Fic: Seven Veils (Various) R
Title: Seven Veils
Author: Sophia_bee
Pairing/Character: Loretta Cancun, Hans, Cliff McCormack, Don Lamb, Dylan Goran, Madison Sinclair, Meg Manning
Word Count: 2774
Rating: R
Summary: Seven veils, seven characters and one Neptune summer
Spoilers/Warnings: Season 1, adult language, adult themes
Author’s Note:X-posted at my journal and veronicamarsfic. Special thanks to Ladydisdain225 for helping me remember Loretta Cancun's name. Yay!
One is for Loretta Cancun
The pole is cold today and she ignores how it rubs on her skin and sends goose bumps up her arms. Instead she smiles and flips her hair back, twitches her hips and licks her lips.
She can’t see them but she knows they’re there. Sitting in the darkened room, breathing in the stale, cigarette scented air. The air-conditioning is a welcome respite from the beating summer heat that has descended on Neptune. The hottest summer in ages the weatherman had crackled across her television the night before while she sipped at a glass of ice water and considered washing off the grime from the evening.
Rosie had sprayed her she pushed open the curtains and prepared to strut onto the stage. She was waiting just before the thick red velvet, spray bottle in her hand.
“They like to see you wet.” She cackled as Loretta winced and the sticky gelatin spray misted across her chest and arms. It stuck to her skin and gave her cleavage all the qualities of a Playboy soft porn video that always involved vacuous women and water falls. It was porn for preteens who were just figuring out where their dicks were and that girls might actually be good for something.
The music thumped and Loretta brushed up against the thick shag carpet that covered the wall behind the stage. She put one hand behind her head and ran the other down her breasts, over her stomach and toward the spandex clad crotch that the sweating, heavy breathing business men on lunch break would only see in their fantasies. There were laws. Five feet away. No beaver shots. No pasties. No touching. No lap dances unless it’s in the back room. After all, Neptune was a decent, family town. If the mayor hadn’t been a regular customer the Veil would have been shut down a long time ago, a victim of moral outrage.
She moves to the front of the stage, braces her legs should-length part and starts to grind her way down to the floor. She twists her hips in time to the thumping music. This is the only time the bright stage lights aren’t angled in a way to keep her from seeing the faces as they stare at her, wanting her. She looks out at the crowd, seeing the same suits, same conservative haircuts, same thick jowls. They shift in their chairs and sigh with her every move. Her gaze cuts across the room until it lands on the table closest to the stage. He sits there, licking his lips nervously, eyes greedily watching her every move. Loretta wonders if he’s even 18. It’s not like Rosie bothers to check IDs that well and the Veil was known for letting some of the worst fake IDs in through her front doors.
He’s young enough that he could be her son, her Johnny, who was finishing up his last year at Westpoint and would be shipping out to Iraq shortly. Johnny, who was the light of her life even though he came from being raped by her best friend’s older brother at fourteen. Johnny, who she loved more than anything, even though he was the reason her mother called her a whore and threw her out of the only home she’d ever known.
Loretta made a mental note to tell him for the hundredth time that she would kill him if she found out he ever went to a joint like the Veil. She wasn’t going to have her son become one of the faceless men who paid to see her slide down a pole and strip down to cheap polyester panties and a skimpy bra. He was a good boy.
Two is for Hans
He hates the sun. It might have been different. He might have been at the beach with the guys, cash in his pocket, a girl on his arm. If it had been that way, he would have liked the sun. Instead it beats down on his head, burning into his scalp. A bead of sweat runs down the side of his face and absorbs into the collar of his scratchy, polyester orange jumpsuit. Hans scratches at his stomach then leans over and grabs another discarded In-n-out Burger wrapper and shoves it into the large black plastic bag he has to drag behind him.
“Community soap.” The bitch had said, smirking at him from the back of his van. He knew his little money making venture was over as her eyes cut through him, angry at him for stealing the beloved pets of the rich and not-so-famous in Neptune. It wasn’t like they couldn’t afford the rewards he’d lined his pockets with.
Luckily his dad had enough money in savings to hire an adequate lawyer. Some guy named Cliff who had a good track record when it came to getting the dancers at the Veil off with misdemeanors when the police decided to stop looking the other way and crack down on the more nefarious goings on in Neptune. He ended up with community service, not community soap, and a stern lecture from the judge.
