TheGreatestWriter: You are absolutely right. Human beings are built to hope because without hope, you have nothing. I also think that we all see ourselves as the star of the show, and in movies, the hero always comes through in the end and all of the chaos that went before is made right again. A sense of balance has been restored. A story like this forces us to confront the fact that life is not a movie, the good guy doesn't always win (sometimes there is no clear cut good guy), and that, most importantly, we don't always get closure. There are a lot of things in life that remain undone and unsaid, loose ends that Hollywood might tie up at the end of a film so the audience walks away feeling good, but that dangle sometimes forever in real life. That's something else I was trying to say with this story, especially the end. i compromised, though, because there was some closure, though not as much as people would have liked.
Loud Risque: Someone called me "an overrated pervert with a keyboard" once so, being sarcastic, I used it as my bio. No, I'm not a cop or a teacher or anything like that, I'm just a loser who writes.
Guest: I may one day write a story like that. Maybe it will even be a prequel to The 'Cest Kids.
The Keeper of Worlds: They do take a few generations. Like I said in my author note, I intentionally used unrealistic deformities to counterbalance what I felt as the depiction of incest children as unrealistically healthy and "normal."
CipherFiveZero: I might make changes here and there.
Guest: Lisa acting as a type of genetic midwife is, I think, an idea that crops up from time to time in the sin kids fandom, but most people don't take it seriously.
Lupa Loud hobbled down the hallway the next morning, the tips of her crutches making a steady, metallic sound as they tap-tap-tapped against the floor. Lacy walked next to her, a black Nike bag slung over one shoulder. On Lupa's other side, Liby walked with her head down: She was painfully shy and never, ever looked up. She reminded Lupa of a mouse - a timid, frightened little mouse. Sometimes it made Lupa sad...and other times, for some reason, it made her angry: She wanted to snatch the girl up by the front of her shirt and shake her until she snapped out of it.
"I'm really looking forward to practice today," Lacy said, "I'm gonna mop up. Guaranteed."
Everyone has their own way of coping with their problems. For Lacy, it was being the best at sports. Running faster, hitting harder, and winning more made her feel better about herself. At least that's how Lupa saw it, and while she wasn't an expert in psychology, she did stay at a Holiday Inn last night.
Heh. That was a joke; can't be doom and gloom all the time, right?
Where was she? Oh, yeah, Lacy. That's how she dealt with her problems. Sometimes it was heartbreaking, and other times it was annoying.
"Cool," Lupa said.
"Amanda Paulson won't know what hit her."
Amanda Paulson was Lacy's archrival on the football team. Lupa didn't know her very well, but she suspected that, like Lacy, she overachieved at sports to compensate for something bad in her life. Maybe she was dirt poor, or maybe she was being molested. Either way, she struck Lupa as a mirror image of Lacy...so of course they hated each other's guts. What did that say about their frame of mind...about Lacy's? Again, she wasn't an expert, but if you meet someone just like you and hate them, that probably means you hate yourself, too.
Lupa sighed.
"I have to go to the bathroom," Liby said. Her voice was barely above a whisper.
Lacy rolled her eyes. "Really? We're gonna be late as it is."
"I-I'm sorry," Liby said.
Lacy slumped her shoulders. "Come on."
SIde-by-side-by-side, they made their way to the girls' room next to the gym. Lupa rested on her crutches and Lacy crossed her arms while Liby stood in front of the entrance. She looked up at Lacy, and Lacy groaned. Taking her sister's hand, Lacy led her into the bathroom. Liby didn't like going in by herself because oftentimes the girls already in there would make fun of her.
Why are kids so goddamn cruel? Lupa wondered as she leaned back against the wall and watched kids pass on their way to class. She thought of Leia and scrunched her lips to the side. Leia was...different. Or was she? Maybe everyone was a complete fucking sociopath except for Lupa...maybe she was the one who was fucked in the head. She scanned the faces of her classmates, and felt such a dizzy rush of alienation that she could barely breathe. Her mind turned to the pack of razor blades hidden in her underwear drawer. Her arms, hidden in the folds over her oversized hoodie, tingled at the memory of past incisions. None of her siblings knew about the ugly white scars crisscrossing her skin...none knew that sometimes, as she lie in bed at night, she held a blade to her soft, pulsing throat and tried, fruitlessly, to gather the courage to jerk it across. Eventually she figured she would. The world was already gray and bland, each day identical to the one before. By the time she was thirty she would probably beg for death.
