Who'll pour the wine?
I, said the Swine.
I'll pour the wine and tread on the glass
For poor Cock Robin.

—

Heather didn't comment on the new-delivered TV; it wasn't even a good TV. Someone had played what sounded like a bad action movie on it half the night, constant explosions over and over. She hadn't got enough sleep.

"Being dead is so boring," she whined. J.D.'s patience looked to be hanging by a thread so thin you couldn't even use it as floss. Maybe she wouldn't snap it, just yet.

"Read a book." Since you broke the TV last time you watched, he implied in his glare.

"I'm popular; I have people to do that shit for me." That and cheat guides. Heather was never into doing something the hard way when you could do it the easy way or make some nerd do it for you. "I'm hungry. Did you bring me food?"

A Snappy Snack Shack plastic bag slid over the counter to her. It was cold. "Spare turbo dog."

"Has anything resembling a vegetable ever been near this thing?" Heather poked experimentally at it.

"It might have been a vegetarian dog, before they fed it into the sausage machine," J.D. said. "Along with a kitty, the worst parts of the cow, and gelatin filler swept up from the floors of the knackery."

Boys are gross. Heather rolled her eyes, but let the conversation rise to a relatively civil note. "Everything at the Snappy Snack Shack is crap and gives you pimples, but I actually like their corn nuts. BQ flavor only. Just for future reference."

"Strongly disagree. Classic cheese," J.D. said. He put on an electric kettle, looking weirdly domesticated. He dug around for some coffee.

"Tea," Heather said. Her favorite sort was rose-hip and rooibos, this artsy blend sold in an unbearably tacky hippie packet design at the farmers' market two towns over, but she wouldn't push the envelope. She was surprised to see J.D. scrounge up lemon rather than the expected boring-black.

"I'm gonna bite," J.D. said, baring his teeth maybe a touch too literally. It didn't look like a smile. "Why and how did the Heathers come about? You can't seriously all be called Heather."

"It's the same reason why you're called Jason. Don't give me that look, of course I snooped at the box with certificates and registrations and things," Heather said. "Did you know you were born right here in Sherwood? I guess you moved on too fast to remember. Popular baby names of the seventies, isn't it fun?"

(She wasn't going to tell him yet what her dad told her after the meet-and-greet. It isn't the first time I've used him, princess, but you don't remember, do you? You weren't even in school yet. Her dad had laughed, and Heather mentally checked out like she normally did when he rolled around in the sentimental-reminiscing like a pig in mud. You whacked his kid over the head with a pink Easy-Bake Oven. Gave him a good scar, I think. His mom had about seven kinds of kittens, but I told her, if my little girl beats up a boy she had good reason for it. Sent her away soon enough. It had been pre-emptive revenge, Heather thought.)

J.D. put Heather's tea down. It was midnight-black coffee for him, definitely not clichéd at all.

"How did the Heathers begin?" Heather continued. "I got together with Heather first; we made a great team. Same name and same interests. The only difference is that she wants people to like her, but I expect people to like me. And then there was Heather in the background. I always intended Heather to join us, ever since the beginning, and she was fine once I taught her to get her nose out of a book all the time and make better friends."

"Hold on with all the Heathers. I take it Big Heather was first to be assimilated, followed by Ironing Board Heather?"

Duh. Heather rolled her eyes briefly at his stupidity. "Yep. Veronica used to be a Girl Scout, badges for cookie selling and knot-tying and reading encyclopedias. She wanted more; she wasn't dweeby and grateful for half a stale cookie crumb like Betty Finn. She wanted to learn to fly.

"An eagle sees a tortoise and thinks, mmm, that sweet meat sure looks good, but I can't get it inside that shell. In the meantime, the tortoise thinks, boy, I sure wish I could fly like one of those eagles. So the tortoise says to the eagle, hello, friend, how about picking me up. The eagle picks up the tortoise and flies as high as it can. It drops the tortoise. Sometimes, I guess, the eagle drops the tortoise then swoops down to pick it up in mid-air a few times, just to have some fun. Then the tortoise smashes into the ground. The game's supposed to end that way. The eagle gets that sweet, sweet meat. That eagle's happy.

