Maybe we're a little different There's no need to be ashamed You've got the light to fight the shadows So stop hiding it away
Reality, 16th May 2016.
The pen clicked in her fingertips, a right hand that had been saved from the line of fire time after time, her lips pushed tightly together as if she was silencing herself from speaking out loud. Maybe she was. She always read her pieces aloud but she glanced over to Zach sleeping peacefully on top of her bed, his book tucked beneath his face. She rolled her eyes and pressed the tip of her pen to the paper. Maybe this was a different kind of piece.
“Dear world,
My name is Faybian Davis.
You have been led to believe that you know me through flashing lights and news reports, through journalistic pieces about my morbidly critical personality. My name is Faybian Davis and you know exactly three things about me. The first, is my name. The second is that I work with Zachary Kent, a reporter that most of you hail as tall, dark, handsome and mysterious. The third and final thing that you know about me is that you don’t truly know anything about me at all.
Over the years I have been asked the same questions a thousand times. Who am I? Where did I come from? What made me the way I am? I didn’t answer. That made me a mystery. That made me one of those fierce women who have ice growing around their heart, the kind that could stab you with a stiletto if you crossed them. If you ask my oldest friend Casey Bell then you will know, you are not entirely wrong. Except, the thing is, you can’t ask Casey. Just like you can’t ask Trevor Quinn. Just like you can’t ask Hazel Marks.
Did you read about her in the papers while you spooned cereal out of your bowl? Did you gossip about her in inner city London where she used to party? Did you whisper her name like a sin behind your parents backs like she might hear? I bet you did. It’s okay, we all did. Hazel Marks was a girl but we made her into a complexity, we turned her into a legend. Legends never die. The problem is, Hazel did. She died that day as she took one final leap of faith from a roof, for whatever reason. The stories varied, didn’t they? They became tales for parties about the boy with the blonde hair that everyone knew holding onto her hand, the possibility of her star football player pushing her, maybe her best friend and her were on a binge. Wasn’t she pregnant? How many rumours did you hear? Did the truth matter? Did you ever think that maybe she was just a girl?
Hazel Marks was just a girl. She was a pretty girl. She was a fine girl. She wasn’t all that fantastic but she wasn’t all that terrible. She had hobbies and interests. She could sing and dance but she wasn’t too smart, she scraped her grades, pretended she loved school council and cheered at every football match. She argued with her popular boyfriend, pissed off her closest friends and lied to her brother. She wore pink. She wore black. Sometimes she wore yellow. She had two arms, two legs, two eyes and some damn good hair, but she was human. She was no more special than anyone. She was a girl and then she was dead. You chose to make that into a story when it wasn’t, it was a fact.
How many more stories did you tell? How many were about me? About people I knew? How many were worth telling? You see, world, I’m a Whittemore kid. Do they still call it that? Do you remember how you treated those kids? Every party, every corner, whispers. Rumours. You talked about that school like it was an omen, like it was a curse. You placed it on a pedestal of horror that people shaded their children from, that the filthy rich gasped at the thought of. We were rich, we were dirty rich, we could of rolled in money, but that didn’t mean we were happy. We had the world. We had you. We had you and we threw you away for the things we thought would make it right. We were just kids and we were given too much power and we lost someone and tried to live without her becoming a legend. Even after Whittemore burned down and we started our new lives we were still Whittemore kids.
Do you know what the funniest part of it all is, world? You were still waiting. With pensive glances and gentle touches. You waited for that fire, lit by our own hands, to consume us whole. To burn down our homes like a tragedy so you could stand on street corners and peer at ruins, so you could run your fingertips against stone that looked unscorched and say “wow, imagine if I went here.” There were so many chances for us to speak up, to tell the real story about Whittemore and the horrors that went on behind those walls but we bit our tongues and we clenched our jaws and we held our head up higher than the rest in order to simply not care. Mostly it worked. I know as well as everyone that nobody ever spoke about it, like some weird clique, some weird vow of silence over the lives we had led. Why? We didn’t tell our parents, we didn’t tell our friends, we didn’t tell anyone.
