This makes my life,” she says seriously. “God, Rachel, use the bloody mushroom.”

“I don’t want to go faster,” Rachel says, words petulant. She really doesn’t. The motion of the car onscreen makes her feel nauseous enough as it is. There’s a little fanfare from onscreen as Veera easily sails across the finish line, and from the floor Sarah actually groans.

“Give me that,” she says, reaching behind her to fumble in the direction of Rachel’s hands. “Give – give me the bloody controller.”

“No,” Rachel says. “I want to win.” Actually, she – doesn’t. She doesn’t really care. She’s so surprised at that that her grip goes loose on the controller and Sarah grabs it, triumphantly.

“Eat shit, MK,” she says, and presses the button for next round.

“I don’t think so, Sarah,” Veera says with a sad sort of fondness, and they’re off. Rachel watches them with her eyes half-lidded, leans against the arm of the couch. Sarah’s weight is very warm against her legs. She starts scratching the top of Sarah’s scalp, contemplatively. Sarah makes a sort of mm noise in the back of her throat but doesn’t look away from the screen.

She doesn’t beat Veera, but she does get a respectable second place. Onscreen Rosalina hops up from solid 12th to…less solid 12th. By now a few other people have gathered – Tony on one of the beanbags, Niki perched on the arm of the couch next to Veera, Alison sitting on the edge of one of the chairs and Donnie sitting on a nearby beanbag nearly vibrating with nerves. Cosima and Shay wander in, and Shay pulls Cosima giggling onto another beanbag. Cal folds his oversized limbs up enough to fit into one of the chairs. There’s a banging from the staircase and then Helena has thrown herself on the couch next to Rachel, nestles against Rachel’s ribcage. Rachel moves one of her hands from Sarah’s scalp to Helena’s. She really likes touching. She doesn’t know why she never ever touches people. This is nice.

“I am King Pong,” Helena whispers.

“I’m proud of you,” Rachel says, and means it. Sarah sends a blue shell rocketing into Veera’s car and everyone lets out a quiet unanimous oooooh. Rachel could fall asleep here, probably. But she doesn’t think she’s going to.

There’s more sound from the stairs and then Beth’s in the basement. “Party over,” she says, and there’s some ragged cheering. “Afterparty time.” She walks into Rachel’s line of sight and Rachel sees she’s clutching two bottles of Fireball, one in each hand. She passes one to Niki and one to Helena and then sits down next to Veera, who puts the game on pause so she can carefully lean up against Beth’s side. Niki slides onto the couch and presses against Veera’s other side. Veera, in the middle, is making this silly fond little smile and not moving.

Helena sits up to knock the bottle back, and she drinks from it for a moment before putting it down and making a disgusted face.

“Here,” she says, handing it to Rachel.

“You didn’t make it look very appealing,” Rachel says.

“She makes that face,” Sarah says; she’s moved so she’s sitting between Rachel’s feet, her weight against Rachel’s shins, her head dropped back so it bumps against Rachel’s knees. Rachel blinks at the feeling of Sarah’s hair falling over her legs. It tickles.

“If you’re not gonna drink, pass the bottle,” Sarah says, eyes locked upside-down on Rachel’s. They’re whiskey-colored; Rachel drinks. Gags on it a little, but lets the warmth fill her. She passes the bottle down and Sarah sits up to drink from it before screwing the cap back on and rolling it over to Tony.

Rachel doesn’t realize she’d missed the warm weight of Sarah’s back against her legs until it’s back. Helena’s curled back up against Rachel’s side and has reached down to grab one of Sarah’s hands. The world is warm, and very soft.

“Are we finally gonna play Truth or Dare,” Tony says, presumably after taking his drink from the bottle.

“No,” Alison says, before anyone else can answer. She’s going to make Donnie upset, Rachel whispers to Helena, and Helena makes a snort that ruffles both of their hair.

“Hey, sister, you don’t speak for all of us,” Tony says.

“I do,” Beth says, “and I’m vetoing the fuck out of it.”

“Y’all suck,” Tony says.

“We could do questions again,” Niki says. “That was fun, last time.”

“Happiest memory,” Veera says quietly.

