GOLD RUSH : a good girl's guide to murder oneshots

R.I.P.

part three of august thirtieth & fine line

⬇️

trigger warning — abuse, implied eating disorder, mental hospital
please don't read this if that will affect you negatively ! take care of yourself !
🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻
—————

Being tired was one thing, and being numb was another. But being tired of being numb, of staring at the same old white walls for hours, not hearing a word anyone around her said; being unable to write or read or eat or sleep, being unable to smile, being unable to move or breathe or live was like hell on earth, slowly consuming her soul and eating her from the inside out with sharp teeth that ripped through her, but none of it mattered, because she couldn't feel a thing.

First, she'd been called crazy for diving into a case that wasn't hers to investigate, for getting too wrapped up in it, then she'd been praised for solving it. She was a hero for solving another case when nobody else would, then she was crazy again, because she had post-traumatic stress disorder and had to take Xanax to get her feelings to go away, because again, the cops couldn't do their job, so she had to. She was never a hero again, just a crazy local genius with a podcast and an addiction. Only, she got crazier, because once she began to research another case, she began to convince herself that she'd killed a man, so her parents had to lock her up where she couldn't get any crazier, because now the cops wanted to do something good for society, apparently.

Sending her somewhere that she could get the 'help' that she needed was good for society, for the fine people of Fairview, sure, but not for her. She spent hours laying on the scratchy quilt in her 'room', staring at the ceiling or at the walls or at the pages of a book whose words she couldn't read, not getting better but not getting worse; it was like she was suspended in this space between life and death, this bubble in which her voice was trapped outside and every time she tried to speak (which she didn't, no matter how much she had to say), static replaced her voice and her mouth hung open in the ghost of the words she couldn't say.

For the first two months of her stay, she turned away any visitors; just picked at her food when she was told to eat, refused the pills they tried to feed her, and stared on with, what she imagined were colorless eyes, trying to find faces in the ugly white walls of this place that had to be worse than prison. She wouldn't talk, she wouldn't listen, and she wouldn't move much, unless it was to drag her feet across the linoleum floors to the bathrooms, slowly strip herself, and sink into the burning water of a bath, submerging every inch of herself other than her nose, so that she could breathe.

In the third month, though, she'd found someone else's voice and taken it for herself — at least she must've, because she didn't know how to speak anymore — and quietly agreed to take a visitor with a raspy 'Yeah.' And when a familiar face appeared in the threshold of the door, she had laid back, arms crossed over her stomach, eyes on the ceiling, searching for an explanation as to why she, of all people, was standing in her room. In a leather jacket and freshly-dyed dark purple hair, wearing an expression almost as dull as the girl on the scratchy quilt, was Lauren, eyes squinted in just the slightest, as if she was examining the ghost of a girl in front of her.

Pippa slowly sat back up, longer and thinner and messier hair falling over her shoulder as she squinted back, mustering up as much power as she could to make her dull-green eyes mean, though she truly felt nothing, not a single push or pull in her chest that could make her feel a thing.

"Ant ended up crazier than you," Lauren told Pippa, or the ghost of Pippa, closing the door and leaning against the empty wall that the ghost-girl on the scratchy quilt was always eyeing. "We were going to move to New York together for college. I changed my mind, I ended up with a broken arm." To Pippa, Lauren seemed just as numb as she was. There was no light in her eyes anymore, and there was a question lingering in the air between them that they both seemed to wonder: if I could feel anything, would it be sympathy for the girl in front of me? Lauren's cracked lips quirked up into the whisper of a smile that didn't reach her eyes, and Pippa realized she could understand every word Lauren said, and it wasn't just an overwhelming ocean of white noise in her ears anymore. "I want to know the truth about why you're in here," Pippa heard her say, and the white noise started again.