by Sonya Jesus
Toughness only comes with an upper hand.
In a huff, Vanessa grabs her jacket, which hangs over Ledger’s desk chair. “Yeah, I’m done hearing about your new bitch.”
“She’s dead, Vanessa! Have some fucking respect.” Her memory will not be tainted by anyone, especially not someone as vile as someone who calls herself the Ice Queen Fashionista.
“Dead?”
“Yeah, dead. Just like this,” I point between the two of us, “…is dead.”
“So, you’re dumping me for a ghost?” Her eyes widen, and she throws her head back. “That’s even worse.” She shoves her arms through the sleeves of the jacket. All the anger in the world rushing to her red cheeks as she processes. “You’d rather be alone, talking to a box full of memories and pining over a dead teen ghost than be with someone real.” She pops her jacket collar. “That’s all sorts of messed up, Kai.”
“Maybe it is, but Thorn isn’t why we aren’t working.”
“So, the ghost has a name?” Opening the door to my bedroom, she turns back to face me. “We were working just fine last night, and we were working just fine the day before that.” She looks at the jar of pennies in my hand. “Or were you pretending I was her?”
“Watch it,” I growl and set the jar down on my desk. “It wasn’t like that with Thorn and me. She had a hard life.” And I didn’t even know the half of it.
“So, you pitied her?”
“No.” But I should’ve known what her foster mom did to her.
Meryl used to lock her outside in the cold so she’d get sick and could stay home during family outings when Del Rio came home. I had suspected then, always telling myself one day I would tell him what was going on, but Del Rio scared the crap out of me. Now, it was too late to do anything about it.
“I knew her for fifteen months before Gaspar Del Rio was charged with murdering his wife and foster daughter… then threw himself into the churning whirlpool of Niagara Falls.” His suicide and Meryl’s gruesome death were all over the news, but not even in death did Thorn flower.
“Two sentences,” I say aloud and show her the newspaper article.
Vanessa takes it from me and reads along as I say the words I had memorized: “Fifteen-year-old foster daughter, Penelope R. Thornton, who had been staying with the couple for over a year, also lost her life in this homicide. After searching Horseshoe Falls early this morning, Canadian police announced they were still on the search for two of the three bodies along the Niagara River, one of them belonging to the teenager.”
Vanessa continues, “All three members of the Del Rio household were on the prosecution’s key witness list against European drug lord Betrán Baillon, a power player in the cartel known as La Expansión. Gaspar del Rio, the criminal known as Rio, was an American citizen who held one of five seats in the cartel’s Junta Directiva.” She hands the paper back to me and grabs her backpack. “So, you’re in love with the ghost of a drug lord princess?”
“She wasn’t part of their family. No one really knew—”
“Look, this is obviously because of the anniversary of her death.” Her tune changes slightly. Despite her still being annoyed and the pitch carrying an abrasive edge, she’s calmer than before. “Maybe this isn’t the right time to decide our future.”
I glance down at the date: October 20, five years ago. Was it about the anniversary?
“Let’s take a break for a couple days.” She opens the door and swings her bag onto her shoulder, knocking the jar of pennies to the floor. She looks down at them and doesn’t bother to pick them up. “Use the time to decide: it’s me in the flesh or the ghost. You choose.”
Vanessa slams the door to my room, leaving me alone with my thoughts and my box full of memories. I bend over to grab the penny jar, remembering its purpose.
The night of the block party, I snuck out to the rose garden. Thorn was there, poking at the fire with a long stick. This time, fully clothed.
“Penny for your thoughts,” I had asked, because that’s what my grandmother always used to say before she’d whip out a quarter—to be different. I didn’t have a quarter at that moment, so I plucked a penny from my pocket.
She turned to me with watery eyes locked on the coin, avoiding eye contact. “You wouldn’t have enough pennies for all my thoughts.”
