Tiffany Mary Shay grows up in a dilapidated house with a tin roof that makes the endless rain echo all around the house and makes it seem so loud that makes her think the rain could penetrate through the roof at any moment. School is extremely important to her, and she's constantly trying to the achieve the best mark possible, even though her family believe that good enough will do.
Her mother is an extreme feminist, but she still does the house work and she still stays at home for most of the day. Her father is quiet and she's rarely able to have a conversation with him, but she never pushes the matter because the scars of war and bitter triumph still litter his skin, and they say more than enough.
Some days, she feels good, happy and on top of the world and of course I can do anything. Other days she feel like there's a thunder cloud over her head and that with each clench of her fists a bolt of lightning strikes down up on. She thinks that they're all tell-tale signs, thinks that she sees it in her eyes when she repeats to the mirror that everything will be ok.
No one says that she has a problem, because Shays are strong and courageous and they don't get sick, because sick is weak and pathetic and to be pitied, and that's not what Shays do.
She never said that she was strong.
.
By the age of eleven, she knows exactly what the word neurotic means.
.
Her parents finally acknowledge that she may have a problem when they find her one day with her maths strewn over the floor, some pages torn and others eternally creased, with a knife in her hand at a fateful angle. Her mother rushes to her, grabs the knife out of her hand and looks at her with the urge to slap her to the ground and to hug her and never let go crosses her facial features. Instead, she decides to try and get her daughter of a downward spiral with forgotten words and a tight grip on her arm.
Tiffany watches over her mother's shoulder as her father walks out the doorway.
She hates the white waiting room with the cool and cold receptionist, the bland walls and the blank piece of paper in front of her in contrast the colourful crayons and pens laid out before her. The page continues to remain blank the whole fifteen minutes in which the doctor takes to call out her suddenly unfamiliar name.
The doctor checks for scars that she doesn't have on her skin but she's thought about in her mind, tells her to describe impossible emotions with words, and looks up at her with calm and almost pitying eyes that make her want to crawl into a cave and die. And then that's that; with some plain confirmative words and an easy flick of her pen, she's officially sick and most likely just a big fucking disgrace to her family name.
The pills are pretty, that's for sure, but the rainbow of colours seems to get boring after a while and she's sick of them trailing acid down her throat and into her stomach every morning. Her father distance himself more from her, seeming to disappear into a tunnel of light that's far too long for her to walk down. Her mother doesn't really ever look at her the same way again.
Oh god, she isn't even eighteen yet (and her life is n o t h i n g ).
.
Her father is buried in his long and dark uniform that she's so used to seeing him in, but his face is pale and foreign to the hard-lined, stone like expression that she expected to keep on seeing, even after the phone call. It rains at the funeral, because it's fucking Seattle and there's nothing cliché about it, only expectations to meet, and her life isn't one not to deliver (because she happens to know to expect the surprises and the thunder clouds and the pills).
Still, she doesn't bring an umbrella and has to run to the subway in the now shattering rain that makes her think of tin rooves and small but grateful fires. For the first time since that prescription paper was handed to her, she gets the urge to just stop forever, and it's deep and it's there and even she isn't so far gone that she could possibly ignore it.
She manages to find her way to a bar, her sodden hair dripping down her chilled back. She orders a whiskey, the glass nearly slipping out of her wet hands as the condensation meets her skin. It does nothing to warm her up – or dull the pain. More people come into the bar, and all too soon she's hearing laughter and loud voices and people calling rounds, and she has a headache and the alcohol either didn't agree with her acid stomach or her pills.
She rushes to the bathroom, and the vomit leaves an acid trail similar to the one that the pills leave as they go down into her stomach. She doesn't know how long she stays there for, head leaning over a toilet and the back of her eyelids flashing bright and strangely familiar colours, but it's long enough for her forehead to heat up the glazed surface of the toilet, and for it to be no more use.
She washes her hands, splashing her face with water and walks back out, only to collapse again as a sudden heat washes over her. She groans as she leans back against a nearby wall, hitting her head slightly and feeling a headache come on almost immediately.
"Hey, are you ok?" She hears a voice ask, but her eyes refuse to open and her tongue feels too heavy to move. She feels hands start to grip her shoulders and a cool breath as it passes over her face, and then she's finally able to see with blurry eyes and double vision. But the navy colour looks familiar and she can see concerned brown eyes, and then she's leaning her forehead against his.
"Fine," she mutters, and she can tell that her lips are getting closer to his. But then he's saying nonono, and she's bursting into tears and screaming to go home, and she can't even control her own fucking body.
