ANATOMY OF A GIRL

part fourteen

Arlo had made a home within Sapphire's mind. He was a constant echo, shimmering in the darkness of her skull. And now, the echo grew louder with thoughts of Leo. How close he'd been to death. The boy she'd known for as long as she could remember. Her oldest friend.

Everything was different now. It was so easy when they were young. She remembered her childhood as something distant — unsure if it was really her own. Had she truly ever been that hopeful girl? She couldn't find a trace of that girl in her anymore. If only she could go back — back to when Ayden made her hair stand up in the air, and Leo turned into a spider and hid in Ayden's coloring pencils' box. When she used to tell them what sandwich they wanted for lunch like a magic trick.

But now they'd been shoved out of the world they knew — safe and full of all things kind — and into a violent place of dark magic and murder. A place that crept beneath her skin and grew there like a fungus.

"I thought we were studying?" Flair said, looking over at her.

Sapphire tried a grin, despite the dark clouds floating in her skull. "You're studying enough for the both of us."

Looking to Flair, her hair pulled up into a high pony and a pen caught between her top and bottom teeth, Sapphire could see the difference that time had made. Not only had Flair stopped crying into her pillow late at night (when she thought Sapphire was asleep), she'd refocused on her academics and was talking about starting running again.

Perhaps time would do the same for her. She could rid herself of these thoughts, pulling the sickness out from underneath her skin.

Sapphire continued to watch the glass screen of her phone, reflecting the fan's blades. She couldn't avert her eyes from the movement. It was soothing in some strange way. It helped her forget the carnage that lay around her.

"Sapphire," Flair called out, looking to her in a moment of complete certainty. "I want to see the lake." Before Sapphire could be gong objecting, Flair continued quickly. "We can check if the police missed anything."

"I don't know, Flair. What if it's too much too soon?" she said. She didn't mention the fact that a dark creature could be lurking somewhere deep in the forest. Flair would wave it off as paranoia.

"It won't be," she promised. "I have to know more, Sapph," she said more desperately. "I can't live not knowing."

"Okay," she relented. "Let's go."

*

Sapphire used to think the Black Lake was beautiful. Glowing depths of the deepest blues and glittering blacks, surrounded by the greenest grass she could imagine, and the lushest forest of greens and splashes of purples. But that was before its water filled Arlo's lungs, took away his breath, and stopped his golden heart. The lake just looked like a crime scene now. Where Arlo was killed, where death lurked.

She used to think the forest was beautiful, too. But lately, it seemed like nothing more than a place for all the bad in the world to gather, writhing in silence. The purple flowers became bloody, scarlet handprints. The forest wasn't light and green anymore, as it had once been. The darker trees were all Sapphire saw when she looked at the forest. She saw only the darkest parts. It had become the same with people.

The forest looked like a dark maze now, where someone could get lost and never leave its walls, because the walls kept moving around and shuffling positions and everything was changing all the time and nothing stayed constant. Suddenly, there was no entrance, no exit. And then, it seemed there was but one way out of the shadowy maze — death. Lately, she couldn't see any light at all.