After that, I made sure to have enough pennies to know everything. Every Wednesday night, I’d grab a handful of these and trade them for thoughts. I mostly got silly things, but once in a while, one of her thoughts would strike my heart and make me wish I hadn’t known in the first place.
The fractured elbow.
The bruises on her stomach.
The cigarette burns on the bottoms of her feet.
Had I known everything, maybe I could’ve saved her.
Rage boils inside me, and I throw the jar of pennies across the room, unintentionally hitting the long mirror and shattering the glass, but not the jar.
Shit. I head over and pick up the one shard of glass that fell off of it and throw it in the trash. Then, I empty the contents on the floor and sit down in front of the mirror, counting the coins one by one. Every so often, glancing at my reflection in the shattered mirror and recognizing the distorted image.
How could I not? I’d been shattered since the day she died.
Why is a question I often ask, and every time I count the pennies, I get the same answer: 1048.
One thousand forty-eight thoughts that I had saved up for.
One thousand forty-eight questions I should have asked.
Any one of those might have saved her.
3
Deformed Perfection
Thorn
“Bad days are scars, Thorn. They’re meant to mar perfection, but you keep smiling through them... Scarred but beautiful.”
Those last three words are tattooed on my outer thigh and pelvic bone, over the healed gashes on my skin, not because I loved the person who said them, but because Kai’s words got me through the hardest parts of my life—the ones without him in it.
And there were plenty of those.
But I always clung to the moments of my life where Kai and I existed within the same space, almost within the same heart. He lit my dark past with flames of a fire, and with a penny, healed the parts of me no one had ever wanted to know about. It was easy to be the awkward me around the cool him because he liked me. And though he was only in my life for a little over a year, I smiled more in those days than I smiled my whole life.
It’s been a while since I talked to someone other than the voice inside my head. Even that was silent after the accident. For a while, I didn’t even know who I was. The last thing I remember is Gaspar del Rio rushing Meryl and me into a car. Something had gone wrong at his job, and we were needed to go to Canada in a rush. He didn’t even give me time to say goodbye to Kai or pack.
Meryl was so scared she didn’t say anything, but I trusted Gaspar. Though he wasn’t there often, he put in the effort. He promised I could call Kai after we got to the new place.
I fell asleep in the car, and when I woke up, we were pulling into a park. I assumed by the time we spent driving that we were in Canada. Meryl was asleep in the front seat, and he turned around to me and whispered, “Penelope, I need you to go with them. I promise they will keep you safe.”
The door swung open, and two men dressed in black ushered me to an SUV. Someone about my height exchanged places with me. The men escorting me spoke a language I didn’t understand. On their shove order, I got in the front seat. While the driver peeled out of there, speeding down a hill, the guy in the back handed me a vest. Given all the water around us, I thought it was a life vest, but I realized it was a bulletproof vest, open on the sides and complicated to put on. It weighed on my chest, compressing my small breasts as I attempted to fasten it around my waist, but my fingers shook so hard, the material kept slipping.
Then we crashed.
Without a seat belt, the impact propelled me through the wind
shield head first, slicing my skin and breaking bones as I hit the asphalt. At first I slid, my cheeks burning as they rubbed against the hard surface, pieces of the road embedding themselves in the gashes caused by glass.
At one hundred and fifty miles per hour, physics is unforgiving. Every part of me touched a surface. Sheer force. Friction. Newton’s Laws. All of them exerted their truths on my poor body.
Small collisions with flexible me and unbending ground.
Consecutive impacts propelled me into a rotation, pain searing through every body part as the vest flew off me.
Left shoulder. Right elbow. Left hip. Right—everything.
While tumbling in blood and tears and coating the road with my skin, I caught a glimpse of the SUV crashing against a tree. My ears were clogged with blood and debris, but I heard the whoosh of the flames and the screams of the men meant to protect me.
I came to a full stop. Only then had my thoughts kicked in, but only for a split second. Adrenaline pumped my heart with so much force, it throbbed in my throat. It was stuck there with my voice.