The room is quiet, for a moment. I don’t want to think about that, Rachel thinks, but she doesn’t think she’s said it out loud. Helena burrows even closer, like the room’s suddenly gone cold.

“My dad took us skiing,” Beth says. “Up in the mountains. Usually he pushes us, you know, go faster, beat your time, but this time he just said fuck it and we all did whatever we wanted.

“And I went down the slope, lifted my poles up, and I was flying. It was just me and all that white and I couldn’t see anyone or feel anything. Like – like I was dead, only it was a good death. The kind of death I’d choose. Just me on and on and on forever, and all that bright white light.”

“The first time I had ice cream,” Helena says, before the silence can get too heavy, and everyone laughs with a sort of uneasy relief. (Rachel’s still picturing it, though: the cold, the white, the absence. She wishes she’d sat down next to Beth, that first day. She feels like Beth might understand – something.)

“What flavor, though,” says Shay.

“All of them,” Helena says very seriously. “Little spoons for every flavor. Much tasting.”

Sarah tilts her head against Rachel’s leg and she’s looking at Helena. Rachel can’t see Helena’s face, but from the weight of Sarah’s gaze she thinks they’re doing that – thing, again, where they have entire conversations without speaking. Sarah looks horribly sad. Her hand clenches around Helena’s where it’s still dangling off the couch. She looks away.

“The school picture day, Niki,” Veera says. Niki lets out a bright peal of laughter, bell-like, and says cheerily: “Oh balls.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“It was! My hair was, like – ugh. I don’t even want to talk about it.” She pauses. “But yeah. Yeah. I know what you mean.”

Sarah nudges Rachel’s leg with her shoulder. “You go,” she says.

“I don’t have one.”

“You have to have a happy memory,” says someone, Rachel doesn’t know, she’s closed her eyes and she’s floating in the dark.

“When I was seven,” she says, “my parents took me to the park. We played in the leaves. My mother threw me into a pile of them, even though I told her to stop. I didn’t mean it. She knew that.” The room’s silent again, and Rachel wonders if it’s because of the way she sounds – because she can’t stop the way her words are ringing bitter, how every sentence sounds like it’s coming off a factory line. “My father recorded it. I used to watch that video all the time.”

And her voice is getting louder, and she can’t stop it. “I haven’t been happy since then, did you know? I’ve forgotten how. I keep thinking that if I watch the tape I’ll remember, but I don’t. Of course I don’t.”

“I haven’t been happy since I was seven years old,” she says, and then she’s abruptly done with the game – she wrenches herself out of the Manning sister pile with effort and then staggers off to the bathroom to go throw up.

(She wakes up somewhere between night and dawn curled up on the floor, head on Sarah’s chest, Helena wrapped around her back like Rachel’s a security blanket she doesn’t want to drop. In a muzzy, half-asleep state Rachel doesn’t think about moving. Sarah’s chest rises and falls under her head. She doesn’t have any idea where they are or why her mouth tastes like warmed-over death. Her bra is digging into her ribs; she shifts to readjust it and Helena burbles, paddles her legs like a sleeping dog. “No,” she says sleepily.

“I’m not leaving,” Rachel slurs, and Helena makes a pleased hum and returns to the land of the unconscious. Her breathing is a heavy, constant wheeze, painting over Rachel’s neck and shoulder, and Rachel gives up on trying to be more comfortable and drifts. She isn’t quite awake, but she isn’t quite asleep either. She’d like to live like this, maybe. Where the whole world is soft, and none of it hurts you. And someone is always holding you. A tear slides down her face, salt-slippery, but that’s alright too. She forgives herself.)

When she wakes up it’s morning, light sliding through the window of – oh, god, Beth’s basement. Rachel blinks dry eyes and realizes her head is on Sarah’s stomach, which makes her abruptly nauseous; she sits up, makes a low sound of pain at the way her head is ringing like a gong, and – oh, no, that nausea isn’t from touching Sarah. She makes it to the bathroom just in time.

Her reflection in the mirror is sallow; her lipstick is smeared. What happened to you, Rachel. Poor Rachel. What happened to you? And she doesn’t remember. The memory of last night is a golden blur, someone’s voice saying you’re fine, promise and Sarah’s head in her lap and the taste of the alcohol on her tongue and the vague remembered feeling that she’d done it, she’d made it, and everything was finally alright.

