𝙋𝙀𝙉𝘿𝙐𝙇𝙐𝙈 | 𝙎𝙥𝙞𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙚 | 𝙈. 𝙊'𝙃𝙖𝙧𝙖

1| 𝙋𝙖𝙩𝙝 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙒𝙞𝙘𝙠𝙚𝙙

┅╍━━🐈‍⬛🏺💋━━╍┅

( 𝙁𝙖𝙮𝙚'𝙨 𝙋𝙊𝙑 )

Faye had often found her life to be one of the strongest examples that a proponent of Murphy's Law could use to validate its existence. Anything that had the slightest chance of going wrong did.

Christmas Eve when she was six. She vaguely remembered a loud crash and then waking up to a Mariah Carey song, drifting into the furore of sirens, wails, and distorted speech. Her headache felt more like a jackhammer pounding into her temples, the lids of her right eye felt glued together with the wet sticky fluid dripping from her forehead. Someone asked for her name and before she could reply, they slipped a soft silicone mask onto her face. The cool, sterile gas that had flowed through the mask had this burning purity to it that baptised her lungs with each strained breath. Through the gaps in the wall of glistening neon green jackets, she had glimpsed a limp hand hanging from a stretcher.

"Mama." The squeaky voice that came out sounded so much different than her own. The diamond on her mother's platinum wedding band glinted at her, the final blaze of the evening star before it sunk below the horizon.

She would later learn that no other vehicle caught in the same pile-up on that frosted highway had casualties. Something about a brake malfunction.

The accident had forced her father, a budding Egyptologist, to relocate to Queens with her from Brightville. Maybe the streets reminded him too much of her mother. Maybe it was the hope that some kind of miracle awaited them beyond the Hudson, a hope that a change in scenery could magically fix a broken home.

Homecooked meals were reduced to stale take-outs from the Thai restaurant below their apartment. Moth-bitten holes would go unrepaired in her shirts, tears in the hems held together with staples and safety pins. Stacks of dusty ledgers lined up in her dad's study forming a dystopian cityscape of cobwebs, failing investments, unpaid salaries, and unresolved debts. Most of all she hated the bills, rolls, and rolls of white paper bills branded with figures and letters that would crawl across their little apartment just to get lost in the void underneath the couch or behind a closet, never to be retrieved when the loan sharks came banging at their door.

School wasn't any better. The bullies were more creative in their execution of their twisted laws, a grim reflection of the grey world around them that they grew up in. Not to mention the villains who took them hostage every week- she had been held at gunpoint more times than she had been to an amusement park.

Then there was the shark tank that was Midtown High, she didn't wish to dwell upon much. All that hatred and apathy from teachers and students alike had her hating society in general, so much for the scholarship that had gotten her in.

Her dad never took his stress of having a toxic work environment out on her, oh no, he was too good of a soul for that. Instead, he would just shut himself down entirely, staring at the ceiling for hours after the bedtime story about Ramssess II or Thutmose III was over, with tears drying in his eyes. Little did Dr. Bill Hardy know that the same mellowness that made him so universally loved in the Met would have him locked up behind bars for a crime he didn't commit a few years down the road.

Faye sighed, the next day would mark two years since her father's incarceration. He had never talked about the colleagues who had betrayed him even once. This silent resignation of his would have Faye telling him to stop trying to be the next Nelson Mandela on her conjugal visits. He would just smile sadly and ask her about her day.

Maybe Faye got her resilience from her father amongst other things.

"You'll have to do a redo, doesn't matter that the code took you three months, Alchemax won't extend deadlines," she spoke into her phone, holding the sandbag with her free hand as her other kneaded her temple. Her knuckles tested out the leather surface of the punching bag with gentle pushes.