With my cheek flattened against the ground, I saw two blurry bodies in the distance. If I had been one of those children, who were loved by an adult, I would have cried for help. But my body had taken enough abuse, and help only came with consequences.
I shut my eyes and prepared to die. The world had been spinning far too fast for me to remain vigilant, and my life waned with each second. I mouthed Kai’s name, putting it out into the universe and hoping somehow it would reach him. Not to ask him for help, but to convey that he was the only thing I was sad to leave behind.
Ten months later, I woke up in pain in a hospital room with no memory of why I was there.
Anterograde amnesia from the brain swelling, I had found out after. I had been in an induced coma for months. I could remember everything up to the accident but couldn’t keep short-term memories, so for a few weeks, I would wake up freaking out because I was in the hospital. Apparently, the two people who I remembered had seen the accident and came to help me.
About a year after, when I had somewhat healed from the brain trauma, I found out the truth about what happened. The police were aware of the situation, and the DEA had suggested I remain in Canada. The couple who found me offered to adopt me and give me their last name, and the US offered me a deal: I tell them everything I knew about Gaspar del Rio and his involvement with a dangerous drug cartel that had Mafia ties, and they’d facilitate my citizenship exchange and would leave my case open, and after a few years, have me legally declared dead. The only exception: I couldn’t go back to my old life.
I was so severely scarred then, I couldn’t even fathom the idea. Now, I’m back stateside and attending Camelot University as a new me.
I glance in the mirror, staring at my reflection. The towel wrapped around my torso is short, and if I angle myself to the side, I can clearly see the pattern of scars across my thighs. Unfastening the edge of the towel to hold the ends out, I expose my scars to the air.
I’m the ugliest when I’m naked.
Like a weed creeping up a rail, my scars extend over my skin, up toward my torso, and end at my ribcage. Four reconstructive surgeries later, and they aren’t as hideous, but they aren’t transparent either. The scars on my lower legs have been treated, as well as the ones on my arms and chest. The surgeons made sure any of the remaining ones, I could hide underneath my clothes. They even fixed the damaged pretty that I was born with—-straightened my nose, perfected my chin, and removed the strawberry birthmark at the edge of my jaw.
Well, technically sliding against the asphalt and the glass sliced it out, the doctors just fixed the skin and the bones underneath it.
Nothing a little makeup can’t hide now.
The people who helped me, my now adoptive parents, had been and still are worried about ‘psychological ramifications of superficial deformities,’ or something like that. One is a heart doctor, and the other a plastic surgeon for the stars.
For them, what could be seen was fixed.
I don’t blame them for not knowing these scars are only flesh deep. The other ones from my youth—the unfixable ones that mar my soul and poison happiness—are embedded deep within the fibers of my being. Reconstructive surgery can change my face and fix my ugly, but it can’t change my insides.
There is a Kai-sized vacancy in my heart. But he’s been doing just fine without me.
Over the years, I kept tabs on him. My extended hospital stay turned into stalking sessions. Kai had been a year older than me in school, so by the time I recovered and searched him online, his high school picture showed his plans to attend CamU.
His and Ledger’s video channel had grown substantially, and Kai’s voice still sounded angelic. I wanted to reach out to him, but not only had I been damaged inside, but I was also messed up on the outside. That, and the DEA had me under surveillance, so there wasn’t much I could do but watch him from afar.
Thanks to my foster parents, who kept the suits at bay, I only gave my official statement at eighteen. They were highly disappointed in the lack of information and threatened me. First, with my assets. The Del Rios had left me with a hefty inheritance, and despite Gaspar’s assets being frozen pending investigation, Meryl’s were not.
Then they attempted the fear tactic, saying that without their protection, La Expansión would locate me and kill me. They held my official death papers as ransom, but death threats only work on people who fear death.
