1

SIX HOURS BEFORE

Lilya Chong was drinking water from a toilet, and she almost deserved it.

Not of her own accord. Her assailants were of her own build; teenaged girls. They were looking for a quick punch of dopamine before the fifth period started. High school experiences had the quirk of being one person's best years and another's suppressed memories. Lilya Chong's day-to-days belonged firmly in the realm of the latter.

There were multiple reasons why her mere presence could turn even an apple-gifting, boot-tip-sucking teacher's lapdog into a menace. At a whopping 6'0, she had about a fistful of metric increments over most of the boys and all the girls, which might've marked her as a Highly Desirable if she was not Lilya Chong. Unfortunately she was an existence that happened to be cursed not by one, but two deficiencies: she affected a poor posture, with her spine coiled about her core like a frail and wiry comma; and more saliently, she presented herself like she needed at least ten years worth of trips to the therapist.

She had too many marks against her soul to be considered a functional member of society. It was why she was drinking toilet water.

The girls were gone now. She rose, her eyes blubbery from the chlorine, her fingers wrapped around the lip of the bowl. In the past four years she had learned that the best way to go about being drowned in the toilet was to grasp the sides, so that your assailants would not be able to trap your chin around the bend of the plumbing. Because if they were ever blessed by the bright idea of flushing the toilet while she was stuck in that crook, Lilya knew that she would surely suffocate.

Thus: the struggle was necessary. It made her pathetic, but it kept her alive, and while Lilya was at best ambivalently anhedonic about being alive, like most people she hated dying even more.

So she kept her hands on that bowl lid.

She tore out a handful of single-ply from the dispenser and pressed them into her eyes first, then her cheeks, then daubed around her hairline until she looked like someone who hadn't just done a lap in their local sink. This never worked: her shirt was wet from the shoulders up, and there was nothing she could do about the smell, which clung to her like flies to a corpse. After deeming her appearance a lost cause, she lowered her mouth to the tap and gargled, and drank, and rubbed at her face until her skin stung and glowed an inflamed, hot-coal-red in the mirror. Then when she was ready, and when she was proper sure that the girls from before were out of both ear and eyeshot, she left the bathrooms and headed straight for class.

Outside, the corridors—which were lined with a hideously plump material that stuck to the soles like wet sugar—were almost completely empty. The bell had likely gone off while she was bubbling around in the toilet. Made sense: they'd abandoned her too early. Lilya did not mind being late if it meant that she could stave off the comments about her stench for even five more minutes.

Luck was not on her side.

As she rounded a bend, her balance off-kiltered, she quite nearly rammed nose first into another body: the odd student meandering in front of the trophy cases. She was rattling two bobby pins around the lock, and on the glass was a smattering of fingerprints.

She looked up at Lilya. Lilya tried her best not to look back.

The attempt was about as useful as closing her eyes in an attempt to erase the sun.

First of all, it was a miracle that this girl hadn't beaten Lilya into a puddle yet, because she looked like the kind of truant who would have done so in a heartbeat. The student was dressed in a mustard-yellow hoodie and bright white Nikes, which were miles past any sensible notion of school regulation. Her hair was a nonsense hodge-podge of subdued hazels and golden-wheat blondes, cramped into curls that bounced above her shoulders and made her look like a tired, puttered-out solar flare. Her only saving grace was that, unlike most of the girls that were eager to drown Lilya, this student had chosen to wear her Pealsburg skirt properly, letting the hem hang down to the midsection of her calves.

The two of them had held each other's gazes for far too long now, longer than what was socially acceptable for a chance meeting between strangers.

Finally the student said, "You've got, uh, something."

She motioned to her shoulders.

"Thanks," Lilya mumbled fumblingly. Then, because she apparently wanted another hiding, she added, "I didn't see anything."

Another pause. The student responded, "What?"

Lilya pointed to the trophy case. The student blinked, as if she'd forgotten that stealing could be considered a crime, then mouthed a drawn-out "oh."

"But I won't tell." Lilya waved her hands.

A snort. The stranger went back to jiggling the lock and said nothing else.

The sun-centric comparisons now embarrassed her greatly. She left.

Again, it didn't matter. None of it really.

The girls would dunk her head under a second time after sixth period, when school was properly over and they were free to harass her clean past the darkening hours of four and five. The teachers would chide her in front of the class for being late for the third time that week again. Another detention was probably imminent. These things happened regardless of whether or not she smelt like sewage or wore her bag lopsided, and if she really wanted to be dramatic about it, climate change was going to knock them all dead anyway. It just didn't matter.

It mattered so little to her that she had stopped crying about it long ago; something that took much grit to admit. The fact that she'd even cried at all, once upon a time, shamed her deeply.

***

The sun was streaming its hot pre-evening light through the now shuttered windows. The hallways were dead quiet. Lilya stumbled out of the bathrooms again, her hair wet from another bout of torment, her shirt damp right down to its stitches. In her blubbery, asphyxiated haze she could sense a deep vibration emanating from her skirt pocket. Her phone was ringing. It was her mother.

She scrambled to swipe her thumb—which was similarly sopping wet and had started to make her phone go haywire—across the screen to accept the call. This took several tries. By the time she had the stroke of brilliance to wipe down her fingers on her jacket, the call was dead.

Lilya said a very rude word. Her head was aching already from the dehydration, a trait she'd picked up having seen the bottom of a toilet bowl one too many times; water had never tasted the same since. She jerked her phone-hand above and behind her neck, poising to smash it into its constituent parts on the ground, then thought better of it when the phone started vibrating again.

