An Imago of Rust and Crimson (Worm crossover)
- Thread starter EarthScorpion
- Start date
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I love how jaded Taylor is starting to get to this sort of thing. Her first reaction to a Biblical sign of the apocalypse is a sarcastic "oh, how wonderful".EarthScorpion said:
... well, Kirsty's apparently a quiet one. Though I guess those scars would kind of dominate any memory you had of her. Still, forgetting about her totally... a parahuman talent, perhaps?EarthScorpion said:
I'd just like to note that the level of bland understatement in this sentence is hilarious.EarthScorpion said:
I see we're getting off to an excellent start on the "being a good person" front.EarthScorpion said:
Taylor. Taylor, you need to know something.EarthScorpion said:
Taylor, you have the best scrying method ever.
So cool~
Taylor, sweetie, you're a nWoD character. And possibly a Mage. Hyper-acute omnifocused paranoia isn't a mental health problem, it's normal.EarthScorpion said:
I just imagined the Leviathan fight. Taylor takes one look at da beastie, and decides to experiment. She conjures up a second Leviathan (smeared with a shifting mass of coagulated blood and gore instead of a shroud of water) and amps up his size a bit, adds a second set of arms. Throws in a ridge of spines and a gapeing maw of teeth. Maybe wings- because monsters with wings are badass.EarthScorpion said:
Drowns the sucker in chains (because there's no way you want something like that running around unsupervised).
As an afterthought, makes it visible (because if she can make the Real World visible in the Other Place, the reverse is probably true). With that sets Fauxiathan loose on the origional.
...
Sure, it might get her labled an S-class threat, but it sounded like a good idea at the time. Right? Riiiiight?
- Location
- Little Rock, AR
I was like she's making progress! When she realized she was getting self righteously paranoid. She was opening up! Then she backtracked right back and missed the feact that coming out with powers would be a good way to keep your dad from worrying about you being suicidal or seeing things that aren't real.
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
Taylor, don't you know Goetia harms wisdom...EarthScorpion said:
Carry on.
Huh, I'm not sure if that's a good sign or not. Canon Taylor basically didn't allow herself those kinds of thoughts. But, frankly, they're very natural thoughts.EarthScorpion said:
Also, Texas is a bit larger then most states, and an Acrophobe might not want to climb Mt. Everest.
- Location
- The Land of Many Bregrets
- Pronouns
- They/Them
...Well that makes the S IX S IX S IX thing all the more appropriate doesn't it.aquinas said:
Wonderful chapter! Taylor's jaded sarcasm is great; she's like your standard creepy horror girl who's self aware and thus feels amusingly more realistic/human than most creepy horror girls.
I predict trying to research her power is going to prove entertainingly easier and trickier; if she spends too much time on it it's going to look like she's avoiding people and if anyone finds her notes... ha ha ha.
...Though one wonders what would happen if she wrote those notes in the 'Other Place' or got an automata to do it. What would the 'normal world' version be?
That's a really good question.Guessmyname said:
Possabilities:
1) nothing, no change, except maybe it's not her handwriting or something minor like that (which might still be useful, but is unlikely to happen)
2) indecipherable for anyone that lacks Taylor's power- just looks like random scribbles.
2.b) indecipherable for anyone that lacks Taylor's power- looks like a madman's abstract art project. May or may not result in headaches/nosebleeds/madness in Thinkers and others who attempt to decipher it.
2.c) Looks like a madman's abstract art project. No ill effects.
3) variations and subtleties on previous options (each observers sees something different, ect)
4) the pages are blank to anyone without special sight (might be the creepiest one, right there)
- Location
- The Land of Many Bregrets
- Pronouns
- They/Them
...It also occurs to me it's pretty much garaunteed she will be writing her notes in the Other Place, because the alternative is hopping back and forth to look / write it down which would be kinda a pain in the arse. So odds are either nothing happens or the notes get hilariously mundane.
If Taylor takes up artwork though...
If Taylor takes up artwork though...
Winged One
Not the Simurgh
- Location
- definitely the ground
- Pronouns
- They/Them/It
As amusing as that is, a means of easy translation from symbolism to sanity seems way too convenient to exist.illhousen said:
Winged One
Not the Simurgh
- Location
- definitely the ground
- Pronouns
- They/Them/It
I got the joke, thanks.illhousen said:
That would be one way to do it, except that Taylor doesn't seem like the type to lose her journal.Peanuckle said:
Not unintentionally...Winged One said:
The last entry is her deciding to scatter the pages to help whoever is unfortunate enough to be trapped in Padaemonium with her and possibly save themselves...or gloating about her trap.
YES!
...
...and now I want to see Armsmaster and Miss Militia pageing through them, possilby with commentary from Clockblocker, Gallant, and Vista.
YES!
It'd make more sense for the Protectorate to find her journals after she's outed or something.Peanuckle said:
...
...and now I want to see Armsmaster and Miss Militia pageing through them, possilby with commentary from Clockblocker, Gallant, and Vista.
YES!
Turns out, seventeen days of downtime in a psychiatric hospital with not much to do is more time to sit down and think about things than she got in canon... like, almost ever. And she's been putting a lot of effort into learning how best to fill the criteria to get out of there, which means she's been having to think a lot about how other people see her, so she can best fit their expectations for "someone who's not going to kill themselves".Satori said:
Clearly some of that's been sinking into her via osmosis if nothing else.
Giygas said:
As I already commented in the Helminths thread, when canon often requires pretty much everything which could go wrong does go wrong, it's very hard for small changes to not improve the situation.Sir Bill said:
Also, I'm a cynic who believes that everyone is the hero of their own story and is doing what they think is best (even if sometimes it's "what's best for myself"), and that protagonists shouldn't get special treatment. That makes me considerably more optimistic than canon, which appears to subscribe to a rather more adolescent "everyone is a bastard".
It's the curly hair. She tried letting it fall in front of her face like a creepy veil, but curly hair really isn't friendly when you try to do that and just ends up getting in your eyes and mouth, so she gave up on attempts to be a more standard horror girl.Guessmyname said:
Of course, the sarcasm is a defence mechanism. It's either that, or freak out because it's raining blood, and one of those options means she doesn't get out of the psychiatric hospital.
(And when the sarcasm isn't enough, she turns her powers on herself and self-mindhacks so she isn't so worried about it. Goddamnit Taylor, stop being blasé about things that other people would find really disturbing.)
Winged One
Not the Simurgh
- Location
- definitely the ground
- Pronouns
- They/Them/It
A mental hospital that has actual benefits for a patient? That's rather off-genre, isn't it?EarthScorpion said:
I'm not complaining, I'm just surprised that you'd let her have something nice like that.
Isn't the timeline about right for there to be an Endbringer attack somewhere else? Assuming that Eidolon and his imaginary friends are still a thing in this story, of course.
I expect that's a major contributor to why these fics are so numerous, though your reputation suggests you had darker motives for writing one.
You know, I hadn't thought of it in those words, but that's pretty much my biggest problem with Worm canon, right there. At least, when it's not appealing to the remains of my adolescent self. Who knows, maybe the world might be saved with barely any mind control required at all here! Or it'll all end in well-intentioned fire.
