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TO THE BONE ✷ OVERTURE, NO ONE GETS OUT OF THIS
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IT'S LATE AUGUST and Amelie glows under the summer heat, a halo of light seeping through the window and shrouding her body. Iseult never considered herself to be holy, never considered devotion to anyone until now. She knows that it's blasphemous, because the nuns at school are so pious and the church next door so daunting, but Amelie is the closest thing there is to God.
She is everything.
And Iseult, her disciple, her shadow, was nothing before Amelie. If she were anyone else, Iseult would have broken her. But Amelie feels like home and she could never hurt her. Who would ever want to?
"Isa, listen," Amelie says with a strange somberness. They're sitting on her bed and the window is open and there's a breeze and Iseult thinks that it sounds like being underwater. It feels like that too when Amelie says, "I've been thinking... I've been thinking—" She sighs. It's not soft—no, frustrated. Iseult waits with bated breath. "I'm leaving."
Water, burning, drowning.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, I'm leaving. I... I can't stay here."
Sinking, swallowing, suffocating.
She doesn't get it. She's freshly sixteen and God, she's trying, but she doesn't get it. "But we—but I thought—" And then: "You can't."
"Isa—"
"No," Isa pushes herself off the bed. Her voice has an edge, a darkness, the hunger clawing at her throat. It tastes the betrayal, can feel Amelie pulling away. "You promised that we'd leave together—go to London, leave this behind—but not me. You said you'd never leave me!"
Amelie's voice comes out choked. Iseult had never stopped to wonder if Amelie had some dark thing clawing at her throat too—but she was only sixteen. She just didn't get it. "I can't stay, Isa, I can't. It's getting worse. She's so angry these days and it's my fault. There's never anywhere left to hide. I can't keep hoping that I'll disappear." She doesn't say it but she means: I need to get out of this. And really: Any way that I can.
