The Broken Social Scene Story Project by Carl Wilson

Author:Carl Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2013-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

“This is beautiful,” Amber said, the necklace slithering between her fingers. She straightened it in a line and watched the pendant zip to the middle. It was the palest pinks of a watermelon frozen in a drop, and her eyes had never looked as green as they did on either side of it. But then she did something you wouldn’t believe: she placed my mother’s favourite, costliest necklace in her mouth and swallowed it whole.

“Like a sugar cube,” she said, and she laughed.

I had a three-row string of pearls around her neck before I knew what was what. A garbled what the fuck smothered against my palm, her mushroom cloud of curls writhing in my face, smelling of faux womanhood, of sandalwood, patchouli, vanilla.

“Throw it up! Throw it up now!” I jerked her neck back. I caught her pupils in the mirror, leaking out of shape like Rorschach ink blots. Her shirt slipped, I could see the bony lacework of her chest. I pulled the cowboy knife from my pocket and let it soar below the sternum, somewhere soft. I thought only of my mother’s necklace, did what any daughter would do. So I kept digging, stuck my hand right in the hole.

Amber’s slippers folded over and I couldn’t support her weight. I lowered her to the carpet, didn’t think about the blood. It was a warm pattern against my arms, an old sweater, nothing at all. But there were other fluids that truly sickened. White-spotted exposed muscle like canker sores, and I couldn’t find the necklace anywhere.

I called Zack, a college sophomore who loved me, who biked over in sweats I could tell he had been sleeping in. I wasn’t particularly pleased about it. I had just gotten him off my back. Amber’s body lay there ruining the carpet and he lost his lunch the moment he saw her. He shook me, shouting, “Are you hurt? Are you all right?” He spread blood from my hands all over his own. It made him flash below the ceiling light, swift and red like a candle flame.

“What happened?”

I rubbed my eyes. I couldn’t tell what I was seeing. Amber foamed with pearls, a pancreas of costume brass, purple gems like blood bubbles. Zack squished my face, pressed the air between our noses. “What’s wrong with you? What did you take?” He squeezed my cheeks and my shoulders so hard I felt like clay. Reshaped and deformed with one eye up my forehead and my mouth smudged out. “What did you girls take?”

“She took acid,” I blurted. “Or something, I think.”

“Where the fuck would she get acid?”

“Look around. Where do you think?”

“That’s fucked up, Naomi.” Sweat matted itself to his armpits, made his skin sop. “Fuck, that’s so fucked up.”

“Get it together, I need your help.”

He backed away from me a little. “No way she did all of that to herself.”

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