Well, that's just an adorable mental image there.
Well, of course. Freaking out because of things that any reasonable person would freak out over got her in there in the first place, and while it's been a benefit, it's about time for her to leave.
Bah, that's one of the attractions to this story.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
I was expecting something more along the lines of "professional psychiatric care is congenial to your mental health. Whodathunk?" But that works too.EarthScorpion said:
Weren't you the one who characterized humans as bastard coated bastards with a bastard filling?EarthScorpion said:
"Couldn't you just turn your feelings into apple pies and then eat them? I'm sure they'd stay down better."Samarkand said:
earthboy
(verified ape)
- Location
- NYC
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Feeling disturbed sounds kinda negative. Since it's a negative feeling, one must presume it's already chained up in Taylor's psychic catacombs.Samarkand said:
"... so then I chained up my ability to feel disturbed by my power's horrific leitmotif, and now I'm able to experience the chain clanks and sorrowful wailing as an interesting melody."
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Really? Because my impression of canon was pretty consistently the former. The interlude chapters help with this, especially considering that one of the earliest ones is from the perspective of a Neo-Nazi, but so does the general trend of horrible people helping others out of enlightened self-interest (Leviathan, Coil providing Skitter help with refugees in exchange for her service, the massive team-up around the end of the world that dissolved into infighting only when it became clear that people would be able to gain more individual benefit by not fighting against an unstoppable threat and instead taking the opportunity to accomplish personal goals). I mean, there's the Slaughterhouse Nine, but even most of those were trying to do what they thought was best for themselves.EarthScorpion said:
Amorous Intent
Love the future
- Location
- Octavia, Venus
- Pronouns
- She/her
It's worse for me. No matter what combination of scripts I whitelist, Failbucket refuses to actually show the goddamn image, making it utterly worthless. This is why imgur is superior.Doomlord9 said:
Xicree
Murder.Malice.Might
I do feel the need to contest this a little, since in canon it is pretty much outright an engineered situation... which is missing the attentive tuneups of its engineer. Mainly since Zion and Eden were giving out pieces of themselves with the distinct intent and foreknowledge of the conflicts which they would engender, and in ways which specifically prohibited their prey from climbing up from the pit of errors which that would cause in any easy manner. It was pretty much stated at one point that trigger capes are pretty crazy... and crazy in specific ways which are prodded at by their passengers to ensure that the crazy train continues.EarthScorpion said:
As such it seems to me that canon DOES subscribe to the optimistic view... to the point where the author saw it as necessary for alien brain-worms to forcibly alter that into the train-wreck canon became.
In that vein I can see your version of Taylor over coming this because of her 'removing the worms' and thus having a more normalized and human perspective than the average Parahuman would. But it seems to me an unnecessary stab at the author to say his world setting was centered around the more juvenile mindset rather than engineered towards it. Because at least to me it seemed that he was pointing at how the optimistic view is the right one and how artificial and abrasive 'everyone are bastards' would actually be.
And even Cauldron is veered towards it rather than it being a natural outcropping of their primary drives, as they are driven by fear of failure, fear that sharing the knowledge they have would cause said failure, and fear of the fact that the last time they tired to be begin to be open... the situation collapsed. All of these things have their roots in the same mastermind which set the entire setting in motion.
Xicree
Murder.Malice.Might
You definitely can't, and that is the truth... But it's more of a filter down effect and one which was partially part of what was engineered. On the other hand Mother was responding to circumstances which were far beyond her from the start and only continued to spiral out of her control. Saint was touched by brainworms indirectly, Tagg had been smurfed, and every one else was really no better or worse than real life, with several either overcoming their issues (particularly since Eden wasn't around to reinforce then even more).Azure said:
I found it amusingly ironic though that it was a combination of both the best and the worst human qualities which won the end of worm rather than simply collapsing or having a big cheerful unambiguously wonderful win.
The blood rain makes me imagine the Slaughterhouse Nine hitting up the asylum for entertainment, and perhaps recruitment. They've got someone wearing their brand on the inside, though they could very well have put her there.Giygas said:
TheLastOne
Person of impeccable tastes (for destruction)
What Tagg and Alexandria were doing was so hilariously illegal and immoral that it put Taylor in a good position to be acquitted of all charges due to how they were abusing their power. A lawyer who didn't continue to defend his client through that wouldn't be worth toilet paper.Azure said:
That said, that whole part of Worm was particularly weak, which is a shame as the previous little bit had been an excellent character piece as Taylor dealt with the final disintegration of her life as Taylor. I'm not sure where Earthscorpion is going to have Taylor end up on the villain/hero index, or for that matter how clear-cut that index is in Imago, but if she switches from villain to hero at some point I hope he does a better job, because that and the almost incoherent timeskip really hurt the overall story a great deal.
2.02
An Imago of Rust and Crimson
Chapter 2.02
As I dressed, I realized how strange it felt to be wearing normal clothes again. It was funny – I'd found the constant pyjamas to be infantilising, another sign of how little we were trusted with our own safety. And sure, they were, but they were also kind of comfy. My jeans felt itchy and tight by comparison.
I said my farewells, and left with a bag full of pamphlets and advice leaflets. I'd scribbled Sam and Leah's mobile numbers on one. I didn't have a mobile, while as Arcadia girls they probably had Tinkerfab smartphones, but at least I might be able to contact them once they were out of there. I hadn't expected to make my first sort-of friends in years in a psychiatric hospital, but I suppose it shouldn't have surprised me that the place they kept crazy people was less crazy than high school.
It was still raining as I walked out the door, so Dad sprinted for the car and brought it around just in front of the entrance. I still ended up soaked getting my stuff from the hospital to the trunk.
"I only just got into these things," I said to Dad as I dried my glasses on my top. "Guess I'll have to get into my pyjamas as soon as I get home."
He grinned back, and frowned. "How are your hands?" he asked.
"Better, better," I said. I peeled off my left latex glove, showing him my hand. "They're not oozing any more. One of the nurses in the hospital was seeing to them, and she said the main thing now is keeping them dry and clean, and I need to keep on taking the antibiotics." I tapped my ring and little finger with my thumb. "I can't feel that very well, and those two fingers are a bit stiff, but I have hand exercises which are meant to help."
"Mmm," he said, and paused. "Are you hungry?" he asked carefully.
I was. I hadn't had much for breakfast because of the nerves, and it was now mid-afternoon. I'd packed as fast as I could, but there had still been paperwork to do and talks about what to do if I had any suicidal urges and so on. "Yeah," I said. "Just… please, nothing with fries in. They served them way too much in there."
"Does Italian sound good?" he asked hopefully.
"Pasta with proper toppings that isn't just mac-and-cheese? Yes!" It sounded really good to me.
He started the engine. "That's good, then. I'm pretty hungry too." He shook his head. "Wish the weather had let up, though. The forecast said it was going stop by noon."
