Disclaimer: I do not own anything affiliated with Ginger Snaps or any content or characters contained therewithin.
Everything is about Ginger.
Everything has always been about Ginger. Resigning myself to this undeniable fact does not make our resulting relationship any less difficult to stomach. We are sisters, yes, but something more than most siblings could fathom—cellmates in our world, trying to survive our sentence and break free from the shackles of suburban life by being different. Our mother is an idiot, our father barely speaks, and we wander through life as the other's only source of support.
Together forever, so she always reminds me.
The Death Project increases the urgency of our pact every time we take out the fake gore and the camera, mining our morbid minds for creative ways to shock our pathetic peers. Ginger reminds me often how closely her impending sixteenth birthday looms, how she wants to die in some spectacular fashion, how suicide is "the ultimate fuck-you." She speaks with feigned confidence, or perhaps my own doubts infuse a lot more fear into her sultry voice than she would ever betray. Ginger sits, sixteen and anything but sweet, on the brink of womanhood, gazing down reluctantly into the pool of her sexuality. Even her own aversion to all things considered "normal" will not keep her from curiously tapping her toe and rippling the edge of that glassy surface someday soon. And I teeter on the edge as well, liable to tumble in without any of the innate grace she tries to hide with bulky clothing. It's sink or swim out there in the real world, the hellhole beyond our bedroom. As to whether being dead or remaining alive scares her more, I cannot be certain. She says, given the chance to die alongside me or emerge unscathed from the waters, she would drown.
Under the right circumstances, Ginger proves a phenomenal liar.
We made the damn pact when we were eight, both too young, suddenly and strangely fixated on death, to realize the implications of such words. Now as she begins to display subtle hesitation, she suddenly morphs into the advocate, the mastermind. As if she could deceive her own sister, make me think she was anything but scared shitless.
Out by sixteen, or dead on the scene. Where the fuck did we ever expect to go? I guess as long as we ended up there together, it did not matter if our destination was heaven or hell. Although the thought of Ginger and I never parting sustained me through several awkward years, lately our seemingly mutual pledge had strained, splintered. And despite our efforts to demonize dull-as-nails Bailey Downs, lately the balance of blandness had shifted, if only slightly, in favor of the "interesting and/or mildly amusing" end of the spectrum. As we prepare to wreak moral mayhem on our class with our insightful interpretation of "Life in Bailey Downs", someone, or something, took the initiative and created a bit of malignant madness all their own.
The "Beast" is headline news now as neighborhood dogs disappear one by one in the dead of night. Sometimes owners find their precious pets' bodies days later, torn to pieces by some undeniably disturbing force. Sometimes they find nothing more than a few bones, scraps of fur, the remains of a red vinyl collar. This afternoon, however, as I watch Mrs. Grover scream her anguish over her prized and recently perished Golden Retriever, I figure she's one of the unlucky ones who will have to clean up the cold, mangled carcass of a former family member from its kennel. The little terrier that belongs to the pudgy boy next door proceeds to yip and yammer himself hoarse, excited by all the commotion Mrs. Grover makes as she falls to her knees in her front yard, weeping openly. I frown at the frank display of emotion, but otherwise am about as concerned as the group of kids playing hockey in the street nearby.
"Shut up Norman," I growl as I glance sideways at the terrier leaping up and down behind the chain link fence. Despite myself, I silently hope that the little bastard isn't next.
"Baxter's fertilizer," I say, as I enter our bedroom. Ginger's got the knife again, and she slides it back and forth across her pale left wrist. She uses the edge with the perfect combination of threat and delicacy to avoid doing any real damage, while looking as if, provoked, she would end it all right there. An outsider would believe the charade, but I can detect her hidden fear in the way she stares at the blade, the way she wills it with her eyes not to slip.
"Fuck!" She says this suddenly, and I cannot tell if it's because I interrupted her meditation over her miserable life, or because my entrance means she'll have to think about someone other than herself for a few minutes. She invents an excuse for not slicing that delicate skin, for not letting her blood spill.
"Wrists are for girls." Ginger sinks back unceremoniously on the bed, twirling the knife. She waits for me to comment on her change of heart, to say that I have changed my mind, that I will release her from the bond we forged so long ago.
"And everyone's just standing there…like…staring," I continue, ignoring her attempts to justify her hesitation. I'm not in the mood for Ginger's self-centered suicide plans. Instead, I think of the "Beast"—what it is, why it hungers for carnage. "Why don't they just catch that thing?"
Ginger falls into herself again quickly. She's not listening to me, which is nothing new—but the regularity of her dejection cuts as keenly as that damn blade every time. She lies, splayed as if some ethereal artist painted her into this world purely for pleasure—for me to love and to loathe all in the same instant. Considering her lithe body, admiring the lack of flaws, she searches for a way to impress me. The difficulty of that task increases continually, through my own awakenings and her constant deviations along the path as my protector. Finally deigning to glance in my direction, she concludes with false determination.
"I'm slitting my throat."
I suppress a sigh of disbelief as I stack various Death Project paraphernalia on the floor, on my desk. I turn to face my lovely sister, searching for some sort of sympathy in her cerulean eyes. They may be fathoms deep, but they contain nothing more than her own desires, dreams, death wishes. Where I swim within those watery irises, where she ends and I begin—no one will ever know. Everything is about Ginger, and unless some drastic change overcomes us, it always will be.
I want to howl my distress in her ears, make her aware of my pain. But I just suppress my rage beneath the stony façade I rarely remove, let the ache swell and then subside within my chest before I speak.
"How hard can it be," I ask, irritated by the irony of it all, "In a place full of dead ends?"
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