A/N: I don't like this chapter. In fact, I quite hate it. But this exposition had to be done somewhere. So for now, it stays. Unfortunately.

-Fallon

Variation #1: "Fall Apart"

25. Trouble Lurking

Puberty.

The one word Skinny hated more than 'moist' (which was a really gross word that she wished people just wouldn't say. Like, why was it necessary? There were other perfectly good words to describe the same concept – 'wet, not soaked' - without giving her Goosebumps all over her body).

It had been a turbulent time for Skinny, partially because she had only a father to rely on for advice – which rendered him pretty much useless – and partially because she'd started that whole 'adult' transition thing at around age 11.

She grew before the other girls in her class, wore bras before the other girls in her class, needed pads before the other girls in her class. It got her noticed, it got her name-called, it got her picked on and targeted, but, worst of all, it got her noticed. Like, noticed.

As in, male-noticed.

She'd never been much of a girly girl. Sure, she could dress and look the part, but when it came down to it she loved sports, and playing with the boys, and watching Pokémon battles, and wrestling, and horseplay, and fart jokes, and all the other things that would pretty much classify her as a 'boy' – you know, except for the right parts.

So the male attention – this other kind of male attention – was…new. Very, very new to her. She started to like boys, sure, but in a 'you're-so-cute-please-hold-my-hand-and-give-me-a-teddy-bear' kind of way, not the 'my-legs-are-open-take-me-now' kind of way.

And the discrepancy between the two became painfully obvious as she grew older.

Contrary to her namesake, Skinny wasn't 'skinny'. She was tall and leggy, but also curvaceous and lithe, a figure that men would kill for. She wasn't lanky, and she wasn't awkward, and she wasn't caught in that space between child and adult, the one that hung there for several years overhead like a spider web you just couldn't reach, growing and evolving as it was spun into creation – no. She'd been thrust into the trials of adulthood long before she was ready.

It wasn't too big of a problem at first. Her city wasn't small, but she knew it well, like the back of her hand, in fact, and was familiar with all she needed to keep her safe and out of harm's way. It grew increasingly apparent that she would attract male attention, with more encounters presenting themselves, particularly in the company of her father (which was always mortifying; apparently, people had taken him for a cradle-robber rather than her father).

But she'd always managed to look out for herself.

And then her father was diagnosed with Minnows.

And food needed to be kept on the table.

And medical bills needed to be paid in full.

And household utilities needed to be dealt with.

And King needed the proper care her father had always given him.

And Skinny was running out of options. She was in her senior year of high school, with no job, no car, and no credentials to get a decent job with a pay near high enough to cover all the expenses she'd had to assume responsibility for.

And so she fell into the world of crime; slow, at first, obviously, but it was easy, so easy with looks like hers, so much easier than an honest day's work that earned her so little when she could gain so much by doing nothing at all, and so it enveloped her until she knew nothing else, until his name was the poison that fell from her lips each night into every rising sun, until she had betrayed everything she once thought herself to be just to protect the life she'd abandoned.

And no one would ever know.