Fear Her (Complete)

Episode 12

“Gonna fix yourself up for your faves?”

“I’m putting my bun back. It’s my bun.” She gathered her wet hair on top of her head and arranged it neatly into a bun with hair pins to secure her baby hairs and everything. That was what made Virgo really believe Taurus had been a ballerina. She wasn’t even really watching what she was doing; her hands knew what to do. Habit made that happen, same as habit and drilling told Virgo what zodiac signs were ascribed to what birthdates. You do something long enough, you just know.

“It’s a good look.”

Virgo was taking a good look at Taurus now that she wasn’t relegating her to the sobriquet ‘Girl’ or ‘that one weirdo with the face’. Taurus looked her age, she just didn’t act it. She had the posture of a ballerina with a spine so straight she’d be living in a chiropractor’s office before thirty and a smile that blinded the willing. Crest white strips white. Chiclet teeth. Straight in a line. A little under bite she jutted her chin to compensate for. Taurus knew her flaws. The way she put herself together for other people, like Virgo, like the Future Female Murderers of America, said somebody had written them down for her. They’d made her a tidy little list, probably spritzed with perfume and doodled in the margins with bleeding rollerball hearts, telling her everything they saw that was wrong with her and telling her how to fix it. Then she fixed it. And she fixed it again. Taurus fixed her flaws every minute of every day and then three blind mice shoved her face in a toilet because she missed a spot.

Virgo had missed a spot.

“Where’d you get a tattoo like that?”

Taurus rubbed the small sunburst inked just behind her right ear. “My parents. My birth parents. They were a lot more laid back about the body mod thing. They had this idea that bodies are just vessels for the soul. If it’s yours, dress it up.”

“You loved them a lot?” Most anybody who managed to talk about their parents this long without gritting their teeth loved them. Just something Virgo had picked up on in juvie. The dead ones lived on a pedestal they didn’t deserve. The live ones resided in pits in the ground they might have.

“I remember…not being scared of them. I don’t remember much else. They had these too. They loved Ra and they believed in his blessings beyond any other god there’s supposed to be. That’s what I grew up with. That doesn’t go away because somebody dies.” Virgo wanted to ask how they died. Did sun worshippers go up in flames and end in ashes? Did they inhale smoke till they fell asleep and leave stunning, sun-kissed corpses for a pyre? How did they die? But healthy, well-adjusted people didn’t ask questions like that.

“At least it gives you something to remember them by.”

“Every day.”

Taurus wasn’t in dress code anymore by the time she headed back. Her gym shirt was mismatched with the sunflower barrettes pinning her bangs out of her face. Nevada Lights colors were purple and green, like they’d gotten a little too attached to the idea of Mardi Gras to compromise toward anything else. Taurus was too attached to the sun to accept that it just didn’t fit her outfit. Taurus was a little zealot streaking through life living by dead people’s doctrines. She didn’t stride through the hallways like a queen because she was better than everybody else; she just didn’t hear them. Their disdain and giggles flowed off her like heat reflected off white tees. She was impervious because in her own mind she wasn’t alone. Taurus the premature junior was god-tier and nobody could ever let her know.

Maybe someday.

When megalomaniacs stopped being mistaken for gods on earth. But not a minute before.

Taurus did the escorting on their way back to the building. She even snuck Virgo into the cafeteria to buy a coke. The lunch ladies and laddies smoked their cigarettes at the swinging doors and didn’t have much of anything to say about it. They got benefits but not a salary good enough for going above and beyond. Snitches get stitches and all that. Gruel to make and serve, bruised apples to withhold. Food servers were universally jaded and disinclined to hear your human interest story. Like loan sharks, you pay the (wo)men or they pay you dust.

“So,” Taurus opened as they dashed behind the cafeteria to avoid a much more attentive-looking campus cop.

“So what?”

“What do you like to do?”

“Assuming you mean for fun and not in life, I like to cook.”

“Oh, yeah, why?”

“Memories.” Virgo grinned to herself. Work assignments at WyJuCo had been about what you’d expect for juvie. Plant and tend a community garden. Harvest, package, and sell to the local farmer’s market to earn her keep. Work in the prison Laundromat doing inmate and outsourced loads. Work in the library. Work in the kitchens. She had enjoyed the kitchens until her workmates found out what she was in for. Being a murderer got you points for toughness; being a poisoner assigned to the kitchen got you long sidewise glances. She hadn’t minded the looks, people were always staring her down within an inch of her life; it was her cohorts who had complained, saying she made them nervous. Once they convinced the general population that she was poisoning them (she’d had no complaints about her cooking up to then), the warden hadn’t had a choice, she’d been re-assigned. The library was easy labor, but she hadn’t enjoyed it nearly as much.

The books on subtle poison were fun reads. Never hurts to learn something new, could come in handy someday. Virgo was nothing like her detractors expected her to be when she was a girl. Still, it could be entertaining meeting some of their expectations head-on. I can kill you without breaking a sweat. I wouldn’t even have to burn your house down.

“What are you thinking about?”

“The past.”

“Must be nice.”

“Not the word I’d use, but it could be worse.”

“That’s what everybody says.”

“Oh? This the last refuge of throwaway kids?”

“Pretty much. Ask anybody. Everybody’s got something to hide. Getting in each other’s business is the fastest way to make them hate you, and here we really know how to hold a grudge.”

“I’m good at grudges, too. Ask anybody that used to know me.” Whoever had survived.

Taurus beamed. “Then, you’ll do just fine.”