"I was out of your league,
And you were 20,000 underneath the sea,
Waving affections.
You were out of my league,
At a distance that I didn't want to see,
Down to the bottom."
-True Affection, The Blow
!
As You Wish
!
It all started with a Jarred.
For whatever reason, men avoided Sarah like children avoided the crust on a sandwich, or like a New Yorker might avoid an unattended box on a train—by running full speed in the opposite direction. They looked at her like a small woman might peer into a back alley at night; with skepticism and more than a little distress. Karen chocked it up to intimidation, said that she was just so pretty, so headstrong—Lord knew that she was a hellion a few years ago—that men didn't know how to approach her, didn't know what to do with her.
But it wasn't like that, and Sarah couldn't explain it to her step-mother without sounding like a looney toon. It was more like a curse, like she wasn't a qualified contestant for the dating scene. Like everyone else were birds and she was a fish.
She didn't match. There was no one out there charming enough, or clever enough, or tempting enough. It just wasn't fair.
Strangely enough, it wasn't until Sarah's eighteenth birthday that she got her first—second, she noted with aversion—taste of true, unadulterated male attention.
Sarah didn't make wishes anymore, at least not out loud. She knew now that there were things in the dark that listened, jealous, lonely things that twisted hopes and dreams and innocence into something more than they should have been.
And so it was an unspoken wish that brought Jarred to Sarah, his image obscured by the hazy, pungent smoke of the candles she had just blown out.
She had wished for a beautiful man, a gorgeous, handsome man.
She only had to look at Jarred to know that he was a model. His face was carved from marble, cheek bones and chin line sharp, faerie sharp—sharp like someone else's, someone she had known a long time ago. His eyes were dark, velvet shadows set into his face. Those eyes hunted her, mocked her.
It wasn't Jarred that she liked, it was the smooth, cold man she saw underneath. It was his name, his name that was so close, sounded so much the same. She could almost play pretend.
And it was a game, make no mistake. A man like Jarred, confined to one woman? What a silly thought. She should have learned by then to make better wishes, because beautiful, handsome and gorgeous was not the same on the outside as it was on the inside.
Sarah was mad. She was mad at every thought of him. Jarred, she told herself, Jarred. But somehow those last few letters slipped. Somehow her thoughts always wandered back to him. She was mad at herself, really. She wanted to drown every thought of him out, drown his existence—or nonexistence—from her life.
And she did, in Fireball whiskey with her best friend, Gabby.
That only seemed to make it worse. The cinnamon, the rich, cloying scent of it reminded her of him, Jare—No. It stained lips red, like his. Burned on the way down, like him. It warmed her from the inside out, like he did.
Drunkenly, Sarah might have uttered that she wished she could find someone fun. What she really wanted was to forget.
That night, Jon made her forget.
He flirted with her, and she liked it. He was in a band, and she didn't have the heart to tell him that she really didn't like live music. She listened to him anyways, and he dedicated a song to her. It was a dirty song, with lines that told her that he wanted to make her come—closer to him.
He invited her to his house.
And she was stupid, she was so stupid. She wasn't that kind of girl, but she was buzzing hard and she did it anyways. She went home with him.
Sarah wondered why it was that a man couldn't go five minutes without trying to stick his hand up her shirt. She didn't like it, and she didn't like him. He was a sleazy, slippery eel of a man. He recited his life verbatim from his Facebook page, as though the 2D slab was everything that made him up.
And that's why, she told herself, she threw up on his expensive Tom shoes as he was sliding his hand into her pants.
It wasn't the alcohol that made her sick, it was his disgusting personality.
Needless to say, Jon lost her number after that, and Sarah didn't mind.
He was an empty thing, anyways.
She looked at the people around her with a strange sense of disappointment. They were all so blunt-faced, everything about them congruent and explainable and predictable. Their hair was plain, their eyes so dull, their spirits broken and trampled on like sickly weeds. She knew what the men wanted from her. She knew what the women thought of her, with their eyes bright and steely like angry surgical blades.