It was early afternoon, but the weather had barely cleared up at all. The sky was iron-grey, and I could barely see the gas stations and fast food restaurants by the side of the road. Their light was masked by the rain which hammered down against the car. The windscreen wipers were working full out. Dad was taking it carefully, and I was glad of it. I'd hate to get out of a psychiatric hospital and immediately wind up back in a normal one – or worse.
Of course, he always drove very carefully. No matter what.
Static hissed as I flicked through the stations.
"… love hurts, I'm telling you, but sweet babe~, what can you do? But I say
"listen, it's simply the way that liberals try to shut down anyone who speaks against them. She's calling me a bigot, but she can't deny the facts, and those facts say that Japanese immigrants are involved in mass people-smuggling operations, and have ties to the sex trade. They're a criminal influence and
"what will you do if your loved ones fall ill? Without health insurance, you could suffer an unexpected illness and
"Florida Man gave a public statement saying 'Sure, he was a real smart bad guy, but then I remembered that his power was all about bein' smart and nothin' about being immune to ma shotgun and so
"casualty reports from Dubai are still coming in, but they're already over ten thousand. Almost the whole city is flooded, and even from up here, you can see the bodies in the flooded streets. It almost looks like Venice from a distance, but then you see the fallen skyscrapers and the damage to the…"
My dad reached out and firmly turned off the radio. "Don't channel-hop, Taylor," he said evasively. "Either find some music or turn it off."
I frowned. "Dad," I said cautiously. "What was that talking about casualties?"
He said nothing.
"Dad?"
He sighed. "The Leviathan attacked Dubai last night," he said. "I didn't pay much attention to the news this morning, but… it's bad."
"Oh," I said.
"Yeah." He sighed. "There's always that little bit of guilt from being relieved that it was nowhere near here," he said, knuckles whitening around the steering wheel.
Another Endbringer attack. Yes. My dad was right. There always was that little frisson of guilt when you heard that you'd been spared an attack by one of those… one of those things.
There were three of them. They'd appeared in the nineties, one after the other. The Behemoth had come first, tearing its way out of a volcanic eruption, then the Leviathan had risen from the Pacific Ocean in a giant tsunami, and the Simurgh had descended from the moon in a total eclipse over Europe. They attacked a city each, every year, ever since each of them had appeared. "Endbringer" was synonymous with disaster, with calamity and death. Sometimes they could be driven away, but they always caused left devastation and mass death behind.
I'd never known a world without them, but I was old enough to know that they were why everything was getting worse.
Could that be why it had been raining blood when I'd woken up?
But Dubai was… like, almost on the other side of the world, somewhere in the Middle East. Would it really have that much of an effect? Well, I guessed the only way I could find out was to pay close attention to the weather in future. And start to worry if it started raining blood again, which was a perfectly natural reaction.
I blinked. Oh, I was feeling concerned about that again. The construct which had been trapping it must have fallen apart. They did that after a few hours at best. Some of them only lasted seconds, if I made it to do a specific thing. I'd managed to make one which had lasted over a day, but that had been hard. I had to be incredibly precise when mentally constructing it to stop it falling apart with time, and have you ever tried holding a very detailed image in your mind while adding more and more complexity to it? It's really difficult.
"So, how's work?" I asked, both to distract myself and break the awkward silence in the car.
My dad glanced my way briefly. "Things have calmed down a bit," he said. "It's still simmering a bit, but… well, I mean, it's tense, but that's better than it was. Right until some idiot does something stupid again," he muttered under his breath.
I pretended I hadn't heard that. "I meant that thing you were talking about last time you called. You know, the thing you said you couldn't talk about?"
"Yes, I… uh, still can't really talk about it. Talks are still ongoing, and I can't even tell you because there are some people who really wouldn't like some of the things which we're talking about."
I blanched. "… it's not illegal, is it?" I asked.
"No. Much as some people would like to stop us from…" He winced. "Uh, can you forget I just said that?"
"Said what?" I said innocently, even if I was already starting to put things together.
"Good girl," he said. "I mean, uh, thanks Taylor."
My dad was with the Dockworker's Union, and just like pretty much everything else in the city, it was suffering. The ships just weren't coming in. From what he said, he spent his time trapped between the companies who just wanted to fire everyone and bring in new workers for a fraction of the cost and the more radical elements of the labour movement.
His sympathies, I suspected, lay with the radicals. He approved of the cooperatives and workers' associations which had become a feature in the inner cities. Sometimes, I wondered if having to support me was stopping him from really throwing himself into it. I knew he worried about money and how stable his job was.
But just up ahead there was a stark reminder that things could have been a lot, lot worse for us. By the side of the freeway, sprawling over an abandoned industrial estate, was a shanty town. Some people called them 'new Hoovervilles'. I guess it was because they really, really sucked. Shanty town made more sense as a name, though.
I tried not to stare out at the mobile homes extended into permanent shacks and the abandoned factories and office blocks cannibalised into squats. The taller buildings looked like they'd contracted some kind of skin condition, their windows haphazardly boarded over or barricaded up. Everywhere, corrugated iron and blue plastic roofing channelled small rivers down onto the already sodden ground.
The government hated these places, I knew that much. They were hives of gang activity, the ideal spot for ramshackle drug-labs or whole armouries of unlicensed weapons. There were squat clearance operations – I'd heard people on the news complaining that too much money was spent in road-and-housebuilding programmes and not enough on getting rid of these places – but more always sprung up. When areas of the city were abandoned or empty, it wasn't hard for people to break into a building and start living there. And since there simply weren't enough jobs to go around in the Greatest Depression, there were more than enough homeless people willing to break the law to get out of the weather.
Up in the rainy sky, I thought I could see the lurking shape of an insect-like government Tinkerfab helicopter. No doubt it was loaded up with sensor equipment which didn't care about the rain. But I only saw it for a moment, and then it was gone.
If the sight of the shanty town was bad in the real world, it was worse in the Other Place. The entire place was cloaked in an oily fog, blowing downwind. When the car drove through it, it smelt like burnt tires and stale sweat and misery. And as for the scabrous buildings which bled rust into the red-tinged rain, as for the half-alive slimy slug-like trailers, as for the shuffling figures I could see with my perfect vision in the Other Place… well, the less said about them the better. But I wanted to get away.
We drove on and left the shanty town behind.
I'd regained my appetite by the time we got to the Italian place. It was in Brockton Bay proper, fairly close to the Boardwalk. As we parked, dad and I pulled a face in unison. The rain still hadn't let up. The walk to the restaurant still left us pretty damp, but we got a table close to a radiator. Inside, there was a slight smell of wood smoke, and swing playing faintly in the background. The slow drive meant we'd missed the lunch crowd, leaving us in a mostly empty restaurant.
I was glad that that there weren't too many other people around. I was going to be saying some things I didn't want overheard, and it was going to be hard enough to admit some of them without looking over my shoulder every five seconds.
Just in case, I checked the Other Place. The restaurant was reassuringly bland by the standards of that world. Yes, the wood panelling was cracked and splintering revealing raw concrete underneath, and yes, there was a low level of filth everywhere, but there were no mysterious bloody stains or toxic cloying emotional clouds. I winced as the off-tune music scraped against my nerves, but it was just noise and there was no mysterious screaming. I should probably check the food when it arrived, but at least I had no reason to try to talk my dad into going somewhere else.