Until now.
I’m telling you.
I’m telling you about the stranger that flew us a million miles away from home in order to force an arranged marriage, I’m telling you about the man that beheaded his brother to save our lives only to find he was wrong. I’m telling you about the girl that went to rehab and never quite made it back out, the boy who had the world but it was never quite enough, the star football player who never quite made it to happy. I’m telling you about the smart, the stealthy, the wild and brave kids who arranged a cure for a deadly disease that gripped the minds of seven of us. I’m telling you about the seven stupid children who gripped a needle like it was their life and fought the invincible and won. I’m telling you about an entire war that didn’t touch the outside world until a drug epidemic was splashed on the front cover of every news paper. There was a drug problem, but it wasn’t ours. We were just an experiment.
I’m telling you that while you were worried about who was overdosing on MDMA, who was punching who, we were in a political war ground wearing school uniforms and badges claiming we belonged to houses when we belonged to nobody. Who did we belong to? The adults who were meant to protect us turned their backs and closed their doors, they slid over the lock in more ways than one and when we pounded, nobody came. We became each others family and some of us were annoying cousins and angry step fathers who didn’t want to be here but it worked as best as it ever could of. We went to school as children and we left as adults raised by one another but mainly by those of us with enough spirit. We were raised by a boy who sung along to music and women that were born from their own destruction, each of us dragged the other violently to the finishing line and even if we spat on it, we could of still sworn that we won.
Then it was over. We were parted like the red sea by the hand of fate, everything we knew stripped away from us.
Some of us became legends in our own right. Some of us followed the dreams of our parents, sliding into shoes a few sizes too big until one day we woke up and they fit. Some of carried our kind heart to a new realm where the sun shone or animals relied on us to survive. Some of us became the stars of the press where our smiles or tales of a fight where we landed a great punch were written in fonts we could not have named if we tried. Some of us opened new establishments, cut ribbons with a friend by our side but a giant space to our left where a family should of been. Some of us watched each other grow to new heights and others closed their eyes and pretended that it was truly over. Some of us were lost, some of us were found, some found one another in an attempt to make things right but the sad truth was that we could force the pieces of a puzzle together but the thing that would always be missing was Whittemore Academy. We loathed it but we loved it. Anyone who tells you differently is a liar. We waited for it to call us back. We were not surprised when it did.
We returned as if we thought we could leave, we took with us the grandest parts of our lives to live between the walls that had haunted us for three years. We took our stories and our secrets and our truth and went on a mission into the dark. I would be lying if I told you that I thought it would end well, I didn’t. None of us truly did. Even the strangers felt it creep up their spines, the thought that this would be our very sudden end. And how right I was. It seems that the past always catches up and chaos consumed us more than ever before, our head master died a savage death by our hands, our faults alone, and we allowed an innocent man to take one final swing into oblivious, severing his head right from his body.
Yes. We killed him. We killed him in every way except the one that mattered and then we spent the remainder of the night stuffing body parts into bags, allowing a man we already knew was a killer somehow, sweep away our mess. That’s the thing about family, right? We’re in it together. It’s sick but it’s true. It was like an initiation. I bet right now you wish you were there. It’s okay to admit it, world. You can tell me the truth, you want to be a part of the drama, don’t you? You’re squirming because you watch TV shows and they’re almost as bizarre as this but not quite. You’re holding your breath because it’s not normal to want to be involved in a master plan of lies, deception and cold blooded murder but you don’t have to. I know the truth. You always want to be here... Until you are.
There are so many things that happened, so many layers of terrible, insane, plans, that I can’t even begin to explain them. I’ve truly tried and if I ever get another chance then I will continue to. We deserve it. Justice. We deserve you to look us in the face and apologise for believing you knew what we had been through, for making us into a story of despair and confusion fit for a theatre that none of us would DARE ever step foot in. How did this all begin with a little game? None of us know and neither do you. You never will.
