DISORDER

thread

[antisocial personality disorder]

Camren wrapped people like thread around her fingers. They were easy to charm, she realized, to flash a smile and to manipulate wherever she wanted them to go. The gleam in her eyes told more than her lips ever did, and those too intelligent to fall into the spider's web whispered about her from afar.

They told her she was monstrous, despicable, the girl with a rotting soul hiding behind a red-haired mask of innocence. And she knew she was. A scarlet queen on a golden throne, fingers just as crimson as her hair, with fangs filling her bloodied mouth and ruby staining her ivory skin. The teachers were the easiest to manipulate — if she put on a shy mask, hiding her nose in a book, acting like the perfect student, they'd punish the people who spat her name like it was the devil's. Camren. It was such a beautiful name, so unfitting for the girl who should have been named for the havoc she wrought in her wake.

Until she was sixteen, she was proud of the title she'd been given, of the reputation that made every word she sugarcoated worthless like dirt. And then everything crumbled, and her perfect order burned to ashes.

It all started with a fight. A fight she'd initiated, a fight she'd regret for the rest of her life — where the other person stared at her with horror in their eyes as she pinned them by the neck against the wall. She smiled while they suffocated, and danced in the wake of their destruction. That was when she learned there was fire in her lungs instead of oxygen.

But that was before they found her nails ripped and torn, blood clotted under them, and a shirt draped around her shoulders like the crimson fibers in her victim's hands. And by the end of September, not only was there fire in Camren's lungs, there was steel around her wrists.

That was when the scarlet queen was banished from the dark side of Heaven to the worst part of Hell.

She was a monster — that was what her parents told her through the prison bars. A demon. A killer.

It was true, the scarlet queen realized, flinching back from the cold fingers around her heart.

She was a victim, said the bruises on her arms, the scars on her legs where she'd tried to stop the rage before. You are no demon. You are a girl. Why should they punish you for letting the devil out to play?

And by the end of October, she was suffocating too.