Chapter 25: A Beautiful, Little fool

Question: Who still needs to pack? Answer: Me... (So I shouldn't have written anything tonight but I had it in my head and was worried I would lose it if I didn't just type it out right away. "Hello my name is Dixie and I'm a Windaholic." Ahh. I'm such an addict about GWTW, always have been. I need to find a support group.)

Previously on AGW: Brent's funeral (15); the last chapter (24)

"Scarlett! Scarlett! Oh my…Scarlett. Please God. Scarlett."

It was a voice she knew, but something was the matter with it. It was broken. She wanted to answer but she couldn't. She was broken.

The world was.

It had exploded and she was floating in the aftermath, on a sea of shattered glass. Only her face stayed above the jagged surface. Her arms and legs skidded beneath with the crystal shards. Her stomach and back had been sawed open. She didn't know what was holding her body together. It wasn't her ripped apart belly. It wasn't the glass; that once fragile substance damaged and destroyed, the endangered becoming the danger.

Lights pulsated through her shut lids. Pressure built up against her bones. The man's ragged voice had silenced. Maybe it had been her imagination. Maybe it had been a hallucination. Maybe it had never happened, any of it—her world erupting, her body splintering, her life cleaving in two: the moment before and the moment after. Maybe this was the only moment, a million cuts grinding her flesh raw; the end collapsing into the beginning.

Scarlett lounged on her parent's porch swing, fanning herself with the American Lit worksheet she was supposed to be finishing. Her pose was lazy, almost graceful. Raven locks spilled around her shoulders and dipped into the shadow in between her breasts. Stripes of ivory flesh peeked out from below her shirt when she rustled her arms. The April sun beat down on her, basting her skin with a rosy sheen of sweat. The cutoff jeans exposed her muscular, slender legs. Every easy curve and firm slope of her body was languidly sensual, sweetly erotic. And if not for that wild hunger in her green eyes, innocent.

At sixteen she was aware as she was unaware of sex, not the act or the gender, but of the fantasy, the addiction, the intimacy, the symbol beyond the thrill of corporeal connection and a chemical spike. The sex exuding from her was all those things, and more. It was the simple allure of the ankle to men in former times, the promise of touching the forbidden. It was the potential of everything. She was Eve, uninterrupted, biting the fruit with conviction and not from temptation. In her eyes, as green as the earth, stirred the primordial forces of life itself: chaos and creation.

She crossed her bare legs, her thighs rubbing against each other, and hid the smirk at the surge of lust in the Tarleton twins' eyes. The potency of passion meant nothing to her, except a vague sense of control. She was too young to know the price, or the value, of power. She was a girl, in a woman's body

"War? What war?" she asked, bored.

"What war?" Brent stuttered, flushed from the heat of bodies above and below. He slapped his thigh for release. Incredulity doused the daydream. He shook his head at Stu and turned back to Scarlett.

"The war on terror—do you ever watch the news?'

"Yes."

"The news—not the Daily Show."

"The Daily Show is news."

"I hate to break it to you, Scar," cut in Stu, more relaxed and aggressive. He poked the stripe of skin above her jeans. "But Jon Stewart talks about the war, or wars, in the Middle East on a pretty regular basis."

Scarlett folded her hands, crinkling her sheet of homework.

"So I only watch it if he's interviewing someone I like. And I'm not a bimbo. I know there's a war going on." She brushed her hair back. "But what difference does that make to me? We're in Georgia, not Badghad—"

"I think you mean Baghdad," suggested Brent.

"Whatever. Baghdad. We're not even in New York. Honestly, I don't know why you want to enlist Brent. Your parents practically own half of UGA—they would have admitted you no matter what your GPA was. They did Stu."

She elbowed Stu and winked, the jab of touch softening the verbal one. The twins laughed. Their long, thick bodies shook the swing. Their biceps flexed against Scarlett's arms.

"Hey, I get more credit than that." Stu pumped his arm, throwing an invisible football. "I've got mad skills on the field."

The three laughs rang out again. Their lusty, young voices braided together in a carefree, careless harmony. Stu was a top-draft high school lineman, but he'd said what Boyd always did when his younger brothers ragged on him for lacking any athletic ability. Brent was the first to quiet. His blue eyes suddenly colored with a cool ferocity, the fervor of the unjaded believer.

"I'll get to learn how to use sniper riffles and grenades. It ain't all drones. I mean, I'll be a Marine, guys. They're intense. They have to be. The war's intense."

