milk teeth — sera & iz / jb

Full disclosure: I don’t ever listen to the names at the Reapings. Don’t really see the point in it, when Six hasn’t had a Victor in years and any names pulled out of that bowl are destined to be forgotten in two weeks’ time, tops. Names are off limits to us in the graveyard; I wouldn’t expect anything different in the daylight.

So I’m sure I hear ‘Isolde Owens’ as she’s marked for death, but I don’t hear it, you know? I’m just waiting for the shuffling of feet and the sobbing goodbyes of people lucky enough to have someone in this world worth caring about.

Joke’s on me, though, because it’s homegirl next to me who starts walking and I’m the chump that’s tasked with fulfilling the role of the heartbroken friend.

I reach for her shoulder but find air as our paths divulge for the very first time. I see the fork in the road, feel my lip tremble embarrassingly. “Iz–”, that’s not you. Isolde isn’t Iz; Seraphina isn’t Sera. We’re not supposed to be the ones who end up in ditches.

But she lets out the air in her lungs through a crack in her teeth – it’s right between the canine and first bicuspid where she hit herself with the end of her shovel in the beginning, when we were nervous and new to each other and this strange, unfortunate life – and walks up to the podium all nonchalant and cool. I’ve always envied that about her. That air of untouchable always surrounding her. I guess that’s why it stings so much to see her walk away.

“Water the plants for me?”

Damn girl and her stupid ficuses. If she thinks that’s the last thing she gets to say to me, she’s got another fucking thing coming.

I have half a mind to listen to the second name they pull out now that my world’s been spun off its axis, but when the one and only person you care about has already been snatched away from you, you realise there’s not really any point in sticking around for the finale. So I ditch. Sneak right past a grey-looking Peacekeeper who’s sat through too many Reapings to count, he couldn’t care less about little old me getting a head start on the crowd. I could run, but there’s nowhere worth going without Iz by my side. So I approach the building I’ve vehemently avoided for my entire eighteen years and stand by the side door with only my hammering heart to keep me company.

When the show’s over and the rest of Six has returned home with their tails between their legs, I’m forced to wait for a second and third Peacekeeper to give the allocated five minutes of family time, even when I tell them eight times that nobody else is coming. A tinny little alarm goes off as my cue to enter, and I speed past the pair of them before they can turn me away, just to prove a point.

They follow me anyway.

“Five minutes.”

Yeah, no shit.

She’s sitting on the couch, simultaneously trying to melt into the cushions and get as far away from the washed-out fabric as possible. She’s looking up at the ceiling like the mould in the corner’s the most important thing in the world. I wonder if she’s thinking of the sky – whether it’s night or day that she sees when she closes her eyes.

“Bitch.” This shit sucks.

She still doesn’t look at me. I don’t want to look at her, either, but I need to remember her face.

“If I had a will, well, you’d get Figgy.”

Well, that’s just dumb. She knows as well as I do that plant’s as good as dead in my care. But I play along anyway, nodding mutely, realising then that there’s truly nobody else in this world she trusts more than me if she’s asking me to look after the brood she’s so proud of having kept alive in a world of decay.

It hurts, I realise, to be special to someone. Hurts more to be the one to let them down.

“You can have my body too, by the way.”

Traditionally speaking, a rotting corpse doesn’t tend to make for the best décor. But I dunno. I reckon I could make it work, if I had to.

But I won’t have to.

“Hey, shut up. Nobody’s touching your damn kidneys.” We reach for each other at the same time, telepathic twins. I try to squeeze her back, but all the energy’s drained out of me, and so my hand hangs as limp as a cadaver in her clammy grasp. The nail polish on her fingernails is chipped; no time to fix it now, and I guess that’s the final straw, the thing that pushes me right over the edge and calls the tears I’ve been holding back for eighteen years to the surface.

“You have to fight. You have to try. I know Six is trash and Flynn Garner is a washed-up used-to-be but he’s, like, smart. And so are you. And resilient. And tough – the toughest bitch I know.” I hate how desperate she’s made me, but I guess that’s love. I don’t even care that she’ll probably spend the entire train ride laughing at my pathetic whining. She has to have something good to hold on to in the dark.

There’s a memory of us – sixteen, all too familiar to each other now, with no secrets between us. We tell each other we love each other every day, in little ways. She turns the lamp off when she comes to bed after me, even though it’s on my side of the room and would be the easiest thing in the world for me to just reach across my body and do it myself. And in return, I put her plants outside for their allotted fifteen minutes of afternoon sunlight without even complaining about the uncomfortable feeling of the terracotta pots against my skin. We’d never say how much we meant to each other – don’t need the words, usually, when you know it so intrinsically. But that day, in the shade of a lemon tree, sixteen and vulnerable, we reach for each other:

“Don’t ever leave me?”
“As if, babe.”

Izzy is a girl of her word.

Is Isolde Owens?

I don’t know, I don’t know – but I have to believe that she is.

“And if you don’t come back home to me – I swear to god, Iz – I will kill you.”