When she makes it out of the bathroom there are vague stirrings of life from all around the room. There’s a heap on the couch, Alison and Beth and Veera and Niki, and various piles of humanity draped on the beanbags on the floor. Helena’s eyes open abruptly, like a doll’s, and she gives Rachel a tired, content little smirk before her lids droop shut again. Rachel heads upstairs to find her bag, refresh her lipstick.

She makes the mistake of pulling out her phone.

>7 MISSED CALLS
>12 MISSED TEXT MESSAGES

They’re all from her mother.

Chapter Text

Beth’s house is close enough to Rachel’s that she can walk home. It takes her half an hour, which gives her time to listen to all of the voicemails in her inbox.

We’re very disappointed in you—

I’ve looked into community service organizations affiliated with the school, and none of them—

Rachel Duncan if you don’t pick up your phone this instant—

Your father and I are very dis—

Rachel, I am—

We are so di—

We’ll expect you home by noon.

It’s 11:30am. Rachel is walking down the sunny sidewalk, dangling her heels off her fingertips. The sunlight is warm on the back of her neck. There’s a scuff mark all along the side of one heel, and for some reason she feels that Veera is to blame. She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t know if she had enough to drink to make her forget, or if she’s just repressed everything. Doesn’t know which one is worse. For some reason every time she thinks about last night she just thinks about the shark tank, the cool serenity of the water-light. That and some memory from when she was seven.

“No, come on,” Sarah says, “don’t go. Stay with us, c’mere.”

She vomits in a bush by the sidewalk. Wipes off her mouth with the back of her hand. Well, hopefully that takes care of that.

Her house looms in front of her. She fumbles in her bag for her keys, finds them, double checks in her mirror that her makeup is – oh, god, she looks awful. Alright. That’s a lost cause.

She slips her shoes back on. Her first few steps are wobbly but after that she’s walking alright. She slaps the side of her face, once, with the flat of her hand. Waits for the pain to hit her brain – sure enough the gears start grinding, and she’s awake again. She doesn’t want to be here at all. She doesn’t – she wants to go ho—

She doesn’t even bother checking to see if the door is unlocked. It isn’t; her key works and she lets herself in. Her feet click loudly on the tile floor. God, why can’t they own one rug. She hates this house. Her mouth still tastes like old bile, and that seems about right – that’s how anger feels, isn’t it? Like bile.

She walks to the back of the house. Her parents are sitting on the couch, stiff and not looking at each other. Her father is tapping his fingers thoughtfully against his lips. Her mother is sitting poker-straight, seemingly maintaining her posture with sheer rage.

The words on Rachel’s tongue are: I’m sorry. They’re so soft. She means it, she does. She’s sorry. She’s soft. She’s sorry.

“Sit down,” snaps her mother, and Rachel does. The world lurches slightly when she reaches the chair, but she holds it together alright. She wants to sleep for a hundred years. Her head hurts.

“Would you like to explain this,” says Rachel’s mother, and turns her tablet on. Slides it across the table. Rachel looks down at it, blinks. It’s a mid-semester report card. There aren’t enough vowels on it to spell out a word. She laughs, once, a desperate high-pitched gulp, and then pushes the tablet back across the table.

“Those are my grades,” she says. “You’ll notice my grade in math has gone up.”

Rachel’s mother stands up, leans across the table, and slaps her. Rachel freezes. Tears bubble in her throat and she holds very still, very still, so that they don’t get out. She can’t let them get out. She can’t be a child. Not here, not now, she cannot be a child.

“Susan,” hisses Rachel’s father, shocked and horrified. “That is not how we raise our daughter.”

“I don’t understand how else we’re meant to get through to her,” Rachel’s mother snaps. She sounds equally shocked, equally horrified. Whether it’s by the violence or by the apparent discord between her two parents Rachel does not know.

“Rachel,” her mother says, too sharp to be pleading, “what has gotten into you? You smell like cheap whiskey and there’s vomit in the corner of your mouth. We’ve raised you better than this.”

You HAVE NOT RAISED ME, Rachel thinks. She’s so angry she wants to cry. She wants to cry, and that makes her so angry. She doesn’t say anything, just clenches her jaw and digs her nails into the skin of her knees. Waits for it to be over. Eventually they’ll say what they want her to do, and she’ll do it, and then it will all be over.