On Friday afternoons Hans rips off the scratchy jumpsuit and shoves it into his worn gray backpack. He catches the 174 over to the seedier side of town and walks determinedly toward the Veil. He knows the girl who works the door, the daughter of the owner. He met her at one of the non-09er parties on some random weekend. She told him her name was Lolita and he almost spit into his drink. They’d made out in the back yard for about an hour and he’d called her a couple times since for a quick fuck in the back of his van. She greets him with a smile and a wink, he calls her ‘Lola’ and kisses her cheek, then she waves him through to the dark inner sanctum.
The music is pounding as Hans sits down at a rickety table toward the front of the stage. A woman steps from behind the curtain, her eyes lined with thick, black kohl, eyebrows carefully penciled, thick blue eye shadow caked across her lids. She smiles at the audience, her glossy red lips leaving a streak of lipstick on he slightly crooked teeth. Her eyes sweep the room and each man feels she’s looking at him as she starts to move, her chest shining with sweat, heaving up and down. She struts across the stage, each step confident and sure in six-inch platform shoes that deserve the moniker ‘hooker heels’. Hans swallows and takes another sip of the ginger ale Lola had set on his table moments before the lights went down and the show started.
Three is for Cliff McCormack
He fishes in his pocket and pulls out a crumpled handkerchief, swabs his forehead and shoves it back where it came from.
“I thought this was the year you got air conditioning.”
Cliff looked across his desk at the woman sitting in the chair, pencil in hand, notebook balanced across one bare leg, blond hair piled high enough to make Angie Dickinson proud. She’s smacking pink gum between glossy lips and looking at him half annoyed and half amused.
Air conditioning is for the big boy in their high-rise offices with floor to ceiling windows and three martini lunches. It’s for people who can take an afternoon off for golf and have an entire army of lackeys to do their bidding. Cliff only has Candy and half the time she tells him to go fuck himself.
“Next year, sweetheart,” Cliff mumbles, fishing in his pocket for his handkerchief again.
“Yeah, right,” Candy smacks. “And by the way, that ‘sweetheart’ is going to cost you when I file my sexual harassment suite.”
Cliff raises his eyebrows and looks at Candy who is grinning as she tucks her pencil behind her ear.
“It’s not like you offer a 401K,” she says smartly. “A girl has to have a retirement plan and I haven’t found that long-lost relative who will bequeath me their estate yet.”
“Bequeath?” Cliff says, wondering how a girl who grew up in project housing in the Bay before she moved south to the beach and found a prime position as personal assistant to one of the best lawyers a prostitute could hire in Neptune, could use a word like ‘bequeath’. She continued to grin and smack her gum.
“It’s not like I don’t look at your stupid cases, dumbshit. No need to look to surprised that a girl like me can use such highfalutin words.”
Cliff smiled and made a mental note to ask Candy out for a drink someday, then quickly erased it from his mind. He shoved his increasingly damp handkerchief back into his pocket.
“Next year,” He says “We get air-conditioning. We’ll live like the big boys. No more of this summer heat.”
“You’re the boss.” Candy said as she stood up and turned to leave the tiny office. “Whatever you say, Cliff.”
Four is for Lamb
He’s never told anyone but he really hates his uniform. It itches and doesn’t fit him very well. When he puts it on, he feels like a kid playing dress up. He hates putting it on every morning, buttoning the stiff buttons, feeling the fabric against his fingertips.
He scrapes the mist of the bathroom mirror and looks at his reflection. He looks older, tired. He wipes his forehead, which is already sweaty even in the cool morning air. At least the office has air conditioning, except it’s the last place Sheriff Don Lamb wants to be.
Ever since they brought Echolls into the jail everyone has looked at him like the dumb shit he’s always felt inside. They never say anything but behind his back they whisper about how he was tricked by Jake Kane and all his money, how a high school student saw what he never could see. They talk over lunch about how he was so eager to say his office had caught Lilly Kane’s killer that he never saw the obvious.
He’s started taking a drink in the morning; just a small one, just enough to get him ready to face another day. It’s the only way he can face the cameras and questions as he forces his way through the throngs of reporters who have camped out in front of the sheriff’s office. It’s just to get him through, he tells himself. He can stop when things calm down.
He’s in control.
Five is for Dylan Goran
For a long time he didn’t have any feeling in his left arm. Fucking psycho movie star and his fucking psycho daughter. He was tempted to go to the emergency room and tell them exactly who had fucked him up, watch their eyes grow side and hear them gasp that everybody’s favorite matinee idol had a nasty violent streak.