"Taylor?" I looked away from the window, to my dad and the waitress. "What do you want to drink?"
I blinked, and quickly scanned the menu. "Uh… just water, please," I said.
"There's no reason to skimp," Dad said after the waitress had left. "This is a treat."
"I just felt in a water mood," I said. "I didn't feel like anything sweet."
He nodded. "So…" he began, and then didn't say anything. We sat there in mutual awkwardness for far too long. 'I'm not crazy'? Would that be a good thing to say to break the conversational silence?
"It's good to have you back," he said eventually.
"Thank you," I said.
Oh God, what was I meant to say? Was I just going to admit it? Should I wait until the food had come? But I was hungry and what if he lost his temper when I told him some of the things I had been keeping from him? To avoid having to talk, I hid behind the menu, reading it like my life depended on it.
The waitress returned with my water and Dad's Coke. "Are you ready to order?" she asked. "Do you want starters?"
"Taylor?"
"Uh… no starters." I didn't want to delay the main course. "Just a main for me."
"Okay," my dad said. "So…"
"…yeah. I'll… um," I scanned down the list, "I'll have the spaghetti alle vongole," I said, and paused. "Uh, unless… how much garlic is on this?"
"Oh no, we don't put too much garlic on here," the waitress said.
"Then, yes, the vongole."
"And you?"
My dad pursed his lips. "Um… I'll just have the carbonara."
"Great!" She took the menus. My cover was gone. I'd have to talk and I was dreading it and I was working to try to hide the way my stomach was churning. I couldn't do it. I couldn't talk to him. I couldn't come clean. "Anything else?"
"Uh," I said. "Where are the bathrooms?"
She turned and pointed. "Just take that passageway over there, and there are signs. Ladies are on the left."
"Thank you," I said, standing. "I'll be back in a moment."
The bathrooms were acceptable, and I shut myself in one of the cubicles. Sitting down on the toilet, I hyperventilated into my cupped hands. I felt sick to my stomach. I couldn't do it. I also needed the toilet for real, so I did my business and then stared at myself in the small mirror over the sink.
"Pull yourself together, Taylor," I told my reflection, trying to talk myself into it. "What's there to be afraid of? He knows you're being bullied. He knows that Emma, Sophia and Madison were doing it. You're not going to be admitting to anything he doesn't already know."
"If he knows how long it was going on, he might do something stupid," I answered. "I don't want him getting in trouble. You know he gets angry and tries to control it."
"And you don't think he won't do it if I don't tell him?" I pointed out. "At least this way I can be honest with him. If I come clean, he'll trust me more and we- I might be able to stop him getting too angry. After all, that's the big thing. He already knows. I can't keep it a secret anymore. And I bet he's been worrying and worrying about it ever since he found out."
I sighed. It made sense, I just didn't want it to. When it came down to it, I was ashamed. I didn't want to look weak, like I couldn't do anything. Even though I couldn't have done anything to stop it, for all the years it had been going, for all of high school.
I shifted into the Other Place and glanced around, noting the snow that dusted the broken and cracked sink in front of me. Snow. Hah. So someone used this sink frequently for cocaine, I guessed. I leant forwards and took a tiny sniff. Yes, the snow smelt of dependency, need, and a desperate hunger for something which wasn't food. I shook my head.
It was so easy to make the construct from my secrecy, my fear of telling, all those years of bullying. I just had to think of it and pour it into my breath.
And the product of this concentration looked like me. It looked very much like me. It was me without the scars. Not a monster; just me. And – God – I could read my own expression so well. She was scared. She was trying to be strong, but the fear and apathy and relentless oppression had got to her, so she was just trying to walk through life and not be noticed.
Then I noticed the staples around the edge of her face and the redness around her eyes, and realised that that expression was just another mask, locked onto her face. It was too rigid to be a real face.
A morbid thought struck me. This construct, if it worked like I thought it would, might well be able to force people to not tell things with as much strength as I'd felt about not wanting to tell about the bullying. That was scary.
Maybe I shouldn't tell after all. Yes, that would be the sensible thing to do. It wasn't like I could make a difference. And I didn't want to worry him. I'd made my mind up, but having just made this construct to help pluck up the courage, maybe I shouldn't. After all, this couldn't be natural.
Or maybe the construct – Madame Secret, I was going to call her – was just affecting me too. I gritted my teeth. No. I was going ahead with this.
It was hard to trap her. Very hard. She was strong, perhaps the strongest construct I had ever made yet, and she fought to slip out of her binds. Worse, she attacked back, with waves of apathy, waves of fear, waves of I-shouldn't-be-doing-this-there's-no-need-to-make-a-fuss. A chain snaked around one arm, pulling it tight against the wall, but as it dived to weave around her arm she managed to wrench the arm loose from the wall, uncaring that the bone audibly snapped.
This wasn't working, I thought. I was on a fool's errand. I should just give up and – I exhaled, sweating, no! That wasn't me. I could feel her hammering my mind and I swayed, my vision momentarily greying. I clenched my teeth, panting, throwing everything just into holding her where she was. And I was losing. She dislocated both arms to get free of the bond around her shoulders, and wriggled like a squirming insect out of the chains on her legs. One desperate last attempt got her around the throat, but she was breaking that too.
This wasn't working. She was just too slippery. I needed a new approach. I glared at her, and two bloodshot eyes glared back at me from behind her mask.
I laughed, a small giggle escaping my lips. It all made sense.
I let go of the chains and she rushed in towards me, fingers twisted into claws. And then I exhaled a cloud of rusty butterflies right into Madame Secret's face. They tore her mask off, and all of a sudden the resistance stopped. I took the chance to trap her tighter than a fly in a spider's web. She was weak, compliant as the chains trussed her up tight. I tried not to stare at her face, because she had no skin under the mask which now lay on the filthy floor. There was just red muscle and fat and the gouges from where the staples had been, weeping blood.
I'd cut her open, exposed her raw, bloody core, and now she was helpless.
Yes. I could tell my dad. The freedom was wonderful. I stooped down, and picked up the fallen mask. It was, and wasn't real. I could feel it, but it felt fizzy, almost like froth on a milkshake. I glanced from it to Madame Secret, and back again. And this – this was interesting. A mask of secrets. I could see that it wasn't alive, wasn't aware like she was. I focussed and let the mask flow back into me, leaving the greater construct still intact. Yes, I could make constructs which weren't beings in their own right.
I inhaled Madame Secret, and then returned to the normal world and checked my appearance. I washed the sweat from my face, and adjusted my hair.
"Are you feeling fine?" my dad asked. I could hear his concern.
I coughed, and tried to look embarrassed. "There wasn't much fibre in the meals in the canteen," I muttered, looking away from him.
He coughed. "Well. Uh. That won't be a problem now you're back home," he tried.
It looked like it had worked. "Yeah, I'll be glad to be home in my room with my bed and my books and…" I groaned as a realisation hit me.
