What Is [Left] // (Windy)

( N I N O D E K K A R I P L E Y )

Your Trojan's in my head
It's okay if it's gone
The thoughts that you had that it was the one
And, oh, what is left
For all those times is that what you get

"Play hooky with me."

Before she could answer, it was always my hand on hers, fingers sliding down her wrist until we were palm to palm and running out the back door into the alleyway behind her family's pawn shop. Laughs would echo into the air with no regard for stealth, the door clattering shut noncommittally, as if to mimic our frivolous emotions and poorly concealed secret. Penelope and I could never take each other seriously, so even as I tugged on her arm, the sudden movement pulling her toward me as I backed her against the old brick wall that knew our habits too well, she would grin as if how I was about to kiss her was nothing more than a child's game.

I suppose she wasn't wrong. We began as a playground dare that followed a familiar taunt: "If you love him so much, why don't you marry him!" And petulant little Pen, with all the bravery a seven-year-old possesses in the face of their fear of cooties, proclaimed that fine! She would. She would marry all of the Ripley boys, Bala Guppy, you stupidheaded meanie. Just you watch! Then she scrunched her face up as if the agony of her soon-to-be cooties affliction was already wracking her tiny body with pain and she kissed me square on the lips.

Granted, when the two of us grew out of the cooties phase, it had nothing to do with each other. If Pen ever tried to hide her infatuation with my brother Noah and his reckless temper, then she didn't do a very good job of it, and I —

Well, Ursula Libertine has always been devastatingly pretty and I was by no means the only guy in District Four to realize it.

Oh, regardless
The walls get painted anyway
Oh, you're guarding the gates
But it all got away
Your Trojan's in my head

So faced with Noah's thick-headed ignorance and the impossibility of Ursula, Penelope and I settled for each other, figuring that this was maybe as close as either of us was going to get to what we really wanted. I always knew what was going through her mind when she kissed me: 'I wonder if this is what Noah's lips would feel like?' And I couldn't judge her for it when her thoughts mirrored my own about her sister. We were whiling away our daydreams in that back alley and the casual honesty of it was always comfortable. Whenever the time would come for us to go back to being the simplest of friends, there would be no pain of separation. If we were to part, neither of us would hurt.

There should have been truth in that, but I guess I always thought of losing Penelope in a significantly less literal sense. I assumed that if I never kissed her again that it would be because her lips were pressed against Noah's, not because they were hanging open, begging for a last gasp of air as blood trickled down her cheek and into the hollow of emptiness I used to inhabit. For a girl who was always so unreachable, who I could press into a brick wall until there was nothing left between us except the thin threads of our clothing and still feel as though she was ten thousand miles away, that spear found a way into her cryptic thoughts far too easily. With all that blood curling across her skin in the sick calligraphy of death, I wasn't looking at her face and seeing her sister. I was realizing that there's no such thing as separation without pain and what fools we'd allowed our youth to turn us into.

The backs of her legs find the stone of the castle wall, pressing into the sand with the kind of unexpected force I used to twirl her around with in an experiment to see if I could shock the smile off her face just once, discovering a hint of what might exist beyond the boundaries of our childhood games. Now, as I watch the moment play out across the television screen, there is no playful smirk on her lips, although I feel the ghost of her on my own. I see the memory of bricks superimposed across my vision, but she is falling through an empty window from the force of the blow, tipping into the nothingness where no one's hand seeks to lead her away. There is a part of me that wants to reach out and grab her, begging her to abandon this moment like all the ones we ran from before. I could say: "I know you're dying, but play hooky with me."

Take it off and take it in
Take off all the thoughts
Of what we've been
Take a look, then hesitate
Take a picture you could never recreate

Tumbling limbs take turn over turn, twisting through midair until she is face-down and kissing the surface of the ocean. I know you're drowning, but play hooky with me. I am still a fool, but it's strangely difficult to take this moment seriously when Penelope Libertine spent her entire life drowning. People often claim that their most horrible experiences feel like dreams, but that's not what my thoughts mean right now.

I am inhaling the breath into my lungs that Penelope is unable to when the camera cuts to Fitz. An instant ago I was prepared to wail her name and scream at the unfairness of life and the loss of it, but my brother is holding air within him that is far closer to her than my own and there is an awful gratitude blooming within me for that. Penelope Libertine is dead and Fitz Ripley is there to watch. Then I am crying, not from love or loyalty for the loss of a girl I used to trade moments with, but for the guilt that I am grateful for her fall. I liked her. I liked her as something more than the sister of Ursula Libertine, because life was never as simple as we pretended it was, but I love my brother. I love my brother enough to be thankful for her death, even as memories tug at my thoughts of her laughing so hard against my mouth that the sound pushed into my lungs until it literally filled me up.

On screen, she is drifting away on the ocean's tide, a trail of red painting the water's surface in her wake until she sinks beneath the waves. When I close my eyes to the reality of it, she is still there, early afternoon sunlight washing out the color of her hair in the moments following a lighthearted comment about my being bad for her work ethic. It's true. I was. And the newfound was of her existence is enough to make me hate myself for seeing Fitz's face and not hurting as much over the loss of her as I should. And, perhaps because I am a fool who, like Penelope Libertine, has always had too much youth and not enough sense, I want to hurt. So I cross my fingers with one hand and make a fist with the other, swinging it into Noah's face where he stands watching her death beside me, with the violent hopes that the temper Pen loved so persistently might flare just once in retribution for us both.

Write a song
Make a note for the lump that sits inside your throat
Change the locks and change the scene
Change it all
But can't change what we've been