I Wish

Chapter 44

I wasn’t sure why she believed that he was scared of me, but she did believe it, and I believed her. Probably because it was enough for me to want to throw a party. I hated that asshole, and his stalker bullshit didn’t help. This, this helped. I knew that I had a lot of pieces that weren’t adding up. Last time I thought that if I could just get home, then my head would sort it all out. If I could get home, I could think and everything would sort itself out. I held no such delusions, which tempered the desperation behind the urge to go home. Still, I figured that when I got there the space to  get my head together wouldn’t hurt…. Ha-ha-ha-haaaa, wrong. A great big bowl of painfully, and inarguably, wrong but we’re getting ahead ourselves now. That cluster f**k was a little bit further down the road.

“Are you going to be weird now?” Ivy asked, following me around the castle. I looked up from where I’d just been casually wandering around, thinking about all of this stuff and not getting particularly far with it. 

“What do you mean weird?” I shot back, wincing as I did so. I wasn’t sure if I was trying to start an argument or if I was trying to get her to start one for me, but I knew whatever way it ended it was not going to go well. She shot me, what was for Ivy, a particularly filthy look. Eyes scrunching up, delicate brows furrowing, and eyes that glare daggers at me.

“We were somewhat happy,” she said and I felt the need to interrupt.

“Except for Kaede,” I muttered muslishly.

“Except for that asshole,” she agreed, “And then you backtrack. So what are we doing? Is it a bones day, or no bones?” I could picture the colours of the fireworks in my head, the ones shedding my brain and making it metaphorically melt out of my ear. She doesn’t have tik tok. It dosn’t even exist here, so WHAT THE f**k! How does she keep referencing content? Do fae move to the human world, and then like… come visit for the holiday’s to spread random pop-culture? It didn’t matter, it pissed me off. Disturbingly, despite all my protests, I wanted to be her only human. I didn’t even want her to have friends, or family that lived there. Didn’t that just make me a whole new level of toxic. Great, now I am angry and disgusted with myself. Doesn’t that just take the cake. “Hello?” she said waving a hand in front of me, “We’re having a conversation here.” If Ivy wouldn’t go so ballistic, and past experience says she had no tolerance for what she considered my bullshit, I would apologise and tell her I was ruminating on what a shitty human being I was. Again. She really did bring it out in me.

“Do you even know what makes a bones day, or no bones day? An elderly dog is helped to stand, and if their legs give out from under them then it is considered a no bones day. If they stand it’s a bones day, and it’s supposed to be a good day,” I told her, ignoring her last comments altogether. Her face twists into a kind of fascination and confusion.

“And humans think this is normal? Is it the same dog? If not, what do you do if everyone has different results? Is it unique to the individual, and if it’s one dog for everyone then I don’t see how that would work. For a start, how do you even collectively spread this information in a day? There’s no way that it could be reliably informed before it was over, so how would people know if there day was a bones day or not?” she said, and her tone rose in pitch as she tried to articulate just how much she didn’t get it. 

“See, that's what bothers me. This is new information, but you could use the term in the correct context. How do you know how to do that?” I said suspiciously. It was eating at me, because I knew I’d had the same passing thought about other things she’d said before. Pushed away because it sounded ridiculous, and now I couldn’t remember what it was that she had said that had made me think it in the first place. All I could remember was the feeling. The one that stopped and said, ‘Hey, that doesn’t seem right.’ Of course now I feel like an i***t, unable to bring up anything else specifically to support my argument.

“It’s just something my best friend says sometimes, she doesn’t explain how these things work. I knew she was weird, I didn’t know she was that weird,” Ivy said and it wasn’t even defensively. It didn’t seem to matter. I wanted to throw something through the stained glass window next to us. Sending all of the little glass pieces falling to the ground below us. She said her, and there was not a word that indicated a blood relationship. If this so-called best friend showed up right now, I think I would probably cut her… and I was going to stop that thought right now, because I was imagining some faceless woman choking on her own blood. I could hear ringing in my ears, and I was starting to think that it was a no bones day.

“If I see this b***h I’ll kill her,” I said, deadly serious. Ivy squealed, bouncing on the balls of her feet and smiling. 

“You say the sweetest things,” she said and Ivy was so happy it was like a literal halo of light was raining down on her. It didn’t bother her at all, regardless of the fact that I was not joking. I was going to kill her best friend if I ever encountered her, and she thought it was great. Flattering even, what kind of… I could hear myself breathing, and the walls started to close in on me. The rhythmic rushing sound was not soothing, or helpful. My hands went up to my face, and dark spots started to dance across my vision.

“This is not healthy… this is… it’s not okay,” I panted and my voice grated with the effort to make it work, “Why do you think it’s sweet?” And there I go, just killing the happiness that she’d been basking in. There was a fresh spike of failure at the active distress spreading across her face.

“Go get the clothes you came in, I’m taking you home,” she said softly. That certainly stopped my panic. It was a bit like being shot, or rather a bit like what I imagined getting shot would feel like without it actually happening. I think it was a shock. Nothing had moved, I hadn’t spoken, but everything just felt like it was far away and I was moving through quicksand. “I think… that it might be past the point where this is helpful anymore, and that maybe you need to go home. Just for a little bit.”

“I thought you wanted me to stay,” I said in a small voice. The kind that made you imagine someone's eyes well up with tears, which were not under any circumstances, there.

“And one day when you come home that will be with me, and you’ll stay forever, but I think… I think it’s reaching the point where it’s hurting you, and I don’t want to do that,” she confessed, “Treasure, it’s time to go. I swallowed. I had imagined that I would have been happy. Running up the stairs to pack my stuff and go home to my family. This wasn’t like that, because that had been optimistic and foolish of me. My brain was so twisted up around her that she felt like being banished, and now that I was going I didn’t want to. 

“Maybe that’s a good idea,” I said, even though it didn’t feel like one, “Although, at this rate you would think it would kill me to be happy with what I’ve got, huh?” She chuckled humorlessly.

“This was not the thing I wanted us to agree on,” she replied sadly in return.