Happy Ever After
by Angela Griffen
beta: Twilight
You should relax. You're just being paranoid.
That's what you keep telling yourself, but it's hard not to flash back to that adrenaline-filled night, Stan's face pressed up against the door's window and trying to tell you how beautiful being part of a collective organism was. Telling you that he, star quarter-back, wanted you, science-fiction-reading lone wolf. And it was all a ploy to lure you outside, to get you to open the door so he could come in and infect you and make you like him.
So it only follows that it's hard to believe him now, when he tells you that he loves you, that he wants you, and he's raining kisses on your face and shoulders, and you want to believe him, but you can't. Because you keep expecting wiry tentacles to slither out of his mouth, or to see the movement of the slug-like parasites under the skin of his face.
"Everything's perfect," Stan said once, and you wanted to tell him that that was the problem. Everything is too perfect, and it feels like it's only some sort of plastic veneer over what was there before, or worse, something more sinister.
Casey's got some of his photographs in the art gallery downtown and he's on the cover of every fucking magazine in the country, small-town nerd done good. More than that, he's finally caught Delilah, who somehow figured out that image doesn't matter nearly as much as she thought. The whole thing is too pat, feels like someone stuck their fingers into the universe and made something that should never have happened happen.
It's worse with Zeke, who's somehow turned into a clean-cut, almost normal person in the past month, except for the fact that the entire faculty seems to be turning a blind eye to his relationship with Miss Burke, which is possibly the only thing that lets you know you're attending the same school you were at in August. It's not like nobody knew that there was something odd about Miss Burke and Zeke before all this, but it's just too slimy-perfect, too fucked-up with a bright white capped smile.
Everyone is so goddamned happy now, happy to be human, happy to be free of the aliens, happy to have friends, they say. You all have what you wanted. You got Stan, attentive, caring, showing up on your doorstep in the evening at least twice a week wanting to study for the history test because he was serious about the academic thing. He's pulling B-minuses rather than Ds now, and you want to be happy for him, but it all feels like some happy fake ending.
You can't explain why it feels wrong, only that it does. And even though you should be happy, you can't help wondering if you were wrong, and that, somehow, they really did win.
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