𝐆𝐑𝐈𝐌 & 𝐃𝐀𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐆! | harry styles

𝐗𝐗

SADIE'S room is like a monument to pre-teen lust.

Everything is pink. Literally everything. The bedspread, the pillows, the curtains, the walls. Even the carpet is this horrid fuschia-colored shag she begged and begged for. Dad said it reminded him of the inside of a stomach, but he bought it anyway. When it came to Sadie, he was a sucker. I guess we all were because I helped paint the walls, and Mom sewed the curtains, and Dad even found her a cheap plastic chandelier to hang over her bed.

Also pink.

Like a Pepto-Bismol nightmare, if you ask me.

We haven't touched it, Dad and I. Mom wanted to clean it out, strip the carpet, and repaint the walls, basically just erase any indication Sadie ever lived there, but Dad wouldn't let her. He grabbed her wrists and hauled her back into the hallway and screamed at her about the memory of their daughter and how if she killed it off, she was just as bad as the asshole who took Sadie in the first place. He threatened to bar the door. Threatened to nail it shut. Threatened to move himself in there if he had to, just to keep it safe from her. That was the night the fighting started, and it never stopped, really. A screaming match in the hallway, and then Mom was drinking, drinking, drinking all day, every day, and then she was driving to the station to make a scene in front of all Dad's colleagues before she fled town and never came back.

All of it over Sadie's ugly pink carpet.

But now, three years later, everything is covered in dust. The house always gets coated in a fine layer of ash from the lumber yards ten miles down the highway. I could never let it go long without wiping it away, or we'd drown in it. It turned the white enameled stove black. Turned the wooden windowsills grey. The mantle looked grimy all the time, and when I vacuumed, it came up in clouds.

The ash is so thick in Sadie's room, I leave footprints.

The first thing I do is sit down on that ugly pink carpet, my back against the rose-colored footboard, and cry. I haven't cried over Sadie. Not in three years. Not that night. Not the next day. Not at her funeral. Not on her birthdays. Not at Christmas. Not every time I caught my dad sitting in the dark with her stuffed bear or her hair bow or her sock in his hand, silent tears spilled all to himself.

If no one sees you cry, did it even happen?

My lack of tears at the funeral was what sparked it all. The town began to whisper, and then that whisper was a murmur, and then the murmur was just regular talking, and pretty soon the rumor mill was like a screaming banshee. It was a sign of a psychopath, the girl who couldn't even manage a tear over her poor, dead-but-not-dead sister. I was no better than a cold-hearted killer. Maybe I was the cold-hearted killer. That day, the day of the funeral, as I was putting on my ugly blue dress and hating my knees and my face and my life, I never could have imagined this was where I'd end up.

Curled up in a ball on my sister's ash-covered carpet, crying over her fangs.

I scrub the salt from my cheeks and stand, puffs of ash rising around me as I wipe myself down. I get a backpack from her closet, pink, of course, decorated with purple flowers and a plastic pull on the zipper in the shape of a star. I put her favorite tulle skirt in the bottom, magenta-colored, and shove her pastel sweater in on top, the one with the sequins around the neck. She'd need socks and underwear, and all of those have pink ruffles on them somewhere, somehow. I pack her a pair of jeans and a couple of t-shirts, My Little Pony and a blue one with a big gold bow printed on the front of it. I pack her jacket with the fake fur around the hood before I remember she's just cold anyway, forever, and probably doesn't need a jacket. I toss the jacket aside and shove in a few headbands, with big pink bows and pink ribbons on them.