“There have to be consequences,” Rachel’s father says, shaking his head, and some small pleading part of Rachel whispers Daddy no. Her vision blurs. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She doesn’t move her hand to her face; to wipe away the tears would be to acknowledge them.

“We’ll have Daniel take you straight to and from school,” her mother sighs. “Really, we’ve been far too lenient with your comings and goings. And as for your grades…”

There’s a moment of quiet from her parents. Rachel doesn’t look up from her knees. Eventually they start murmuring to each other, and she still doesn’t look up. She blinks enough that her tears clear, slightly. She’s missed a patch of hairs by the side of her knee while shaving – maybe half a centimeter wide. Everyone’s probably noticed. She doesn’t know when she became so sloppy.

“If you don’t raise them,” her father says sadly, “we’ll be sending you away to boarding school.”

Rachel goes stiff. Swallows. “I understand,” she says. She stays very, very still.

“Good,” Rachel’s mother says. “This isn’t what we’d wanted for you, Rachel, you must understand. You’re meant for bigger things than – goodness, drunk riots in some shabby basement or another.”

Rachel doesn’t know how her mother knew about Beth’s basement, but in this moment she isn’t surprised at all. Of course her mother is omniscient. Of course she knows every mistake Rachel’s ever made. “Yes,” she says, voice cracked and dry.

“You may go,” her mother says. Rachel stands up, stares at the ground, and walks up the stairs. All the way to her empty room. She closes the door. She sits on the bed. She stares at the places where the door hinges meet the wall and waits, very patiently, to feel something. Sadness. Anger. There’s something bulging against the skin of her throat, and she thinks she’s ready to feel it.

But it doesn’t come. There’s only this: her, and the silence.

After about half an hour of Rachel lying on her bed and not thinking about anything in particular: her phone buzzes.

It’s a picture of five boxes of pizza. Rachel can see the edge of Sarah’s face in the corner of the photo; she’s sticking her tongue out.

>COME BACK WE MISS YOU
>Im not coming back.
>RACHEL YOURE BREAKING SARAHS HEART

There’s a photograph attached of Sarah making an exaggerated sad face. A pause. Rachel’s phone buzzes again: a picture of Helena, making an exaggerated sad face, and Helena doesn’t get it. She doesn’t understand. Rachel doesn’t know how, after all this time, she can just – not understand.

>Helena. I am not coming back.
>OKAY FINE RACHEL! SEE YOU MONDAY

Rachel stares at her phone, hands clenched on the case, and then hurriedly types out I dont want to see you again. and shoves her phone under her pillow. There. Done. Rachel’s chest shudders and her vision blurs and the phone under her pillow is buzzing, buzzing, and she’s done.

She’s done. It’s true. She doesn’t understand why it doesn’t feel true.

Eventually, her phone stops buzzing.

“Rachel,” calls her mother from downstairs. “Dinner.” Rachel breathes in horrible shaking breaths until her breathing calms. It’s funny: years ago this would have been all she wanted, for her mother to call her down to dinner. Because that means her mother wants her there, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it? Doesn’t that have to be what it means?

Their dining table is huge, even though Rachel’s parents rarely have guests. She takes the chair she usually takes, out of habit; it isn’t until her parents have settled that she realizes her chair is at the opposite end of the table. None of the three of them comment. They all eat. The chicken is dry – Rachel’s parents are, actually, terrible cooks. But she’s given up on ever telling them.

“We are sorry about earlier, my dear,” her father says – calls, practically, from across the room. His knife saws against his plate. “But it’s like your mother said. You are meant for greater things!”

“Honestly,” Rachel’s mother says. “You’ll thank us later, you know.”

“I know,” Rachel says quietly. She does. She knows. Years from now, when she’s on the top floor of some skyscraper, she’ll look back and remember this and she’ll hate herself for ever having been weak enough to care about—

The doorbell rings.

Rachel and her parents all stare at each other. Her father lowers the fork that’s partway to his mouth. They’re all thinking the same thing, Rachel is sure: who would possibly come to the door.