Scarlett gave him a look. The War on Terror. It had been going on since she could remember, her dad complaining about who knows what, in who knows where, her mother worrying silently over some unfamiliar and unseen horror. Some collective events had inevitably trickled down into her dense, distracted brain, only to pool in forgotten corners, leaving about as much impression on her as a breeze on a window.

The violence was too far removed, the terror somebody else's reality. The storm raged in some other place. But if Brent went to that unknown place—it would become a known place. Her world would shrink. And it couldn't do that. Her world was her; she the sole, selfish inhabitant. A faint ache tugged at her heart. It had a name she knew by instinct. Dread.

"I don't want to talk about the stupid war anymore," she abruptly snapped. "You can play the hero Brent. Not me."

Both Tarletons looked a little taken aback. The smoothness of the afternoon shorted into static. It took a moment for the picture-perfect scene to blink back, the zebra pixels to become sharp colors again. The return of ease was only a visual effect, skin deep.

"You…you going to the Wilkes' party tomorrow night?" Stu asked after a moment, standing up and stretching his arms over his head.

"A party? Of course."

Her response was robotic, the automated voice of hotlines and ATM machines. Stu and Brent tried a few more topics but they all fizzled against Scarlett's superficial interest. In the end they left. Stu said good bye and jogged down the steps. Brent rose reluctantly. He watched Scarlett. Before he turned to go, he spoke. His words fell clumsily from his inarticulate, untried tongue.

"Truth Scarlett? I'm going to be doing something that matters—even to you. All these wars…they can't be for nothing." He licked his lips. "They just can't be for nothing."

The twins hopped into their Mustang and sped out of her drive way. Scarlett stayed on the porch. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows across the lawn, across her body. That tingle of dread wouldn't quit. It kept pricking here, there, here, there. What would happen if her world changed?

She glanced down at her crumpled assignment. A series of quotes that she was supposed to write about, that she didn't even understand. One jumped off the page.

"And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed...He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. "I know myself," he cried, "but that is all."

Scarlett lifted her turbulent, lusty gaze. The struggle would be worth the while. She was worth the while. Her wants, her needs, her life, her world. No one would change it. She knew herself. The world was hers to change.

An electric scream and a techno beep bleated in Scarlett's ears. Sparks flew at her heart. The chandelier bits crushed beneath her body fragmented into smaller, pointed granules; the weight of her bucking chest pounding the pieces to powder.

And in her mind, she silently screamed. Fool, fool, fool. Everything had been for nothing. Her struggles, her failures and her triumphs fractured, futile. War—fighting—it was all for nothing. Brent had died. She would, too. In the end youth and beauty were no more. Always, always life surrendered to death. She had not changed the world. It had changed her.

Had her life ever been in one piece? Had she? Once. As a child she had been unbroken, when time had given instead of taken, when she could have one thing without losing something else, when she'd had a mother, when she'd had a father, when she had been a girl. What was left of that girl but an aching soul? She didn't want to repeat her innocence. She wanted to repeat the intoxicating thrill of losing it again; to bite the apple and not face the consequences of a fallen world. Not to be bitten in return.

Another jolt rocked her body. Time meant nothing, with her existence so near and so far. Her eyes fluttered open. A dark face streaked with tears. The sable eyes drenched in the gossamer strands. It was a face that called her back from the brink. It reminded her of what she still had to lose, of what she still had to gain. It reminded her of another girl, the girl whose world she would destroy should she accept defeat. But it was not the face she wanted to see.

She opened her mouth, the sweet stench of morphine being sopped up by her veins and sinking her back into oblivion, "Mammy…Where's Rhett?"

Before her grandmother could answer, Scarlett was gone.

Note: Stop. She's just in a morphine-induced coma. I liked the effect the ambiguity had on the text but I will clarify so I don't have a revolt. Thanks for the reviews. Sorry I won't have time to review the other updates I saw on the board...but I hope to have a chance to read while I'm away.

And I meant to have a stronger narrative-voice. Mitchell does in the first part of the first chapter...I wanted to mirror that.

Key: Jon Stewart is an American comedian who satirizes the news on a TV show called the Daily Show. American Lit is short for American Literature, most high school juniors have to take the class. She reads Fitzgerald and I actually quote quite a bit from him. He's my favorite American author, Mitchell included. She's my favorite story-teller. A lineman is a defensive position in US football. UGA is University of Georgia. GPA is grade point average.

And since I'm on a Fitzgerald kick: Applicable quotes to AGW/GWTW:

"Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood, she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again."
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

"Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves."
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

"All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream"
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned