32. Pandora
PANDORA
It’s late enough that there aren’t a lot of people still out and about on campus. There’s a drunk girl staggering home, and two guys sipping beers, but if they notice me, they don’t say anything.
Maybe the guys took more pictures.
It’s late, and I don’t know how long it takes me to get back to the dorm. Once there, I tug at the door, only to remember that I need a key to get inside after hours.
I swipe my keycard against the lock. Nothing happens.
The drunk girl I’d seen stumbling ends up right in front of me, and she blinks several times at me like she’s trying to clear her vision.
Like she’s trying to see if I’m really naked or if she’s that drunk.
“You need a key,” she says helpfully.
“I know,” I answer. I swipe the card again, and this time the lock beeps. I open the door, swallowing a wince from the strain of moving my arm.
“You’re naked,” she comments slowly.
“I am,” I confirm. “Don’t tell anyone. I normally charge for shows.”
She laughs nervously, like even in her drunk state she can’t tell whether that’s funny or not.
Honestly, I’m not even sure.
By the time I get back to my room, I’m completely exhausted. I want to collapse into bed, but I am filthy and disgusting and I need to scrape my skin off first.
I go to the bathroom I share with Sam. The lights are harsh, and they give me a pallid glow.
I stare at the strange person in the mirror. Hair completely disheveled. Makeup smeared. Dirt and grime all over. Cum on her chest and stomach. Blood between her thighs.
And the words.
Reversed in the mirror, in barely legible handwriting or in large all caps. CRAZY, WHORE. Psycho, cunt, deranged, slut, various crude drawings of dicks and semen squirting.
If I had my phone, I’d take a picture.
Gotta commemorate their artistic endeavors.
Then again, they’ve already done that for me, haven’t they?
Maybe I should call the cops. I’ve got all the DNA evidence on me. I know who did it. This is classic assault. Nobody’s going to look at me and think I asked for this, that I simply regretted the sex.
Except the frat douches were right that I can’t go to the cops without my role in the fire coming to light.
I step into the shower and turn the water to scalding hot. Then I stand there, waiting for my body to reassemble itself, for the pain to leave, for something to make some fucking sense again.
Why would Blaze and Asch and River do this to me?
They were supposed to be perfect.
I grab the soap to wash off the grime. I scrub between my legs to remove the blood. The words fade, but they’re still visible, and I decide I don’t really care. I get my hair clean, I even condition it, and when I get out, I towel myself down completely.
Pain flares up from my cunt, stretched out and torn up. Good thing I’m such a loose slut, or this would all be worse, right ?
Vaginas don’t really work like that, I know.
It was a joke, geez.
The towel ends up smeared in dark streaks from the markers. I wrap it around my body and go back to the kitchen.
I need several glasses of water before my throat stops ripping itself apart with acid. My eyes are on the flowers on the vase in the middle of the kitchen table, and I wonder if they’re supposed to be that strange hue of blood red or if all the interior-goring is making my vision go wrong.
Sam’s door remains closed. I guess she’s not such a light sleeper today. Lucky me. I wonder if she would show sympathy, or if she’d say that I called it on myself by being, well, a slut.
I head into my dorm room, and even though Echo is sleeping I open the cage and pull her out. I lay down on the bed with her, wishing for one moment that she was the kind of pet who could snuggle with me.
She ends up coiled near my side, tail flicking while she considers how to escape this cage I made for her.
“Too bad you aren’t six feet yet,” I tell Echo. “I really need somebody who can devour men whole.”
My eyes are doing that weird thing again, the turning-blurry-for-no-reason thing, and I hate how fucking weak and stupid and vulnerable I feel right now because this isn’t me at all!
I’m not weak.
I’m not stupid.
I’m not frail.
I can handle my own problems.
But maybe it would be nice to hear a comforting voice. Somebody who actually likes me, despite all the ways I’m wrong inside and out.
I grab my tablet from the bedside table and tab over to the messaging app.
Pandora
You awake?
Call me if you are.
Two seconds later, the app shows an incoming video call from Papa.
I answer it. Papa is in the reptile room, sitting in one of the armchairs that overlooks the large enclosures. The dye is growing out of his hair, so only the very tips of it are still blond, the rest a light brown.
“Hey, Frog,” Papa says. “What’s… What the fuck?”
I’m confused about his reaction, until I remember that there’s still writing on my face. I think that one said crazy , but I don’t remember.
Blaze wrote that word.
He must feel very strongly about it.
“Oh, this,” I say with fake cheer. “It’s nothing. You should see the other guy.”
Papa’s eyes narrow. “Yeah, that won’t even work on Mama. It definitely doesn’t work on me.”
I giggle, because he’s right that it’s completely unbelievable. “Well. It was worth a try.”
“I’ll wake Damien and Slayer,” Papa says. “We can be in Dyschord before morning. Just tell me who needs to get taken care of.”
It would be so easy.
I want to murder every single person who did this to me. Papa would do it for me, no questions asked, damn the fucking consequences because consequences are for people who don’t have vast riches and connections to every organized crime family up and down the east coast.
