Chapter Text
It happens over spring break.
Orange is out of town and the twins are cooped up in their house and there’s been no word from Red in days and Yellow is all alone in her too-quiet treehouse.
Yellow doesn’t like the quiet.
It sounds too much like home. Like dinners interspersed with only the scrape of silverware on porcelain. Like the weighted silence between arguments. Like the stale air of an empty house.
Her six year old self had cried when her parents first afforded that house, a half-baked compromise between her mom’s big dreams and her dad’s love for his hometown. She was inconsolable for days, sobbing incoherently about ceilings that felt too high and rooms that felt too empty. She didn’t have the words to express it, back then, but some part of her knew that houses that big could only be filled by years of memories, and her family could never fill a house like that.
Yellow’s thoughts get loud when it’s quiet. Laying in a pile of sleeping bags too soft where the wooden boards of the treehouse are too hard, staring at full containers of food she can’t bring herself to eat, there’s nothing left to do but think. The world feels too big and this town feels too small and her friends are out of reach and all of it juts against her skin in just the wrong places. She wants to shriek and wail like a wild animal until someone puts her down. She wants to claw herself bloody and expose her nerves to the open air, just to feel something real.
She doesn’t.
Because people would see.
The school wouldn’t care, but her friends would and she doesn't want them to worry.
And so Yellow lays there and thinks.
She thinks about her parents, who stay together for her sake yet also don’t stay at all. She thinks about her friends, who live in a world too cruel for their kindness. About Red, who’s always deserved so much more than he’s ever gotten. About Green, who’s brilliant in all the ways no one looks for. About Blue, who’s already gentler and wiser than any adult she’s ever known. About Orange, whose smile trembles under the weight of everything she's seen.
She thinks about the systems that are supposedly in place to help, and how every one of them has failed.
She thinks about the bottle of pills stashed under the floorboards.
She thinks.
It happens over spring break, a summer and change before the start of high school. Yellow is thirteen-going-on-fourteen but feels so much older than that.
High school is supposed to be a time for changes, for a few more freedoms and a lot more responsibilities. It’s a time for after-school activities and college applications and planning for when they ‘get the hell out of this place’, as Green likes to put it.
It’s a time for friend groups to drift apart.
After all these years, her parents' house is still empty. There's a fine layer of dust clinging to about half of the furniture. Paintings hang from the walls, glimmering winter forests, radiant sunsets, bright patches of wildflowers, but even the most colorful of them seem washed out by the vast expanses of engulfing white they can never fully cover. She'd noticed once, on an impromptu visit to Orange's house, that there were photos of familiar faces she didn't recognize cradled in slightly-crooked frames. The imperfection should have bothered her, and the curiosity should have driven her to ask, but all she could focus on was the joy seeping out of each memory.
Her family's photos are stashed in a box in the attic. It was always her uncle who liked keeping albums, each one lovingly labeled in his messy scrawl. Her mother had barely glanced at them when they were sorting through his belongings after the funeral, just tossed them into a pile called 'keep'.
One of those albums is stashed beneath her bed, alongside two unworn wedding rings and everything else she doesn't want to lose. It's easy for things to get lost in big houses.
She used to take that album out, sometimes, just to look at. It contains fifty pages of her parent's wedding photos, from the havoc-ridden dressing rooms to the cans rattling behind their car as they drove to their honeymoon. Her visual memory isn't very good, but she has every picture memorized to the last detail. It's the only time she's seen her parents looking happy to be around each other. She remembers their eyes, glowing with joy as they looked at each other, every bit the lovestruck couple from those poems and fairy tales.
But love like that fades, she supposes. Or maybe it never existed to begin with. Not with real people, with their complicated emotions and endless problems. Real people get tired of each other.
Yellow stares unseeingly at her shelves of trinkets, searching for her friends' smiles in the treasured pieces. She loves with a ferocity she'd never learned how to express, and she tries, now, to remember if she's ever seen that same love reflected back at her. She can't be sure. It's all blurry. Everything feels dull without her friends around, like they'd taken their namesake colors with them and left her with only yellowed memories. What she does remember, however, is those rare moments when her friends frowned at her with the same unhappiness she sees in her parents. She remembers exactly what she'd done to cause them. Green's disappointed sigh when she'd stared at his artwork with uncomprehending blankness. Blue's sad eyes when she'd tried and failed to understand why she harbored no hatred toward Miss Willow. Orange's distraught look when she'd joked that she wanted to drop a match watch this town burn. Red's baleful glare when she didn't cry at her uncle's- his father's- funeral.
She's corrected herself, of course. Analyzed the things that caused them hurt and buried those parts of herself deep. Become more sensitive to their moods. Learned to scour their faces for displeasure. Made sure they won't tire of her. She's fixed all of it, except for one thing.
She wishes she had cried that day.
She wishes she could still cry.
It's one of the many things she'd lost in that house, the ability to cry. That house, that stupid, empty, horrid house had taken the feeling out of her, and other things had gotten in. At some point over the years, something sharp and cold had imbedded itself into her heart, like that one fairy tale about the snow queen and her mirror. It left her as something abrasive and less than human. Something with jagged edges and sharp teeth. Something that hides its predation behind unpresuming mimicry. Something selfish and cruel.
It's something that makes her want to test her friendships with the same calculated methodology she applies to her projects. She could withdraw, brush past them in hallways and see if they call after her. Disappear for days and see if anyone comes looking. But people aren’t machines and feelings aren’t numbers, and then she feels guilty for considering it in the first place.
She tries not to think about colleges scattered far across the country.
She tries not to feel betrayed by the fact that none of her friends are here with her.
She tries not to understand, with painful clarity, why her father was so adamant about staying in this familiar town. Why he'd shackled her mother with invisible chains and kept her miserable. She tries to swallow down the urge to do the same thing to her friends: it would be so easy, really, because they love that sweet version of herself that she puts out there, the one that explains their schoolwork and builds them trinkets and holds them tight through the bad and it would be so easy to dig just a little deeper and sink bloody claws into their hearts and tug them close. They wouldn't voice their protests, not if she pulls back the veil just enough to show them the madness seeping in at the edges of her mind, not if they, the saints that they are, believe they can save her from what she already is.
She tries to believe they won't try to leave her, won't give her a reason to do it.
She tries to believe she won't hurt them if they do.
She tries.
It happens over spring break, on a perfectly temperate day where the sun’s warm rays and the wind’s cool caress mix to form the type of weather that beckons even the most stubborn of recluses outside. Birdsong rings beautifully through the air. The shadows of tree branches dance across golden, dappled ground. A creek babbles with cheer as it glides between trees. There's a freshness in the air, the kind that usually comes after rainfall but had simply appeared today, as easily as anything. The whole world, it seems, is in pure harmony.
It really is a perfect day.
Yellow doesn’t remember thinking about it, barely even remembers doing it. Just remembers closing her eyes with the warmth of the afternoon sun enveloping her and feeling more content than she has in years.
She wakes up to a pounding headache, a sore throat that extends down her esophagus, and disappointment mixing bitterly with activated charcoal on her tongue.