Aaron Echolls had beat him to the punch and showed the world himself. The headlines screamed that America’s action hero was actually a cold blooded killer. Dylan had sipped his vodka and tonic and told all the guys at the bar that he knew it all along. Told them that Aaron had almost kicked his ass and if it hadn’t been for his black belt training, he probably would have been hurt. Instead he left the actor with a nice black eye. Actually, if you looked hard at the pictures in the paper you can see the remnants.
Dylan liked it when he lied. He liked how the people around him gave him sympathy and patted his back, told him he was lucky he didn’t end up like Lilly Kane. He was the star of the show, the one who got away from the crazy man. He wondered if any of the tabloids would be interested in his story.
He never called Trina after that night. After all, it was pretty clear Aaron wasn’t going to be taking a part in his movie and just because he’d smacked up that bitch a little. Fucking hypocrite. Trina was useless to him now. He took some of the money he’d saved for the movie and drove to the strip and bought the best junk he could find. Then he went back to his room, his mouth watering as he tightened the tourniquet, eyes falling shut as it hit his veins and took all the pain away.
There would be another Hollywood kid; another daughter struggling to get her father’s love and approval. Another girl who watched her old man beat her mother enough times that she knew all the tricks for covering up bruises. IN this town they were a dime a dozen, scarred and fragile, waiting for an aspiring producer like Dylan Goran to sweep them off their feet, make them feel special, then suggest that daddy might be interested in investing in his latest project, a sure fire hit.
Dylan closed his eyes and fell back onto the thin bedspread. He looked up at the water stained ceiling of the $35.00 per night hotel room and decided he’d start looking for his next meal ticket tomorrow. Tomorrow he'll wake up and not shoot crap into his veins, grab his script and start looking for his next true believer.
Six is for Madison Sinclair
The sun beats down on Madison’s already tan thighs and she sighs heavily into the sticky afternoon air.
“Did you see this article about Veronica Mars?” Dick’s voice drifts across the pool from where’s he’s stretched out on a towel he spread over the cement.
“Fuck Veronica Mars.” Madison mutters under her breath.
The world is busy making a martyr of Veronica Mars. There is article after article about how she broke the Lilly Kane case, how a teenager did what no one else in Neptune could do. How she found the truth. Everyone is proud of Veronica. It makes Madison hate her with every fiber in her body.
She’d been annoying when she was dating Duncan Kane. Little miss goody-two-shoes, sweet as sugar and always nice. Madison had been happy to see her fall, to find out she really was the slut of the century and Madison never lost an opportunity to remind Veronica that without Duncan Kane she was below even the bottom feeders at Neptune High.
Now the bitch was the celebrity of the moment. Madison had even heard they were thinking about making a television show about the girl detective. She was sure if that happened it would totally bomb.
Madison rolls over and yells at Dick to come and spread lotion over her back. She thinks about how she was a half pound lighter that morning and how days of only diet soda were paying off. She thought about the big party that weekend and what she would wear. She thought about anything but Veronica Mars.
Seven is for Meg Manning
She hates Duncan Kane.
She thought she loved him, thought he was the boy who would be her high school sweetheart, and then they’d get married and have beautiful children and she’d be insanely happy. Forever.
It all shattered along with the window on Duncan’s car.
He loves her - the other girl. Meg wouldn’t even allow herself to think her name, let alone say it into the silence of her room.
The summer was hot, heat shimmering up from the pavement. She’d been looking forward to the beach or hanging out by the Kane pool. Instead she was sitting in her room, staring at the wall.
She thinks of all the ways she would hurt him.
Destroy his reputation.
Scream at him.
Cut him until he bleeds, until she can see him hurt as much as she hurts.
Duncan Kane has changed her. Before she was happy. She loved everyone. She saw no wrong. Now everything is in darkness. Everything hurts. She’s sorry she ever allowed herself to be caught in his trap, to succumb to his charms.
Meg gets up and walks to the pink and white vanity her parents gave her when she was nine years old. She sits on the velvet-covered bench and opens a drawer. She pulls out a pair of scissors with bright orange handles. Then she cuts, feeling the way the scissors open and close, listening to the rasps of the blades sliding against each other. She watches as her hair falls to the ground, long, golden, lying on the while pile carpet, scattered across the room.
When she’s done she looks in the mirror. Gone is the long hair. In it’s place is shorn, ragged hair, uneven, angry.
