This story has main themes of suicide and demonic possession. Other warnings include religious psychosis, underage drinking, violence, knives, and minor transphobia.
To make Rose tell this tale, you have to crack open a can of peach soda and mix it with vodka. The mix of nostalgia and alcohol is just right to loosen her tongue to tell you all about her shitty highschool.
She’d tell you that Ash could probably tell the story better. He’d have been able to write a song or ramble about it through text and you’d get the full story with every detail, including the ones that even he didn’t know before the conversations started. She’d hesitate before she ended up saying something dumb like she missed him.
Ash Marwood was her childhood friend. He’d always wanted to be a guitarist for a touring band, he was chronically online, he never left his room, he used to be a she, and he did his eyeliner shitty on purpose. He snuck out and got a piercing on his lower lip, right side, when he was fifteen, over the summer? His parents were pissed. It got infected, though. Serves him right.
And if you asked her what she was like, back when they were friends, she’d laugh real awkwardly. Oh, I was a bitch, she’d say, but I guess I still am, so not much has changed. Rose loved tying bows in her hair, she drank peach soda from a can more than water, she listened to Lana Del Rey and corralled Ash into painting his nails pink with her, and she’d only gotten her ears pierced once (though she had her sights set on a small septum piercing, once she was older).
We’d grown up together. She looks off across the room. You’d think that it would take something stronger than just a weird school fight to make us hate each other.
Rose was right. It was a lot stronger than just a weird school fight.
When he turned fourteen, Ash Marwood became aware that he was possessed.
He wouldn’t admit it to himself for years, of course–he was content with simply thinking that something was seriously wrong with him. The supernatural was interesting, but claiming that it was happening to you without any substantial proof was for idiots. He just tried his best to ignore the orange specter floating just out of his vision, like the mirages in your eyes when you stare into the sun, and he didn’t look in the mirror long enough to really see the ochre flecks slowly forming in his eyes, and he found all sorts of ways to fall asleep before he started hearing the whispering.
When she turned fourteen, Rose became aware that Ash was kind of weird.
It was embarrassing to be seen with someone who had dyed his hair purple in his bathroom sink and let the roots show, who was a wannabe midwest emo star, who spent all day every day in his room. And he had been more tired, lately, too. He was always exhausted these days and he was always too tired for her.
When she turned fourteen, Katherine became aware that she had a divine mission and that it involved the evisceration of Ash Marwood.
Katherine was–well. She’s always been hard to describe. Rose won’t describe her, can’t, honestly–she never really listened to Kat well enough to know enough of her to describe.
Kat was deeply religious, Roman Catholic in all the wrong ways. She attended Mass every day that she could with a holy light in her eyes and zeal in her heart, she went to confessional and poured out every minute sin she could remember and did her penance with the utmost sincerity, she stared at the icon of Joan of Arc that she’d hung over her bed for hours while she prayed. She was convinced that cursing was a one-way ticket to hell.
And she believed that that divine something that she stared at and looked for daily was in her–not in the Holy Spirit Be With You way, but in the I Am A Saint Waiting To Be Canonized way. She rolled cigarettes with fumbling fingers and coughed her way through smoking them, under the impression that every saint needed to have some sort of vice in order to be tragic enough to be beloved by the masses of angels.
She was also of the opinion that she was qualified to be the one to exorcize Ash Marwood, despite being nowhere near priesthood.
Somehow, she looked at Ash Marwood one day as they passed him in the halls and became suddenly struck with the strong, zealous conviction that there was some evil thing growing in him. She thanked God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, Mary Mother of God, Joan of Arc, and her guardian angel, too, for good measure; and immediately started preparing to fulfill her divine mission.
She started small–stopping by his locker to invite him to Mass, urging him into confessionals, gifting him a well-worn and annotated Bible wrapped in a rosary. He accepted the gifts hesitantly, because on one hand who the hell is this kid why does she keep giving me stuff she’s unnerving, but on the other hand she’s fucking 6’5” and strong as hell I am not getting beaten up because I didn’t go to church that’d be the stupidest fucking way to die ever.
