(Charliegh: unedited) 

Once Upon a Time, there had been a girl with her eyes and steady smile, who sat upon the molded barstools of a new-age coffee shop and puzzled through the beginning and ending of friendship. Strange how she had always thought that it would be Sylas leaving her, for a girl.

Now, she was the villain – only she hadn’t abandoned Sylas. That, he had done all on his own. 

Some of her silly rambling had come to fruition: just because she was Charliegh McGowan and he was Sylas King didn’t mean they would elude the inevitable ending to everything.

And so, unobtrusively, quiet as a murmur, he had begun to fade from her life. He stopped asking her to watch Lennon – stopped asking for accompaniment to gigs for his band, or for gummy bears, or for anything menial that would have amounted to reconciliation.

Somehow, she hadn’t realized how much it would hurt. How sharply she would remember, like the twisting of her heartstrings, that he would not be coming to save her from Nolan, or her sister’s escapades.

When she had first told him about the bruising, the beating, he had not flinched. He pulled her into his arms and mumbled reassurance into her hair, slow and steady. Unmovable.

Finding out the Nolan had been her tormentor had changed everything.

His mother was in league with the man who almost ruined your life, he had yelled. Can’t you see? Didn’t you know?

Yes, she wanted to say, yes, I did know. Eyes wide open. But instead, she had fumbled for an excuse fabricated of lust and mistakes. She was framed by her grievances, guilded by her sorrows. And, in his eyes, degraded.

That hurt the worst of all. She was slowly beginning to understand Randall’s twisted rational behind his final actions – and, for the first time, she could empathize with the hurt of losing someone who stood so solidly out of reach.

The business of making mistakes, it seemed, was not so much the mistake as it was the resulting chaos. Randall had chosen to kill himself; and left behind a girl torn by her divided loyalties. Now she had chosen to take up with Nolan, throwing caution to the wind, and had driven her sole ally away.

What else could go wrong? When would she finally slip, lose footing, banished to a world of was and is not anymore? Would Sylas forgive her? Or was she doomed to struggle through the aftermath of her decisions, utterly alone?

The End. There was no end. Only a beginning. Only a gateway, an unleashed floodgate to the juxtaposition of her soul. How long before she would crumble, drown? How could she repair broken confidence, upon the premise of two weeks of painstaking joy?

That was the thing about Once Upon a Time – and fairytales in general – not everyone received their version of Happily Ever After.

***

A hallucination opened the door to her apartment, slouching and wreathed with smoke. “I was wondering when you’d come back around,” he said, and smiled, teeth crooked, camouflage cap pushed back on his head.

Charliegh screamed. She shut her eyes, blinking frantically, willing him away. The bruises on her sides and stomach burned, throbbed, pain sinking through the skin and seizing hold of her aching muscles. There was a fire in her forehead, a flickering fuse along her temples.

Hopeless. Stronger than the fire was the sheer hopelessness, a strange sort of numbness that settled along her limbs and rendered her woozy with disbelief.

She didn’t hear her backpack bounce upon the steps, zipper shattering to spill its paper organs onto the cement. She couldn’t see anything, feel anything except cool air flickering across her arms, and the thick wetness of cigarette smoke as it draped itself across her shoulders.

“Charliegh.” Someone was shaking her arm, fingers too thick and firm to belong to Nolan. A strand of hair brushed her skin – ropey, and oddly dry. “Charliegh. Open those blues. Little by little. There we go.”

Janis.

Sylas’s mother stood before her, turquoise peasant skirt swirling about her plump thighs like an aurora, freckled forehead knotted in confusion. “Someone had a long, long day. I sense some negative energy.”

Charliegh simply stood, and stared. It had been weeks, months, since she had seen Janis. Sylas preferred not to speak of her, and when he did, it was usually in curt, one-worded answers to rhetorical questions. Yet somehow, there she stood. Her blonde-tinged dreadlocks were piled high atop her head, and her tangled web of necklaces swung lazily in tempo to her slow, loose movements. A freshly inked flock of doves curved down the side of her neck. She looked exactly as Charliegh remembered – a patchwork of sluggish, earthy, and radical.

