Toxic Devotion

Prologue

ROXY

I was eight years old the first time I understood that adults were liars.

Mrs. Patterson lived three houses down from us in our quiet suburban neighborhood in Connecticut.

She had a garden full of roses that she tended every morning, and she always waved when I rode my bike past her house.

She was old, maybe seventy, with white hair that she kept in a neat bun along with reading glasses attached to a chain around her neck.

It was a Tuesday in October when I saw the ambulance outside her house.

I was walking home from school, my backpack heavy with books I'd never read, and there it was, lights flashing BUT no siren.

Two paramedics were wheeling a gurney out of her front door and there was a sheet over the body.

White, pristine, covering the shape underneath completely.

The sight made me come to a stop on the sidewalk as I stared.

One of the paramedics noticed me watching, whispering something to his partner, before loading the gurney into the ambulance with a practiced efficiency. The doors closed and the ambulance drove away like it had all the time in the world.

Mrs. Patterson was dead. Even at my age back then, I knew it with absolute certainty. It wasn’t just the fact that she was covered up to her face, it was the expressions on the paramedics faces, the slow movements and an eerie calm that washed over her house after they left.

When I got home, my mother was sitting at the kitchen island, reading through work papers. Always working.

"Where's Mrs. Patterson?" I asked.

My mother didn't look up from her work as she spoke, not even acknowledging my arrival.

"She went to stay with her daughter for a while. She wasn't feeling well."

A lie. I'd seen the sheet and the gurney. I'd seen death, and my mother was sitting there telling me Mrs. Patterson had gone to visit family.

"She's dead," I said.

My mother slowly lifted her icy blue eyes to mine.

"Roxy, that's not nice."

"I saw the ambulance. I saw them take her body."

"You don't know what you saw."

But I did. I knew exactly what I'd seen.

My mother stood and walked over to me, her expression tight with something I couldn't name. Discomfort, maybe.

"Mrs. Patterson passed away this afternoon. But we don't talk about it like that, it's not appropriate."

"Why not?"

"Because it's upsetting."

"It's the truth."

"Roxy." Her voice had that warning edge like it always did when I asked any question. "Go do your homework."

I went to my room, but I didn't do homework.

Instead, I sat at my desk and drew Mrs. Patterson's house with the ambulance outside.

I drew the gurney with the sheet covering the body and the empty garden with the roses still blooming, unaware that the person who'd planted them would never touch them again.

I drew death. And for the first time in my life, I felt like I was doing something real.

By the time I was fourteen, I'd learned that everyone was lying about everything.

They lied about being happy and about loving their families.

They lied about having dreams and a purpose in life.

The reality was that they walked through life pretending they weren't terrified of the only thing that was guaranteed, which was that one day, they'd stop existing.

I couldn't pretend. I tried. God, I tried.

I smiled when I was supposed to smile. Laughed at jokes that weren't funny.

Sat with girls at lunch who talked about boys and clothes and TV shows like any of it mattered.

But I couldn't stop seeing it. The emptiness behind their eyes with a performance of being alive.

The desperate, clawing need to fill the void with noise and distraction and anything that kept them from thinking about the fact that they were going to die.

That’s when I started drawing them. Not the way they wanted to be seen all pretty, happy and normal. I drew what I saw underneath, showing the sadness and the fear of being conscious in a body that was slowly breaking down.

My art teacher called my parents in for a conference when I was fifteen.

"Roxy's work is…concerning," Mrs. Lycet said, spreading my drawings across her desk. One was of a girl's face half-skeletal, then a classroom full of students with hollow eyes. A self-portrait where my skin was transparent, showing the bones underneath.

My mother and father looked at the drawings like they were evidence of a crime.

"This isn't normal," my mother said to my father.

"I'm worried she might be depressed. She really does have potential, but this is not what we would consider…well, it’s not what I would expect. Maybe she is struggling with dark thoughts," Mrs. Lycet said gently.

"I'm not depressed," I said.

They all looked at me like I'd said something obscene.

"Roxy, this isn't healthy," my father said. "Drawing death and horror like this is not normal.”

"It's real."

"You need to draw something else, something positive," my mother said. I think her denial was to hope a quick harsh word and demand would fix it all. It wouldn’t. In my eyes positivity was a huge lie to mask reality.

But, in order to prevent them from banning me from drawing, I stopped showing my work at school. However, in secret, I continued.

I set up an account on a dark web marketplace, one of those places where people bought and sold things that weren't allowed in polite society.

I posted my drawings of pencil sketches of rot and they sold.

Not for much at first, only twenty dollars here, fifty there.

But people wanted them. I was relieved to see people who understood that darkness wasn't something to be afraid of, but something to be preserved and celebrated.

By the time I was seventeen, I'd saved three thousand dollars.

Enough to buy a van.

Enough to leave.