Tiff struggles under the vise grip of Despina holding her to the ground, straddling her chest so she could slash her face. Stuck on the ground, pinned by the dead girl, Tiff reaches for the composition book diary. She struggles to breathe and her voice comes out strained, but she knows what to say for once. "Here's a story about Despina Worth. Here's a story about you."

*****

You're so good at holding it together, but we all know you're not fooling anyone.

You lean in at the bathroom mirror, hips to ceramic, in the bathroom between the library and the chemistry lab. You're doing what you do best: you're keeping it under control. When you were younger, you used to pull your pigtails tighter until you thought your head would tear and your scalp would bleed. Nowadays, you scratch out your eyes.

You do it in your yearbook photos with black pen clenched in a tight fist. You do it in pictures taken and developed by your boyfriend until everything about them seems paper-white. You do it here in the bathroom with an eyeliner pencil until you're more raccoon than girl, more painted than pure.

You keep yourself together.

It's easy, not to think about it. He loves you, and he says he loves you, and he says he always will. Who cares if the rest of the world doesn't seem to see why? Who cares if they think you're perfect for each other for all the wrong reasons?

You feel like you're being watched, but you don't do anything to stop it. You just shiver a little and steel-faced, lean back from the mirror.

Who needs the approval of everybody else? You have what you need outside the ideals of this shitty little town. Lake Wonder can suck your ass, because you're getting out of here as soon as you get your diploma. You're going to make something of yourself. You're going to Empire City, or California, or Tampa. Anywhere that isn't here will do.

You'll have Janus with you. He's the only person here who matters. He says he loves you. Isn't that enough?

You don't know it's your last day alive. If you did, you would do things differently. You would finally give your mom one more, definitive fuck you, you would call up your father to do the same, you would light a fire, and you would go see your uncle to tell him just how much he means to you.

You don't know, though.

So life just goes on as normal.

You meet him in the hall like you always do-- and you think this place is a crock. It's full of pop-culture-obsessed posers who have never had an original thought in their lives. (God, do you really think that? I know 2009 was a different time, but that's super NLOG of you, Dez.)

But you want to get out of here someday, and you want all the trappings of a good life. When the two of you go up to the roof of the school to smoke and commiserate and kiss just a little, you look over the town that has trapped you in tragedy your whole life. It always has. Your aunt getting the blame for a bunch of murders in the drug tunnels back in the 90s was just a blip on the radar. They always look down on people like you, anyway, and you know that as your boyfriend issues your neck and you can't keep yourself from giggling, that your nonconformity will be your downfall. That doesn't deter you, though. One day, you'll leave this place behind.

And you want that more than anything.

After school, everything falls into place. You get into the dress you altered, made from one you found at a charity shop. Your uncle helps you with the zipper in the back-- your mom is too busy drinking and smoking on the couch to do that. It's whatever. She always does that. You're used to her passing out in a puddle of drool on the armrest.

Sometimes, you think that your uncle is the only one who cares about you. He has a family of his own to take care of and, yet, he's here, holding the camera when you come out of the tiny room in your mom's trailer. He smiles when he sees you in the dress you made and the updo his wife helped you with this afternoon; the ice around your heart melts a little when he gestures for you to stand in front of the door so he can take a picture.

You wonder why you couldn't have been his daughter. You wonder why your mother is passed out on the couch again, cigarette smoldering between limp fingers over the armrest ashtray. The sound of static and the camera shutter are one and the same, and you think they might be symbolic of something you can't put a finger on.

When Jnus comes to the front door to pick you up with this silly bicycle that he's had forever, it's him that takes a picture of the two of you and wishes you well-- tells you to come home before midnight, tells you to have fun.

You should be happy. This is what happiness is supposed to be like-- he lifts you onto the bicycle and tells you that one day you'll leave this town behind and you'll both live okay enough lives outside of the confines of Lake Wonder. It's hope, it's gliding on the pavement, it's the sound of the bike's chains while he skids into the parking lot of the high school. It's the feeling of his lips on yours, the scent of the cologne you know he shoplifted at Max-Mart.

You're not quite sure what makes things go wrong. Maybe it's when Rita Keane and her stupid cronies shove the two of you into the basement. Maybe it's when you see a flash of violet-blue light from behind the boiler. Maybe it's when you start the walk home and decide to go the scenic route, around the lake, and Janus's eyes flash dark blue.

I don't know what happened next, because you don't know what happened next. Maybe he lifted you, with his eyes glazed over and swimming with blue and gold, to take you into the woods, or maybe back to the basement. Whatever the case, the two of you clearly ended up down here-- that's his body in the closet out there, with the rubber bracelets on the bones. Neither of you made it out of Lake Wonder alive.

You were right, Despina. We are the same.

My mother only told me that she was proud of me one time in my life, and it was two days before she kicked me out. Your mother didn't love you, either. We were mistakes, weren't we? We were mistakes who got worse, who made everything worse-- and so maybe we are the same.

I'm not afraid of dying, Despina. And you thought you weren't, but you were.

There are things you never got to do. That happens all too often. You could say it's this town, but it's everywhere. It's the whole world. It's everything.

And it's not your fault that you never got to do them. It's not your fault that tragedy hit and messed up the whole plan. It's not your fault that the world knocked you down and then just kept kicking. It's nobody's fault.

It wasn't Eliza's fault that her friends were all killed by ghouls and she only escaped because she drove away. It's not Eddy's fault that his grandmother died in front of him. It's not your fault that the wizard used your boyfriend to kill you, just like it isn't Denny's fault that Joey Albert killed Jennifer, or anyone's fault that Tiffany Summers drowned.

But the rage... it's going to eat us alive. It'll kill us the same way self-loathing will.

I know I have to get a handle on it. It has ruined so many things for me. I'll tell you-- this is a story about you, but I'll tell you-- I'm weak, maybe, or maybe I just get angry really easily. I could blame my parents, maybe (like you could blame yours), but maybe it's just a personal failing. And when I blew up like that, I could feel the way that other people saw me. More than that, though, I could feel the way I saw myself.

And, sure, I hate myself. Who doesn't? It's really easy to. It's easy to open your mouth and say something you regret, and then go on to dig the hole deeper and deeper.

It's... destructive. Maybe it's better to not feel at all.

But that's silly, and you know it. No, not silly-- incorrect. You want to feel. You just want to feel something else.

You look at the people in front of you. You look at the girl you pin to the ground. You haven't cried in years-- since 2008, almost a year before you died. You aren't crying now, but you can feel it stinging your lacrimal glands, and isn't that the same? Isn't the burning the same as the tears falling on their own?

You're angry, Despina. You should be. But not at us. We're not the ones who did this to you.