“Janis, what are you doing here?”

“In Redemption? I came back early from the festivals –”

“In my apartment.”

“Hmm.” Janis tilted her head, eyes slipping over Charliegh. “That’s a long question.” She stepped back, allowing room in the doorway. One long-fingered hand gestured beckoningly. “Care for some herbal tea?”

 Inside, the familiar cavern of her apartment had been illuminated by a skinny standing lamp, purple light bulb casting a faint gleam over the furniture. Springs were sticking out of the couch cushions and a half-eaten box of pizza, nearly covered by a spread of magazines and crumpled tissues, was scattered across the coffee table. It looked desolate – as if someone had been away for a very long time, and had only just returned.

The tissues were probably Faith’s, Charliegh mused as she followed Janis into the kitchen. Asher must have broken her heart yet again. The pile of broken lipsticks and empty perfume vials standing at attention around the television – all gifts – and the ball of rumpled laundry in the corner of the room bore witness to it. Faith never washed when she was broken. Like sorrow, her dirty things accumulated, spilling into the normalcy of everyday life until it became too much to bear.

Quite frankly, Charliegh couldn’t remember a time in the past six months that the tumultuous dynamic of Faith and Asher’s relationship hadn’t dominated the household. There were little clues everywhere, if one knew where to look.

And she did. She had, for almost two years now. With their father coming and going at odd hours, and her sister’s escapades, it was almost as if Charliegh was the extra, unnecessary fixture upon the mantelpiece. Useless. Nothing more than an object, to be admired from a distance and ignored from afar.

Janis had brought two boxes of tea, her ancient copper kettle, and a box of cinnamon sticks, which she splayed across the kitchen counter like an edible fan. She coaxed Charliegh into a seat and poured water into the kettle, humming something idly under her breath. Her movements and gentle, rhythmic voice was a stinging reminder of Sylas. 

 As the water began to boil, she took two thick mugs down from the cupboard and slid one in front of Charliegh. “Jasmine or Indian spice?”

“Jasmine.” Charliegh retrieved a satchel of crushed herbs from one of the boxes, dunking it into her mug. Within minutes the water began to change colors, purple swirling up from the depths. It reminded of her clouds, swimming across the surface of her tea with an airy transparency.

Janis shoved the kettle to the back of the stove and plucked her own mug from the countertop. She slid into the stool across from Charliegh, propping her booted heels upon the rungs. Her tea turned black in a matter of seconds, growing steadily darker with each gentle dip of the tea bag.

There was a moment of quiet before either spoke. The sounds of an empty household – a dripping faucet, a rattling washer, the murmuring of the television – seemed to echo between them. Finally, Janis wrapped her hands tightly around her mug and leaned forward, settling into her seat. “So. You’ve been at odds with Sylas, hmm?”

“Yes.” Charliegh took a small sip of her tea, trying desperately to ease the parched sensation at the back of her throat. Her vocals cords felt like parchment, pieces that had been ripped apart and sewn jaggedly back together. She wondered if Sylas had spilled. Anything. Everything. Judging from the inquisitive look stretched taut across Janis’s speckled features, how much could she really know? “How…”

“When I came home, I didn’t find you sleeping on his bedroom floor.” Janis gave her a sad smile. “He was all alone.” 

“By choice.”

"A fight? Or,” Janis mused, “an other.”

Other. Charliegh blinked furiously. She didn’t want to think of Nolan. Or Randall. Or Price. Or Sylas. Or anyone remotely intertwined with her life; all of whom would end up scarring her in one way or another. “Why are you in my apartment?”

“As your second mother, I hold full liberty to invade. At any moment.”

