In Laymon's Terms

Deadweight studied her face. “Hmmm...this guy...kind of weird. Makes your tits all scabby but leaves no trail anywhere else. Leave it to you to find a freaky guy like that. I bet he still lives with his mother, and still sucks on her each night to satiate his titty fetish. I wonder if he makes his mommy’s titties all scabby.” She grinned with teeth that weren’t quite crooked, or quite straight.

Angie sighed. “You just wish some guy, any guy would bother making your tits scabby.”

Deadweight glared. “That was uncalled for.” Her eyes flinched in their sockets the way they had when Angie would pull a pigtail when they were little.

“Ummm...wait, before we get into this...You’re the one who’s been ragging on me. I just say one thing and...”

“I was kidding; that wasn’t kidding.”

“Relax, kidding is in the eye of the beholder. Okay?”

Her glare relaxed, but her mouth still tensed. “Just because I don’t have a different guy each week doesn’t mean I’m ugly.”

Angie looked up at Deadweight. Her cousin, underling, and sometimes-confidante oozed a broken-spiritedness that hadn’t been in since the days of grunge and heroin chic. Only, she couldn’t possibly pull off the waif look until she dropped a hundred pounds. Beyond her size and her despondence, there were other things. Those thick glasses caked with smudges. The acne which, even at eighteen, clustered in colonies on her forehead and chin. Deadweight’s attempts to match Angie’s fashion sense slammed against the reality of the girls’ disproportionate family incomes.

To see the two of them together served as a compelling testament to the power of nurture over nature. The defining features of their matrilineal clan lingered over both. Each had wide hips, ample breasts, and most defining of all, the Roman nose and pouty mouth. Yet, as if subjected to an experiment, each had been raised in homes as different as two sisters can be.

“I didn’t say you were ugly. Look, I’m really, really tired. We shouldn’t fight like this our last summer together. No more fights, okay?”

“Oh, I see, the commoner did your nails, served her purpose, so now you need to crash. Who’s going to do mine?”

Angie remembered Deadweight’s brittle, chipped nails. She got up and pulled the bed sheets down. “Tomorrow. Right now I have to crash, and this headache’s killing me.”

Deadweight looked on.

“Good Byyyyyyeee.”

It stabbed and released, over and over again with the rhythm of rutting. Each pain in her skull reminding her of J.D. clawing into her, slurping and sucking on her nipples, then biting and thrusting into her. He gave no pause before crashing into her like high tide in winter, and she had succumbed gratefully.

She woke up damp. Wet between her thighs, wet atop her skin, and frozen to the marrow. Someone kept on knocking on the door, and calling to her. She found her panties and nightshirt tossed to the floor. She scrambled to put them on, stumbled and fell onto the hardwood floor. The knocking at the door continued, and the knocking in her head resumed, now like a hammer driving a nail deeper and deeper into her brain. She crawled to the door. Bracing herself with the handle, she pulled herself up from the ground. She turned the knob.

Deadweight stood just outside, frowning. “Aren’t you going? You’ve been hiding out in there all day.”

She glanced out the window. Nighttime. “Going...where?”

“To the outlets. We were supposed to find me some new shorts, remember?”

“Oh, I...” Her teeth chattered and pricked her gums. “Ouch.”

“Something isn’t right. You’re sick.”

“My mouth...fuck!”

“Here, let me see.” Deadweight flicked on the light switch.

The only hint of color in the girl’s body was the thin scribbles of blue veins around her wrists, the undersides of her elbows, and her legs. Something had bleached her skin an impossible white. Her dirty blonde hair, brown eyes and candy apple nail polish now stood out as awkward anachronisms from days of life and color.

Deadweight screamed her throat raw. “Oh God, what the fuck’s happened to you?”

Muffled voices from downstairs. “What’s wrong up there?” She heard the clanking lever of her father’s Lay-Z-Boy. His steel-toed footsteps bounded up the stairs, creaking the hardwood. Squeak, pound. Squeak, pound. Deadweight continued to shriek.

New instincts asserted themselves. The pounding inside Angie’s head grew less severe, less foreign. It now served as a new pulse, a psychic one picking up where the physical one ended. She tried to tell Deadweight to shut up, but it came out as a hiss and a snarl. Frustrated by her inability to tell Deadweight exactly what she thought of her, she summed it up by flipping her the vampiric bird.

Yellow and red flew past her, followed by a ghostly rush of air. The window flinched twice in two seconds. Then the door flew open, and Deadweight turned to face Uncle Ray. “She’s left.”