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It wasn’t Ginger’s fault, Brigitte told herself.
“Are you staring at my tits? Perv.”
Brigitte hadn’t been, but Ginger seemed insistent.
Brigitte looked at the floor, waiting for the tirade to be over.
It wasn’t Ginger’s fault. It wasn’t her fault. It was fucking Bailey Downs’s fault, if anything. On their tiny basement television, there was always a steady stream of movies, mostly old, black-and-white, and grainy – because why would anything new and bold make it to Bailey Downs? – but sometimes the old sci-fi or horror movies were old enough to be uncool to the other kids in high school, which then made them cool to the Fitzgerald sisters, because fuck the dumbasses around them. One such midnight movie was about pod people. They had no individuality, no human emotion, no distinctiveness. They would have fit right in here in Bailey fucking Downs. Bailey Downs, that bred you into some kind of pod-person-Pamela and if you weren’t perfect, if you severed yourself from the vine, you yellowed over and collapsed in on yourself. That was what Ginger was going through. Rotting on the vine as Pamela tried to cultivate her, as she tried to cut herself free, syrupy pus running down from the hack marks like blood. Brigitte could… empathize (sympathize?) with that…
Pamela certainly felt like the epitome of a pod person sometimes, with her blindly cheery expectations for her saplings and her affinity already for gardening, flower arrangements, and general plant stuff. All Pamela’s attempts at careful pruning – clipping their leaves just so, not letting Brigitte cut her hair the way she wanted, warning of the amorous advances of boys… well, what if boys didn’t tickle your fancy like pollen tickling a bee’s legs? Huh, Pamela? Brigitte… had her own experiences with that…
It wasn’t Ginger’s fault, Brigitte told herself.
“Yeah. You are. Wishing you were me, huh, B? Wanting to be me? Listened to too much of Pamela going on about ‘blooming into womanhood’ and starting to get jealous? Or are you just a pervert? Wouldn’t put it past you if you tried to touch them…”
Brigitte kept her eyes on the floor, wishing for it to be over.
The sick thing was, Brigitte’s eyes had strayed to Ginger’s chest in the past, but it hadn’t been pervert shit. It had been… young curiosity, or just… her eyes settling in the wrong place as Ginger was splayed out, gore-stained, for a photo. If Brigitte accidentally looked down her sister’s shirt while snapping pictures, Ginger wouldn’t have said that was pervert shit, would she?
(She would, some part of Brigitte’s mind whispered darkly. Ginger would do anything to make Brigitte share in her guilt.)
“You can touch them, if you like,” said Ginger offhand, with a detachment of tone she usually used for suicide talk. It didn’t seem to faze Ginger that she’d just called that pervert shit a moment before. The point wasn’t consistency. The sick mind game was the point. “It won’t make you a dyke or anything.”
Brigitte wondered if Ginger said that because she saw Brigitte seared under the sunlamps the other pod people set up to grow saplings into good little grotesques, and wanted to sear her more, wanted to use Brigitte’s vulnerable state against her. Knew Brigitte was a dyke hiding in plain sight among the pod people of Bailey Downs, rebelling and guiltily assimilating at the same time, and wanted to use that guilt to her own advantage. Or if Ginger said that because it was Ginger’s own form of self-assurance. Asking her sister to feel her up didn’t make her a dyke, in Ginger’s twisted logic. Projecting her own insecurities onto Brigitte. It was never really about Brigitte. It was always about her.
“Ew,” said Brigitte dully. Ginger immediately became defensive.
“Fuck, B, don’t be gross about it. Think of it as a way of sticking it to everything Pamela patters on about all day. Us growing into ‘fine young ladies.’ Soppy-simpery suburbs-eat-your-brains bullcrap. Taking something pastel-pink and pure like us ‘flowering into womanhood’ and tainting it, tarnishing it. It’s the shit, B, let me tell you.”
“Sticking it… to Pamela?” Brigitte repeated with dry, skeptical resignation. She didn’t know if Ginger expected her to believe it.
From beyond the curtain of her hair as she stared at the floor, she heard Ginger’s voice, whispering close, “You’ve got to understand me, B.”
Brigitte finally raised her eyes and, disgustedly, did understand her – understood the tremble in her voice because it was like the tremble in Brigitte’s own whenever self-confidence shivered and the fragility of her stoic, shadowed performance showed itself in her tone. Understood her yellow and oozy face, sweat-bleeding on the vine. Understood what it was to be a thing unlike Bailey Downs – a dyke, a freak, a fuck – a thing outside Bailey Downs but trapped inside Bailey Downs, in this skin, a pod-person peeling away the cornhusk-shell of her body even if it meant bleeding with it…
She saw herself in Ginger’s eyes.
And mechanically, tiredly, she reached under Ginger’s shirt.
It wasn’t their fault they had this… need. Brigitte refused to call it desire. It was a hollowness in them that they needed to fill, and Brigitte had it as much as Ginger did. If they were anywhere else, maybe it would have been different, maybe they could have found someone else to fill the hollowness in them, but they were here in this dingy basement, musting over with the rest of the decay, they were here in Bailey Downs, strangled close with pod tapers, and Brigitte’s clammy hand was stroking Ginger’s breast.
Ginger’s eyes crusted over like a sugar-sweet left to rot. Brigitte wanted to interpret it as Ginger detaching herself from the action, but she knew that wasn’t true. Some subconscious part of her knew that wasn’t true. Brigitte tried to ignore the little flecks of spittle building on Ginger’s lips, tried to ignore Ginger’s short, ragged breathing that betrayed too much pleasure – Brigitte refused to call it pleasure – the short, ragged gasps that betrayed almost a moan, hinted a moan…
Brigitte tore her hand away apprehensively.
“Ginge, this is…”
Fucked.
Ginger’s glazed eyes darkened. Brigitte felt that whatever sensitivity she had shown her older sister, Ginger took that apprehension as a betrayal. There was a wildness in Ginger’s clouded eyes a moment. She had betrayed too much of herself in that moment. She was the vulnerable one, not Brigitte. She had lost the power in the moment – and she wanted it back.
“Pervert,” she snarled suddenly, accusingly, at Brigitte. “I told you not to get off on it. You’re a sick fuck, B.”
Brigitte said nothing.
It wasn’t Ginger’s fault, Brigitte told herself.
(It was Ginger’s fault.)
(The cruelty, at least, was Ginger’s fault.)
Ginger recoiled from her, huffing declaratively that she was going to jack off to the thought of some jerk who always harassed them at school and try to wash herself clean of this whole experience.
Brigitte turned over in her bed, feeling unclean, and as she heard Ginger’s panting, ragged moans behind her, she tried to convince herself that Ginger had spoken the truth – tried to convince herself that her sister was not thinking of her.