I've always loved our room. It's just so… us, you know? The walls coloured a deep purple just because I like red while Brigitte likes blue. Yeah, we have random stuff everywhere, but that's just because we're cool, taking something from nonexistent friends, buying stuff from Dollar Stores and second-hand shops. We stole that sun-umbrella from our aunt on Dad's side, the one who died of cancer. She didn't care, though, she was too sick to even notice.

Brigitte comes in and I'm turned away from her, the knife mere millimetres away from the flesh on my wrist; a corny show on the television is barely audible to us. Why we even have that T.V. is beyond me… it's not like there's anything good to watch. It's like Bailey Downs is converted to television format on every programme. My sister sets the objects to our next death project between our beds as I talk about our actual death. She sits down on her bed and looks at me, no, not at me, behind me. That's the closest she'll ever come to looking at someone. This I know because she won't look at anyone else; always referring to the wall beside them, down at a book, or occasionally their hands. Don't ask me why she does that, she's just weird that way.

I play with a rubber mouse we stole from Mrs. Jenkins, our math teacher, as she tells me she doesn't want people laughing at her. They won't laugh, what the fuck is she talking about? They'd be in horror, shock that we'd actually do something different, fear that if we did something so outrageous like killing ourselves, their children will follow our suit. Ha! I find that funny: one child kills them self, all the other children will follow, like pathetic dogs with no lives. I wonder what kind of deaths they would come up with.

Today is a good day for a death. The sun is out, the birds are singing, children laugh at others' follies; the blood will coagulate quickly as the milk curdles in it.

"Eww, what's that?" Brigitte asks me as I pull the latex out of a small red package.

"I don't know… it says… coon-dome… on the rapper," I reply, stretching the cloudy thing around my fingers. "It feels funny."

She pokes it, pulling her arm back quickly. "Where'd you get it?"

"Pamela's room," I say, poking her back with my covered fingers. "I wonder what they'd need this for."

"Let me look at the package," she says, grabbing it. "It says condom… What's a condom?" I shake my head and shrug my shoulders.

"Hey, Ginge?" she asks me. I nod, not looking up from my sketch of a hanging person. "Umm… do you remember back when we were little we found that condom in Pam's room?" I nod again. "Uhh, do you ever wonder why they'd have them?" I look up from my sketch, squinting my eyes at her, trying to remember how her eyes looked so I could draw them. I shake my head.

"Not really… why do you ask?"

"Uhh… I heard Pamela talking about… an abortion." My head flies up.

"Who was she talking to?" I inquire.

"Aunt Jeanie, I think…" I bite my lip. "How would it be if we had another sister?" she asks. I look at her bewildered and shake my head. I can't even imagine; it's always been just Me and Bee.

We once had a cat. We named her Thanatos and she was a pretty, seven-toed, green-eyed black cat that had no tail and half a heart. Brigitte found her in the field of Bailey Downs High when we were in elementary school. That was back when she was in a grade lower than me. Anyways, she found this beautiful cat and we named her Thanatos in honour of the Greek god of Death. We loved that thing to death… Trina Sinclair once threatened her and we went ballistic on her, telling her we'd kill her and her family if she dared to even pet her. But she was so annoying, too: she'd get into our death projects and our clothes. She died because of her heart on Winter Solstice at 12:01 AM.

Can you guess what our favourite season is? You probably can, it's winter. I love winter because that's when everything dies; the sun, the stars, the land, the people. Back in the old days, people who weren't prepared for it would die. Can you imagine, sweet, steaming red blood sizzling as it hit the frozen land of snow? I find that image very beautiful. Death can have such an astounding affect on people…

It was winter when we found those ravens. We were in the park when Brigitte spotted the nest by the tree roots. There were two ravens in it, under them were eggs, but the birds were dead, frozen. She looked at me, horrified, when I took their heads off. No blood came out of either of them because it was probably frozen in them. We put the nest in the tree and left with the heads.

"We made these into necklaces, and we'll wear them everyday to show our faith in the pact," I said as I put the necklace around her neck. "Out by sixteen," she put the necklace around my neck, "or dead in this scene," I cut her left hand, "but together forever," she cuts mine.

"United against life as we know it," she added as we clasped hands, joining ourselves together by blood and the femininity of our left hands. I put the skull ring on her right thumb, she did the same for me. By doing so, we were saying "Fuck you," to men, all we needed was each other and out of Bailey Downs. To finish off our pact we poured wax from candles on each others' cuts to seal it.

We made our math teacher in Grade Six go literally insane. She was our first math teacher we had together; Brigitte skipped Grade Five. So, by having us together, she went insane by our "calculating death". That was quite fun. We'd squint at her, and write down random "equations" leading up to her death. She went hysterical by the end of the year, thinking she would actually die within a month… she actually did die within a month at the insane asylum.

We also freaked out the librarian of Bailey Downs Elementary School. We would go in the library each lunch hour and look at books about death, searching up diseases and mental disorders. Once we even found a perfect book for us called The Girls He Adored which had everything we liked in it. We never gave it back to the library and had Pamela pay for it, thinking we had lost it. It's still in our room, somewhere. We also have the famous poem The Raven somewhere in there, too. The line in the poem, "Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing," is how I imagine death… Ok, maybe I don't fear it, just the darkness, the loneliness, the cold, and the thoughtlessness. Perhaps that's why I made the pact… so I won't be alone in the darkness.

When we were in Grade Nine, we took art, and in the course we had to do a skit on film. We had just rented Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd on VHS and loved it, so we were sort of inspired… In our skit I was the Sweeney Todd-type character that killed people with a razor (my index finger), and Brigitte was a victim. I killed her with my make-shift razor and a red silk ribbon to represent blood. She died and then I had to "realize" she was my sister, so I "killed" myself. Je me suis tué, as the French would say.

