The Dollhouse

The Ending

THERE was little to lament over the time that had been robbed from us.

Every piece of the old days felt like a dreadful and distant dream. Gone were the long lonely roads, the sun-stretched shadows across the grounds of the schoolyard, the identical splendor of a suburban street that reeked like hidden stubs of cigarettes.

To view one's childhood through rose-colored glasses, sometimes it could be hazy to recall the bad parts. Some days, an image of the bright posters in my friends' cozy bedrooms would surface, and I'd think of lounging in my own bed in the hours of peaceful solitude, long hair spread across the clean sheets with bare feet rested tentatively on the wall.

Or cold winter nights by the fire, the lines of Christmas lights strung across town flashing through a steamed-up bus window on the way to Randy's Diner. Kicking about the school grounds, laughing together about something witty scribbled on a note passed 'round class.

Sitting on the ground with tucked knees, playing trivia like a real little family. The three of us locked in safety upstairs, Rudy, Violet and I - and one of the only normal things we'd done during out time together.

But I would not mourn for us.

Danny's death manifested as a sadness that grew from beneath the Hollow. They say the locals only speak about it in hushed whispers. Our old friend became the ghost that cursed a ground born of violence, and not for one moment did the murderers pay for what they had done.

I had never regretted the decision to cut him off as a friend, not after the horrible stunt he pulled on Betsy. There were little moments that made me shiver, and the thought plagued me; if we had loved him, included him, he never would have rushed forward desperately like that. The cops never would've raised their weapons. Danny would have been spared.

Yet, there was a guilt-ridden suffocation that we all experienced. It was the end of an era. So much innocence had been drained. It was as if we all shared a sliver of a glass heart that had been shattered.

I could make my own home.

In my home, I would accept there was no way to fix the world, There was no way of stitching in neatly together like torn and broken patchwork. But I could repair what I had.

Radical change favored the turn of the decade.

Sam received an acceptance letter from the university of Florida. There was a desegregation movement happening that only kept growing bigger; he had the got the grades. He cried when he told me, fat salty tears of gratitude that splashed down his jumper. His mother was so proud, and I promised him we'd all come down to visit when he graduated.

And dear, dear Betsy. She left her parents behind in that slow, backwards town, and I don't think she could stand being in that blue farmhouse for more than a week much after that. Alma and Jeremiah always said any one of us could stop by - we could bake cookies, or have dinner between the working days of the farm, or between the creation of art on canvases.

In a way, they lost their daughter. They had never forced Betsy into the inhumane conversion therapy that made her so sick and sad. But the reminder was too painful for her.

Her and Lorna really did go to New York; she even enrolled in school to become a nurse. She doesn't say much about the concrete labyrinth of Manhattan, but I got the feeling things were a lot of more liberating up there. Scenes of anonymity, free of the suffocating image that caged one in the country.

She'd also call every now and then. Sometimes, she'd still want to talk about Danny. She'd talk quietly.

"I want to purge every rotten thought in my mind that's existed since. But I have my own way of forgetting. Of remembering. I can't live so cheerful all the time, masking pain the way I used to force myself to. But that's okay. Turns out you gotta feel your emotions before you can let them go."