1.

Elsa's whole world changes in an instant.

The neighbors call the police. Her mom cries into her hands, can't even look at her. She's a murderer now and everything is different.

The paramedics take pictures of her bruises in the back of an ambulance. She takes off her shirt and lets them touch the tender places where his belt marked her. She's present, and she's not. People are talking to her and she's lucid, her mouth is moving, words are coming out, but she is floating above them all, looking down at the scene below like it's a movie and she's back on her couch, flipping through channels, watching apathetically as someone else's life falls apart.

"Almost done," the woman says, handling her body with blue latex gloves and tidy professionalism. "Can you turn around this way? More into the light? Yes, that's better. Just hold still for a moment, okay?"

Men and women pace in and out of the house, crisp and featureless in their blue suits. Red and blue lights strobe in the dark, illuminating the surrounding houses, distorting them, drawing them closer until it feels like they are crowding the narrow street. Some of the neighbors have come out to survey the spectacle. They stand behind a flimsy barrier of yellow police tape and talk amongst themselves, pointing, gesturing, speculating. It's an exciting bit of action in their burned-out, backwater factory town. Elsa's head throbs as she is loaded into the back of the squad car.

"Too tight?" the officer asks, tugging her seatbelt.

Elsa shakes her head. Maybe it is, but she can't tell. He takes her at her word anyway and closes the door, and then she's alone behind the cage, shaking.

It doesn't let up for hours.

/-/-/-/-/

The police go easy on her because she's so obviously a victim of domestic abuse. Just five months earlier, after another fractured wrist, her mother had finally pressed charges and gone to get a restraining order, because, as she so delicately put it, her husband "had a bit of a problem with drugs." The neighbor, Carol, gives a statement on their behalf, recounting the screams and curses that she heard for years from their house across the street to a room full of sympathetic investigators. It's a no brainer.

"It's a clear case of self-defense," the chief states plainly, and nobody disagrees.

Nobody locks up a scared teenage girl defending her battered mother from a meth-crazed ex-con. They assure her that the DA's office won't press charges. They recommend that Elsa see a counselor, but otherwise she gets off scot free. She won't even transfer schools.

"Take care of yourself, kid," the detective says to her, outside the station in the biting wind. "Don't get stuck here, okay? You're smart. Go to college."

Elsa shakes his hand and mumbles something polite, but her fingers are so numb that she can't really feel him. His eyes linger on her as she shuffles down the icy steps.

She drives her mother home in silence. The radio is off. They don't even turn on the heater as snowflakes melt against the windshield. The chill has seeped under Elsa's skin, down to her bones, and it feels good to be numb. Her muscles feel like they're made of ice. She knows that something big has shifted, something deep and tectonic. The tension that has kept her rigid for so long has finally snapped, and she should feel loose, but she doesn't. She just feels cold.

/-/-/-/-/

When they get home, she spends an hour sitting on the kitchen floor, staring at the broken plastic on the bottom of their Maytag dishwasher. Everything except the gun is exactly where they left it. The off-white Charlie Brown mug is shattered in the sink. Spilled coffee has dripped down and dried on the window pane. Her backpack is lying on its side in the doorway, and the wall clock is face down on the linoleum, broken. The police have come through and taken pictures of everything, labeled the evidence, and bagged the gun. Now they're gone, and all that's left are muddy footprints.

Eventually, she shuffles into the bathroom with the half-hearted intention of taking a shower, but stops cold when she sees herself in the mirror. For second she is standing in the yard again with the heavy gun quivering her in hands, glaring into red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes. Her heart slams against her ribs, rousing her senses from their numbed stupor with alarming speed. She reaches out to steady herself against the porcelain sink, sucking in a heavy, panicked breath, and then she blinks, once, and her own crystal blue blinks back at her, tired and dead.

Her heart, it seems, never gets the memo.

It keeps pounding away in her chest like she's running the final stretch of the Boston Marathon. Her pulse is so high that she slumps to the ground, with cotton in her head and static in her eyes, hot forehead pressed against the frigid tiles below the vanity. Bile rises suddenly in her throat and she fears that she'll be sick. She breathes rapidly, but there isn't enough oxygen in the air to keep pace with her straining lungs.

It's all gone to shit so fast, and the walls are closing in.

Elsa relents, lets her body crumple with a heavy thud onto the bathroom floor, and curls herself into a tight, shivering ball.

/-/-/-/-/

When the storm passes, she can't sleep.

She sits alone on the back porch and watches the snowflakes float down, heaven's frozen tears falling from the steel sky, layering to cover her yard in a blanket of the purest white. By now, the blood is gone. It has soaked into the ground and into the roots of the grass, but she can still see it.

She closes her eyes wearily and it's still there.

The blood.