She swiped. She held her breath, and held the phone at arm's length from her ear.

Her mother's voice floated through the speaker like a weary spectre. "Why didn't you pick up the first time?" she asked, like a completely normal person.

Which made Lilya extremely uncomfortable, because while she had anticipated this very question, she hadn't anticipated her mother to be good natured about it.

"I was busy," Lilya answered.

"Busy… right, busy." Her mother sounded faint. "I just got back. What would you like for dinner?"

"You're early," said Lilya, hesitantly.

"I actually left work at four," she answered. "I had a bad fall… got bumped by something, or someone, don't know what… must've smacked my head on the way down because it left me all dizzy, I could hardly work the till right, let alone think straight. I might lie down for a bit… what would you like for dinner, sweetie?"

Now Lilya was standing ramrod straight and in dire need of a cigarette—she had never smoked in her life. Her mother had gotten through a whopping seven sentences without insulting her or screaming—and she'd called her sweetie, which was a can of worms for another day—which either meant she was in the company of people she wanted to impress… or she needed something.

Lilya asked anticipatorily, "What do you want?" because her mother was deeply neurotic, and rarely saw the need to ingratiate herself to others.

She heard her smack her lips. "Oh, don't be like that. Last I checked, there was steak in the fridge—would you like some of that? Medium or medium-rare? Maybe a side of mashed potatoes?"

"I don't mind. Whatever's easy."

"Don't be like that, I know you've got preferences…"

"I don't mind." She paused. "Medium rare."

"There we go."

In truth, Lilya wanted nothing to do with anything that her mother had touched, even if she had only prodded it for a microsecond with a ten-foot pole.

She was thankful when her mother hung up with nary a parting word, which was again, surprisingly empathetic of her. It also meant that all the times when she hadn't been empathetic (which was all of the time) was not from her inability to read the room, but rather from a distinct lack of willingness to do so. Which really, made this whole thing stink like a day old corpse.

Dinner had likely been laced through with rat poison and drain cleaner and other liver-ruining what-nots. As Lilya hobbled down the school steps, her socks squelching with tap water and toilet water in equal measures, she mentally prepared herself for voluntary starvation.

The sun had slipped somewhere behind the trees, which were mostly bare now and could only branch across the sky in spindly, thin spiderwebs. Further ahead, where the school busways stopped and the public roads began, a long line of cars crawled by inchworm-style, their headlights burning napalm whites into the gravel in front of them. Rush hour had begun—the time was five-thirty, and Lilya knew she was fucked for time if even if she booked it back home.

This boded well: it meant she was free to meander around outside before needing to confront her mother, and if she got home late enough there was a good chance her mother would be out cold on the sofa anyway.

So she took her sweet time with it and chose the other way home, down the roads that were lined by houses that could pass for miniature mansions. Wandering through these neighbourhoods had brought her great joy when she was about six and great envy when she was old enough to understand the hand that she'd been dealt. She did not live here, where the pavement was white and creamy enough to skate down unabated, where every front yard was swarming with a severe surfeit of floral activity and decorative flamingos. She lived over there, past the little muddy reserve, past the hill that sloped downwards. You couldn't see her house and the miniature mansions at the same time.

Lilya wandered until it was so dark that she could no longer read the numbers next to the mailbox without committing trespass. Then it was through the vacuous mud fields, down the cracked and windy spot of pavement, and around the chain-linked fence that was patched with holes and wrapped lamely around a sad, greyish pond.

Home was a single storey flat with a bad roof and an even worse driveway. It sat below the road on a heavy incline that was hell to back out of during rush hour. All of their flowerpots were cracked and lying at the foot of her house like they were still intact; the path leading up to their doorstep had webbed in places, and there were perfectly green weeds growing through these webs like bathroom grouting. The sensor lighting on the garage no longer worked, even when Lilya clapped and jumped beneath it. There was nothing. You could've set an oscar-worthy standing ovation beneath it and the lights wouldn't even wink. She gave up after the fourth round of applause when her neighbour peered over the chainlink and gave her the second worst pair of side-eyes she'd ever seen.

Worse: her mother was being dead quiet about all of this. She'd probably heard her from the bedroom or wherever she'd decided to nap, and in her sudden fit of saintliness she'd chosen to hold her tongue.

The gesture unnerved her. Her mother had always been a light sleeper, and should've woken up by now. The silence was real and it was working. It was like watching a dog stare off into the distance, tail held still. Nothing had happened; something was wrong.

She shucked off her shoes and groped around in the dark for the doorknob. When she felt the confirmation of cold brass at her fingers, she grasped and turned it, fully expecting the knob to catch midway. If it did she was in trouble. Her keys were stuck at the bottom of her bag, and the neighbour—who was a chronic chainsmoker and was not currently smoking, which heralded bad times all around—had gone from side-eyes to death glare.

The door did not click. The door was unlocked—odd, because her mother never left a door unlocked, especially when it happened to be the door to her own house.

There was little time to contemplate the nature of her mother's whimsies. Stoop-shouldered and eager to avoid the stench of a smoker in withdrawal, she hurried into the house, pressed in the lock, and snicked the door shut behind her.

She stepped into the living room. Something had gone wrong. Without fanfare, she was home.

***

The time was six in the evening. The skies had affected a garish shade of ultraviolet blue, the kind you saw in abstract paintings and on computer screens. There was no dinner; there would never be another dinner again. Lilya found her mother's body in that cool, moonlight suffuse, and she knelt over its arm.