"What is it?" my dad asked.
I winced. "Nothing really," I admitted. "Just remembered that I think I forgot to trade books back with Leah. I think I still have some of hers and she has some of mine." And she had come off rather better for the trade, I didn't say. I had thought I read quickly before I met her. I had been quite soundly disabused of that by her ability to finish a 300 page book in an hour or two.
"So… it seems like you, uh, met some people in… that place," he said. "That's good."
"Yes, it was," I said. I took a breath. "But I wasn't nervous about that," I said. "I was nervous because… well, I've been trying to get the courage to tell you something. I've probably been trying to do this for a long time, but now? Now, I think I can do it."
"Are… are you sure?" he asked.
I nodded. "As ready as I've ever been," I said. "More, really. But… uh, please, don't interrupt me. At least not at first. I'm afraid that if I stop, I might not be able to go on. And it might be a bit jumbled up."
He played with his napkin, and swallowed. "Go on," he said.
It was easy, with what I'd done to Madame Secret. I knew I couldn't have done it before. I would have choked up.
"It started… probably after I got back from summer camp in '09," I began. "I mean, I'm not sure if there were some things I'd missed. I still hadn't got over Mum dying when I went off, and I'd offended Emma or something beforehand. I don't really remember, and when I tried asking, she just said she didn't want to hang around with a loser like me anymore. But there had to be some reason, right?" I sighed.
"I don't know. I do know that when I got back, she didn't want to hang around with me anymore. She'd found a new best friend – Sophia – and they'd make fun of me. And that hurt, but… I thought it was going to get better. You know? Like, it still hurt because Emma had been my best friend, but I tried to hang around with other people and I tried to see if we could make-up or something."
"I don't know how they managed it, but it just ended up that I wasn't someone that 'cool kids' talked to, or hung around with. I'm not even sure how it happened myself. There wasn't a single point where everything changed. Everyone just drifted away from me. And the pranks were starting. Like, one day I found all the lead from one of my… you know, those clicky pencil things? All the lead was gone. I had to keep my pencil case in my bag at all times. I had to go and get one of the locker-room lockers, rather than a hallway locker, because they have better locks and," I laughed bitterly, "look what that got me. If I'd had a hallway locker, they're so bad I could probably have just broken out from the inside. You can open them by kicking the door hard in the right place, everyone knows that."
"But yeah. If I didn't watch my bags, things would go missing. People wouldn't get out of my way in the corridors and I'd 'accidentally' be pushed over. But the worst thing was the whispering. The name-calling. And… well, Madison – she really joined in early last year – just did stupid pranks and got me laughed at, and Sophia is just plain mean, but Emma knew all my secrets. She knew how to make things hurt. And…" I felt my eyes begin to burn, "and I was so lonely, because no one was really talking to me and I couldn't do a thing to stop it. No one who found out cared enough. And most of it was 'just' words. Notes in my locker. Slipped into my bag. Sent to my email address. Spoken behind my back. Spoken in front of my back. As if I just didn't matter one little bit."
"I'm… sure the words were very bad," my dad began, and I couldn't let him finish. I just couldn't. I didn't want to hear that from him.
"No, that's the thing, Dad," I said softly. I rubbed my fingers against the cold side of my glass, looking for the right phrasing. "You probably… like, got in fights at school when you were a kid, or something like that?"
He shifted slightly uncomfortably in his seat. "Well, yeah, that kind of thing happens."
"That's a boy thing. If they'd… like, got me near the bike sheds and started punching me, then there'd have been bruises. And I could have at least tried to punch them back, which – God knows – I really wanted to sometimes. But pretty much everything was just words," I said bitterly. "Words behind my back, or in front of it. Words and little petty things which hurt. Anyone who cared what the popular kids thought didn't want to hang around with me, and…" I shrugged, "well. Never enough proof for anyone to listen to me. And it didn't help that I'm so freakishly tall and… and have no figure worth speaking of and aren't pretty either. All of those things were things which make me a target. About the only way it could have been worse is if I was fat."
"You are pretty," my Dad protested, unable to hold his tongue.
"I'm not," I said, crossing my arms protectively. "Emma is pretty. She does modelling. Sophia is all athletic. Madison is 'cute' and has boys trailing her like stupid puppies. I'm just a beanpole." I sighed. "I had told a teacher. Mrs Bellinghausen. And she talked with them and they said they hadn't done anything and nothing came of it. And then she went on maternity leave and as soon as she was out of the picture, things got worse because I was a tattletale. Because there was never any proof, and no one cared. Just words. Just excuses," I almost snarled.
I sighed. "And then just before Christmas, things got better. They just left me alone. They ignored me. I was happy to be ignored, you know. And because of that, there were people who were willing to talk to me. I don't know if they told other people to let up on me, or whether those others had just been afraid that they'd be targeted like I was. Things were getting better." I paused. "And then right after Christmas. Wham. Guess they just wanted me to let my guard down."
"So that's about it. I made sure I made notes on it all. Back home, in my room, I've got a diary of events. There's much more than I can summarise here."
There was silence, broken only by the rain outside and recorded swing playing in the background. My dad was pale. "Taylor, I… I didn't know," he said.
"I know," I said sadly. "I didn't want anyone to know. It… it was so hard to tell you this." He didn't know the half of it. I'd had to cut the face off one of my inner demons to do this.
"I should have known. I should have noticed how… how for two years, you weren't talking about Emma all the time. How you never went around to her house. How she never called. I was just a… just a terrible dad. I should have seen."
Yeah, you should have, I thought. Of course I didn't say that. Dad had almost fallen apart after Mum had died, and he still hadn't been all there at the beginning. And I'd been hiding it from him. It wasn't fair to blame him when I'd been working so hard to keep secrets from him.
I guess that's a useful talent.
"So what are you going to do?" I asked in a small voice.
He sighed, resting his head in his hands. "I don't know," he said. "I… I don't know."
The arrival of the food was a welcome relief.
Chapter 2.02
As I dressed, I realized how strange it felt to be wearing normal clothes again. It was funny – I'd found the constant pyjamas to be infantilising, another sign of how little we were trusted with our own safety. And sure, they were, but they were also kind of comfy. My jeans felt itchy and tight by comparison.
I said my farewells, and left with a bag full of pamphlets and advice leaflets. I'd scribbled Sam and Leah's mobile numbers on one. I didn't have a mobile, while as Arcadia girls they probably had Tinkerfab smartphones, but at least I might be able to contact them once they were out of there. I hadn't expected to make my first sort-of friends in years in a psychiatric hospital, but I suppose it shouldn't have surprised me that the place they kept crazy people was less crazy than high school.
It was still raining as I walked out the door, so Dad sprinted for the car and brought it around just in front of the entrance. I still ended up soaked getting my stuff from the hospital to the trunk.
"I only just got into these things," I said to Dad as I dried my glasses on my top. "Guess I'll have to get into my pyjamas as soon as I get home."
He grinned back, and frowned. "How are your hands?" he asked.