After a month, Katherine became frustrated that all of her noble work wasn’t paying off. She locked herself in her room one Thursday, much to her father’s dismay, and prayed from sunrise to sunset with no interruption. When the deed was done, she emerged with the solution she had sought and with the calm countenance she always saw on the faces of the statues at her cathedral.
That night, when her parents had gone to sleep, she printed out some exorcism prayers (and ignored the warnings for priests alone to read them) and grabbed the biggest knife she could find in her kitchen.
Ash Marwood had just been trying to eat some fucking lunch like a normal fucking guy. But godfuckingdamnit, nothing about his stupid life could ever be normal. He had just sat down for lunch when Katherine walked up and punched him in the face.
Ash got up and started yelling what the hell? just as Kat started rattling off the prayer. He grabbed her to make her shut up, she pushed him, and soon the prayers were forgotten in their fight on the nasty black-and-white tile.
The students in the cafeteria surrounded them and cheered and jeered, Rose rolled her eyes but still pushed to the front to watch.
Ash punched Kat in the face, and she doubled back for her bag. Ash laughed and turned to see Rose’s face. She stared at Kat beyond Ash. She looked scared. That was what made him look back at Kat, who now flipped a steak knife in her hand. He stumbled back, but she was fast as hell, and the silver knife flashed and pain followed.
Ash staggered and stared at the long, clean cut bleeding down his left forearm. Quite a few people ran to go find a teacher, then. And Ash felt a power coiling in his gut and diffusing throughout him, and at the time, he chalked it up to adrenaline. Ash grit his teeth and impulsively tackled her to the ground. He kicked her knife out of her hand. It skidded across the floor and under a table. He knocked Kat’s head back against the tile, and she clenched her jaw at the throbbing pain. She tensed to push him off, and Ash remembered hearing something about the body going where the head goes, so he slammed his palm against her right eye to keep her down, leave me alone you bitch! Leave me alone!
And then the unnatural power exploded out of Ash’s hand.
Blood splattered around them and covered Kat’s face and soaked Ash’s clothes, and his hand felt disgusting, so he pulled it back—and quickly regretted doing that, because oh, god, where the fuck was her eye? He crawled backwards backwards and nearly slipped on the bloodied tile, and Kat was hyperventilating and screaming her head off. She clawed frantically at where her eye once was. She shrieked when her fingers met the nerves mangled inside of the socket.
Ash wouldn’t be able to tell you about this part. He remembered the teachers rushing in. He remembered a teacher pressing a paper towel to Kat’s bloodied mess of a face, and he remembered trying to swallow a sudden wave of nausea when she screamed and a chunk of flesh came away with the towel.
Kat couldn’t tell you about this part. She barely remembers any of it. The ambulance came real fast and she was put under anesthesia soon enough.
Rose couldn’t tell you, either. She had left the crowd to go throw up at the first sight of blood.
Kat was in the hospital for a week, and when she got home she was on too many painkillers to go to school, and when she had healed enough that the prescriptions were deemed unnecessary, her parents agreed that it would be best to enroll her in a different school for the remainder of that year. Kat didn’t mind, and Rose and Ash certainly didn’t either. The mysterious disappearance of the weird religious kid after that weird fight only made it easier for Rose and Ash to never, ever mention her or the fight in conversation. It lay dormant between them, and they mistook it for putting it to rest.
And as Ash lay in his bed at night, trying to rest, the demon talked to him. And one day he decided to listen. It was much easier to listen to the demon say that he was special and not broken, until, of course, the demon told him that it was the other way around, and then that was the easier option to believe until the roles switched again.
One day Ash woke up and found himself to be sixteen years old and in his junior year of high school–not that he measured anything in his life by school anymore, of course. His life had become pockmarked and sectioned off by the pains of the day and the whispering and terror at night, and all of it had been tinted through mania or depression.