Rachel’s mother stands up, huffs, goes to answer it with a vague mutter about solicitors. The door opens. Rachel listens to her mother’s murmuring absentmindedly, and then her head shoots up.

That’s Helena’s voice. Helena is here, outside her door, talking to her mother. Instinct blares at her to shut this down, to stop this immediately. But she can’t move. She looks across the table to her father just to be sure this is happening – but he’s poking at his food, humming absentmindedly. She is certain his brain is ten million miles from here. He wouldn’t listen if she shouted. He wouldn’t even know.

Outside, at the door, a play observed from the wings:

Is Rachel home?

And who might you be, exactly?

Helena.

God, Helena thinks that Rachel has mentioned her to her parents. Helena thinks Rachel’s parents know her. Of course they don’t! she wants to yell. You matter! Why would I give you to them, why would I let them – but Helena wouldn’t understand, and it doesn’t matter, and she isn’t moving. Helena is still trying to talk to Rachel’s mother.

She’s grounded.

Grounded. God. Like Rachel is twelve years old. Humiliation swells to fill her throat and she’s done, abruptly, she’s finished. She stands up and carries her plate to the kitchen, numbly puts it away. On the way back she passes her father, thinks: please. But he doesn’t look up. Rachel goes back into the entryway and takes the staircase up to her room. She can see a flash of blonde out of the corner of her eye – and when Helena sees her she yells her name, once, Rachel!, but Rachel doesn’t stop. She doesn’t turn around. She climbs up the stairs, turns out the light in her room, and crawls into bed. Eventually she falls asleep.

Rachel spends her free period Monday morning at her desk at home, writing three makeup papers and doing extra credit. She doesn’t feel anything in particular. She’s decided it’s best to stop feeling things entirely. For now it’s working – she feels very calm, and very cold, and she’s writing some of the best things she’s done all semester. It’s a powerful feeling. Like she could cry on command if she wanted to, like she could make anyone believe anything. She’s holding onto it with both hands, tight, like a child’s security blanket. She doesn’t want to be left alone in her head. In her heart.

Their driver takes her to school in time for Mandarin. She lingers in the hallway until just before the second bell, and then takes her seat without making eye contact with Beth or Veera or – anyone else, in the classroom. Her notes from the last few weeks are useless. They’re mostly drawings, blobby unformed flowers and geometric shapes. She’ll find a way to redo them.

She stays in the classroom through lunch. Makeup tests to do. Her temples are banging with a headache – too much crammed in, too few hours to cram with. More than anything she wants to rest her head on the desk and sleep, wake up and find that it’s all over and she’s failed irrevocably. She’ll wake up and she’ll already have lost, and it will be too late to take it back, and she can finally walk out the door and live her life without being afraid. Finally: she will not be afraid.

Instead she finishes her tests and hands them in when the bell rings for next period. The teacher takes them with a curt nod and Rachel puts on her backpack, walks out the door.

Sarah is leaning against the wall of lockers. Because of course she is.

“Can’t answer a bloody text?” she says, without turning to look at Rachel.

“Don’t you have a class to skip, Sarah?” Rachel says. She doesn’t look at Sarah either.

“Yeah,” Sarah says, “I do. So do you. Come on.” She has pushed off the wall and now she’s standing in front of Rachel, blocking her path. Around them students go about their lives. No one turns to look. Not a single person turns to look.

“I’m not skipping class,” Rachel says, mouth dry.

“You are,” Sarah says. “You ‘n me need to talk.

“Just once,” she says, “and then you can pretend I don’t exist, if that’s what you want. It’s fine.”

Rachel sighs through her nose, does a complicated little twitch with her head that she hopes conveys grudging acceptance.

Sarah’s hand around her wrist – sudden, abrupt, something like unwanted. “Come on,” she says; she pulls Rachel towards an unobtrusive door, mutters “Cover me,” and pulls out a set of lockpicks.

Rachel can’t help the small, disbelieving laugh that slips through her teeth. This is, she’s fairly certain, precisely what her parents did not want for her. And yet. Here she is. She should be running. She should be slapping Sarah in the face, and going to class. And yet.

The lock clicks. Sarah opens the door, grandly ushers Rachel towards: a staircase, dusty, dark, climbing up and up and up forever. They climb. The only sound is Rachel’s heels clicking on each individual stair.