In a few days under the influence of a politician that I don’t understand, I’m going to open a portal within time and space, the fabric of the universe. I’m going to tear our world right open while thousands, billions of people peacefully go on with their lives with no idea what might have changed, what might have been undone, who might still be breathing. I don’t think that it will go right, I don’t think it will go at all. To be quite honest, I think this might be the grand ending to an over told story. Perhaps this will erase the legends ever beginning. But you’ll always make new ones, won’t you? If it wasn’t us then it would of been someone else, some other scandal, some other set of heroes, villains, civilians.
I don’t know how this will end yet, nobody does. That’s the thing about life. Especially around here. It’s the great unknown, so much like the famous title by Stevie Wonder, this letter will be signed, sealed and delivered, to you world. If nothing changes, if I end up back exactly where I began then some place, somewhere, some person will be reading this on the other side of the world in some labelled building, reading the story of those damn kids in London who went a little too far and fell a little too deep, who risked ruining the world to change their own mistakes rather than just telling the damn truth. They’ll be thinking, hey, this might make a good show, this might make a good movie, and you’ll all agree. There will be main characters who you hail and love, there will be good looking men who wash up well and pretty girls in little costumes, there will be beautiful hair and perfect smiles. It’ll be just like it really was, except it’ll just be a story, one you can distance yourself from, one we might get to see one day, watch. We have a terribly morbid need to transfer everything into a story to share, where nothing is just ours, and this is no exception. Maybe there will be a girl who wrote a letter and inspired the story, too. Maybe I will watch her and I will think, that is me. That’s who I was. Maybe we all will. God knows that you, world, were always better at telling us who we were than we were at telling ourselves.
I guess you’ll know everything, you’ll finally know me too.
Love,
F. Davis.”
Alternate, 16th May 2016.
Faye woke up suddenly. Her eyes snapped open, her eyes widened as she sat upright in bed as if she had just remembered something important that she could not quite put her finger on as her fingers brushed the arm of the boy asleep next to her. His eyes were closed and she watched for a moment as his chest continued to rise and fall, her own fingers closed around a locket around her neck that had been a gift and she took a breath. Why did she feel like there was something she was meant to do?
Her light eyes skewered her path of vision in the darkness and she managed to make out the outline of a canvas, sliding out of the bed she patted over to it, pulling her silk dressing gown over her shoulders, her fingers gently brushing the detailing of the ocean that lay spread beautifully over it. It was so vast and deep, she was calm immediately. Art was everything to her. She glanced back over at the sleeping boy in the bed, his hair messy against the pillow, the ghost of a peaceful smile on his slips. Art was almost everything.
She sat down at the desk and drew a pink pen, her fingers closed around it and she brushed long brown hair out of her face in an attempt to see in the darkness as she pressed the tip against the paper of the notebook. She wanted to write a story. Maybe she wanted to write her story. Maybe she wanted to write theirs. Her fingers were steady but it felt like she hadn’t written in years, why would she? She had never had anything to write about. She may have been achieving social justice in some way now but she had never been the type to have a voice that was strong and unwavering, she dressed herself in diamonds in the hope of becoming one. She had learned long ago how disposable she had truly been and now she felt the hint of a frown cross her face, she was entirely happy with who she had became but no words came to mind as they should have, as she supposed they did for others.
“Dear world,
My name is Faybian Davis.”
The words stopped there. She was stunted. What was it she had wanted to say?
It was then that she realised that she didn’t want to say anything. She had nothing to write about, no purpose to do so. She had everything she wanted. She had nothing that writing could better, nothing to push for that she wasn’t already. They stole from the rich and gave to the poor, they had a system, one that didn’t need words written on paper. Why tell a story that the world didn’t need to hear? There was no point. A small smile pushed it’s way onto her face at her realisation.
“I’m happy.”
And that was all she wrote.
