send “ look at me. “ for my muse’s reaction to yours grabbing mine by the chin and forcing mine to look at them during a tense / highly emotional moment.
She’s ten years old, and at the beach with her twin. It’s lunchtime, and the tide is rough and coming in, but they’re strong swimmers, beach babies, so it’s nothing for them. They’re going to be mermaids when they grow up, well mermaids and veterinarians like their daddy, and the little yellow flags aren’t going to stop them from having their beach day.
The rip is swift. It separates them. It’s the first time Birdie wakes up alone, but it won’t be the last.
She’s exactly ten and a half years old, and they’re moving homes. Momma calls it downsizing, and Daddy just looks sad. There’s a bubblegum pink urn strapped in the seat where her sister used to always sit, and Birdie watches the reflection of passing homes in it’s shiny surface.
She’s tired, and sad, and doesn’t understand the weight in her heart, but knows it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
She’s thirteen, and on her third school in the third town they’ve moved to in just three short years. The boys call her weird, and the girls talk about her dirty and skinned knees. Parents and teachers alike whisper about her being a tragedy. How awful, for a girl to lose her sibling... How terrible for the parents...
Birdie wonders how a tragedy is supposed to live, decides it must be the fullest. Tragedies, after all, always find their lonely end sooner rather than later. She needs to be prepared.
She’s seventeen by the time she finds it in her to rebel. Eighteen when she finds ground beneath her to be successful. Nineteen when she gets her first job that’s not working with her daddy. Almost twenty when someone suggests they she do a summer camp because it would be good for her to be out in nature, and because she’s good with library kids.
Birdie is twenty, in a few months twenty-one, when tragedy strikes her life for a second time. When the boy she likes turns into something other and the boy she trusts drags her to a canoe. She’s cold, and she’s wet, and she’s sticky with blood. There’s tear tracks on her face, and her fingers are clenched around the edges of the canoe, rocking it slightly on the lake’s smooth surface as she peers at the shoreline.
Frank, the boy she trusts, the boy that lets her touch him and pretends to scoff and find her annoying, grabs her face when she shakes the canoe just too much. Grabs her face and growls at her to look at him, and obediently, she does. She stares at him with wide, vacant eyes. Feels his dirty knees bracketing her bloodied ones. Tastes his nicotine-soaked breath in the small space between them.
She wonders if this is a part of a pre-destined tragedy she’s always meant to have. A dead twin and a bubblegum pink urn. A love triangle, with a boy she liked that turned into a wolf and another girl. A boy that looked like destruction, but felt more solid than hope...
Birdie opens her mouth, partially to reassure him that she’s fine. That Nick needs her but she’s fine, Frank.
What comes out instead? Is anything but reassuring.
“There’s bodies... Jacob said there are bodies... in the lake.”