The Bad Ones

It came over me sometimes, this hopeful feeling. If all the hard things in my life—the guilt, the nightmares, my fears for myself and my radically changed Becca—were structures in a looming city, it was moments like this that felt like seeing, at the end of a narrow road, the shine of the open sea. Shifting under the sun, sending up sparks of pure light. I would get there. And for now, I could at least catch glimpses of it. Smell the salt.

First, I reached for her. My best friend's magnificent mind and daunting talent and flashing silliness. Her sun freckles and gimlet eye and that wild October hair. Apples and firelight and butterscotch candy. It took me so long to listen, but I was listening now. I gripped the thought of her, like heat bright wire and when I trusted my hold, I began.

To the place where we made our altar to the goddess of revenge. Inside me, something released. Because the goddesses had always been us. Just us. Making them wasn't magic, it was a way to remind ourselves together we were enough.

A sinner always wants another bite of the apple.

Cat ran with a crew of perpetually chlorinated girls, who woke at 4 each morning by choice and liked to do superhuman feats, like flip upside down and rattle off ten handstand pushups. She left for practice at 5 in the morning and didn't come home until dinner and half the time she'd already eaten Little Caesar's in somebody's car. All that was to say we knew each other, right down to childhood terrors and first words and how best to drive each other up the wall in long car rides, while also not really knowing each other at all. I felt that distance now.

A woman answered. She asked if we wanted to hear a story. My skin prickled. She was already talking when she picked up. It was like walking into a middle of a conversation. Then Becca said hello and she stoped. That's when she asked us, "Do you want to hear a story?" "Tell me you said yes." I gave him, a look, "Of course we did. Don't ask me what it was about though. I can't remember." It was true. Her story hit our brains like rain on dry dirt - cool and sweet, then gone. I wanted to write stories like that, tales that filled people up like a meal or a song they loved. The good kind of lie. The woman on the phone had inspired an entry in our goddess series. Me lying on a white-sheeted bed, surrounded by old phones we picked up at donation shops and thrift stores. My body would around with their cords, a book of fairy tales open in my arms. The goddess of open endings. James made a face, "Palmetto is a strange town, more than you think for a place that has two Chili's.

Becca and I used to tell our parents we were going to the playground. Then we'd walk right past it and into the woods. There we played one long lovely game of make believe interrupted by dinner and sleep and our lives outside the trees. but at the same time never-ending.

I'd never had an audience like Rebecca Cross. Her shining eyes and respectful silence spurred me to ever greater heights of invention. Ever deeper trenches of imagined horrors. By Friday, I'd pegged half our class as speeding towards some kind of astonishing doom. And Becca was mine. We'd been written off as weirdos together. Together. Some girls treated their friends as athletes in competitive trials, constantly moving them up and down the ranks. But for us best friendship was deadly serious. More permanent than a tattoo. We invented code words and handshakes. We made repeated blood pacts. We scratched each other's arms with pine needles and sipped unholy potions we invented in our parents' gardens out of some nebulous, but passionate desire to show out devotion. We snuck clothes into each other's drawers, so we could swear to anyone who asked (no-one ever asked) that we lived together. Our mom's conducted hush phone calls, worried we'd burn bright then break each others hearts. They set up play dates with other children who never asked to come back. Our parents didn't get it. That was all. They didn't believe you could find your soulmate at six.

I just looked at her fingers. They were banded in Blue Agate and tipped with opalescent polish. Picking at the locker grate, I'd never seen those rings, that polish. This was a stranger's hand.

The unmistakable aura of someplace bigger and better rolled off him like heat off a bonfire. Everyone who bought a new shirt or whatever over break and thought that counted as reinvention felt the futility of it when they saw James. Just a tiny bit of effort and he could have upended our entire social order, but he didn't bother. He had the untouchable air of a man doing his time. Counting down the clock until he could go back to his real life. In Manhattan, or Milan or Middle Earth. If you told me he was an ancient vampire being forced to go to High School for the 20th time, I'd've been like - Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Let's say your the girl who saved your best friends life. The person who apparently kept her alive With your love and your constancey. With your steadfast disregard for the worser parts of her nature. Like the way she had, of acting like she and you were the last real people on earth. Then let's say she changed over night. Became elusive, Unpredictable. Treated your love like it was a cage Untill you hit your limit And canceled your constancy. Held your love in reserve. saw her for what she was, and let her know it too. What happens then? What becomes of her life? when your sick of saving it.

One town, one night. Four people gone.