Page 188 of Scrimmage

“Was it him? Was it Damien?”

“I don’t know. I was focused on Ashland.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” Alexi says. “They didn’t have a face anymore.”

I haven’t really thought about who the intruder was. My mind has been in a dissociative state, only making room for Ashland. Someone else was there, though. At least one other person was involved, and they’re dead, presumably by Ashland’s hands. I’m fucking glad. They deserve it.

Penny shoves her face into her hands. “I wasn’t here,” she sobs quietly. “I wasn’t there. I took that stupid internship, and I wasn’t here.”

I clear my throat. “Ashland wanted you to be there.”

“You don’t understand,” she says fiercely. “You don’t understand her.”

It stings in a way that it shouldn’t, but it’s true. I can’t possibly know her in the way Penny does. The most I’ve ever gotten out of her is that she’s from an undetermined state in the South, that her art is fucked up, and that she hates society. That she screams in her sleep, and that she hurts. I don’t even know how she met Penny.

“Then tell me about her,” I whisper.

She looks up at me with wide red-rimmed eyes. “She’s mean.”

I choke on a laugh. Hearing Penny say anything negative about Ashland blows my mind, but to call her mean is an gross understatement.

“Yeah?”

“Yes,” Penny says, sitting up straighter. “So fucking mean. You were right, ya know? She’s abrasive. So fucking abrasive that it makes you want to hit her right in her stupid fucking nose. Such a bitch. When someone is that broody it makes you want to write shitty poetry about your middle school ex-boyfriend and drown yourself in kool-aid. And she talks so much shit. She acts like she hates everything, and in her weird fucking way that’s her being nice.Nice.She’ll pick at you and tear you down. That’s her beingnice.”

“Not what I expected,” Alexi mutters under his breath.

“And it’s all so worth it,” Penny says sadly. “So fucking worth it.”

“It is,” I nod.

“The first time I met Ashland I hated her. Almost everyone does." She glances at Alexi. "Except for you, I guess."

I laugh, actually laugh. It’s strained and full of pain. It sort of feels like we’re at a wake, but it’s welcome. I want to hear about Ashland. Know about her. She asked me to take care of Penny. I’m not good at reading people, but it seems like she has so much she needs to say.

“She was the fakest person I had ever met, and she wore it so well.”

“Fake?” I’m fucking startled. That’s not the girl I know at all.

“Self-preservation does things to a person,” she snorts. “But it only took me one second to see it. Fake can see straight through fake. It’s how you stay alive. Pretend you love being fake and you'll get to live another day. She was so pretty. Not like me. She didn't have to work for it. I was jealous of the way Damien looked at her.”

I don’t know what she’s talking about, but the way Penny says his name is like nails on a chalkboard and the feel of sandpaper on my skin. It gives me the same creepy feelings I got when I looked at Ashland’s sketches. Dark and wrong.

“I was so scared and so innocent, and she was intimidating. Out of all of the girls she was scary, but you have to be when you’re beside someone like him. I thought she liked it. I thought it was different for her, but I was wrong. I learned that I was wrong so quickly that I got whiplash. She's the personification of whiplash.”

“She was married to him,” I say.

It’s burning me alive even hearing that she was so involved. If she was married it makes sense why she didn’t ‘date’ the guy who wrote her an album. Why they never held hands. She was so unwilling to talk about it, and now I see why.

“That’s what he believes,” Penny sniffles. “Doesn’t really matter if there’s a piece of paper or not. That shit is forged all of the time. It’s about what youbelieve,and Damien believed whatever he wanted. If he said they were married, in his mind, they were married.”

There’s a frost crawling across my skin, freezing me to death and squeezing my insides. Something is terribly fucking wrong with this entire story.

“Now I know that you don’t want someone like Damien looking at you the way he looked at her. You want them to never see you in the first place.”

“Fuck.” I shove my head in my hands. It wasn’t an explanation, but it’s enough of one to drive me to hate myself. “And I didn’t even give her a chance to explain.”

“I don’t blame you, Koda. I doubt she does either. It’s not like she really would've told you. A letter like that from someone like him would sound really really bad if you were in her position, and she has no way to defend it without peeling her skin off of her bones. She’d rather die.”

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