At the top of the stairs is another door, and outside that door is the roof of the building. Cigarettes litter the ground. There are a few plastic schoolroom chairs thrown around the roof, but Sarah heads to the edge and sits down with her feet dangling off into space.

“You can see everything from up here,” she says. “Thought you’d like it.”

Rachel does. She doesn’t say anything. On the edge of the roof, Sarah sighs; she runs a hand through her hair.

“I’m not gonna graduate,” she says quietly. “Haven’t gone to any of my classes, don’t know shit about world wars or precalc. I haven’t told S, but I think she knows. Gonna – flip burgers or somethin’, for the rest of my life.”

Rachel blinks, stunned like a rabbit in the headlights. She hadn’t even known you could manage to not make it to graduation – of course she had, objectively, but she couldn’t place that concept to someone she knows. Someone she – knows.

“Sarah,” she says softly, and Sarah shakes her head, says: “Don’t. I don’t want to hear it. I just wanted to tell you, ‘cause – had to tell someone, yeah? Couldn’t tell S, sure as shit couldn’t tell Helena. Couldn’t tell my friends, they’d just…” she trails off into silence. Rachel knows. Tony would probably give her a high-five.

“So why tell me,” Rachel says, voice soft – but not in a good way. In a way that makes her feel like she’s saying dangerous things.

“Because you’re gonna tell me why you’re avoiding us,” Sarah says, looking out over the city. “Quid pro quo. Latin, yeah? Your sort of shite.”

“You’ve got me there,” Rachel says wryly.

Sarah laughs, head tilted back to bare her throat. “I know,” she says, not without affection. “Sit down, so I don’t have to crane my bloody neck to look at you.”

“And if I fall,” Rachel says quietly.

“You think I’m gonna let you fall?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel says. The words sound too honest. She sits down.

“My parents,” she says, and then stops. To say anything else feels too much like a betrayal; already those two words are their own small wound, awful and vulnerable and bleeding. You do not let yourself bleed when there are sharks in the water. Even if they love you. They can’t help themselves – they’ll swallow you whole.

“I figured,” Sarah says softly. She leans back against the roof, even though it’s hot, even though it must be burning her hands. “Helena says you’re grounded.”

“Helena,” Rachel says, “shouldn’t have shown up where she wasn’t invited.” Her voice shakes.

Out of the corner of her eye she can see that Sarah has turned her head to look at her. “Talk to her?” she says. “She’s worried about you, the idiot.”

“I can’t,” Rachel says. “I can’t talk to her again. I can’t – do this, Sarah.”

“Bullshit,” Sarah says.

“My grades have been slipping,” Rachel says – blurts – says. “If they drop any more, or if I don’t come directly home after class, my parents will send me to boarding school.” Oh. There. That was easier than she’d thought it should be. That didn’t sound like much of anything at all.

“And that’s why you can’t talk to Helena,” Sarah says slowly, like Rachel is speaking Martian and Sarah has a faulty translator.

“Yes,” Rachel says.

“So, what,” Sarah says, “gonna just – never talk to us again, hope everything sorts itself out?”

“Yes,” Rachel says again, and then she can’t help herself: she closes her eyes and laughs, just a few shaky breaths out through her nose, the corners of her mouth turned up in a smile.

“You’re an idiot,” Sarah says. It’s still affectionate. Rachel doesn’t understand how.

“Well,” she says, eyes still closed, lips still curled up, “at least I’m in good company.”

“Oi,” Sarah says, and then they’re both laughing. Rachel opens her eyes. Sarah’s grinning at her, slightly queasy, mostly relieved. Rachel knows the same expression is on her own face.

“Hey,” Sarah says. “You’ll figure it out.” She’s tilted her head up to watch the sky, cloudless, blue. “Even if you can’t come over or anythin’.”

“There’s always gym class,” Rachel says dryly.

“Exactly,” Sarah says. “Death, taxes, Coady makin’ you play dodgeball.”

Rachel checks her phone. 12:15. She wonders if she can sidle into English class late, but of course that would mean sitting in her seat next to Helena. So. Not that, then.

She turns her head to watch Sarah again – she’s staring into the distance, eyes unreadable, face solemn. Rachel turns to see what she’s looking at; it’s nothing in particular, just that bright blue sky. It’s so warm. It’s an Indian summer.