The bell rang, and the hall started to clear. She spotted Leia making her way to class, her blonde hair done up in pigtails and her pink skirt fluttering around her knobby knees. The little girl glanced up, saw her older sister, and sneered openly. Lupa flipped her off.
Leia stopped, roughly fifteen feet away, and leaned forward, her eyes blazing with malevolent fire. "No legs," she hissed.
Lupa felt a flush of hot anger, her cheeks turning red and her jaw setting. Leia laughed and continued on, Lupa trailing her with her gaze. I hate that little bitch, Lupa thought bitterly, and hated herself: Leia didn't deserve her hatred, but Lupa gave it to her regardless.
Liby and Lacy came out of the bathroom then, Liby clutching her sister's hand as though it were a life preserver and she a drowning girl. "Come on," Lacy said.
At the end of the hall, Lupa and Lacy dropped Liby off at the special ed room. Lupa peered in and saw Lemy kneeling in front of a toy oven and staring at it intently, as if waiting for something...like fire. His mom didn't trust him to walk, even with the others, so she dropped him off each day herself.
Once Liby was situated, Lacy and Lupa made their way to class, getting there just as the teacher was beginning his lesson. He looked up when they came in and frowned, but didn't say anything. Lupa's face burned self-consciously as she made her way to her seat at the very back. Setting her crutches aside, she sat and drew her useless legs under the desk.
"As I was saying," the teacher said, and Lupa tuned him out. She didn't care about history...or math...or science. In fact, she didn't care about school period.
Down the hall, Lemy sat next to his sister and stared at a crumpled piece of paper he ripped from one of his magazines at home, his lips slightly parted and his breathing heavy. It depicted a house engulfed in flames. His dick was hard, and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. So beautiful...so red. He tittered and glanced over at Liby, who was absently molding a lump of green Play-Doh with slender fingers. She sensed him looking at her and turned her head. "What?" she asked softly.
Lemy held the paper out. "Fire," he said.
Liby looked at it, then at him. "Fire scares me."
"I kkkkknnnnnoooowwwww," he said and laughed.
Liby looked back down at her Play-Doh. She hated sitting next to Lemy; he scared her just as badly as the fire he loved so much. One time, he showed her his...thing...and asked her to touch it. Gross. And sometimes, she caught him looking at her the way a hungry dog would look at a piece of meat. He was her brother and she loved him, but he still creeped her out.
She squished the Play-Doh between her fingers and tried to ignore Lemy's ragged breathing, but couldn't. She glanced at him, and he was smiling broadly at his fire.
Liby shivered.
Lyra Loud got home just before noon. Sitting in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap, she stared out the rain-sluiced window and listened passively to the music filtering from the speakers. Normally, she would tap her foot or nod her head, but she was very groggy from her medication, and she could barely keep her eyelids open.
Behind the wheel, her mother bobbed her head back and forth, her gaze focused on the street. They hadn't spoken since they first got into the car and Mom asked her "How was it?" the way she did every time she picked up her from the hospital. Fine, Lyra replied simply. It was anything but, though; she spent two days on a locked ward alone and afraid. How did she think it was?
When they pulled into the driveway, Lyra unbuckled her seatbelt and got out. She pulled her purple coat closed against the chill and hurried up the walk, her mother following behind. Inside, Aunt Lori and Aunt Luan were sitting on the couch in front of a soap opera, Lori in a blue robe and Luan's hair in curlers. Before they could make a big deal about her being home, she rushed up the stairs and disappeared into the room she shared with Liby, a rush of warm familiarity washing over her when she she walked through the door. She took her coat off and kicked out of her shoes; she crossed to her bed on socked feet and dropped onto it with a sigh, her arms and legs spreading against the mattress. Her eyes fell closed and she snuggled deeply into the covers, the comfort of being in her own home and surrounded by her own things almost intoxicating after two days of being away. She wanted to sleep, but she was excited, and after a few minutes she sat up and grabbed her guitar from its spot between the bed and nightstand.
Like her mother, Lyra loved music. Unlike her mother, she wasn't very good with instruments, even though she had been taking lessons for two years. Her strong suit was her voice: She had been singing since she was a little girl, and when she gave voice to the song within, she could forget the pain and misery of her sickness.
She held the guitar and strummed the strings with her fingers, producing a nameless, clumsy melody. She frowned and turned the tuners. She started to play again, but she was too tired, so she replaced it and leaned back against the headboard with a frustrated sigh. She hated feeling this way; the cure was almost worse than the sickness.