We never learned about puberty until Grade Seven. We started the unit, "Family Life" and our teacher was awkward about it. I personally liked our Grade Seven teacher because she was cool and treated the ones who earned her respect like adults. We were lucky enough to gain her trust. But she just gave us, the class, these worksheets and went to her desk. We looked at them confused and bewildered, and didn't even do them. We started drawing stitches across the woman's genitalia picture and deep red gashes on the penises. Mrs. Grant didn't really care if we turned them in or not. There was this booklet that we were given that had all the basic information about menstruation and all that gross stuff and didn't even talk to any of us. She gave us all A's in "Family Life".

Pamela asked us about school and we told her we had learned about puberty. She got all excited and grossed us out with talking about it, saying that if we ever had any questions to just ask her. Ha! Like we'd talk to her about puberty.

Brigitte looked at me in pain, her eyes watering and widening. Her face went paler and then a very slight blue tinge to her lips, then nose. Her hands went into grotesque positions. Finally she let her breath out. "What's my time?" she inquired.

"Forty-three seconds… Pity, you just about beat my time of fifty-six." She sighed, looking down. "Don't worry," I said, sneering, "I'm only good because I've had practice."

She tilted her head down. I smiled slightly and pulled it back up with my index- and middle- fingers. Her green eyes found mine, and for once we held eye contact. For a few moments we just sat there, her on the floor and me on her bed. I surprised myself by looking away. "Let's go to the graveyard… It's Thanatos' death day." I said, in an almost nonchalant way. I didn't even look at her and left the room, knowing she'd follow.

I stood behind a stone angel, my head peeking out from over its shoulder, my right hand on the joint of a wing, my other one on the jaw of the face, caressing the cold statue softly, my arm under the angel's arm but above the wing. My left leg was wrapped around to the front and I wore my Hallowe'en leather boots. Brigitte took the Polaroid as wind blew my hair in front my face and the face of the statue. That was her idea.

If I had been smart, I would have brought some fake blood and splashed some on the statue, but I didn't know Bee would bring her Polaroid-camera. I really wish I had brought some, just in case, now.

That was a few years back, and we don't do those kinds of shots, now. No, we take pictures of death, not just the mood of it. It was too fun doing the lawnmower death… Brigitte and I were on a role, but were running out of ideas, fast. I decided; let's do one of me with my guts spewed about? So, I grabbed the lawnmower while Bee got the fake guts, I lit a cigarette, laid down with the lawnmower beside me until she got back. She threw a package of blood on me and then arranged the guts. I smoked until she had put the appliance over me. That thing was heavy! So I then put my hand out and waited for her to take the shot. She did exactly seven.

On our laptop with the Fingering Hand Sticker on it we edited the photos; scanning them on because we couldn't get a digital camera. We chose shot number four for the "Lawnmower Death". God, I love that laptop, we have so much stuff on it. Ah, Pamela got that laptop to me on my seventh Christmas. Brigitte got her Polaroid camera…

The walls in our room are weird… As the infamous Stephen King wrote in his novella 1408:

(it feels like silk like old dead skin)

That's our room. Dad didn't do a good job at painting our room, so now our walls are all fucked up. But at least they're good for taping up pictures. Yeah, Dad never does anything all that great… take for instance, our unfinished basement. He isn't good for anything, really, but he's our father. And that's better than being Pamela…

Oh, Pamela… our wasted, useless, annoying mother, Pamela. The one we try to be the complete opposite of. She might have been cool, once, before we were born, but that side of her is gone. If only she had stayed reckless…

The teachers at our school were like Pamela and Henry: unwilling to hear us. You would have thought our art teacher would be able to half-understand us, but she was the worse… Correction, second worse, Mr. Wayne is the worst. With his bushy eyebrows and double chin, he tries and tries to "reach" us, but it's all futile. I'm not too sure who is worse, the teachers or the students…

Enough about our school, more about the cemetery. That's the most beautiful place in Bailey Downs, we find. The crooked tombstones, the statues that guard, the dead ground in which the dead rest, it's all very beautiful. My favourite part of the cemetery is near the far end, there's a giant weeping willow that always sways, no matter if there's wind or not. We sit there, sometimes, after school and plan. We write ways of killing ourselves in the word processor, poems which get re-written onto paper for our death projects, Search and Destroys about random people, (my favourite is the one about Mr. Wayne), and the background has our pact written in Century Gothic font. We took pictures of our scars and a picture Brigitte drew and that's part of our background, too.

Here are some random facts about us. Brigitte's hair goes slightly curly when exposed to humidity. My hair goes lighter in winter than in summer. And we both have freckles on our left shoulder. Bee's are more noticeable, though. When we were younger, we used to have our own bedrooms, until we were about six. Then Dad decided to redo the basement, he told us we could share a room together, and I totally accepted.

"Ginger-honey, what do you and Raven-Bee think about sharing a room downstairs?" Dad asked me. Brigitte was off in her own little world for a few moments before I nudged her out of it.

"Hunhhh?" she groaned.

"What do you think about sharing a room downstairs?" I asked her. She just shrugged. "Ok… I think that'd be cool. Are you really going to redo the basement?" I asked. Dad just nodded, and so, we had a room downstairs.

We bought the blue beaded curtains when we went to Toronto for a field trip with our class. I thought them cool, but only if they had been in red. Brigitte, of course, loved them. Pamela got us a lifetime supply of black electrical tape because she noticed us liking it, so that's what we use to tape our photos and poems up. Me and Bee tend to draw a lot in class, so we hang those up, too. Personally, I really like our room…

A/N: Wow... take a load o' that! I spent most of my day writing this, so, I hope you enjoy!!

KNQ