The Society For Soulless Girls

This girl who was soft at heart, who was both the vast, dark woods and the glorious light of a full moon, who was angry at all the thousand tiny ways she’d been hurt in her life.

Time heals all wounds, but not the ones you leave infected.

Being a woman attracted to another woman was confusing; a constant game of comparison and lust. You never quite knew whether you were jealous of their body or just jealous of the person who got to touch it.

The real reason they encourage little girls not to fight. So that we won’t know how.

She was so much like me that it often felt like talking to myself. There was a unique kind of comfort in that.

How thoroughly unreasonable for my actions to have consequences.

Alice reminded me of the woods: vast and beautiful and dark, but overgrown with defence mechanisms; thistles and hogweed, poisonous mushrooms and gnarled roots. Talking to her was like grabbing a fistful of nettles.

What if it was my imagination that could open this long-sealed door? And if that key let the terror walk right into my own life, so be it.

Anger was a constant current. It felt fundamental to me as a person; a force of nature I couldn’t live without, like gravity.

Anger left to run free is like wildfire, indiscriminate in its destruction. But if you learn to tame it, to position it, to take aim with it? Then it becomes a candle. And what is the candle but one of man’s greatest assets? It warms. It nourishes. It shines a light in the darkest of places, and it illuminates the path forward.

Either way, there was the clear sense that we were no longer just background characters in each other’s lives, passing through the periphery with mutual disdain. Our roots had suddenly and irrevocably knotted together.

Friends were like Pokémon cards, right? I could just keep collecting them until one was a shiny Charizard?

As far back as my ancestral tree could branch, there were women who had been overpowered by men, underestimated by men, controlled by men, dominated by men, all the way back to the very roots of humanity. That anger had woven itself into  the fabric of our beings. And instead of giving it room to breathe, we let it fester like black mould, destroying us from the inside out.

Alice's eyes sparkled, but not with mirth; there was a sinister candescence to them, lined in more black kohl than usual. 'A knife,' she replied calmly. 'A what?' I practically yelped. 'A knife,' she repeated, unwrapping the brown paper to reveal a smooth, olive wood penknife with the intials A.K.W. engraved in a crusive font. 'I had it customised, because I am nothing if not pretentious.

Friendship, for me, was a long game. Something that could not be rushed or fast tracked. My affections were not the quick flint or a forest fire, but rather grew like ivy; a slow creep over many years, difficult to destroy with a barbed comment or a careless joke.

You really do just barrel into situations without any regard for your own safety, don't you?' She grinned, displaying white, slightly overlapping teeth and the two dimples on her cheeks. 'I have my murderous goth to protect me.

Also I was nineteen, and therefore immortal.

To my mind, a story is not a story until it is shared. There is an esoteric current that flows between author and reader; an arcane golden thread whose nature we cannot truly grasp.

It was the world we lived in that ultimately led her here. That pushed her to the ritual in the first place. A world that made her think that to be angry as a woman was fundamentally wrong; something that needed to be exorcised or carved out by whatever dark force necessary.

My hair was frizzy and unwashed, with a halo of fuzz over my crown, and my lips were dry and chapped. And yet the choker, which covered the rubies perfectly, made me feel beautiful. Not the whole dark woods - not like Alice - but maybe a particularly glorious blackberry, the ultra dark kind that bursts with sweetness when you bite into it.

She tenderly swept my hair over one shoulder, then took the clasp from me. Her fingertips brushed the back of my neck as she worked and I could feel her warm, slightly quickened breath on the top of my spine. I shivered despite myself, an odd flutter that extended from the depths of my chest to the tips of my fingers.

Because what I smelled on them was fear. And it smelled fucking delicious.

Eventually I realised that my anger would never leave me unless I gave it somewhere to go. It was a fundamental part of me, and I had to honour it - to exist alongside it.

And yet despite the lack of light and the cold stone floors, there was a certain warmth to the room. The warmth of intimacy, perhaps. Of kinship, and of shared pain. Of knowing that despite everything, we were not monsters. We never had been.

Alice! You are essentially asking me if I love you! Incredibly flippantly, I might add!' Sighing, I forced myself to look at her. Her bright eyes were crinkled with mirth, and the corners of my own mouth quirked treacherously upwards. 'Would it help if I said it first?' Her laughter stopped abruptly, and her cheeks turned pink. 'Said what first?' 'That I love you,' I muttered irritably.

So I couldn't let Lottie get too close to me. If I hurt her, I would never forgive myself. Still, I could indulge myself this single sweet moment. Her hand in mine, sleet on the window, and something pillowy and peace-shaped in my chest.

What if Lottie left too? She was human sunshine, and I was the deep, dark woods. She was bound to grow tired of the shade.