/-/-/-/-/

Elsa skips the funeral and goes back to school as soon as possible because she can't stand to be cooped up in the house. Their two-bedroom craftsman has never felt so claustrophobic. On the fourth morning she changes her jeans, re-braids her hair, and pulls on a raggedy sweatshirt. Autumn has been so cold that it's snowed several times already and she wraps a blue scarf around her neck and tugs a fleece hat over her ears for good measure. She'll be fine like this without a real coat until the temperature plunges in December. Until then, the cold never really bothered her anyway. She slips into her boots and slides her backpack over her shoulder, and avoids the bathroom mirror as she passes in the hallway. Her mother is where's she been for nearly 12 hours, curled up on the living room sofa in her black dress, staring at the flickering TV screen. She doesn't move when Elsa approaches. There are dark circles under her eyes. A large, bruise is fading on her cheek.

"I'll be back this afternoon," Elsa rasps. "Call if you need anything."

Her mother's lips part, but no sound comes out, just a quiet, rattling breath.

"Okay." Elsa kisses her mother on the forehead and leaves for school on a tepid high note.

What she forgets is that people watch the news. It's all out there in the open now, her troubled life story. She might as well emblazon a scarlet letter on her Walmart hoodie. The crowd parts for her in the hallway. She feels their eyes on her as she exchanges books in her locker, and at first she thinks it's all in her head, but then her biology teacher and her math teacher both pull her aside after two successive classes to 'check in', and there can be no doubt. Everybody knows.

She ducks into the library at lunch and hyperventilates in the history section at the back. Her bag falls to the ground and she crumples down next to it, displacing the books on the shelves behind her. She doesn't cry, just digs her fingernails into her palms.

"Damnit," she mutters, and doesn't let up when it begins to sting.

It's awful being the center of attention. It's the worst. All she wants to do is stay out of the spotlight until she can gather up the pieces and put them back together, but now everyone is looking, and she can't disappear.

Her eyes slip closed, and the ledge is immediately there under her feet.

Her toes grip the edge. The void calls to her from below, but she won't jump. Not yet. She finds the only other force inside herself that's strong enough to fight it and grasps it, wraps it like boxing tape around her knuckles.

She chooses anger, because if it's not anger it's despair, and that's a no-brainer.

Anger it is.

/-/-/-/-/

"Work was alright, today," her mother says one evening, piling store-bought mashed potatoes on her plate.

By some miracle, a month has passed. Time has stopped moving at a glacial pace, and her mother is speaking to her again, albeit sporadically. Their lives don't feel so much like a slow motion car wreck anymore. The collision has already happened, the squeal of tires, the crash upon impact, and they are both stitched back up, wrapped in gauze and medical tape.

"That's good," Elsa says, but it's more than good. It's amazing. She remembers to smile a little bit, no longer alarmed by how unnatural it feels.

"How's school?"

Her mother watches her carefully, but Elsa keeps her eyes fixed on the microwaved green beans she is ladling onto her plate.

"Fine," she replies.

And it's only half true.

School is not fine, not exactly. Her classmates still part around her like she's Moses marching into the Red Sea. She still drains her reservoir of anger every day to stay grounded against the whispers and glances, still wrings out every drop until it hurts. When it gets particularly rough, she fantasizes that she can carve herself a set armor from the hardest ice, that she is in a class of her own. Frozen, beautiful, and undisturbed.

Reality is less dazzling.

The sympathy grades from concerned teachers are at least keeping her GPA afloat. Elsa knows it won't last forever, but she can't seem to get on track. Her thoughts are everywhere, scattered like loose marbles on a playground. She just can't focus. She watches her teachers vacantly as they write on their whiteboards, and her pen is so heavy when she tries to lift it. She can barely take notes. She can barely remember what they say. It's like she's greased up and their words just slide right off.

It's incredibly frustrating that the only thing sticking to her right now is an insult that was hurled at her by Derek Marshall, a hockey player in her history class. He wears camo like normal people wear denim, and doesn't seem to care that she ostensibly murdered her deadbeat father in cold blood. He's been vying for her attention for ages, and even that, apparently, isn't going to stop him. It's been a week since he'd told her he had a flat of Natty Ice and a dad that drove long haul trucks on the weekend, and wouldn't she like to "come to his house party, maybe unwind a little?" He had literally waggled his eyebrows at her.

Of course, the thought of alcohol, of losing any of the control she had so carefully cobbled together, sounded like a horrible idea. She had basically told him as much.

"How can you just turn me down like that, you frigid bitch?" he'd demanded, nostrils flared like an angry horse, twisted around in his seat to face her. "You ice queen? Do you know how much crap I'm gonna get for even asking your crazy ass out at all?"

Which was far as he got before the teacher interrupted him. If only it had ended there.