"But sometimes, the tortoise learns to fly. Or, it turns out not to be a tortoise but another eagle. That's what I taught Veronica. You want to fuck with the eagles, you gotta learn how to fly."

"Truly Aesopian," J.D. said.

"Who was Aesop?" Heather said, all I'm-popular-and-don't-know-geeky-stuff. He didn't bite.

"What about Martha Dunnstock?" J.D. asked, with the over-casual air that symbolized he was a lot more interested than he pretended to be.

Heather didn't think he was dumb enough to ask her that without getting most of the story from Veronica first, if not from others too, so she couldn't afford to lie.

"What brought that on?" she challenged.

"Graffiti, courtesy of Heather-And-Stuff. You were only the second place winner," J.D. said. "Seems Martha went first."

Heather scowled at him for putting it that way. Almost three years later, and Martha still managed to steal something that belonged to her.

"It wasn't my fault. The counselor said so," she said. For all Heather generally liked talking about herself, she'd been so glad to dump the mandatory counselling sessions. "Martha Dumptruck was a fat loser who probably tried to drown herself in the kitchen sink when she was in diapers. She took a nosedive into traffic in freshman year, I think it was officially ruled an accident. There's no story there."

J.D.'s lips were set in a thin, angry line. "Not your fault, I see. You seem pretty keen on saying that. I suppose you never said anything to Martha that might have possibly influenced her actions."

"I think I said a lot of stuff," Heather admitted. "Heather and Heather did it too; it wasn't just me. Veronica's done similar things because I asked her. What if I told you, go out and hang yourself in a potter's field, would you do it?" She took a single step toward him. "Go hang yourself. What are you waiting for?" She was amused that got a bit of a flinch from him; maybe another nice little weak spot there. But he wasn't reaching for any ropes. "Don't want to? There you go. That's exactly how much I was to blame for Martha's death. Her mom clearly doesn't blame me; she's our maid."

Mrs. Dunnstock cleaned Heather's room and washed her clothes while she was at school. All Heather saw of her was the occasional Mills and Boon cover flashing out of her bag, those times when she stayed late to finish cleaning the bathrooms and was still somewhere in the background when Heather came home.

"I'm surprised she didn't smother you in your sleep," J.D. said. Weirdly, there was real anger in him, as if he was stupid enough to care about a stupid person who died three years ago and he didn't even know her. "You bullied her daughter to death."

"What, like that's bad?" Heather faced him down. He had to know part of her attitude was refusal to surrender; she'd rather go down an iron-plated bitch with unbreakable steel for a heart than like a sentimental fool with a blotchy red face from crying too hard. "There is no such thing as good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. Oscar Wilde," Heather said, and for a moment J.D. looked surprised that she could actually quote some dead-and-moldering Euro guy. "If I contributed to ridding the world of a tedious person, and I'm not saying I did, it was the most moral act I've ever done."

And besides, Heather had had her own reasons. She just hadn't chosen to whine to the world about them.

J.D. set his cup down with a slow, deliberate clink. He'd gripped the mug hard enough to leave red marks on his hands, or maybe that was just because it was hot. "Killing you wouldn't be a crime, it would be a public service," he said.

Heather went on glaring at him. She knew J.D. was dangerous, more dangerous than she'd initially thought when she recruited him. Someone who brought a gun to school was incredibly fucked up. It bothered her that no one but her had seemed to think that, and she'd died the next day so she didn't have time to bring them to the right way of thinking. She stood her ground anyway.

"It looks like you're the perfect murder. After all, you're already dead," J.D. said.

Heather remembered hearing something about farm kids who kept pigs as pets. It was harder to enjoy bacon if you'd named the pig Petunia and frolicked with it in the back garden hanging dandelion chains around its neck, or whatever the hell it was that you did with a pet pig. She hoped something like the same principle applied here.

Maybe she should ask J.D. to call her Petunia.

"I hear body disposal's a bitch," Heather teased.

"My dad has a woodchipper."

Heather threw her mug at his face. He cried out in pain as the porcelain broke. She shoved him backward into the TV room while he was off guard. He brought down half the contents of a shelf full of videos with him, which was very satisfying.