Chapter Text

Rachel’s driver drops her off at home, directly after school. As promised. But when she opens the door, there’s no one there – just a hastily-scribbled note in her mother’s incomprehensible handwriting, saying something about working late at the lab, she should have dinner without them, she should make sure the door is locked when she goes to sleep.

Rachel stares at the note. She hadn’t realized until she was forced to face the empty silence of this house: she had wanted her parents to be there. She had wanted them to tell her that it was alright, that she’d done it, that coming home was the right decision and of course they’re so very proud of her. She had wanted them to thank her for listening. She still does. Just once.

She bites down on the inside of her lip, turns around, and leaves the house. Locks the door. Walks and walks and walks under the awful summer sun.

In the neighborhood of Siobhan’s house, birds are singing. Her truck is gone. Rachel’s teeth are locked on the inside of her lip; she walks to the front door and knocks.

Helena opens the door with one hand; the other is holding a jumbo-sized bag of Reese’s peanut butter cups. SPECIAL HALLOWEEN PUMPKIN CUPS! blares the side of the bag. Rachel’s heart hurts, suddenly and terribly. She can’t put words to why.

“Hello,” she says. “Can I come in?”

“You said you didn’t want to see me,” Helena says dully. “You ran away from me when I came to your house, and you ran away from me at lunch. And in class. You weren’t there.” Her right hand crumples around the bag. There’s something violent on her face, and it looks so natural there. Rachel hates herself for being frightened. But she is. Only a little – but she is.

“I know,” Rachel says quietly. “Can I come in anyways.”

Helena looks at her, eyes terribly sad. She looks off to the side. She opens the door, wordlessly, steps back and pads up the stairs. In the oversized socks she’s wearing, her feet are silent on the steps. Rachel’s shoes are always the loudest thing in the room. Like little gunshots: too sharp.

Helena’s bed is covered in discarded peanut butter cup wrappers, grinning jack o’lanterns. Helena tosses a notebook off the bed, but not before Rachel sees a scorpion drawn in black ink – so much pen pressure that it’s ripped through the paper, right through to the other side. She sits awkwardly in the place where the notebook was. Helena sits on the bed, legs folded up to her chest, arms slung awkwardly over her knees. Her head thunks against the wall over her headboard. She says: “So.”

Rachel opens her mouth. Closes it. “I don’t suppose you have any absinthe,” she says, voice weak and gritted out between her teeth.

“No, Rachel,” Helena says. “Just you. No cheating.”

“You said I didn’t have to be a shark,” Rachel says. “But it’s so much easier. I didn’t feel this sad, before. I don’t know what to do with it.”

“You carry it,” Helena says. “And when you can’t carry it, you let other people help you.”

“Why not bury it?” Rachel says.

“You can’t,” Helena says wryly. “I tried. For a long time.”

She’s silent for a moment, and Rachel sits there trying to figure out how to speak – how to put any thoughts into words. For some reason she feels the need to tell Helena that the skies in England were grey, all the time, and now they’re stuck in this horrible summer and she doesn’t know what to do. But she can’t tell Helena that; it’s cheating, the same way the sharks were cheating, the same way drinking until she could be honest would be cheating. Helena wants the truth. Rachel wishes she knew how to give it to her.

It’s alright, though: Helena is talking.

“I didn’t always live with Sarah and Missus S,” she says. “Did you know?” She doesn’t leave a pause long enough for Rachel to say anything, though – she’s talking again, dreamy, a monologue. The sort of speech you rehearse in front of the mirror, over and over, and never quite believe that you are actually able to tell someone.

“Missus S found Sarah when she was eight years old,” she says. “So Sarah had a family – hugs and kisses goodnight, someone to ask you how was your day and someone to fill your belly. But I didn’t.

“And then they found me,” she says, and Rachel realizes with a sort of nauseous horror that Helena’s voice is filled with tears. “And I was so scared. I was so scared that they would know that I was broken, and bad, and did not fit. And then they would send me back. And I didn’t know, until they found me, that I was so scared of being alone.”