For the first time Meg feels a little better.
Author: Sophia_bee
Pairing/Character: Loretta Cancun, Hans, Cliff McCormack, Don Lamb, Dylan Goran, Madison Sinclair, Meg Manning
Word Count: 2774
Rating: R
Summary: Seven veils, seven characters and one Neptune summer
Spoilers/Warnings: Season 1, adult language, adult themes
Author’s Note:X-posted at my journal and veronicamarsfic. Special thanks to Ladydisdain225 for helping me remember Loretta Cancun's name. Yay!
One is for Loretta Cancun
The pole is cold today and she ignores how it rubs on her skin and sends goose bumps up her arms. Instead she smiles and flips her hair back, twitches her hips and licks her lips.
She can’t see them but she knows they’re there. Sitting in the darkened room, breathing in the stale, cigarette scented air. The air-conditioning is a welcome respite from the beating summer heat that has descended on Neptune. The hottest summer in ages the weatherman had crackled across her television the night before while she sipped at a glass of ice water and considered washing off the grime from the evening.
Rosie had sprayed her she pushed open the curtains and prepared to strut onto the stage. She was waiting just before the thick red velvet, spray bottle in her hand.
“They like to see you wet.” She cackled as Loretta winced and the sticky gelatin spray misted across her chest and arms. It stuck to her skin and gave her cleavage all the qualities of a Playboy soft porn video that always involved vacuous women and water falls. It was porn for preteens who were just figuring out where their dicks were and that girls might actually be good for something.
The music thumped and Loretta brushed up against the thick shag carpet that covered the wall behind the stage. She put one hand behind her head and ran the other down her breasts, over her stomach and toward the spandex clad crotch that the sweating, heavy breathing business men on lunch break would only see in their fantasies. There were laws. Five feet away. No beaver shots. No pasties. No touching. No lap dances unless it’s in the back room. After all, Neptune was a decent, family town. If the mayor hadn’t been a regular customer the Veil would have been shut down a long time ago, a victim of moral outrage.
She moves to the front of the stage, braces her legs should-length part and starts to grind her way down to the floor. She twists her hips in time to the thumping music. This is the only time the bright stage lights aren’t angled in a way to keep her from seeing the faces as they stare at her, wanting her. She looks out at the crowd, seeing the same suits, same conservative haircuts, same thick jowls. They shift in their chairs and sigh with her every move. Her gaze cuts across the room until it lands on the table closest to the stage. He sits there, licking his lips nervously, eyes greedily watching her every move. Loretta wonders if he’s even 18. It’s not like Rosie bothers to check IDs that well and the Veil was known for letting some of the worst fake IDs in through her front doors.
He’s young enough that he could be her son, her Johnny, who was finishing up his last year at Westpoint and would be shipping out to Iraq shortly. Johnny, who was the light of her life even though he came from being raped by her best friend’s older brother at fourteen. Johnny, who she loved more than anything, even though he was the reason her mother called her a whore and threw her out of the only home she’d ever known.
Loretta made a mental note to tell him for the hundredth time that she would kill him if she found out he ever went to a joint like the Veil. She wasn’t going to have her son become one of the faceless men who paid to see her slide down a pole and strip down to cheap polyester panties and a skimpy bra. He was a good boy.
Two is for Hans
He hates the sun. It might have been different. He might have been at the beach with the guys, cash in his pocket, a girl on his arm. If it had been that way, he would have liked the sun. Instead it beats down on his head, burning into his scalp. A bead of sweat runs down the side of his face and absorbs into the collar of his scratchy, polyester orange jumpsuit. Hans scratches at his stomach then leans over and grabs another discarded In-n-out Burger wrapper and shoves it into the large black plastic bag he has to drag behind him.
“Community soap.” The bitch had said, smirking at him from the back of his van. He knew his little money making venture was over as her eyes cut through him, angry at him for stealing the beloved pets of the rich and not-so-famous in Neptune. It wasn’t like they couldn’t afford the rewards he’d lined his pockets with.
Luckily his dad had enough money in savings to hire an adequate lawyer. Some guy named Cliff who had a good track record when it came to getting the dancers at the Veil off with misdemeanors when the police decided to stop looking the other way and crack down on the more nefarious goings on in Neptune. He ended up with community service, not community soap, and a stern lecture from the judge.
