Fairytale of New York

[xylophonefairy†]

((Acacia Salinger continued from Instinct))

Acacia hugged her knees to her chest and stared out at the sea. The sky was overcast, the water grey and dangerous looking, and there was sand filling her trainers. Her bag was zipped shut a metre or so away, anyone could grab it and she would be too lost in her thoughts to notice them take it. But nobody did. A couple of tears filled in her eyes and she blinked them furiously away. Don't cry. Don't let them see you crying. Playing with the laces on her shoes, she tied them together, knotted them elaborately and then undid them with more ease than she'd thought she'd be able to. She drew pictures in the damp sand, and then hastily rubbed them out with her palm before anyone saw them.

There was a storm in the distance over the sea, and she watched it curiously, wondering if it would come their way. She couldn't decide if that would be a good thing or not. The rain would lash over the sand and the trees, and the grass and all the buildings that were boarded up and the friends that she would probably never see again. It would dull every sound in the vicinity and make everything sweeter and quieter and nobody would ask her if she was okay because they were all so worried about their begonia plants and whether their cat would be okay in all the rain because "Little Mittens just hates the rain".

A car horn beeped.

Acacia spun around. On the road, just back from the beach, her Dad was walking towards her, David was leaning over the back seats to press the car horn again, twice more, three times, and their Mom rested her head against the window with a similar expression to Acacia's. She watched her Dad walk towards her, and crouch down next to her in the rain, pulling her against him and wrapping his strong arms around her.

"Come on, honey. We've got to go," he went to leave but Acacia remained unmoving.
"I don't want to," she said helplessly, indicating the beach and the sea and far off in the distance, the shadowy towers of Manhattan. She liked it here. They were in the suburbs, the glorious suburbs, and yet the city of New York was almost within touching distance. Their town wasn't far off being within the city borders, only about twenty miles. The realtors that had sold Aunt Julia's house had marketed it so.
"We have to," her Dad said softly, looking at the towers too, though to him they brought more memories of criminals and gangs and drugs. Things that he hadn't really had to deal with as a small town cop in Indiana. This was to be their second major move, to a sort of average between Indiana and New York. They were moving to... Minnesota?
"Julia's here," Acacia replied petulantly. There was a pause that seemed to take a lifetime.
"Julia's dead-"
"I know." She buried her face in the crook of her father's elbow and he picked her to her feet and half carried his thirteen year old daughter to the car, her feet dragging in the sand.

That was what had happened the last time she had been to the beach.

Acacia hugged her knees to her chest and stared out at the sea. The sky was overcast, the water grey and dangerous looking, and there was sand filling her trainers. Her bag was zipped shut a metre or so away, anyone could grab it and she would be too lost in her thoughts to notice them take it. But nobody did. A couple of tears filled in her eyes and she blinked them furiously away. Don't cry. Don't let them see you crying. Playing with the laces on her shoes, she tied them together, knotted them elaborately and then undid them with more ease than she'd thought she'd be able to. She drew pictures in the damp sand, and then hastily rubbed them out with her palm before anyone saw them.

She sighed, thinking about how things might have been.
"If you hadn't been so goddamn proud and actually gone for any of your checkups you'd still be alive today." Acacia murmured to nobody in particular. "Also, David would have never gone into the Army and so he'd still be alive too, well, he probably still is, but I don't know. Anyway, also I couldn't have gotten pitched off to Bayview Fucking Secondary School to prance around in a cheerleading costume and subsequently get kidnapped and forced to kill my friends." A memory of Roman's last expression suddenly made her shudder with an uncomfortable mixture of fear and guilt.

Feeling woozy, by automatic motion she reached for her diabetic kit and tested her sugar levels. She couldn't remember the last time she'd injected herself with insulin, probably dinnertime yesterday or something. Even though she'd run many miles since then, she hadn't eaten anything, and the last thing she wanted to do was to put all her glucose back into storage. So weirdly it was almost like not being diabetic for a couple of hours. Still, her sugar was a little on the low side, and Acacia rifled through her bag for some of her backup supplies. Finding a small bag of haribo, she ate them all in two handfuls, then returned to her previous position.

She threw a pebble into the sea.
"It's all your fault."

Having someone to blame helped less than she had hoped it might. It was easiest to blame a dead person, they couldn't argue back, they lost by default. It would be just as easy to blame anyone who wasn't there, who was pretty much everyone in the world. Anyone who had helped them on their way to St Paul was a criminal now in her eyes. The realtor that told them to buy near Bayview rather than in Minneapolis. The guy from the NYPD that told her Dad about the job in Minnesota when they decided to leave. Everyone in Indiana that failed to entice them back there. Her parents for giving birth to her exactly when they did. Her parents for allowing her to go on the trip, even though there was never really any reason why they should. David for not putting up a better fight when he said he wanted to move somewhere warmer, rather than somewhere even colder again.

The sun was making it's first efforts at rising. She'd left their camp four hours ago, and run south, not stopping for anything. She'd gone arounf the mountain and crossed the river by the miraculously deserted bridge and from there taken a sharp right to follow the stream to it's mouth and then followed the coast until the beach became sufficiently beachy to be a stand in for the beach back in Long Island.

They'd been back multiple times since, only she'd made a point of not going to the beach while they were there. It would only take her back to the day they'd left, and the pure guilt they had all felt at leaving Julia's grave with nobody to mourn beside it. But such things were in the past now, and anyway, this was all Julia's fault. Acacia tied her laces back correctly again, and drew a sad face in the sand. She added eyebrows that came to a downward cleft above the nose and the sad fac became an evil face. It pretty much summed up how she was feeling and how she must be being perceived. She felt like she should say something to the twins' Mom, surely she was watching? Were they burning pictures of her face right now? That thought made her squirm, she'd never really been hated by anyone. Not that she knew of anyhow.

Acacia checked her watch. There were two hours left until the announcement, when the whole island would find out what she'd done. She hoped Danya would specify that she had been helping her friend, that she was allowing him to die with dignity, perhaps then people would be more forgiving? She could only hope.

There were people somewhere nearby. She knew that a little behind her, up on the slope there was the Groundskeepers Hut, a likely place for people to gather if there ever was one. She didn't want to be near people when the announcements were read out, what if she inadvertently ran across one of Roman's mates? Or worse, one of Alex', her boyfriend perhaps? They'd last seen him in this area, perhaps he was still skulking around. Acacia shook her head.

She didn't want to stay on the beach either. She hated fucking beaches.

((Acacia Salinger continued in Anthem for Doomed Youth))