“That’s not the same,” Rachel says, voice sour. She hates herself, suddenly – the logical reaction to this is sympathy, sadness, her hand on Helena’s knee. But she is such a mess that all she can feel is anger. “I’m not you,” she snaps, and her hands are curled in the edge of Helena’s bedspread, and this isn’t how it should go. Rachel should say I’m sorry and Helena should say I forgive you and they should hold each other and finally be safe. Rachel wishes she could hold her terrible heart in her hands and crush it until all its jagged pieces bumped their way back into line. She wants that, right now, more than anything.

“Maybe it wasn’t about you,” Helena says. God, she sounds angry too. Why does Rachel ruin everything she ever brings herself to touch. “Maybe I wanted you to understand that you hurt me, Rachel. You hurt me! You left!”

“I wanted everything to be the way it was!” Rachel says. Her voice strangles her throat. She’s shoved herself to standing, she doesn’t know when. “I wanted to cut you out of my life, and I wanted you to take everything with you. You ruined me!” She’s screaming now, at the top of her lungs. “I was fine before! I was fine before you ruined everything!”

She turns around and watches Helena, lungs like bellows, mouth full of fire. Helena is just watching her. Her own hands have found the bed; she looks like she’s about to launch herself, but whether towards fight or flight Rachel doesn’t know.

“Rachel,” she says, voice aching with the sympathy that Rachel can’t find. “Were you happy?”

Anger slips between her fingers and it’s gone before she can catch it and it’s gone, before she can catch it, and Rachel is alone with nothing but the apocalypse between her ribcage. Dust and silence.

“No,” she whispers. “But what does that matter?”

“It does matter,” Helena says fiercely. “It matters more than anything.”

“That’s not true,” Rachel says. She circles back around the bed so she’s sitting right next to Helena, feet over the edge of the bed, torso twisted to look at her. Her hand is right next to Helena’s ankle; she can’t bring herself to touch Helena, though, not even after all this time.

“Success matters,” she says. “Grades. Promotions. Things that you can hold.”

“Oh, Rachel,” Helena says. “Who told you that you had to choose?”

Rachel blinks at her, flustered. “No one told me,” she says. “No one made me, but I chose you. I can’t seem to stop myself from choosing you. And that’s why I can’t have you. I’m meant for – bigger things. Greater things. I can’t lose all of those things to – this.”

“It’s not losing,” Helena says, voice quiet and small and puzzled.

“It is,” Rachel says. The word are sharp and horribly final. They land like a handful of dropped butcher knives on the fabric of Helena’s bedspread. Rachel’s gaze has plummeted to the fabric, so she can hear but can’t see Helena’s fingers clenching and unclenching – the soft rustling of fabric. Rachel wishes everything about Helena didn’t sound so soft. She wishes Helena was made entirely of knives, so the two of them getting close to each other would only send them both bleeding out. She wishes this with the exact same urgency she’d wished they could hold each other, earlier, and hates herself for it.

“Okay,” Helena says, voice like blood in the water, voice like – and Rachel doesn’t know, her eyes are blurring with tears. Please, she thinks. Please don’t cry. Sharks can’t help themselves. Sharks can never stop themselves from doing what they were born to do.

But Helena says it again. “Okay. But – don’t go. Please.”

“I’m going to have to,” Rachel says. “You know it. You have to have known it, this whole time.” Please.

“Someday,” Helena says, “but not today, not yet. Not right now. Rachel? Stay.”

Rachel sighs, and tells herself she isn’t crying, and lies to herself over and over and over again. Keeps on lying to herself. Her hands are on her knees and she smoothes out the fabric of her skirt, like that would fix anything. She slips her feet out of her shoes and crawls across the bed, wordless, until she’s sitting next to Helena. Her head bumps against the headboard, and then finds Helena’s shoulder. Helena’s head lands on top of hers. Rachel keeps looking forward, straight ahead, does not turn to look at Helena sitting next to her. If she keeps her eyes forward it’s alright. It’s all going to be okay.

But when Helena’s hand tentatively bumps against her hand, Rachel grabs it. She twines their fingers together, desperate and hungry and desperate. Her whole side is pressed against Helena’s side, the bones of Helena’s shoulder digging into her head. She closes her eyes, so all she can see is the black. It’s all going to be okay. It’s all going to be okay. It’s all going to be okay. It’s all going to be—