In the aftermath of her twin sister's tragic death, Reagan Sinclair finds herself in a never-ending battle against paralyzing panic attacks and drowning in grief. Desperate to just survive each day, Reagan's world is turned upside down when Paris un...
Reagan: I just got tatted. I think I'm hardcore now.
Samara: What?
Reagan: Yeah, from a dude on the subway.
Samara: PICTURES. IMMEDIATELY.
Samara: Never mind, I'm coming over.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I DIDN'T PLAN TO get a stick-and-poke tattoo on a Saturday afternoon on a train going to Central Park, but I don't regret it. Maybe I'll regret it later. When I'm not feeling so numb, later. When the bottle hiding inside the brown paper bag I'm holding is empty, later. In any case, I blame Carsyn for this.
My father has married three times since divorcing my mother, and although he seems to struggle with the concept of monogamy, it hasn't made him a bad dad. He just really knows how to pick 'em. Wife number two and three were snarky but tolerable, but his most recent wife, Carsyn with a Y gets on every one of my nerves. She's jealous and winy and can always be depended on to bring up my stay at Briar Rose. I'm always in a bad mood after talking to her.
“How are you doing up there?” Darius asks. I give him a thumbs up, smiling like this doesn't scare the living crap out of me.
“A-okay,” my voice shakes, so I take a swing from my wine to disguise it, gritting my teeth. Really, the pain isn't that bad. I've had worse cramps. It's the thought of the needle going into my skin that makes me twitch. I close my eyes and lean my head back against my seat, feeling the vibration of the train as it moves and trying not to think about the stupid video call.
I'll never know what my father felt when he found me lying in a pool of my own blood. One daughter dead, the other on the brink of it. I didn't think about someone finding me when I took the scissors to my skin. I wasn't thinking much at all. But I wish I had. I wish I hadn't done that to my father. Our relationship has been strained ever since that day. There's a tenseness to our conversations now, like he can't talk to me without remembering the way my blood felt on his hands or the way it stained his shirt red, and with Carsyn constantly competing with me for his attention, our video calls are always a painful mess.
So, it made sense that I wasn't exactly fixin' to shake a tail feather after our video call ended. That familiar edgy feeling crawled up my skin, the one that meant I needed to rearrange my entire apartment or chop my hair off. I focussed all the edginess on the former because the last time I cut my hair, my mother nearly had an aneurysm. I moved my TV to a different wall and rearranged the furniture around it, took the pots and dishes out of the cabinets only to put them back in colour order. I even took Esmeralda the Aloe Vera plant out to the balcony. When the feeling still hadn't subsided and cutting my hair started to look like a great idea, I took the Cabernet from the cupboard, threw it in a paper bag, and walked to the train station where I offered a kid eighty dollars if he coughed up his eight-dollar ticket. Maybe some fresh air would help.
