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She swallowed; the vise was back again. “No.”

“Well, here I was watching you—and it being so long and all, I decided I’d give you a kiss. So I bend down, and you know what you did?” Pause for reaction. None forthcoming, so: “Took my hand, and then you start—licking it, right? Like it was some old lollipop. Licking and licking.” Still nothing. “Isn’t that just the sweetest?”

“I’d never.”

A shrug. ‘’Cept you did.“

She finally spotted the cap, a red smudge wedged between divisions, halfway down the drain. Have to use the tweezers on that. “You’re lying,” she said, not looking up.

“Now, would I lie?”

Only every day of my life.

“I gotta go to bed. School.”

But he caught her in mid-stride, backing the door shut; licorice on his breath, rank with time. Pinning both her hands as he reached high over her head for the nearest bottle of moisturizer. “Dad, please don’t,” she whispered. “Not anymore. Please, it hurts.”

“But sweetie,” he said, almost genuinely shocked. “You know I only do this for you, right? All part’a growing up.”

Don’t break you in NOW, it just hurts that much worse later on . . .

And then they were down on the floor, the tiles cold on her face. Let me not care, let me not care. His hands. Grunting. Distant shapes in the mirror, blurred and distorted beyond recognition.

Plus God, somewhere, laughing his nonexistent ass off.

* * *

She dreamed, later—for the first time since she was seven or so, that she could recall. The year it all started going to hell or she started noticing how bad it already was, whichever came first.

In the dream, she was wearing her long black dress—the one with the stiff Afghani embroidery, red and yellow with little round bits of mirror sewn across the bodice and down the front. A witch’s dress. In real life it didn’t fit anymore; she slept with it tucked inside her pillow-case, rough against her cheek in the darkness.

While Hepzibah, a voice called. Hep-zi-bah.

She brushed red hair from her eyes—thigh-long, bloody with a power that crackled through her fingers. The voice seemed to be coming from outside, in the backyard, or further: Yes, from the Ravine. She knelt down from the trumpet-vine’s main knot, awaiting further instructions.

What do you want? The voice asked, finally.

Janice and Doug gone. And Wang. And Jenny Diamond. I don’t want to have to go to school. I want people to leave me alone, or die.

As quick as she said it, the words bred and splintered. A thousand thousand shades of grey, but one true meaning: I want them all to be as much afraid of me as I am of them.

And it came to her, sitting there in the cool, impossible dirt of her impossible garden—all her carefully-tended poisons abloom at last, ripe and lush for plucking—that there might still be a way to unpick the thread between her and the world around her, even now. To give up all hope of love. To give up pain. To be free, free, free at last.

She felt it all collect, hard and hot, in a lump just below her sternum—a smooth black egg, finally about to hatch.

And: This is the gift, came that same whisper again—from inside, or outside? Or . . . everywhere? At once?

THIS is what you were marked for. To live.

Confirmation, finally, that the fantasy which had sustained her so far might actually be meant to be . . . more. Not fantasy at all. Truth, or truth-to-be.

Foreshadowing.

To OUT-live, Hepzibah. Everyone.

Repeating the words, tasting every inch of them, and wondering at the welcome, impossible weight of them: Live. Out-live.

(Everyone.)