“Nah, there’s no need,” I say instead. “I’m already plotting my revenge, don’t worry.”
Papa shakes his head. “You called me up just to tell me not to do anything?”
“Yeah,” I close my eyes. “I just wanted to hear you tell me it’s okay for me to murder a few people myself. ”
Papa bursts out laughing. “Why do you need my permission?”
“I don’t know. But there’s a stupid voice in my head that’s screaming at me that it’s my fault, and parts of me aren’t fitting right at all, and my heart hasn’t been inside my chest in years, but now I wonder if I was even born with one, because if I had one, I wouldn’t have…
” My voice catches. “I mean, if I was normal, if I wasn’t me, I would have normal reactions to things and not immediately destroy everything I touch. ”
Papa goes quiet, and I expect another promise of violence from him.
“Pandora…” Papa says. “That’s… I know how you feel.
I do. Damien can tell you all about how I am.
How I’ve always been. Mama isn’t a stranger to it either.
” He runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t care how you deal with it.
If you want to murder, that’s fine. If… fuck, don’t tell anyone I said this, okay?
But if you go to a counselor, and they give you pills, and you want to take those? That’s okay too.”
I giggle, because it’s so in-character for him to be more embarrassed about encouraging therapy than about encouraging violence.
“You think it would make me feel… not like this?” I ask, and I don’t even know what this is.
“Or so I’m told. But I want you to be whoever you want to be.” Papa abruptly gets up, the camera tilting. He ends up walking to the large enclosure, where his largest snake—a boa constrictor—is lazing on a branch. “I’ll even promise to be understanding.”
“No you won’t,” I point out, grinning. “There is no way you could manage to be understanding.”
Papa laughs, too. “Fine, I would pretend very hard to be understanding, and then I’d grab Slayer and we’d have fun at the cabin. Oh, we got a new table saw, by the way. Super sharp, and it’s got these things to make cleanup easier.”
“You can show me next time I come home,” I say.
“We could meet halfway. It’s pretty much on the way to Dyschord.”
We keep chatting, my earlier outburst forgotten. Papa shows me how the rest of the reptiles are doing, and I feel much more like myself by the end of the conversation.
I’m no longer precariously glued together. There is only a single me, one that doesn’t have a heart anywhere near her chest, but my parts all move in all the right ways and I even manage a smile that fools Papa.
Or, he pretends it fools him, in any case.
“Thanks for the talk,” I say. “Don’t tell anyone else about it. Well, tell Daddy not to worry if he hears about a fire or whatever. It wasn’t me, I swear.”
Papa laughs again. “Yeah, sure.” After a brief pause, he says, “I know you’re a fully grown destroyer of worlds, Frog, but I will drop everything to support your efforts to devour your enemies.”
“Papa! Cannibalism is frowned upon. And now I should get some sleep, because I have… classes.”
“On a Saturday?” Papa waves to me. “Okay. Call me again. Tomorrow.”
“Yep! Bye!” I end the call, then scoop up Echo and place her back into her enclosure. I change into my PJs, at which point I realize I’m starving.
I go back out to the kitchen, past the flowers, and check the freezer. The only thing in there is an instant meal Sam had bought.
“I’m eating your food!” I shout at Sam’s door. “I’ll pay you back later!”
There’s no response. I place the frozen meal into the microwave and sit down at the table while I wait.
Without my phone, I’m bored enough to look at the flowers. I think they actually are red and not some strange hallucination.
Actually, they look kind of familiar.
I pull out one of the flowers.
Isn’t this a dahlia?
I turn the vase, but there’s no note, no hint of where this came from .
The microwave beeps to let me know the food is done. I ignore it and start knocking on Sam’s door.
“Sam? Sam, sorry to bother you, but I need to know! Where did you get the flowers?”
No response.
The microwave says it’s close to 6 a.m. Normally I’d say that means Sam found some other place to spend the night, but she’s not like me. She doesn’t go out; she doesn’t have fun. She definitely wouldn’t be enjoying a sleepover with a guy.
“Samantha!” I shout.
Shit. I go to my room and grab my lockpicks. The keycard lock has a very small mechanical key lock on the underside, in case the battery runs out. It takes me a few minutes to fumble it open.
Nobody inside.
I go in, picking up Sam’s things and trying to find something that might give me an idea of where the fuck she might be.
I spot her tablet on the desk, and I tap it on. It asks me for a password, but that’s not the important part.
The background image is of Sam and Zayden, hugging.
They’re in the greenhouse, with the fucking blood red dahlias behind them.
My lips widen into a grin. “Oh, Zayden. I knew I didn’t like you.”
He’s the one. He’s the one who killed Rachel.
He’s the one who took Sam.
And it’s his fault Blaze, Asch, and River turned against me. I know it.
They wouldn’t have done that on their own. No wonder none of it made sense.
I mean, I still have to punish them, obviously. But once they grovel, I can forgive them.
Not like Zayden.
Zayden has to go.
I laugh, and I feel so much better already. The world is finally slotting back into place.
I’ll get some sleep, eat some food, and when I’m all rested up and have all the supplies I need, I can get some shit done.
After all, I’m a destroyer of worlds.