"Better, better," I said. I peeled off my left latex glove, showing him my hand. "They're not oozing any more. One of the nurses in the hospital was seeing to them, and she said the main thing now is keeping them dry and clean, and I need to keep on taking the antibiotics." I tapped my ring and little finger with my thumb. "I can't feel that very well, and those two fingers are a bit stiff, but I have hand exercises which are meant to help."
"Mmm," he said, and paused. "Are you hungry?" he asked carefully.
I was. I hadn't had much for breakfast because of the nerves, and it was now mid-afternoon. I'd packed as fast as I could, but there had still been paperwork to do and talks about what to do if I had any suicidal urges and so on. "Yeah," I said. "Just… please, nothing with fries in. They served them way too much in there."
"Does Italian sound good?" he asked hopefully.
"Pasta with proper toppings that isn't just mac-and-cheese? Yes!" It sounded really good to me.
He started the engine. "That's good, then. I'm pretty hungry too." He shook his head. "Wish the weather had let up, though. The forecast said it was going stop by noon."
It was early afternoon, but the weather had barely cleared up at all. The sky was iron-grey, and I could barely see the gas stations and fast food restaurants by the side of the road. Their light was masked by the rain which hammered down against the car. The windscreen wipers were working full out. Dad was taking it carefully, and I was glad of it. I'd hate to get out of a psychiatric hospital and immediately wind up back in a normal one – or worse.
Of course, he always drove very carefully. No matter what.
Static hissed as I flicked through the stations.
"… love hurts, I'm telling you, but sweet babe~, what can you do? But I say
"listen, it's simply the way that liberals try to shut down anyone who speaks against them. She's calling me a bigot, but she can't deny the facts, and those facts say that Japanese immigrants are involved in mass people-smuggling operations, and have ties to the sex trade. They're a criminal influence and
"what will you do if your loved ones fall ill? Without health insurance, you could suffer an unexpected illness and
"Florida Man gave a public statement saying 'Sure, he was a real smart bad guy, but then I remembered that his power was all about bein' smart and nothin' about being immune to ma shotgun and so
"casualty reports from Dubai are still coming in, but they're already over ten thousand. Almost the whole city is flooded, and even from up here, you can see the bodies in the flooded streets. It almost looks like Venice from a distance, but then you see the fallen skyscrapers and the damage to the…"
My dad reached out and firmly turned off the radio. "Don't channel-hop, Taylor," he said evasively. "Either find some music or turn it off."
I frowned. "Dad," I said cautiously. "What was that talking about casualties?"
He said nothing.
"Dad?"
He sighed. "The Leviathan attacked Dubai last night," he said. "I didn't pay much attention to the news this morning, but… it's bad."
"Oh," I said.
"Yeah." He sighed. "There's always that little bit of guilt from being relieved that it was nowhere near here," he said, knuckles whitening around the steering wheel.
Another Endbringer attack. Yes. My dad was right. There always was that little frisson of guilt when you heard that you'd been spared an attack by one of those… one of those things.
There were three of them. They'd appeared in the nineties, one after the other. The Behemoth had come first, tearing its way out of a volcanic eruption, then the Leviathan had risen from the Pacific Ocean in a giant tsunami, and the Simurgh had descended from the moon in a total eclipse over Europe. They attacked a city each, every year, ever since each of them had appeared. "Endbringer" was synonymous with disaster, with calamity and death. Sometimes they could be driven away, but they always caused left devastation and mass death behind.
I'd never known a world without them, but I was old enough to know that they were why everything was getting worse.
Could that be why it had been raining blood when I'd woken up?
But Dubai was… like, almost on the other side of the world, somewhere in the Middle East. Would it really have that much of an effect? Well, I guessed the only way I could find out was to pay close attention to the weather in future. And start to worry if it started raining blood again, which was a perfectly natural reaction.
I blinked. Oh, I was feeling concerned about that again. The construct which had been trapping it must have fallen apart. They did that after a few hours at best. Some of them only lasted seconds, if I made it to do a specific thing. I'd managed to make one which had lasted over a day, but that had been hard. I had to be incredibly precise when mentally constructing it to stop it falling apart with time, and have you ever tried holding a very detailed image in your mind while adding more and more complexity to it? It's really difficult.
"So, how's work?" I asked, both to distract myself and break the awkward silence in the car.
My dad glanced my way briefly. "Things have calmed down a bit," he said. "It's still simmering a bit, but… well, I mean, it's tense, but that's better than it was. Right until some idiot does something stupid again," he muttered under his breath.
I pretended I hadn't heard that. "I meant that thing you were talking about last time you called. You know, the thing you said you couldn't talk about?"
"Yes, I… uh, still can't really talk about it. Talks are still ongoing, and I can't even tell you because there are some people who really wouldn't like some of the things which we're talking about."
I blanched. "… it's not illegal, is it?" I asked.
"No. Much as some people would like to stop us from…" He winced. "Uh, can you forget I just said that?"
"Said what?" I said innocently, even if I was already starting to put things together.
"Good girl," he said. "I mean, uh, thanks Taylor."
My dad was with the Dockworker's Union, and just like pretty much everything else in the city, it was suffering. The ships just weren't coming in. From what he said, he spent his time trapped between the companies who just wanted to fire everyone and bring in new workers for a fraction of the cost and the more radical elements of the labour movement.
His sympathies, I suspected, lay with the radicals. He approved of the cooperatives and workers' associations which had become a feature in the inner cities. Sometimes, I wondered if having to support me was stopping him from really throwing himself into it. I knew he worried about money and how stable his job was.
But just up ahead there was a stark reminder that things could have been a lot, lot worse for us. By the side of the freeway, sprawling over an abandoned industrial estate, was a shanty town. Some people called them 'new Hoovervilles'. I guess it was because they really, really sucked. Shanty town made more sense as a name, though.
I tried not to stare out at the mobile homes extended into permanent shacks and the abandoned factories and office blocks cannibalised into squats. The taller buildings looked like they'd contracted some kind of skin condition, their windows haphazardly boarded over or barricaded up. Everywhere, corrugated iron and blue plastic roofing channelled small rivers down onto the already sodden ground.
The government hated these places, I knew that much. They were hives of gang activity, the ideal spot for ramshackle drug-labs or whole armouries of unlicensed weapons. There were squat clearance operations – I'd heard people on the news complaining that too much money was spent in road-and-housebuilding programmes and not enough on getting rid of these places – but more always sprung up. When areas of the city were abandoned or empty, it wasn't hard for people to break into a building and start living there. And since there simply weren't enough jobs to go around in the Greatest Depression, there were more than enough homeless people willing to break the law to get out of the weather.
Up in the rainy sky, I thought I could see the lurking shape of an insect-like government Tinkerfab helicopter. No doubt it was loaded up with sensor equipment which didn't care about the rain. But I only saw it for a moment, and then it was gone.
If the sight of the shanty town was bad in the real world, it was worse in the Other Place. The entire place was cloaked in an oily fog, blowing downwind. When the car drove through it, it smelt like burnt tires and stale sweat and misery. And as for the scabrous buildings which bled rust into the red-tinged rain, as for the half-alive slimy slug-like trailers, as for the shuffling figures I could see with my perfect vision in the Other Place… well, the less said about them the better. But I wanted to get away.
