April looked to Shelby, who had emerged from the bathroom pale and sweaty. Orion had expected her to make the sign of the cross in front of April and anything else she might offer. But she was biting her lip with indecision much like a thirteen-year-old Orion had.
Jaclyn smiled, lazily and easily, unlike she’d ever done in Orion’s memory. “It feels good, Shelby.” Her voice had that same languor.
“Jaclyn, stop!” Orion demanded. “Stop trying to influence her.”
“It won’t hurt her,” April offered.
Orion didn’t look at her. She was trying to help, she knew this. But April had no idea what they’d gone through. Where their minds were now. How damaged they had become, and how close Shelby had been to completely breaking just a day before.
“I’ve never done it,” Shelby said, voice small and curious.
Orion stiffened. “Well, I’ve done it once.” She narrowed her eyes at Shelby. “And it did hurt me. When I had no reason to be hurt, it made me freak out. And become paranoid.” She looked at Shelby, her features softening. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Shelbs.”
“That’s not a normal reaction, though,” Jaclyn said, as if she knew better. Jaclyn had come from a background similar to Orion, was exposed to many of the same things. But she was eleven when they took her. Even then, she’d been drinking for some time, dabbled in drugs. She found comfort in them.
Orion scoffed. “Just let her make up her own mind. You saw what the whiskey did.”
Jaclyn ignored her. Didn’t even flip her the bird. She just shrugged. Orion had never seen Jaclyn back down from an argument, with her at least.
“What is a normal reaction?” Shelby asked April.
April smiled. “Like . . . you’re floating. Music sounds better. Food tastes better. Movies are funnier.”
Like they’d heard music, tasted good food, or watched a fucking movie in the not so distant past.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” Shelby decided, uncharacteristically brave.
Orion realized she didn’t know who Shelby was out here. She knew who she was in The Cell. Shelby was the girl who made herself as small as she could. Who submitted to abuse rather than make it worse by fighting. She cried herself to sleep and hadn’t quite understood what reality was.
Orion didn’t know who any of them would be in this new world with windows, locks, food you could order on a phone. Drugs and alcohol at your fingertips.
She especially didn’t know who or what she was apart from angry. So angry she could feel it coursing through her body.
Orion glared at all of them, angry for no reason other than they were brave enough to try something as new and normal as booze. Furious that they were acting like normal twenty somethings when they were anything but.
“Well, do it somewhere else. I don’t want the room to reek of skunk. And I want to get some sleep.” She made that clear by yanking the covers back, and then wrapping them around herself, facing away from them with her eyes out the window.
“We can’t go outside,” April said, in that small, hesitant voice. “The cops are out front. And back. There’s even one chilling in the lobby. He was pretty hot.”
Protecting them. But yet a knockout blonde carrying drugs and booze managed to barge her way in. Small town cops and their small town ways.
“We can just open the window,” Jaclyn said. “We won’t get any smoke in here and won’t alert the uniforms outside. Win, win.”
Orion turned back to face them, sighing loudly, a wrinkle of disgust on her face, but Jaclyn paid her no mind.
She opened the window in question, a crisp breeze filtering in the room. Orion should’ve liked that. The fresh air, the ability to breathe something that wasn’t recycled, damp, and reeking of sadness and death. But she didn’t. It unnerved her. Scared her, though she wouldn’t admit that out loud with a gun to her head.
April moved toward the window, stuck her head out with the joint between her lips, and sparked it up.
Orion watched her every move, growing more agitated by the second, but she also came to the realization that she was outnumbered, and as pissed off as she had become, she was also tired. So very tired. And she didn’t have the energy to fight them anymore.
As she turned back toward the wall and shut her eyes, and the laughter between the three other girls grew, Orion felt truly alone for the first time.
The had always been held together by the chains on their ankles, forced to bond in a way unlike any other. But now they were free. Nothing was keeping them together anymore. And Orion was hit with the sick feeling as she quietly cried herself to sleep that night, that without the chains, one day, they would drift apart for good.