On Friday afternoons Hans rips off the scratchy jumpsuit and shoves it into his worn gray backpack. He catches the 174 over to the seedier side of town and walks determinedly toward the Veil. He knows the girl who works the door, the daughter of the owner. He met her at one of the non-09er parties on some random weekend. She told him her name was Lolita and he almost spit into his drink. They’d made out in the back yard for about an hour and he’d called her a couple times since for a quick fuck in the back of his van. She greets him with a smile and a wink, he calls her ‘Lola’ and kisses her cheek, then she waves him through to the dark inner sanctum.
The music is pounding as Hans sits down at a rickety table toward the front of the stage. A woman steps from behind the curtain, her eyes lined with thick, black kohl, eyebrows carefully penciled, thick blue eye shadow caked across her lids. She smiles at the audience, her glossy red lips leaving a streak of lipstick on he slightly crooked teeth. Her eyes sweep the room and each man feels she’s looking at him as she starts to move, her chest shining with sweat, heaving up and down. She struts across the stage, each step confident and sure in six-inch platform shoes that deserve the moniker ‘hooker heels’. Hans swallows and takes another sip of the ginger ale Lola had set on his table moments before the lights went down and the show started.
Three is for Cliff McCormack
He fishes in his pocket and pulls out a crumpled handkerchief, swabs his forehead and shoves it back where it came from.
“I thought this was the year you got air conditioning.”
Cliff looked across his desk at the woman sitting in the chair, pencil in hand, notebook balanced across one bare leg, blond hair piled high enough to make Angie Dickinson proud. She’s smacking pink gum between glossy lips and looking at him half annoyed and half amused.
Air conditioning is for the big boy in their high-rise offices with floor to ceiling windows and three martini lunches. It’s for people who can take an afternoon off for golf and have an entire army of lackeys to do their bidding. Cliff only has Candy and half the time she tells him to go fuck himself.
“Next year, sweetheart,” Cliff mumbles, fishing in his pocket for his handkerchief again.
“Yeah, right,” Candy smacks. “And by the way, that ‘sweetheart’ is going to cost you when I file my sexual harassment suite.”
Cliff raises his eyebrows and looks at Candy who is grinning as she tucks her pencil behind her ear.
“It’s not like you offer a 401K,” she says smartly. “A girl has to have a retirement plan and I haven’t found that long-lost relative who will bequeath me their estate yet.”
“Bequeath?” Cliff says, wondering how a girl who grew up in project housing in the Bay before she moved south to the beach and found a prime position as personal assistant to one of the best lawyers a prostitute could hire in Neptune, could use a word like ‘bequeath’. She continued to grin and smack her gum.
“It’s not like I don’t look at your stupid cases, dumbshit. No need to look to surprised that a girl like me can use such highfalutin words.”
Cliff smiled and made a mental note to ask Candy out for a drink someday, then quickly erased it from his mind. He shoved his increasingly damp handkerchief back into his pocket.
“Next year,” He says “We get air-conditioning. We’ll live like the big boys. No more of this summer heat.”
“You’re the boss.” Candy said as she stood up and turned to leave the tiny office. “Whatever you say, Cliff.”
Four is for Lamb
He’s never told anyone but he really hates his uniform. It itches and doesn’t fit him very well. When he puts it on, he feels like a kid playing dress up. He hates putting it on every morning, buttoning the stiff buttons, feeling the fabric against his fingertips.
He scrapes the mist of the bathroom mirror and looks at his reflection. He looks older, tired. He wipes his forehead, which is already sweaty even in the cool morning air. At least the office has air conditioning, except it’s the last place Sheriff Don Lamb wants to be.
Ever since they brought Echolls into the jail everyone has looked at him like the dumb shit he’s always felt inside. They never say anything but behind his back they whisper about how he was tricked by Jake Kane and all his money, how a high school student saw what he never could see. They talk over lunch about how he was so eager to say his office had caught Lilly Kane’s killer that he never saw the obvious.
He’s started taking a drink in the morning; just a small one, just enough to get him ready to face another day. It’s the only way he can face the cameras and questions as he forces his way through the throngs of reporters who have camped out in front of the sheriff’s office. It’s just to get him through, he tells himself. He can stop when things calm down.
He’s in control.
Five is for Dylan Goran
For a long time he didn’t have any feeling in his left arm. Fucking psycho movie star and his fucking psycho daughter. He was tempted to go to the emergency room and tell them exactly who had fucked him up, watch their eyes grow side and hear them gasp that everybody’s favorite matinee idol had a nasty violent streak.