We drove on and left the shanty town behind.
…
I'd regained my appetite by the time we got to the Italian place. It was in Brockton Bay proper, fairly close to the Boardwalk. As we parked, dad and I pulled a face in unison. The rain still hadn't let up. The walk to the restaurant still left us pretty damp, but we got a table close to a radiator. Inside, there was a slight smell of wood smoke, and swing playing faintly in the background. The slow drive meant we'd missed the lunch crowd, leaving us in a mostly empty restaurant.
I was glad that that there weren't too many other people around. I was going to be saying some things I didn't want overheard, and it was going to be hard enough to admit some of them without looking over my shoulder every five seconds.
Just in case, I checked the Other Place. The restaurant was reassuringly bland by the standards of that world. Yes, the wood panelling was cracked and splintering revealing raw concrete underneath, and yes, there was a low level of filth everywhere, but there were no mysterious bloody stains or toxic cloying emotional clouds. I winced as the off-tune music scraped against my nerves, but it was just noise and there was no mysterious screaming. I should probably check the food when it arrived, but at least I had no reason to try to talk my dad into going somewhere else.
"Taylor?" I looked away from the window, to my dad and the waitress. "What do you want to drink?"
I blinked, and quickly scanned the menu. "Uh… just water, please," I said.
"There's no reason to skimp," Dad said after the waitress had left. "This is a treat."
"I just felt in a water mood," I said. "I didn't feel like anything sweet."
He nodded. "So…" he began, and then didn't say anything. We sat there in mutual awkwardness for far too long. 'I'm not crazy'? Would that be a good thing to say to break the conversational silence?
"It's good to have you back," he said eventually.
"Thank you," I said.
Oh God, what was I meant to say? Was I just going to admit it? Should I wait until the food had come? But I was hungry and what if he lost his temper when I told him some of the things I had been keeping from him? To avoid having to talk, I hid behind the menu, reading it like my life depended on it.
The waitress returned with my water and Dad's Coke. "Are you ready to order?" she asked. "Do you want starters?"
"Taylor?"
"Uh… no starters." I didn't want to delay the main course. "Just a main for me."
"Okay," my dad said. "So…"
"…yeah. I'll… um," I scanned down the list, "I'll have the spaghetti alle vongole," I said, and paused. "Uh, unless… how much garlic is on this?"
"Oh no, we don't put too much garlic on here," the waitress said.
"Then, yes, the vongole."
"And you?"
My dad pursed his lips. "Um… I'll just have the carbonara."
"Great!" She took the menus. My cover was gone. I'd have to talk and I was dreading it and I was working to try to hide the way my stomach was churning. I couldn't do it. I couldn't talk to him. I couldn't come clean. "Anything else?"
"Uh," I said. "Where are the bathrooms?"
She turned and pointed. "Just take that passageway over there, and there are signs. Ladies are on the left."
"Thank you," I said, standing. "I'll be back in a moment."
The bathrooms were acceptable, and I shut myself in one of the cubicles. Sitting down on the toilet, I hyperventilated into my cupped hands. I felt sick to my stomach. I couldn't do it. I also needed the toilet for real, so I did my business and then stared at myself in the small mirror over the sink.
"Pull yourself together, Taylor," I told my reflection, trying to talk myself into it. "What's there to be afraid of? He knows you're being bullied. He knows that Emma, Sophia and Madison were doing it. You're not going to be admitting to anything he doesn't already know."
"If he knows how long it was going on, he might do something stupid," I answered. "I don't want him getting in trouble. You know he gets angry and tries to control it."
"And you don't think he won't do it if I don't tell him?" I pointed out. "At least this way I can be honest with him. If I come clean, he'll trust me more and we- I might be able to stop him getting too angry. After all, that's the big thing. He already knows. I can't keep it a secret anymore. And I bet he's been worrying and worrying about it ever since he found out."
I sighed. It made sense, I just didn't want it to. When it came down to it, I was ashamed. I didn't want to look weak, like I couldn't do anything. Even though I couldn't have done anything to stop it, for all the years it had been going, for all of high school.
I shifted into the Other Place and glanced around, noting the snow that dusted the broken and cracked sink in front of me. Snow. Hah. So someone used this sink frequently for cocaine, I guessed. I leant forwards and took a tiny sniff. Yes, the snow smelt of dependency, need, and a desperate hunger for something which wasn't food. I shook my head.
It was so easy to make the construct from my secrecy, my fear of telling, all those years of bullying. I just had to think of it and pour it into my breath.
And the product of this concentration looked like me. It looked very much like me. It was me without the scars. Not a monster; just me. And – God – I could read my own expression so well. She was scared. She was trying to be strong, but the fear and apathy and relentless oppression had got to her, so she was just trying to walk through life and not be noticed.
Then I noticed the staples around the edge of her face and the redness around her eyes, and realised that that expression was just another mask, locked onto her face. It was too rigid to be a real face.
A morbid thought struck me. This construct, if it worked like I thought it would, might well be able to force people to not tell things with as much strength as I'd felt about not wanting to tell about the bullying. That was scary.
Maybe I shouldn't tell after all. Yes, that would be the sensible thing to do. It wasn't like I could make a difference. And I didn't want to worry him. I'd made my mind up, but having just made this construct to help pluck up the courage, maybe I shouldn't. After all, this couldn't be natural.
Or maybe the construct – Madame Secret, I was going to call her – was just affecting me too. I gritted my teeth. No. I was going ahead with this.
It was hard to trap her. Very hard. She was strong, perhaps the strongest construct I had ever made yet, and she fought to slip out of her binds. Worse, she attacked back, with waves of apathy, waves of fear, waves of I-shouldn't-be-doing-this-there's-no-need-to-make-a-fuss. A chain snaked around one arm, pulling it tight against the wall, but as it dived to weave around her arm she managed to wrench the arm loose from the wall, uncaring that the bone audibly snapped.
This wasn't working, I thought. I was on a fool's errand. I should just give up and – I exhaled, sweating, no! That wasn't me. I could feel her hammering my mind and I swayed, my vision momentarily greying. I clenched my teeth, panting, throwing everything just into holding her where she was. And I was losing. She dislocated both arms to get free of the bond around her shoulders, and wriggled like a squirming insect out of the chains on her legs. One desperate last attempt got her around the throat, but she was breaking that too.
This wasn't working. She was just too slippery. I needed a new approach. I glared at her, and two bloodshot eyes glared back at me from behind her mask.
I laughed, a small giggle escaping my lips. It all made sense.
I let go of the chains and she rushed in towards me, fingers twisted into claws. And then I exhaled a cloud of rusty butterflies right into Madame Secret's face. They tore her mask off, and all of a sudden the resistance stopped. I took the chance to trap her tighter than a fly in a spider's web. She was weak, compliant as the chains trussed her up tight. I tried not to stare at her face, because she had no skin under the mask which now lay on the filthy floor. There was just red muscle and fat and the gouges from where the staples had been, weeping blood.
