She Said Destroy by Nadia Bulkin

Author:Nadia Bulkin [Bulkin, Nadia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Word Horde
Published: 2017-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

***

Yurie didn’t give up. Really, I should have known she wouldn’t; she’d been friends with me for six years. A normal person would have dumped my ass on the curb after my first crying spell, but Yurie was a sucker for lost souls. I used to say she had a Good Nurse complex, but Yurie insisted the love came first, and the care-taking after. And I won’t lie: after my father died, I clung to Yurie.

And now she clung to me. We stared at ourselves in my bathroom mirror. We walked together to school. We sat together in homeroom, Yurie behind me with her bloody arms childishly locked around my waist, hissing “help me help me.” Back before Asami destroyed Yurie’s bicycle, we used to ride around the suburbs like that, except she’d be pedaling in front, veering to scare me, and I’d be sitting rigid and tense in the back, shrieking at her to be careful. I felt suffocated. I could almost taste her blood in the back of my throat. On some subterranean level I was terrified of her—terrified that she was drowned in blood because she’d been out killing strangers, because she couldn’t touch Asami.

At lunchtime I wound up on the roof, gulping what passed for fresh air and trying not to vomit.

“Did you come to kill yourself like Yurie?” I whipped my neck back. Asami was sitting under one of the roaring air vents, smoking a clandestine cigarette. She blew a little nicotine cloud toward me. “Well? I know you were her other half.”

It sounds absurd given the tears we’d shed over this bitch, but I was relieved to hear someone admit that Yurie’s death was no accident—unless her whole life was an accident, and if so then why not mine, why not Asami’s or my father’s or the Prime Minister’s? Asami shifted and something around her neck caught the light—a tiny sun beneath her chin. She budged again and I saw what it was: a glassy choker, nearly invisible beyond the glare, tight as a lattice tattoo across her throat. She saw me staring and slapped her hand over it. I could almost see something human breathing beneath her bone-fine face. “What are you looking at, freak?”

Asami shed friends so fast, I bet she’d never had a blood-sister—someone her heart had twinned to, for better or for worse. Maybe she envied me and Yurie. “Why did you hate Yurie so much?”

“She was the one that hated us,” said Asami, voice dripping steel. “She rejected us. You know how she was. Always had to be different. Always a loudmouth. How do you think that made us feel?”

I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. “She’s dead because of you.”

Asami lifted the pink-banded Pianissimo to her lips and shrugged. “So she was weak, like all the rest.” I wondered if anyone else had ever turned into a mess on a sidewalk because of Asami. “The strong survive, that’s the rule.”

And that’s when I knew I had to do it—because Asami was wrong about that.

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