"Friends just sleep in another bed"
"Friends shouldn't kiss me like you do."
"But my friends won't love me like you."
In which on the worst night of their lives, two best friends simply can't keep their hands off each other, and with...
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EPILOGUE - "THIS IS THE END."
• TWO YEARS LATER •
MONDE APARTMENT COMPLEX DISASTER - MOTHER RULED KILLER!
The headline pasted in bright red lettering across the magazine caught Lydia Bixler's eye from a mile away, even in the New York mist and rain, it was like a beacon drawing her to it, dragging her back out of the woodwork on the two year anniversary nonetheless.
She approached the stand haphazardly and wrapped her white knuckles around the pages, seeing Ellie's honey sweet smile pasted on the front, labelled a murderer, guilty of filicide, killed by her own sister to protect the children.
L felt sick at the sight, none of it was true, if only they knew that. It wasn't Ellie and it wasn't Bridget, but it didn't matter what any of them said, the cops and the papers and the public would run with whatever story closed the case the fastest, made the best headline, made plausible sense.
None of it could ever make sense to anyone, only to Lyds and her fellow survivors, she thought of them all as she paid the newsstand vendor, and umbrella in hand, evaporated away into the fog.
Further away but nearby all the same, Danny Bixler sat alone at his desk, staring out of the condensated New York apartment window. His new place was small, and took some getting used to, but it was still home like, still enough for him, still somewhere to escape to when it all became too much.
He checked the time and retrieved his anti anxieties from the desk drawer, he took a couple from the cylindrical orange container and took a sip from a rogue glass of water left on the nightstand.
They were hard to swallow as he always found but he knew they helped, especially when that creeping chill fell through him, the same one that had him pushing on the scars at his arm and ankle, remembering every damn time.
"Eeny, meeny, miny! You..."
His mother's words rang in his head like a siren, screaming at him, something's wrong, it was all your fault, it's happening again, get out, go, run!
The pills hadn't kicked in yet. He knew that.
And so instead of pressing at his ankle or his arm, he traced the tattoos he'd placed over them. The one at his ankle wrapped around like vines, the same ones his mother had, all the way up his leg. And the one that webbed itself across his shoulder and around his upper arm, was a spider, weaving its web and resting right where his mother had once ripped into. Spiders had been Bridget's favourite creature, she'd always wanted that exact tattoo; she couldn't have that anymore. He figured that was the best way to honour her, to honour them both.
