memory that presses, aftg.

02 the lighthouse

from a tender age i was cursed with rage

came swinging like a fist inside a batting cage

i went swimming with the devil at the bottom of a lake

and he left me there by my lonesome

Nina awoke the next morning to a text on her burner phone that read, 'Probably smart not to address an ambassador to the yakuza crime family as bitch.' She cackled in the silence of the dorm bedroom she'd broken into.

Last night, she'd walked to Fox Tower, the athlete's dorm, picked the dorm farthest down the hallway and jimmied the lock, intending either for it to be empty or to very rapidly make it empty with a few choice words and maybe a flash of the steel kept in each of her several pockets.

Fortunately (or, unfortunately, if you were Nina and always itching to stab somebody) the room was bare. There weren't even sheets on the mattress, which suited Nina fine— she couldn't remember a time in her life she'd slept on sheets for longer than a week at a time. So she'd closed the blinds, locked the door and curled up on the plastic wrapped bed and fell asleep for fuck knows how long.

'Watch me not give a fuck', She typed out, letter by letter. By the time she was finished, she felt aged.

Nina sat up and rummaged through her bag — she was a charlatan, of course, but a charlatan who enjoyed the finer things in life whenever she could, and there was a shower in this dorm room. The last time she'd showered she'd been rushed because the door had no lock and Trevor's room was right outside. It was a race between time, luck and Jesus on whether or not she'd get to shower in peace or— not. Decidedly not, that time. Now she turned the water as hot as it would go, and took a bit more time washing dirt from her hair and attempting to scrub the scrapes from her skin. About a day had passed, and they were beginning to darken from raw marks that could've been dirt to signature undeniable black and blue. By the time she'd given up on rubbing them to invisibility, some of them beaded blood.

After she got out of the blistering hot water, she spotted her face in the mirror and found one such bruise to be splattered across her cheek. Nina grimaced, but there wasn't much she could do about it now (or then, for that matter) so she decided to just ignore it (just like she did all her other major life issues). That would suit her just fine.

Nina was residually angry, and still tired, and the soreness in every bone in her body didn't do much to help any of that, but she still gathered all of her things and made her way down the hallway. She stopped in front of room 317 and knocked at an obnoxiously loud volume. She'd gone from loudly knocking to outright slamming and was just about to open her mouth and start screaming something god-awful that would make everyone in the building immediately need to take a shower to wash off the filth when the door swung open.

"What the FUCK, it's eleven in the MORNING, on a SATURD–" The guy who'd been unlucky enough to open the door cut off in the middle of his sentence to ogle at her. "Who the hell are you?"

"Nina." She introduced herself and didn't bother sticking out her hand.

"What's..." Nicky trailed off. "What's with your face?" He found his words (fortunately, because Nina had been just about to send out a search party), and lamely gestured at his cheek where Nina's bruise was.

Nina crooked an eyebrow. Nicholas Hemmick. The cousin's older, less skilled-in-Exy-and-probably-everything-else cousin. He did not look the part in any way, shape, or form, but that is what the file had said, and so far the file hadn't lied, so she immediately trusted it more than everyone else she'd already met on this fucking 'vacation'. "Hello, Nicky! Be a doll and let me in."