Grim and Darling

Chapter Eleven

Dear Self,

Your mother’s favorite story to tell about your birth was the one where she asked the nurses to give you away, or lose you on purpose. To switch you at the very least.

She wanted a prettier baby, a quieter baby. One not so skinny. Or loud.

Or real.

You were an oops. That kind of oops you don’t even realize happened until it’s too late, and suddenly there’s a human inside of you. The kind of slip that’s really just a split second, and suddenly you’re growing hair and teeth and brain cells and in ten months or so, you’ll be responsible for keeping it alive. Alice was another oops, but by the time she came along, the deal had already been broken. There was more fighting than friendly family dinners. Your mother had started sleeping down the hallway in the impending nursery long before the new baby arrived. Your dad spent more time hunting than home, more time fishing than being a father. You spent most of your time under the back porch with the dirt and the worms building castles out of the soft dark dirt.

That was your first really bad idea because you got some sort of weird rash on your knees that spread down your legs, and by the time you worked up the courage to tell anyone about it, you looked like you’d stood in a bonfire for a few seconds too long. It took almost six months of antibiotics and some green smelly salve to clear it all up.

A few months later, you tried to become a mermaid and ended up flooding the upstairs bathroom, which in turn flooded the downstairs living room and short circuited the fancy flat screen television your dad had just bought himself to watch baseball on. The house got new carpet, new drywall, new curtains, your dad got another new tv. You got grounded for almost a month.

The next year, you played dress-up with the cat and accidentally strangled it when it tore out of the house wearing a tiny pink doll dress printed with yellow flowers and trimmed with a lacy collar that got caught up in a barbed wire fence. You set your tree house on fire a week later trying to hold a funeral for the cat, toppling one of the candles you stole from the pantry, the ones that were supposed to be saved for the nights when the northwest storms blew through and knocked out the power. It took three days for anyone to actually notice the charred remains in the old sycamore out back, but when they did, your parents grounded you. Again. This time for two months.

In seventh grade, you decided to drive to Port Angeles at midnight because you’d eaten the last of your dad’s special ice cream, and he’d be so mad when he got home from the double he was pulling down at the station that fear got you behind the wheel of the old station wagon. You sat on a pillow to see over the dash and drove halfway there with the parking brake on before you figured out how to disengage it. You spent every last dime of your allowance and even needed to scrounge the car for a few quarters to make up the difference. You got pulled over for speeding on the way back. By him. Grounded. Three months.

You wore black lipstick to school and never lived it down. You tried out for the cheerleading team and never lived it down. You won an art contest with a drawing of a sad girl in a puddle of blood and never lived it down. Most of your high school career was one big long first-hand account of the acute kind of humiliation that only teenagers can inflict on other teenagers. Gitmo doesn’t have shit on high school. Waterboarding, isolation, all that shit was small potatoes compared to the bathroom interrogations, and the locker room beatings, and the hallway gauntlets. Problem was, most of it was your own fault. You could have flown under the radar, could have just slunk through the building and not made eye contact and sat in the back with your head in your books and then gotten the fuck out of there with a little bit of your integrity intact but, for some reason, you couldn’t seem to do that. It’s like you invited it, the lipstick and the tryouts and the bloody artwork.

Not to mention the sleepwalking.     

Your entire life has been one big bad idea.

But your worst idea yet?

Falling for this guy.

First of all, you don’t know anything about him. He might not have a job. He definitely doesn’t have a car. He can run too fast and drink too much, and you’ve never seen him eat anything. What if he hates peanut butter? That’s a deal breaker in your book. What if he loves his mother? You’re not sure you know how to even do that anymore, and what if that’s a deal breaker for him? What if he’s addicted to drugs? What if he deals the drugs? What if he reads books by Nietzsche and Proust? What if he hates the fact that you spend your nights reading smutty fanfiction and scrolling through Tumblr, instead of educating your brain? What if his favorite time of day is the middle of the night, and he finds out that’s usually when you’re fast asleep, walking somewhere?

What if everything about him clashes with everything about you? That could be a problem.

But the biggest problem?

You don’t know how to like someone.

You have no experience with this. Even having a crush on someone is kind of like rowing yourself out into the middle of the ocean and closing your eyes to spin your little boat all around, then using just your nose to row yourself home. You’re gonna end up in China. Or Australia. Or the friggin’ Antarctic before you make it back to the place you started.

Plus, who wants to spend weeks at sea in a tiny rowboat with nothing but sun and sharks and seaweed?

Yours Truly,

You

---

Later, when Edward was standing in my doorway about to leave me alone in my big empty house to spend an entire night by myself, I’m not wondering where I’m going to wake up later. I’m not wondering what I’ll have to do to keep myself awake all night. I’m not wondering why my heart feels so faint or my head feels so heavy or my stomach feels like it’s full of the entire ocean and all of its millions of riptides.

I’m wondering what it would feel like to let myself like him.

“What are you staring at?” I ask him.

“Your face.” He licks his lips and blinks twice and still doesn’t take his eyes off of me.

“I hate my face,” I grumble.

“Funny, that’s the part about you I like the best.”

When he says it, so easy like it’s natural, like he wasn’t even thinking about trying to keep it a secret, my heart jams itself so hard up into my throat that I have to fight back the urge to choke when he reaches a hand out in my direction. I rip my eyes off his face, and it’s just his fingertips reaching for me, the ridges in his skin and the nails he has trimmed down neat and short and square, the cuff of his shirt peeking from beneath the arm of his suit and then his hand is on my cheek, and I finally look up at him.

He’s pretty fucking beautiful, really.

Beautiful like the multicolored rainbow of a ten million gallon oil spill.

Beautiful like the triple trillion heat of a space swallowing nebula.

“May I?”

For a moment, I can’t believe he actually asked. Do people even do that anymore? Ask like that? I’m almost certain that I know what he’s going to do. Kiss me. Kiss my mouth, press his lips to mine, and I’m wondering cliche romance novel things like whether he’ll taste like oranges or smell like cedar. Whether he’ll steal a simple peck or if he’ll lick the seam of my lips to get me to open to him in a real, full-blown tongue tangle. Whether he’ll put his hand on my waist or his fingers through my belt loops or if he’ll slip up underneath my shirt and it’s then that I remember that I forgot to wear a nice bra today, so I’m really hoping he doesn’t do that.

But then he just comes in at my forehead.

A kiss. To my forehead.

“I have to go,” he says, just far enough away that I can feel the sweep of his cold lips against my skin.

“Where?”

“Home. I have a… uh… a guest.”

“Someone is visiting your haunted house?” I step back. Furrow my brows. It’s not his hesitant voice or the fact that he’s not looking at me, because he never really does. It’s not the shuffle in his feet or the downcast of his chin. It’s the fact that he is actually living at the old haunted house out on Hollow Road, and now he has a visitor.

“Sort of.” He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing right there in front of my eyes, and just before I find the thump of his pulse beneath his skin, he’s gone. Off the porch and out of sight and my thousands of tiny bad ideas are slowly blooming into one big giant weed of a crush on this guy who just kissed my forehead.

Next

AN:

Thank you for joining me here.

And thank Hadley Hemingway for basically being the best thing to ever happen ever in the history of ever.