skinny || h.s. au [Rewrite Now Up!]

twentyfive

Marley slept as if she has been deprived of sleep for months. In a dead sleep that not even the late night laughter of other camp sites could pull her from. But her dreams were not quite as peaceful.

She's at the lake again. Plunging into the water. Everything is black and she moves frantically to reach the surface. But then suddenly she's not alone in the water.

Her mother is there. With her hair floating in all directions and a smile as dark as the water around them. Her eyes a luminous shade of crystal blue not quite as remarkable as her daughters' but still sinisterly beautiful like shards of ice.

Marley tries to scream. To tell her mother that she's drowning. To tell her to save her.

But her mother just laughs at her daughter's struggle. As if the water doesn't effect her at all. "I'm leaving, Marley. And I'm never coming back."

Then she's gone. Like she was so long ago. Departing on almost those exact words.

Back then, Marley was different about emotions. It didn't hurt back then, it just reinforced the lock on her feelings. But in this dream she feels abandoned and scared and everything she should have felt before.

Marley fights the pull of the water, but inevitably she sinks lower and lower and lower. The shimmer of the moon on the surface growing farther and farther and farther away.

But then just as quickly as her mother disappeared, the water is gone. Marley is in her living room back home. But she still feels like she's drowning. Just a different kind of drowning.

And it's not a dream, exactly. It's a memory.

"Mom is at it again." Jax sighs. Sits down next to Marley on the couch.

She rolls her eyes. "Of course she is."

And this time, Marley doesn't want to put up with it. So she climbs the stairs to the room she shares with her mother. The door is locked, as always.

"Mom, open the fucking door." At a few days shy of fifteen, even Marley curses like a sailor. The whole family does.

But maybe that's part of it.

"No!" She yells from the other side like a child.

"It's just my fucking birthday, Mom! Are you really going to do this to me again?" But that was the point.

Every year since Marley turned ten, her mother got frantic around her birthday. Not like normal mothers, where they planned a party or worried about presents. No, Marley's birthday is never about her anymore. It's another day for her mother to get drunk and scream about packing her things and never coming back.

Marley guesses that her fifteenth birthday was just the year that instead of screaming about it, her mother actually did it.

"Your birthday isn't for another three days you selfish bitch!" The door shakes with a loud bang. And Marley knows she must have thrown one of her books at the door. She just hopes this time, it wasn't one of her favorites.

"You do this every year, Ma!" Marley yells at the wooden door. "Why?"

"I don't have to explain shit to you!" Another bang on the door causes Marley to flinch back. "You're a worthless fucking daughter! I'm leaving!"