So they switched up their tactics, rummaged through financials, and questioned me about gifts the Del Rios gave me for my fifteenth birthday in September. Meryl had given me a photoshoot and Gaspar a Grimm Brother fairy-tale book.
The DEA made me retell the story so many times, I had it down to a few sentences. But I never told them the whole truth. They didn’t want to know about my life before the Del Rios, with the real monsters.
Gaspar knew though. The day he gave me the old book, he said, Not all fairy tales have a happy ending, Penelope.
To which I had replied, Not all of them have a happy beginning either.
Del Rio had smiled at me, slid the book into my hands, and followed up, Normal people are just stories in the making. He tapped on the yellowed-with-age hardcover book and then bopped me on the nose. Don’t lose this, my little Grimm Keeper. Maybe one day you’ll find a reason to use it.
It had been weird, but weird was my thing.
The DEA insisted and still insists the fairy-tale book is important for some reason. They searched the seized material, but couldn’t find it anywhere. Assuming it had been retrieved by one of Bertrán Baillon’s men, they dropped the subject.
But I had seen it once. In a photograph on a collage in Kai’s room, next to a picture of me on my fifteenth birthday—one from the photoshoot. Someone had taken a picture of him at a gravesite. Kai sat on the grass near the headstone, I guessed mine, an old book balanced on his thigh and a middle finger pointing at the photographer, probably Ledger.
No one would have noticed the clue. It was one tiny object, in the background, that shied in comparison to the beautiful faces and went unnoticed at the sound of Kai and Ledger singing “October.” I had listened to that song over a hundred times because it was about me—about getting over me.
It had been taken down the summer before his freshman year of college and replaced with a new version—one that everyone loved. I scoured every single photograph and video of him, looking to find one photograph from years ago, but anything Thorn-related had been removed.
I suspected it had something to do with him dating Vanessa, the heiress to Voight Department Stores.
Shit! The thought of his girlfriend pulls me back to the present. Maybe coming here was a bad idea, but I had jumped at the opportunity to see Kai in person. Granted, for his safety and mine, I can’t tell him who I really am, but that doesn’t matter.
I’m just happy to be in the same state as him. Same little town. Same small campus. I don’t l
ook like the fifteen-year-old that left him behind, but I had enough of her to spark his interest and find out if he has the book.
Still not quite sure on how I’m going to do that without giving away my identity, but it entails getting into his room and snooping. While I was being debriefed on my roles and prepping to come here, my student visa approval was purposely delayed. CamU had been kind enough to let me do everything online until I got the okay to come here.
Unfortunately, the next available spot at The Lofts was in Vanessa’s suite. Something I think the DEA was involved in.
I’ve only been here one day, and Vanessa hates my guts without even meeting me. The Campus Life Staff made her move the clothes from the single and temporarily relocated me to the top floor of The Dungeon, the freshman dorm, until her royal highness’s team took down the walk-in closet she had installed in the extra bedroom.
“I really hate you too,” I confess my spite to no one, because I’m alone, and toss the damp towel over the chair. It’s hot for October, so I choose a skirt that covers some of my thighs and a light blue top that brings out my eyes.
My hair is blonde now, almost platinum, and the curls have been professionally relaxed into long flowy waves. Everything was tighter, sharper, and my body was healthier. Maybe too healthy. I had curves I never had before, perky round breasts, some junk in my trunk, a perfect nose, and a hell of an eye lift.
My adopted father created a perfect version of myself. I look like old me’s much prettier distant cousin, but feel exactly the same. I should be getting rest, but I’m starving and in desperate need of some coffee.
Someone knocks on the door, startling me. I grab a light jacket and swing the door open to find a tall guy. His dark pants hang snug around his legs, contrasted by a dark-wash denim point-down shirt, unbuttoned at the top to reveal a hint of muscle and perfectly tanned skin. The sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, and his hands are tucked into his pockets, his legs at a comfortable distance from each other.
