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Julia Ko has never been a nice girl.... She's a cheerleader.
Well... was. She was a cheerleader.
Her life ended the day at a in state competition where it felt like her leg split in three after she was dropped from a stunt. She was fucking dropped. How do you drop someone who is perfect? They kept mumbling the words.... Torn. ACL. Never again. She's done. Send her home. Where's her mother?
She was done, and she did not get a say in it.
Let's just say that very mean girl became a very bitter girl. Those girls who dropped her, the rest of their finale year in high school was not smooth—but what did it matter. They were still cheerleaders, Julia was not. They could handle a little mean girl.
So, I've guess they've won. Those four girls who she trusted with her body made it out of Hawkins to be somebodies. They beat the bully and Julia spends her Friday nights in a dingy trailer with a bunch of people she would call friends and freaks but not trust them with her body because how could she? They smoke. They drink. They talk. They rot. They're all so disgustingly Indiana that she knows this is how they'll all die. Just like this rotted together by what could've been for each one of them.
Maybe Steve should be here. But she hasn't seen him in four days and she won't answer his calls. She knows he also won't show up here without her approval because he's that much of a boy. He still acts seventeen can't breathe without a hand in his. (She knows she could be kinder to him.) She wishes he could grow a backbone, like he had been in high school but Steve is also suffering from what could've been and Julia Ko is not a good answer but he can't seem to erase it—and deep down, Julia will not let him stray too far. She fucking hates him but can't stop devouring his bones.
Julia knows Kaimer is watching her smoke her third cigarette of the night and she hasn't even been here for an hour. They're leaning against the trailer exterior. They usually smoke inside but Julia swore she couldn't breathe tonight in the stuffy trailer and Kaimer is the kindest of girls, so she follows even if Julia doesn't particularly deserve her sweetness.
"Do you ever still think about your mother?" Julia says quietly with a breath of smoke. She can't imagine her mother being dead. The woman that held her hand as they told her that her life was over at the hand of other girls with no brains.
Kaimer's eyes stray away from Julia's cigarette and her bottom lip sinks in from the weight of her top teeth. She thinks. Her fingers move the ring around her pointer finger in a circle. Sometimes it catches and she winces. "It's hard not to. It still feels like she lingers in the corners of the trailer sometimes. Like she's watching me. She would've hated this trailer." She is here but she is not.
Julia snickers, "it is gross, Kai." Kaimer knows that, and she takes no offense to it from Julia's lips. They are friends and Julia is just like this. Blunt. Kaimer gets it, the one thing Julia was destined to do with her life was ripped from her hands because other people had been careless with her weight.
