¹ SOME KIND OF DISASTER ─ oliver wood

[ 037 ] like tinsel and ribbons

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
like tinsel and ribbons

SAWYER TOOK COMFORT IN THE idea that this would be the last Christmas she would be forced to spend at home. After graduation, she could do whatever she wanted. She could cut off all contact with the people she knew here. She could be free. No more manacles, no more reminders that nothing she did would ever be enough. For now, though, as she stepped off the train onto the platform with her luggage in tow and her friends bidding her goodbye, the last dregs of that thrill ebbed away like a tide receding from the shore. And then she was back in her father's car with her mother in the passenger seat and they were driving back towards the junction where the potholes in the streets dipped and made the insides of the car tremble in agitation. Leaving Hogwarts, she'd immediately felt her mood improve, felt new all over again. Getting back in this car seemed to undo all that again. Like two hands pressing down on her shoulders, forcing her back into the confined space where she couldn't breathe, she felt it poking at all her organs, pinching the flesh of her flaws, sneering, you poor sad thing.

One moment to another Sawyer barely remembered unpacking. (Maybe it's because she didn't unpack at all because of a lack of motivation to do anything except crawl under her covers and sleep until this was all over, and all her luggage was still sitting at the foot of her bed, waiting for her to decide what to do with her possessions—stay or go? But of course, there was nowhere to go yet. That part of her life was still waiting in the wings for its cue.) Barely remembered forcing herself into the shower and washing away the hours of a train ride freezing her muscles stiff and rolling out the aches in her joints.

Standing before the mirror in her towel, bathed in a pharmacy of lights, Sawyer gazed at her reflection with flat eyes. This is you, she had to tell herself, staring at her heat-flushed skin and recognising none of it. This is your face. Your nose, your freckles, your sad/angry/empty eyes. This is you, and you are supposed to be better. Touching a hand to her inky hair, limp and wet and dripping down her back, she made a mental note to get her father to arrange another session with Dr Josten. And then she remembered that her hair was still due for a trim to keep the weight off. Some part of her didn't know where all that weight came from. It was when she finally traced out the line of her jaw and spotted the purple blemish like a stain at the base of her neck from yesterday that she thought, Let me do it right this once.

And then she turned off the light and stood in the dark listening out for the sounds in the pipes behind the wall like a pulse, all that putrid toilet water rushing around like blood in veins, and pretended she was underwater, feet in the eddies, floating away, floating into oblivion, floating into the future.

Moments later, she'd been ejected from her room by her father, who'd donned his hideous 'kiss the chef' apron everyone expressly despised, brandished a rolling pin, and declared that they needed to restart their annual tradition of making gingerbread houses on Christmas Eve, so they better get practicing from now until the weekend. Fine, Sawyer thought, if this was one step to doing things right again, so be it. And then Christmas Eve came round the corner and the December-bleached sky brought in a curtain of watery snow and things got so much worse.

Apparently Wyatt had decided to make it a competition of teams and hadn't drawn a consensus from his family members (namely Sawyer). Sawyer wanted to point out that just because she was on the Quidditch team didn't mean she was actually a team player, but before she could make her escape plan Wyatt had staked his claim over their father, which left Sawyer no choice but to team up with her mother and wish for the sweet release of death.

Perhaps it was the timing that was off. All timing seemed to be off where her mother was concerned. Perhaps it was because she was just riding the coattails of her medication, still due for her second dosage. Perhaps that was why she knocked down every wall that her mother constructed. Perhaps she didn't want to build a foundation with her mother any more than she wanted to be in this kitchen making gingerbread houses for no reason other than the limp evil of sentiment. Here's the kicker: let me do it right this once sounded like a faraway cry.