She falls asleep after she's in his arms and the words of her address have left her lips.
.
His name is Stephen Dorfman and he's in the U.S Navy Air Force and he's handsome, but he's nice and there's a certain innocence that she finds endearing and lets her be ever so slightly hopeful against her own will. She's not really certain when it happens, possibly somewhere in between coffee and when he lets her under his umbrella in a thunder storm so fierce that the thunder makes the ground rumble. But she knows that she starts to f a l l .
The glass starts to chip and break away in her hand, but the light golden liquid is already bubbling in her insides and she's far too caught up in Stephen's kisses to notice anything. But then he starts to slide off her dress and the kisses are fiercer and he manages to make all her stress that the pills have kept down for so long now out of her body in a scream and a touch of his hand.
After that, she does try to tell him, shows him the endless silver packets and the rainbow of capsules, but he doesn't really notice and there's something about his eyes that promises that he wouldn't care anyway (and she's never really been that much of a talker). And then the deal is sealed because her silver ring intertwines them and she has the vows to prove it.
.
She gets pregnant, and amidst the screams and the hugs and the good luck kisses, it has to be one of the most realistic nightmares she's ever had, because ohdeargod, there's a child growing inside her. Her hands start to shake when she takes her pills, appointments to the doctors becomes frequent, almost weekly occurrences, and she's not sure that even with Stephen holding on so tightly to her hand that she'll be able to make it.
(She doesn't really think that he'd understand though, because he's like her father and she knows that he doesn't believe in illness and he's wearing the exact same uniform.)
She does though, and she gives birth to a baby boy that she names Spencer and seems like a happy, healthy baby and she doesn't think that she's ever been so scared. After only a couple of days, the nurses tell her that she can go – to which she promptly bursts into tears. She cries and she screams, and soon Spencer is crying and screaming with her, and she only cries harder when she sees Stephen in the room.
They try and get her help, but she happens to think that it's a lost cause, even with they bring back her safe&happy little pills. Eventually, it's Spencer's eyes that make her own eyes dry again, and she finally swallows down the pills and agrees to leave, as long as they help her.
She doesn't think that she could be any happier to watch Spencer grow up, his eyes staying the same even as his body and hair got longer. She picks him up a lot, loving the feel of his arms around her neck and his constant, happy squealing of Mummy (she's never felt prouder). Every picture he paints at school is hung up in her room, and she looks at them almost every night before she goes to sleep.
(And, he only ever asks about the pills once; he was always a curious child.)
It's a long time before she thinks that she's ready to have a child again, with Spencer already above her shoulder and continuously telling her "I'm going to be taller than you someday, just you see." When she thinks that she wants a child, she wishes it was another boy.
Instead, it's a girl who she names Carly with brown eyes that she manages to get lost in.
And then, everything comes back.
.
She swears to god that she's burnt almost every single item of clothing that Spencer owns with the iron, and fuck, Carly's crying again and she could be sick and she's just such a terrible mother. Carly calms almost immediately after she picks her up, but then she coughs in her sleep and she's not really sure about whether she should take her to the hospital or not.
She misses Stephen – a lot. He's been called more and more to work than normal, and she's almost used to the empty bed at night, but she never seems to be able to accommodate for the lonely that she feels when she rolls over onto cold sheets in the morning.
Carrying Carly in her arms, she makes herself a cup of coffee before throwing the cup into the floor and hearing it shatter, not thinking about the consequences until she hears Carly awake and burst into tears again. She presses her hand to the back of Carly's neck and tries to sooth her once again, giving her a weak smile that Carly wouldn't see her register anyway. After Carly has calmed down, she dresses her and hurries out of the apartment and drops her off at day care.
After that, she takes the car out for a long, long drive and calms to calm down a bit. But as she's turning back, her hands still are still clenched tightly on the wheel and, oh, she thinks that she may just have forgotten to take her concoction of pills this morning. Maybe it's for this reason that she doesn't see the truck come and shove her car out of the way, unable to screech the breaks in time, maybe the colours of the pills distracted her away from the colour of the traffic lights. She doesn't know.
But she does know that Stephen, Spencer and her little baby Carly all think that she may have done it on purpose, that maybe she finally told herself convincingly enough that it was the right thing to do – she can tell you it wasn't, that it never was.
(Merely an hour after the phone call hits home, her little pills are in the bin and the colours of them are trying to be forgotten from where they're stained onto the back of eyelids.)
Disclaimer: I do not own iCarly.
A/N: Tell me when I get boring, k? PM or review if you didn't understand it, hated it etc.