Almost.
She didn't realize she was drifting until a tentative knock at the door roused her. She opened her eyes and saw Lizy standing in the doorway, an uncertain expression on her face. Lyra smiled warmly. "Hey," she said tiredly.
"Hey," Lizy said, "how are you feeling?"
"Sleepy," Lyra said. "And happy to be home." She patted the bed next to her. "Wanna hang?"
Lizy's face lit up. "Sure!" She came in and climbed onto the mattress, crawling over and sitting beside her older sister. Lyra put her arm around the little girl's shoulder and drew her close.
"Anything interesting happen while I was gone?"
Lizy shrugged. "Not really. Same old, same old."
"Lemy didn't start any fires?"
Lizy shook her head.
"Lacy didn't break any windows?"
"Nope."
Well, that was good; the last time Lacy drove a football through a window, Dad lost his shit. Lyra smiled weakly at the memory of him literally falling to his knees, his fingers pressed to his temples. Jesus Christ, not another one! He could be really dramatic sometimes. To be fair, though, Lacy did break a lot of shit. You ever see a war movie where guys are storming a beach or something and bullets are whizzing over their heads? That's what living with Lacy was like, only they were balls instead of bullets. Soccer balls, baseballs, tennis balls. Once Lyra was playing her guitar when a basketball flew through the door, slammed in her in the head, and knocked her off her feet: The guitar flew from her hands and hit the ground at exactly the right angle to snap the neck off.
Lizy snuggled into her sister's side. "I did finish the Mustang I was working on."
One of Lizy's favorite pastimes was building models: Cars, planes, ships, and Transformers. She had been working on the Mustang for nearly a month. It was a very intricate model as far as Lyra could tell, with more bits, pieces, and moving parts than an actual car.
"That's cool," Lyra said and yawned, "can I see it?"
"Sure. Let me get it."
Lizy jumped up and left the room, returning a few minutes later with it in her hands. She beamed proudly as she came over and held it up. "The engine block took me the longest," she explained. Lyra took it and turned it over in her hands. It was red and sleek, a late sixties or early seventies model.
"Ride, Sally, ride," she grinned and gave it back.
Lizy tilted her head in confusion.
"It's a song," Lyra explained.
"Oh...can you sing it to me?"
Lizy loved it when Lyra sang to her.
"I don't know it very well," Lyra confessed, "but yeah, okay." She picked her little sister up and sat her on her lap. She glanced up at the ceiling as she tried to remember the lyrics. She cleared her throat and started to sing in a high, clear voice. "I bought you a brand new Mustang….1965...something, something, ride around, Sally."
Lizy giggled.
"That's pretty much all I know," Lyra said.
"I like it," Lizy said.
"Yeah, it's a pretty wicked track," Lyra replied. "I think my mom has the CD somewhere. I can ask her for it."
Lizy nodded.
Lyra caught a flicker of movement from the corner of her eye and turned toward the door. Liena grinned widely. "Hi..you're home!"
"Yeah, I'm home," Lyra said.
"How do you feel?"
"Better."
Liena came in and sat on the edge of the bed, her hands going to her knees. "I missed you," she said seriously.
"I missed you too," Lyra said. She reached out and took her older sister's hand. In the depths of her last paranoid episode, Lyra was certain that Liena was plotting to kill her. Every comment, every wayward glance, every chance meeting in the hall convinced her that Liena was getting closer and closer to striking. Her only choice, then, was to strike first.
She shivered at the thought of what she may have done had her mother not taken her to Dr. Lopez. She loved her siblings dearly (even Leia, who called her Norman Bates), and the thought of hurting one of them made her sick to her stomach.
"I was really, like, worried," Liena said, "I don't like it when you have to stay at the doctor's."
Lyra sighed. "Neither do I, but hopefully that'll be the last time."
It wasn't.
All that day, Leia Loud planned her older sister's downfall. She did this coldly and methodically, the way a chess player plans her next move; she envisioned a thousand possible avenues of revenge, carefully examined them from every angle, then rejected them. The point, she figured, was to do it in a way that it would never come back on her, and that wasn't exactly easy. She did have an idea, but it required an accomplice...and not just any accomplice - her retarded brother, Lemy. Using him was like playing with fire (pun intended): He was so goddamn stupid he'd probably give her up the first chance he got.
She wasn't crazy about Lemy being involved, but she did like the plan otherwise; not only would it take care of Lacy, but of Lupa as well...and maybe others. She saw it in her mind and grinned devilishly. Oh, it was beautiful.
