A/N So I guess I'm doing sort of character analyses for Teen Wolf? I just feel that although the finale was PERFECT AND WONDERFUL and it actually wrapped things up very well and kinda soothed us all and kissed us on the forehead, the betas especially are very vulnerable and lost young people. Isaac is one of my favourite characters, but Erica fascinates me.
Reading Abandon Me before this helps a lot. Also, Cancel on Me by Bombay Bicycle Club is good and helpful. (:
Erica is a slut, she knows this.
She's easy, a hollaback girl, the neighbourhood bike, a drop-out, good-for-nothing. She's also a natural blonde, a C-cup, and great at geography.
The insults people throw at her are nothing new. "How long did it take you to come up with that one?" she'll reply silkily at some jab or another.
Toss your hair, smile a white smile, blink those big eyes. Erica, Erica, Erica Hale.
No, that's not her name.
Boyd is a charmer when he wants to be. They're sitting on the hood of his Zamboni in the middle of the ice rink. How he managed to keep his job after the last ice rink incident is anyone's guess, but Erica's not complaining. She likes the cold air, the way the ice makes her skin luminous.
She leans back on her arms and looks up at the brilliant overhead lights, each as powerful as a supernova. Erica can feel Boyd's eyes on her; she pretends to ignore him. At first, what they had was just a game. Erica remembers it like it was yesterday (and sometimes, she thinks it was yesterday, because Boyd knows nothing about her. They are naked acquaintances).
"What do you want, Boyd?" she asks to the ceiling. Erica tosses him these bones sometimes, a test of his will. Maybe she's hoping that one day he'll answer with something so poetic and wonderful, and Erica will look at him and fall apart, and give him everything.
She wants that, she does.
Boyd touches her cheek gently with a finger, tracing from her cheekbone to the cleft of her chin. "I want you," he says gently, "all I want is you."
Is that what she wants to hear? Is that all she needs? Erica smiles, a perfect smitten mask. She is a girl in Halloween costume: ugly on the outside, as carefully crafted as twisted plastic. She tilts her head back to look at Boyd. The light makes his skin gleam as dark as teak. His eyes are lowered. She knows that one day, she too will have to bear her soul. Boyd can only give so much. She'll need to let him in for a while, perhaps a week, to keep him coming back.
"You need to kiss me," she teases, grinning.
Boyd complies.
Good dog.
Erica used to want to be the way she is now. She wanted to be the girl who strode down the school hallway, like some tacky cut-out character from a highschool chick-flick. She wanted to pout and preen and be the prom queen. Erica, Erica, Erica Lahey.
She still wants Derek. She wants Isaac back, too. Sometimes she even wants Stiles, but when she reaches that point she'll draw her hand back from between her legs.
It's never Boyd. Affectionate, strong Boyd, who wants to give her the world.
Erica was never good at making up her mind.
"Isaac, wait." Erica doesn't do pleading. As her wolf growls and spits fire, on the outside she yearns with her Bambi eyes. Her heart clenches as the tall boy turns to face her, his backpack slipping off his shoulder, his expression devoid of life. She knows Isaac feels nothing for her anymore.
"What?"
Come back to me, run away with me, love me, want me, need me, Isaac.
"You dropped this." She pulls the pen from the valley between her breasts, hands it over with a look to rival Jessica Rabbit. Isaac stares at the pen blankly, but he takes it. Erica opens her mouth (that new sci-fi film is playing; I'm stuck in Mass Effect; what are your thoughts on Louis Lane?) and he mutters a thanks and continues down the hallway.
Erica would like to believe that it's her personality. But she knows it has to do with things like breasts and fallopian tubes, and not much to do with how they used to be.
Somewhere along the line, Isaac changed. Or perhaps he had always been that way; she was too blind to see it. Being with Isaac was like an epileptic fit: out of control, flashing lights, waves of darkness. But he would touch her, and she would see.
Erica doesn't do tears. So she purses her lips, undoes another button on her shirt, and struts back the way she came.
Her parents don't talk to her anymore – but that's fine, because Erica doesn't talk to them, either.
She's in her massive attic room, sitting on the bed. The walls are covered with gaming posters and Penguin Classics advertisements and prints of Monet. Erica's a smart girl. Not as smart as Lydia, but good enough. She's always been good enough.
Erica isn't wearing any makeup; her hair is in a sloppy ponytail. She's inspecting the claws on her left hand, looking at the way the crude, primitive bits of bone jut out sharply from her skin. Erica has taken to ignoring the way the skin has split and how sometimes she wakes up with bloody bed sheets.
Once, when she was with Isaac in those first golden weeks of wolf-hood, he had sat on this very bed with her and taken her hand gently in his own. His eyes (like cut crystal) traced the shallow lines of red flesh and the bits of torn skin. Isaac had kissed each finger, poured over her ruined fingernails as if she were an ancient artefact. He hadn't done it to be sensual. He had done it because, no matter what he said, Isaac was more wolf than human, and she was part of his pack.
Sometimes Erica thought that Derek wasn't the alpha at all.
At Jackson's end-of-summer party, Erica had lost herself in the blur of people and time and music and alcohol. She drunk far too much and puked it down the toilet. She made Boyd get her more punch. Erica watched Isaac kiss Lydia with a half-hearted, lust-driven desire, then watched him crumble at Jackson's blue-blue gaze. Erica watched Isaac's body coil with heat and sex when he met Scott's gaze; watched Isaac lose himself when Stiles innocently pressed himself against his back.
Erica could help Isaac. She could pretend.
Take me, Isaac. I'm a good little boy.
When Boyd returned, Erica downed the cup and threw herself on him. She'd lost her shirt some hours ago, so when his massive bronze paw enveloped her breast, she shuddered and whined like a bitch in heat. They made out against the wall with her grapevine legs wrapped around his middle. Derek appeared across the room. She held his cold gaze as Boyd buried his face in her hair and whispered a hand along the waistband of her underwear.
Erica, Erica, Erica.
Who are you?