Chapter 4: (v.2) Destroyed

Reads: 143

4. Destroyed

The bracelet chafed our skin, rubbing a bloody sore on the inside of our ankle. We were allowed to be not in jail if Allison’s parents agreed to the terms of a house arrest. We were not to leave the house, preferably not even Allison’s room, but obviously we had to go the bathroom for bathroom functions and the kitchen for food, so our movement was restricted to the house. The ankle bracelet enforced it. It would notify the police immediately if I stepped foot outside the door.

Now we sat on our bed with right leg crossed over our left, pulling gently at the skin where it had peeled back to reveal the pink sore spot rubbed by the bracelet. A piece of it came up and I held it up to the light, looking at its translucence, its fibrous etching in the window light. I brushed it against our lips to feel its roughness. Skin. So much a part of us and yet also just a container. Skin so sensuous and yet now feeling so lonely. I flicked it to the floor to join the other little bits I had picked off over recent days.

Our skin was so much Allison and yet it now contained both of us, the us-me that now included my spider self. There was nothing spidery about that skin. It was smooth and flesh-white, with traces of blue following the veins and a undercurrent of girlie pink.

I thought of the way our skin had felt against Brianna’s on that night, and then tried to remember other times we had touched. There was very little touching of skin in our society, perhaps a moment of hand holding when making a passionate point, but only a moment. Skin. It shouldn’t have to be so lonely.

Although I was forbidden from having any contact with the world of social media – they had taken away Allison’s phone and computer, we were able to, when Allison’s parents weren’t home, to sneak into Dad’s office and power up the old desktop. There was still an unused account on that PC in Allison’s name, mostly forgotten on a computer now mostly forgotten. We logged into the social media account Allison had set up as Twilight Sparkle, when she was nine but had lied about her age to make herself thirteen. Brianna had been a friend even then, had used her real name for her illicit account, and had not bothered to change to a different ID all these years later.

Now Twilight Sparkle gave us an anonymous way to learn what was going on out in the social world. It was not good. That night, someone had heard the car roaring down River Road and the crash. Someone had called the paramedics and the cops. They found us, our bloody lips resting on Maddy’s face, our hand cupping a naked breast. Pictures were taken. Evidence. Of course. But someone, a cop or an EMT, or maybe just a witness who had wandered down from the house where they had been awakened by the crash, had taken a personal picture with their phone. That picture was released onto the internet, Brianna naked from the waist up with Allison-us lying on top of her, kissing, “making out,” even though Brianna had nothing to do with it. I noticed that she had gone social media silent, although there was a posting where she thanked people for their best wishes and prayers.

I was never given a chance to apologize to her about that, about the shit that came her way, particularly after the hospital stay and the return to school with her arm still covered in a cast. I could see it everywhere and hear it in my mind, the name-calling, labeling her a “dyke,” a les, a slut, a pervert for something that she had nothing to do with. She had probably been the best friend I had ever had up to that point, and we had ruined her life with that strange lust that lived inside us, a surging that I didn’t even understand myself.

Michael was dead, thrown from the car in the initial flip. He had probably been killed by a blow to the head they said, but he was found lying face-down in the shallow water of the muddy river. So it was possible that he had died by drowning. But of course it didn’t matter. In either case we had killed him, Lincoln High School’s rising basketball and track star.

We heard that they had grief counseling at the high school for anyone who wanted it, but not us of course. Allison had been labeled the personification of evil. There was talk of naming a locker room, the gym or something else after Michael because of his promised glory. And I suspected most people wanted a booth in hell named after Allison. I had killed the golden boy and ruined the prospect next year’s basketball team winning the conference championship.

Davie would be in the hospital for weeks, with the concussion and the crushed right leg. Doctors were still discussing whether or not they would be able to save the leg. Perhaps he would be an amputee, limping about on a prosthetic for the rest of his life. The Pontiac was beyond rehabilitation. It was hauled off to a junk yard somewhere. I wondered if anyone found Brianna’s shirt and bra buried in the back seat, and then I remembered that I wasn’t sure whether or not she had been wearing a bra that night. In any case, I was certain that Davie wasn’t Allison’s boyfriend any more.

They tested our blood at the hospital. The alcohol level was only barely illegal, if Allison had been an adult, but of course no teenage should have had that much booze in their system. And either Brianna or David had told the cops that Allison was the one who was driving. It didn’t matter which one. We were going to be sent to some kind of detention regardless.

Eventually there was a hearing and the lawyer to whom Allison’s Dad had paid a lot of money made a deal with the court to get me-us sent to Holshue House instead of a place much worse.

Like I said, Holshue House was a nice place, a “rehab facility” for young women and girls, constructed in a converted ante-bellum mansion. We were pretty sure that Scarlett O’Hara never looked out at a six foot chain link fence topped with barbed wire while sitting on the veranda of Tara. But, for a prison it was a nice place, with “nice” people, who tried to “treat” those of us unacceptable to general society, to “rehabilitate” us into people who might someday, as adults, become model citizens.

Other than my plea of “guilty” I had nothing to say during the court proceedings. We had done this horrible thing initially on a drunken impulse, and no one else in the car saw that the darkness that I had seen racing beside us that night. It was indefensible. My parents even told us that Brianna’s parents wanted sexual assault added to the charges after that picture of the two us appeared, but the prosecutor said that since we were both unconscious when the paramedics arrived, there was no way to prove that we hadn’t just landed that way. We were convicted of Aggravated Vehicular Homicide and sentenced to eight years with the possibility of being released when Allison turned twenty-one, which was pretty much of the same thing.

Our world had become officially screwed up.

Submitted: August 14, 2023

Fantasy teen romance lesbian ya lgbtq