I'd cut her open, exposed her raw, bloody core, and now she was helpless.
Yes. I could tell my dad. The freedom was wonderful. I stooped down, and picked up the fallen mask. It was, and wasn't real. I could feel it, but it felt fizzy, almost like froth on a milkshake. I glanced from it to Madame Secret, and back again. And this – this was interesting. A mask of secrets. I could see that it wasn't alive, wasn't aware like she was. I focussed and let the mask flow back into me, leaving the greater construct still intact. Yes, I could make constructs which weren't beings in their own right.
I inhaled Madame Secret, and then returned to the normal world and checked my appearance. I washed the sweat from my face, and adjusted my hair.
"Are you feeling fine?" my dad asked. I could hear his concern.
I coughed, and tried to look embarrassed. "There wasn't much fibre in the meals in the canteen," I muttered, looking away from him.
He coughed. "Well. Uh. That won't be a problem now you're back home," he tried.
It looked like it had worked. "Yeah, I'll be glad to be home in my room with my bed and my books and…" I groaned as a realisation hit me.
"What is it?" my dad asked.
I winced. "Nothing really," I admitted. "Just remembered that I think I forgot to trade books back with Leah. I think I still have some of hers and she has some of mine." And she had come off rather better for the trade, I didn't say. I had thought I read quickly before I met her. I had been quite soundly disabused of that by her ability to finish a 300 page book in an hour or two.
"So… it seems like you, uh, met some people in… that place," he said. "That's good."
"Yes, it was," I said. I took a breath. "But I wasn't nervous about that," I said. "I was nervous because… well, I've been trying to get the courage to tell you something. I've probably been trying to do this for a long time, but now? Now, I think I can do it."
"Are… are you sure?" he asked.
I nodded. "As ready as I've ever been," I said. "More, really. But… uh, please, don't interrupt me. At least not at first. I'm afraid that if I stop, I might not be able to go on. And it might be a bit jumbled up."
He played with his napkin, and swallowed. "Go on," he said.
It was easy, with what I'd done to Madame Secret. I knew I couldn't have done it before. I would have choked up.
"It started… probably after I got back from summer camp in '09," I began. "I mean, I'm not sure if there were some things I'd missed. I still hadn't got over Mum dying when I went off, and I'd offended Emma or something beforehand. I don't really remember, and when I tried asking, she just said she didn't want to hang around with a loser like me anymore. But there had to be some reason, right?" I sighed.
"I don't know. I do know that when I got back, she didn't want to hang around with me anymore. She'd found a new best friend – Sophia – and they'd make fun of me. And that hurt, but… I thought it was going to get better. You know? Like, it still hurt because Emma had been my best friend, but I tried to hang around with other people and I tried to see if we could make-up or something."
"I don't know how they managed it, but it just ended up that I wasn't someone that 'cool kids' talked to, or hung around with. I'm not even sure how it happened myself. There wasn't a single point where everything changed. Everyone just drifted away from me. And the pranks were starting. Like, one day I found all the lead from one of my… you know, those clicky pencil things? All the lead was gone. I had to keep my pencil case in my bag at all times. I had to go and get one of the locker-room lockers, rather than a hallway locker, because they have better locks and," I laughed bitterly, "look what that got me. If I'd had a hallway locker, they're so bad I could probably have just broken out from the inside. You can open them by kicking the door hard in the right place, everyone knows that."
"But yeah. If I didn't watch my bags, things would go missing. People wouldn't get out of my way in the corridors and I'd 'accidentally' be pushed over. But the worst thing was the whispering. The name-calling. And… well, Madison – she really joined in early last year – just did stupid pranks and got me laughed at, and Sophia is just plain mean, but Emma knew all my secrets. She knew how to make things hurt. And…" I felt my eyes begin to burn, "and I was so lonely, because no one was really talking to me and I couldn't do a thing to stop it. No one who found out cared enough. And most of it was 'just' words. Notes in my locker. Slipped into my bag. Sent to my email address. Spoken behind my back. Spoken in front of my back. As if I just didn't matter one little bit."
"I'm… sure the words were very bad," my dad began, and I couldn't let him finish. I just couldn't. I didn't want to hear that from him.
"No, that's the thing, Dad," I said softly. I rubbed my fingers against the cold side of my glass, looking for the right phrasing. "You probably… like, got in fights at school when you were a kid, or something like that?"
He shifted slightly uncomfortably in his seat. "Well, yeah, that kind of thing happens."
"That's a boy thing. If they'd… like, got me near the bike sheds and started punching me, then there'd have been bruises. And I could have at least tried to punch them back, which – God knows – I really wanted to sometimes. But pretty much everything was just words," I said bitterly. "Words behind my back, or in front of it. Words and little petty things which hurt. Anyone who cared what the popular kids thought didn't want to hang around with me, and…" I shrugged, "well. Never enough proof for anyone to listen to me. And it didn't help that I'm so freakishly tall and… and have no figure worth speaking of and aren't pretty either. All of those things were things which make me a target. About the only way it could have been worse is if I was fat."
"You are pretty," my Dad protested, unable to hold his tongue.
"I'm not," I said, crossing my arms protectively. "Emma is pretty. She does modelling. Sophia is all athletic. Madison is 'cute' and has boys trailing her like stupid puppies. I'm just a beanpole." I sighed. "I had told a teacher. Mrs Bellinghausen. And she talked with them and they said they hadn't done anything and nothing came of it. And then she went on maternity leave and as soon as she was out of the picture, things got worse because I was a tattletale. Because there was never any proof, and no one cared. Just words. Just excuses," I almost snarled.
I sighed. "And then just before Christmas, things got better. They just left me alone. They ignored me. I was happy to be ignored, you know. And because of that, there were people who were willing to talk to me. I don't know if they told other people to let up on me, or whether those others had just been afraid that they'd be targeted like I was. Things were getting better." I paused. "And then right after Christmas. Wham. Guess they just wanted me to let my guard down."
"So that's about it. I made sure I made notes on it all. Back home, in my room, I've got a diary of events. There's much more than I can summarise here."
There was silence, broken only by the rain outside and recorded swing playing in the background. My dad was pale. "Taylor, I… I didn't know," he said.
"I know," I said sadly. "I didn't want anyone to know. It… it was so hard to tell you this." He didn't know the half of it. I'd had to cut the face off one of my inner demons to do this.
"I should have known. I should have noticed how… how for two years, you weren't talking about Emma all the time. How you never went around to her house. How she never called. I was just a… just a terrible dad. I should have seen."
Yeah, you should have, I thought. Of course I didn't say that. Dad had almost fallen apart after Mum had died, and he still hadn't been all there at the beginning. And I'd been hiding it from him. It wasn't fair to blame him when I'd been working so hard to keep secrets from him.
I guess that's a useful talent.
"So what are you going to do?" I asked in a small voice.
He sighed, resting his head in his hands. "I don't know," he said. "I… I don't know."
The arrival of the food was a welcome relief.
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