Rose’ll tell you that, once it was all said and done, she got sent off to a psychiatrist to tell him all about herself and about Ash. The doctor said that he might’ve had bipolar disorder. It sounded about right to Rose. If he did, he never knew of it.
Rose can only really guess at Ash’s life now, looking back on it. She’ll be loath to tell you that she’d been avoiding him–at first coincidentally, then on purpose. Can you really blame her? He was weird. He was mopy. He never had the energy for anything anymore, and something in his eyes felt different. Hanging out with him was social suicide, and Rose was someone who wanted to be smiled at, not tolerated.
And then, in the second week of their junior year, Katherine came back to school.
She’d made a remarkable recovery–sure, she’d lost an eye, but the socket had been covered by a starburst-shaped gnarl of scar tissue, and other than a concussion, there hadn’t been any other injuries. It had been a year and a half–it was time, she assured her worried parents, to return to where she was supposed to be.
Rose took one look at an older, scarred, shabbily dressed Katherine and fell head over heels. (She never really did have the best taste in men.) Kat accepted the new attention surprisingly well, even though she always was a bit of an awkward fit with Rose’s friend group–and, of course, the minute that Ash Marwood found out that Rose was now buddy-buddy with the kid who’d ruined his life, his opinion of both of them soured that much more.
Prom came in mid-November. Rose did her hair up and wore a pink ruffled thing covered in tulle, Kat tugged on a thrift store suit and brushed her hair for once, and Ash bothered learning how to tie a tie. He got to prom with all of the intentions of having a half-decent night with Rose, maybe even a heart-to-heart, hell, maybe even a kiss? All hope of such a time was shattered when Ash walked into the decked-out dimly lit gym, only to see Rose and Kat joined at the hip. (Of course, it was Rose doing all of the clinging. She had also decided that she was going to have a nice romantic kiss tonight. Katherine was not aware that the two of them were dating.)
Ash tried to get Rose alone to talk to her. Katherine objected to the idea of leaving Rose alone with such a sinning satyr. They argued for a moment, but they had each learned their lesson about getting physical with each other. Rose stormed outside, already halfway to drunk from the flask of vodka hidden in her bra, announcing that the night had been ruined for her. Ash followed, depressingly loyal as ever.
The parking lot was large and cold and crowded with cars. Rose navigated her way through the maze of cars, trying to walk fast enough to make Ash decide that she was more trouble than she was worth. She stopped walking when she realized that she had been heading to Ash’s car out of habit.
She whirled right round and screamed at him to leave her well enough alone, and said a good bit of other nasty things that I don’t think she’ll ever own up to, before she stumbled back inside. Ash stood out in the cold and felt the presence beside him and inside him better than ever.
Rose texted him the entire drive home. He stared at his phone as he drove and half-hoped that something would run him over and end this shit already. Her drunken raving texts swung wildly between profusely admitting her faults to shrieking that he fuck off forever. A lot of her texts had some variation of KYS as punctuation.
So he did. Much to the demon’s pleasure and Rose’s horror, he did.
Rose was the one who found the body. She had let herself in with the spare key hidden under the doormat. He’d turned the lights out and left the note on the floor and he hadn’t even bothered to close the door. Rose opened it, and she had seen the silhouette of his legs dangling, dimly backlit by what early evening light was forcing its way through the curtains, and—
–and the funeral was nice, she supposed. She hadn’t been to many funerals. She curled her hair and wore a black dress with stockings and a cardigan and a coat, because it was early December and the ground was tough for the men to dig up. Katherine was there. She watched from the very edge of the cemetery, right where the forest ends and the first row of stones begins. Rose didn’t dare spend too long staring. She couldn’t read Kat’s expression, and it made her sad to try.
Rose won’t tell you any more after this. She has gotten too drunk to remember this sad pointless story right. And, really, can you blame her?
(Ash goes to Mass. Years later, Rose and Katherine talk after the funeral.)
(Ash has been having dreams, lately.)