Heather didn't usually do physical violence. Devastate them emotionally was her style, inflict a thousand cuts of cruel social isolation, strip away the last tattered flaps of self esteem until there was nothing but blood and tears left, rip out hearts in an elegantly metaphorical way. Heather Chandler frequently said loudly appalling things with a body that literally every man wanted to fuck and the combination was irresistible.

Heather's boots crunched over shattered china. The sudden rush of intensity that came with this fight made her think: God, what have I been missing out on?

Another part of her thought: how much of Don't-Hit-Girls ever sunk into him, if any?

And yet another part of her was ticking over, briefly considering: reaction provoked to mommy-left-you, probably because she had a horrible kid like you; reaction provoked to go-hang-yourself; wouldn't it be Heather Chandler's normal good luck in finding exactly the right button to press if his mom actually went out and hanged herself?

J.D. rose up and grabbed her. Damn, he was fast. Heather barely saw his knee come up to slam her head. For a moment, it was like she saw stars - those sparkling brown dots on the edge of consciousness when you closed your eyes. Her flailing hands reached out to find a tall lamp. It came down over his head. J.D. got the worst of it on his back, but they both fell together. They rolled around on the floor. There was another satisfying crunch as a small glass table shattered. Something cut Heather's cheek and she'd never felt so alive. There was blood on J.D.'s ear as well. They fought in the middle of the shards, painful on Heather's back. She sort of understood this, that it was better to feel something than nothing at all, even if that something was burning pain and hands tightening around your arms.

He wasn't particularly tall or tough, but he was stronger than Heather was. She couldn't budge him and make him fall down again, much as she wanted to slam him down in the middle of broken glass.

So she went completely limp, letting J.D. pin her down. He glared at her.

"Fuck me, this is hot," Heather said, and smiled up at him with a glittering, inviting grin.

She watched J.D.'s face change from confused to comprehending, followed by self-loathing and then horror. Served him right. He flung himself off her as if he'd been trying to hold down a poisonous snake. He left, running out and slamming the door.

Heather slowly rose, and brushed a shower of glittering fragments off her shirt.

"You had no right to look at me like that. You're just as bad as me, if not worse. I can always make people as bad as I want them to be," she said into the empty room.

She picked up a photograph of a light-haired woman that had fallen on the ground. The glass was cracked over her face, but it didn't look like the picture was damaged. If Heather was in a vengeful mood, she'd feed it to the garbage disposal. But she simply put it back on the counter.

She stooped among the amateur videotapes. She'd given them a cursory look before; best case scenario was blackmail-worthy or at least embarrassing footage of Young Jason Dean, worst case scenario was gross amateur porn of an old guy. She took out a handkerchief she'd forgotten in her jeans pocket, so she didn't have to touch anything. Heather's handkerchiefs came from Grandma Chandler every birthday and Christmas, pink with hand-embroidered roses and always accompanied by a pathetic five-dollar check she didn't even bother to cash.

All the cassettes were dated, followed by the name of a building. There were too many public sounding places, offices and apartments and libraries and halls, for scenario two to really be a possibility. Heather idly sorted them back into the date order they'd been in. That almost made it a dead certainty J.D. wasn't the amateur cameraman: he was so into the rebel-without-a-cause image that organization was probably to him as capitalism to Jewish guys with huge beards.

She'd noticed that one older tape seemed more often revisited than the others around it, the writing on it more smudged by touch and the surface of both tape and container absolutely clear of dust. James Brown Miller Memorial Library, Texas, it read.

In all her life, Heather had never seen even one interesting thing about a library. What was so special about this one? She put the old tape on. She'd some time to kill, and a bucket if she needed one to puke in.

The James Brown Miller Memorial Library was deserted, abandoned. Several of the letters in the sign were missing and the rest were dusty and wind-torn. It was a four-story building with most of the windows smashed. Heather didn't see even the most dedicated book-fucker coming here.

Then there was a flash of movement, a woman's hand waving in one of the windows. Heather heard a cry like a trapped animal somewhere outside the camera's range, next a faint sound like running feet pounding against ground.

And then the library imploded.

No more James Brown Miller Memorial Library. No more woman waving in the window.

Seems that was how she died.

Heather rewound and watched again, part morbid curiosity, part maybe-it-wasn't-what-it-looked-like. Things clicked into place.

She knew why Mr. Dean was in Sherwood and what he was looking for. It was her.