Aaron Echolls had beat him to the punch and showed the world himself. The headlines screamed that America’s action hero was actually a cold blooded killer. Dylan had sipped his vodka and tonic and told all the guys at the bar that he knew it all along. Told them that Aaron had almost kicked his ass and if it hadn’t been for his black belt training, he probably would have been hurt. Instead he left the actor with a nice black eye. Actually, if you looked hard at the pictures in the paper you can see the remnants.
Dylan liked it when he lied. He liked how the people around him gave him sympathy and patted his back, told him he was lucky he didn’t end up like Lilly Kane. He was the star of the show, the one who got away from the crazy man. He wondered if any of the tabloids would be interested in his story.
He never called Trina after that night. After all, it was pretty clear Aaron wasn’t going to be taking a part in his movie and just because he’d smacked up that bitch a little. Fucking hypocrite. Trina was useless to him now. He took some of the money he’d saved for the movie and drove to the strip and bought the best junk he could find. Then he went back to his room, his mouth watering as he tightened the tourniquet, eyes falling shut as it hit his veins and took all the pain away.
There would be another Hollywood kid; another daughter struggling to get her father’s love and approval. Another girl who watched her old man beat her mother enough times that she knew all the tricks for covering up bruises. IN this town they were a dime a dozen, scarred and fragile, waiting for an aspiring producer like Dylan Goran to sweep them off their feet, make them feel special, then suggest that daddy might be interested in investing in his latest project, a sure fire hit.
Dylan closed his eyes and fell back onto the thin bedspread. He looked up at the water stained ceiling of the $35.00 per night hotel room and decided he’d start looking for his next meal ticket tomorrow. Tomorrow he'll wake up and not shoot crap into his veins, grab his script and start looking for his next true believer.
Six is for Madison Sinclair
The sun beats down on Madison’s already tan thighs and she sighs heavily into the sticky afternoon air.
“Did you see this article about Veronica Mars?” Dick’s voice drifts across the pool from where’s he’s stretched out on a towel he spread over the cement.
“Fuck Veronica Mars.” Madison mutters under her breath.
The world is busy making a martyr of Veronica Mars. There is article after article about how she broke the Lilly Kane case, how a teenager did what no one else in Neptune could do. How she found the truth. Everyone is proud of Veronica. It makes Madison hate her with every fiber in her body.
She’d been annoying when she was dating Duncan Kane. Little miss goody-two-shoes, sweet as sugar and always nice. Madison had been happy to see her fall, to find out she really was the slut of the century and Madison never lost an opportunity to remind Veronica that without Duncan Kane she was below even the bottom feeders at Neptune High.
Now the bitch was the celebrity of the moment. Madison had even heard they were thinking about making a television show about the girl detective. She was sure if that happened it would totally bomb.
Madison rolls over and yells at Dick to come and spread lotion over her back. She thinks about how she was a half pound lighter that morning and how days of only diet soda were paying off. She thought about the big party that weekend and what she would wear. She thought about anything but Veronica Mars.
Seven is for Meg Manning
She hates Duncan Kane.
She thought she loved him, thought he was the boy who would be her high school sweetheart, and then they’d get married and have beautiful children and she’d be insanely happy. Forever.
It all shattered along with the window on Duncan’s car.
He loves her - the other girl. Meg wouldn’t even allow herself to think her name, let alone say it into the silence of her room.
The summer was hot, heat shimmering up from the pavement. She’d been looking forward to the beach or hanging out by the Kane pool. Instead she was sitting in her room, staring at the wall.
She thinks of all the ways she would hurt him.
Destroy his reputation.
Scream at him.
Cut him until he bleeds, until she can see him hurt as much as she hurts.
Duncan Kane has changed her. Before she was happy. She loved everyone. She saw no wrong. Now everything is in darkness. Everything hurts. She’s sorry she ever allowed herself to be caught in his trap, to succumb to his charms.
Meg gets up and walks to the pink and white vanity her parents gave her when she was nine years old. She sits on the velvet-covered bench and opens a drawer. She pulls out a pair of scissors with bright orange handles. Then she cuts, feeling the way the scissors open and close, listening to the rasps of the blades sliding against each other. She watches as her hair falls to the ground, long, golden, lying on the while pile carpet, scattered across the room.
When she’s done she looks in the mirror. Gone is the long hair. In it’s place is shorn, ragged hair, uneven, angry.
For the first time Meg feels a little better.