Did she really need Lemy, though? He'd naturally be the first suspect, so she could do it herself. She kind of wanted him to be caught red handed, bu she guessed he didn't have to be.
At snack time, the boy next to her pulled a pack of cookies from his book bag: They looked really good. Leaning in, she batted her eyelashes. "What'cha got there?" she asked.
"Devil's food cookies," he said with a smug edge that Leia didn't like.
"Can I have one?"
"No," he said, "I only have a couple."
Wrong answer. She snatched the pack out of his hand. "Now you have none."
"Hey!" he cried and whipped around. "Give them back!"
Instead, she ripped the package open, plucked one out, and tossed it into her mouth, her eyes never leaving his. She chewed slowly, making a long, obscene ummmmm noise and rolling her eyes back into her head like the sluts in the porn movies Daddy watched with Lacy and Liena. His face flushed red. "Give...them...back."
She swallowed and took another cooke out. "No," she said.
His face hardened, and for a moment she thought he was going to hit her. Instead, he turned to the teacher and shot his hand up. "Mrs. Morris!"
Little snitch. She angrily crushed the package in her hand, squishing the last two cookies, and then smashed it against the back of his head. "Here," she growled, "fag."
He cried out, and Mrs. Morris came over. "What's going on?"
"Leia took my cookies and hit me," the boy said, beginning to cry. Leia rolled her eyes in disgust. She hated crying.
Mrs. Morris turned a stern eye on her. "Is that true, Leia?"
"No," Leia said, "I asked him for one and he pulled my hair."
"Did not!"
Mrs. Morris sighed. "James, move to another seat. Leia, one more incident like this and I'm sending you to the principal's office."
Leia was very adept at picking her battles, and this was one battle that she did not want to fight; she had bigger fish to fry than some little bitch and his nasty, chalky cookies. She bowed her head. "Yes, ma'am," she said in faux contrition.
At recess, Leia sat by herself on a bench and watched the other kids running around and climbing the playground equipment like retards. Speaking of retards, she spotted Liby sitting slack on the swing, her head bowed and her shoes dragging in the mulch. Lemy was nearby, holding onto a pole and spinning around it like the moron he was. Leia rolled her eyes; one of life's greatest tragedies was that she was related to them. Loan was a total, drooling 'tard; Liena was just plain stupid; Lyra was a skitzo; Liby was 'tard too; Lupa was a cripple ass emo bitch; Lacy was a cunt with a face like the Grand Canyon; Lemy was a pyro; Lizy was half blind and had a frog hand; and Lulu was a shitty, smelly baby. How in the name of God did someone so perfect wind up being born into a family like this? It wasn't fair. She should be a princess or a socialite; instead she lived in a leaky old house with a freak show family.
She crossed her arms. She'd take care of them...she'd take care of all of them.
And she would enjoy it immensely.
When the final bell rang, she went to her locker, shoved her books in, and left the building; it was raining again, so she opened her umbrella (pink with purple and yellow hearts) and held it over her head as she followed the sidewalk home. She walked through the door fifteen minutes after setting out; Loan was lying on her back in the middle of the living room, her arms and legs spread out. For a wonderful second Leia thought she was dead, then she kicked her feet and grunted loudly. "Knock it off!" Lori called from the kitchen. "You can't have anymore candy, you'll spoil your dinner!"
Leia shut the door behind her and went up the stairs. In her room, Lizy was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor and building a Lego monstrosity. Leia kicked it as she passed, and it exploded into a million pieces. "Hey!" Lizy cried.
"The floor is for walking, One Eye Willy, not playing with your little toys."
"DON'T CALL ME THAT!"
Leia turned to her sister and drew her foot back; Lizy shied away and threw her hands protectively over her face. "Shut up, frog fingers," Leia spat.
Crying, Lizy got to her feet and ran from the room, her hand covering her eyes. Leia kicked the blocks out of her way and dropped onto her bed. Could today get any worse?
Lyra walked by in the hall, and Leia slumped her shoulders. Oh, great, Skitz was back. Why did I even open my mouth? The older girl turned. "Hey, Lei."
Leia hated being called Lei. "Don't talk to me, Norman. I'm not in the mood for your paranoid bullshit."
A satisfying look of hurt crossed Lyra's face. She turned and hurried away. Fucking psycho.
Finally alone, Leia went back to her plotting. Should she use Lemy, or just frame him?