Looking back, all she could see was the filmy fluttering of pale wings, the endless, mocking stretch of glittering mahogany brick, a crooked nose set into a knotted face with glass-like eyes. She could smell the thick, rotten-fruit-and-putrid-eggs scent as it crept down her throat, stuck in her lungs like half-chewed taffy.
She saw devil masks, wild hair, bright eyes, sharp faces and tongues. She felt chiffon, taffeta, velvet, tulle, silk rustling against her skin. Hands on her waist, mismatched eyes on her face.
How could she have known then what he was offering her?
How could she have known then that there was no one in her world like him?
The Labyrinth had crawled into her veins; he had crawled into her veins like an inchworm with an accent. She was spliced now, a child of both worlds but still neither. It was this place that wasn't real now.
Because the whole world was a labyrinth, really. It was a twisting, turning thing with no way forward or back. There wasn't even a castle in the middle that she could aim for now.
So she wished then for someone to love her. Love her like h—
Jason did love her. He loved her well and often, and often so well that she couldn't walk straight. He put a sickness in her, one that covered up the incurable disease she already had. He did love her. He loved her until she put her shirt back on, until she walked out that door and into the real world where there were no mornings of gold or valentine evenings.
He loved her until his wife showed up at the door. Followed by his other mistress.
And it didn't matter, because really she knew all along. What more could you expect from natural born liars? After all, what did long nights of phone silence truly mean? What was the truth behind the words, gone on a business trip?
The truth was a five year old child. A child that could have been Toby, or someone else's baby brother.
And Sarah wondered who she was now. Who was she that she dated pretentious model-men, and was preyed on by greasy, guitar playing sweet-talkers in a bar, and slept with cheating fathers of children that could have been wished away to a world where she could only wish to be wished away to?
She was not a character in some movie or book, who grew up to be an A-list actress and got engaged to a perfect prince from overseas that had oodles of money which she could give away to children in Haiti or homeless people. She was not a page with ink scribbled all over it, writing her out as a one way street without a smarmy back road in sight.
She wasn't selfless, see-through Princess Sarah.
Because people eventually became twisted too, like old, gnarled trees. Like words that never should have been said, or like goblins. Like Hoggle's wrinkled face. Like her path through the Labyrinth.
Sarah wished, not for anything this time, she just wished.
That wish brought her Josh, and how she wished it hadn't.
He wasn't particularly stupid, he was just un-smart. He was un-smart like a goblin was un-smart, or like a child. He was slow on a basic level. He didn't offer Sarah the last piece of pizza. He was too broke to take her out to eat, but not so broke that he couldn't buy beer. He turned his back to her instead of cuddling. He was just obnoxious.
He was like the punch line to a year long joke that Sarah didn't find funny. Everyone else must have been laughing at her expense, though. She knew at least one person that would be laughing at her.
She couldn't get away from Josh fast enough. From all of them.
By Sarah's nineteenth birthday, she was wishing that Jarred had never looked her way, caught her eye beyond the orange burning of the eighteen candles. She was wishing that not a single drop of Jareth-smelling-belly-burning cinnamon whiskey had ever passed her lips and loosened her up enough to go home with Jon and throw up on his pretentious, ass-ugly, sixty-dollar shoes. She wished that she had never believed a word that came out of Jason's been-around-the-block-thrice lips. She wished that poor, jacked and tanned Josh hadn't had the mind of a goblin.
At midnight, with nineteen candles glowing like crystals, like nineteen orange, velvety peaches in the dark room, Sarah's burnt out heart made a wish that she wished it hadn't. Her heart wasn't a fair thing, but then, a heart wouldn't be a heart if it were fair.
"I wish," she whispered into the darkness.
12:00, the clock read.
The candles blew out, startling her.
"Why is it," asked a familiar voice, "that you always seem to make the wrong wishes?"