Derek was waiting for her in class the next day with a cup of ice in his hand. "For you," he'd said, his acid smile lopsided and cruel, "in case it gets too warm in here for the ice queen."

It had shocked all of the air out of the room, and all of the fight out of Elsa. By the end of the week she had gotten six more cups from various members of the hockey team, but Elsa is still surprised that juvenile comment from Derek Marshall has stuck.

Ice queen? Really?

"Everyone thinks you're on drugs," Jenny had explained to her later, one of her oldest, and most jaded school friends. "Meth, actually. You know, like ice?"

Jenny is tall and lanky and troubled, cynical to a fault with a fatal attraction to losers and cheap alcohol, but she's known Elsa since middle school, and she knows not to bring up the family situation. They try not to bring it up at all if they can help it. It's a sensitively situation all around.

"On drugs?" Elsa had scrunched her brow in confusion. "Or cooking drugs?"

Jenny had rolled her eyes, her obvious disdain telegraphed even more strongly by her heavy, black eyeliner. "Don't count on highschoolers to make that distinction, Elce."

"I guess it's kind of funny," Elsa had mumbled, "like in a dark humor way, since my father-"

"Yeah," Jenny had cut her off with a sharp, warning look, "I read the news."

"Sorry."

"I know you are," she'd replied, and changed the topic.

It's all she'll get. Jenny doesn't do condolences. She says it's because she's dead inside, but it's probably more closely related to the Hoover Dam she's constructed to keep her own emotions at bay. Some of Elsa's classmates do give her sympathetic looks, though, as though it helps, as though it's enough. She doesn't know what to do with their pity. It makes her angry. It makes her anxious. She almost prefers Jenny's aggressively enforced emotional isolationism. At least that helps her keep up her thick, frozen barriers, because as the school's resident 'ice queen', she isn't actually very icy at all. She's a tumultuous vessel of burning feelings, and she can hardly contain it. Everything is too small, every building, every hallway, every room full of curious faces. Her heart beats so fast sometimes she thinks it will explode out of her chest, but it doesn't.

She hasn't killed anyone again. She hasn't turned into a serial killer, yet. It's the thinnest silver lining she's ever seen, a more liberal definition of "fine" than she'd have normally been comfortable with.

"Just fine, Elsa?" Her mother's hard voice from across the table drags her back into the present.

"Yeah," she shrugs a bit, "fine."

"Right," her mom scoffs. "You know who else is fine? My opiate-addicted boss."

Elsa frowns. "What are you getting at?"

"I'm saying I don't believe you." Her mom chews some potatoes and reaches for her water. "After...what happened, can you honestly tell me you're fine?"

Elsa opens her mouth to protest, and closes it again. "...No."

"Okay." Her mother runs her fingers through her long, brown hair. "Do you wanna talk about it?"

"Not really," she admits.

"Are you talking to the therapist at school?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I'm not…" Elsa sighs and pushes her food around her plate. "I'm not ready to talk to him yet."

"When will you be ready?"

"I don't know."

"Do you want to talk to my therapist? Dr. Eifert? She's really good."

Elsa stabs a hapless greenbean with her fork. "I'll think about it."

In good faith, because she respects her mother, she does think about it a little, but when she lays in her bed that night and tries to figure out what she would say, the words float away from her like smoke, slipping between her fingers. Each time she tries to grasp them, her fist closes on air. The only thing she feels for sure right now is the perpetual itch of anger. The rest of it is nebulous. The problem is that it's too much. It's too enormous. Everything that's happened, her whole life, the world as she knew it, ended with a spiraling bit of lead that was loosed by her hand. She's certain that no therapist can possibly help her until she finds a way to describe the unintelligible rage that's hollowing her out from the center.

Elsa's fingers flutter against her bedspread in the dark. The room is frigid, and she keeps it that way more often lately, window cracked, letting the winter air flow inside. She watches a white cloud of breath rise from her lips and catch the moonlight. The goosebumps on her skin are painful, and the brush of her fingernails against her arms feel like needles. She's so tense that her muscles are ready to snap. There are permanent knots in her back, and she feels a roiling queasiness rise up yet again from her sour stomach.

It hits her all at once that she can't remember what it's like to feel something other than the suffocating weight of shame on her chest, so heavy that it's a struggle to breathe some days, to inhale and exhale, in that order, to keep heart rate from spiking into overdrive. This is the new normal, and it's awful. It's not what she imagined at all when she snatched his gun off the table, and aimed it between his eyes. The pull of that trigger was meant to free them both forever, but she knows better now. Nothing in the world is free, and violence comes with a price.

Elsa knows that she will pay that price until the day she dies, possibly after, possibly forever.

She closes her eyes and licks her lips, not surprised to find them already chapped and bitten.

/-/-/-/-/


A/N: Please let a review!