“Well.” Charliegh kept on blinking, trying now to swallow the lump that was rising in her throat. Other. So many people. So many stories – lives, endings, fallout. Even if she appeared as spontaneously as the Cheshire cat, and dodged most problems bigger than her bevy of tattoos, Janis had remained a constant fixture in her life. Longer than the rest. “You can be my first mother.”

Janis’s eyes softened. She took a drink of tea. “I haven’t got full liberty for that.”

“She wouldn’t mind.”

“No. I suppose she wouldn’t.”

Charliegh stared into her mug. The lavender tinge had darkened to plum. Her real mother – her birth mother – loved purple. The color of royalty, she would say.

“Have you heard from her?”

Mutely, she shook her head.

“Not a call? Or a postcard? Or even – I don’t know – a news article?”

“I haven’t heard from her.”

“That’s that, then, isn’t it?” Janis shifted again. The turn of her shoulders swung her array of pendants. One of the charms, a bamboo tube, made a soft rushing noise, like running water.

Charliegh wondered if they had hippies in Hollywood.

Proper hippies – or, at least, skilled pretenders – like Janis. Long hair, dirty clothing, herbal tea, Woodstock dreams. Had her mother seen them? Met them? Or was she too busy rubbing shoulders with elitist royalty, sipping champagne out of thin-stemmed glasses and laughing through her bleached teeth?

Sometimes, dreams cannot end until they have reached a decisive moment of conclusion; the past ten years had not, apparently, brought that moment to her mother. If anything, they had fostered her insatiable appetite for film immortality. She appeared in the newspapers from time to time, smirking at her abandoned daughter from beneath a blackened headline.

 So the dream continued – right along with her absence – and Charliegh skirted through her days by pretending that Janis and Sylas and Lennon comprised her real family. Because however dysfunctional, they had remained.

Until Sylas had discovered her secret. Then it had been heartbreakingly easy for him to leave her when he saw for the first time how human, how flawed, she really was. That was the difficult part: people inevitably failed her. And there was no remedy for a conundrum like that.

That was reality.

Charliegh began to memorize the curvatures of her mug. Anything to avoid Janis’s impending speech. “I suppose it is.”

“You can talk to Sylas about this, you know.” Janis said. “If you can’t tell me. He’s a listener.”

“What if I’ve done something? Something that makes him a talker, or an avoider, or anything but a listener?”

“Well.” Janis reached across the table and wrapped her hand around Charliegh’s mug, fingers slipping between her fingers. “If you don’t talk, he can’t listen.”

She felt ridiculously close to tears. The back of her throat was burning, an itching beginning at the corners of her eyes. “I’ve told him. I’ve talked. I can’t.”

“There is such a thing as second chances.”

“What?”

“Second chances, Charliegh.” Janis repeated patiently. “They’re like apologies – if you can’t try and give them to someone else, they’ll be wasted on you.”

Charliegh pulled away. It was useless to sit and ponder the future, idling all her second chances away. There was a cramp in her ankle when she stood. It sent pain shooting up her calf, but she gritted her teeth and managed a sad smile. “Thank you for the tea.”

“Thanks for letting me move in.”

“Occupy any time you like.”

“That’s a dangerous offer to make.” Janis grinned as she stood, stretching her arms over her head. She collected both mugs and carried them to the counter. When she hugged Charliegh, her skin smelled like cinnamon – like Sylas. “Don’t be a stranger.”

“If I can make amends, somehow, I won’t be. You’ll see too much of me.” Charliegh felt wistful, standing there thinking of Sylas. “Sick at the sight of me.”

“Hmm. Not what Sylas would say.” Janis squeezed her shoulders lightly and stepped back. “He’s playing a gig tonight. A bar in a hotel, I think. Somewhere near Old Orchard.”

“Is that my cue to go find him?”

“And to bring him back.” Janis said. “Then, we can all be home again.”

***

Dedicated to stealth_ninjacat for binge-reading Stained Glass Souls. Thank you so much, darling. The support means the world.