A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twelve, Pt. 2
Still curled up on the floor, Jill gagged on a sob. She spat it out. “I can’t live like this…”
“Jill, what happened?” Zoe repeated.
“What do you think?”
Zoe stepped into the room, approaching slowly. “I’m here, okay?”
“How do people do it?”
Zoe knelt a couple feet from her sister. She reached out but didn’t quite touch. “Do what?”
“How do people wake up and this is the world we live in? How do people look around for more than five minutes and not want all of this to go away?”
She took Jill’s arm, stroking her sister’s shoulder with her thumb. “I don’t know.”
Not far away, a circle of salt surrounded a splat of tarry black. Seals and sigils bound it up, a gob of shapeless gross. Zoe wondered, if she’d bound and sealed the pack of cloves she’d thrown down the garbage disposal, would it have become viscous, vantablack ejecta, too?
“I keep having this dream…” Jill had stopped sobbing and now just sounded tired. “And I keep thinking back, remembering. Jonathan didn’t really kill himself, you know.”
Zoe froze. “What?”
“It’s the world. All the pressure and the pain people put you through not even on purpose but just because nobody cares, or just because they can. We know magic, Zo’…we should be able to save someone.”
“You couldn’t have done anything.”
“I know,” and the tiredness turned to anger. “I know that. Nobody could have. Nobody should have had to. The world should have been a better place and better people should’ve lived in it. But instead people just kept piling on rocks until the rocks fucking crushed him.”
(what kind of psycho piles rocks on)
(today’s in-class activity)
Zoe didn’t know what to say. Maybe there wasn’t anything.
“I don’t want to be here, anymore,” Jill whispered. “Here needs to be different or I need to be somewhere else, but I can’t…I just can’t.”
“Yeah, well. Too bad.”
“Zo’, please, could you not?”
“I’m being serious. ‘Here’ needs you. I—I need you.”
Jill turned to look at Zoe, half her face revealed, pale and sick, wisps of frayed black hair stuck to a sheened forehead. “No, you don’t.”
“I don’t have anyone else.”
“You have Sung-ho.”
Zoe snorted. “As a mentor. As a friend. But we’re family. I’ve known you my whole life.”
Jill rolled over, repositioning. Buttressed on one arm, she faced Zoe but didn’t make eye contact. “You’re three years older so technically just my whole life.”
Zoe reached over and put her hand on Jill’s arm again. “See? You feel better already.”
“I don’t. I just…the first time I used, I didn’t even want to. They—well, I didn’t want to. But I did. And now it eats up my thoughts like I don’t even know what. Everything feels so sharp and hard. Just reading about the world, sometimes just knowing about it, it cuts me up, and this junk, this stupid fucking poison, it puts me back together again. I can’t escape it because it is an escape. And I can’t keep living in a place where I need an escape and my escape is killing me.”
“So we’ll change it.”
“What?” Jill’s gaze flicked up to Zoe’s.
“We change the escape or we change the world, either way. But I can’t lose you. I won’t.”
Jill pursed quivering lips and wiped at a glisten of more tears glassing her bloodshot. “I don’t know what to do.”
Zoe stood up. A wash of splayed books cluttered the floor where Jill had pushed over the two bookshelves. She picked a few of them up and piled them neatly. “You can start researching again. I know it helps.”
“Zo’…”
“It’s a risk, but what isn’t?”
“You’re sure?” Jill asked, shifting on the floor.
Zoe picked up a heavy, leather-wrapped grimoire. Staring at it, she nodded. “Yeah. I’m sure. Now,” she turned around, an almost-real smile painted on her face, “care to give me a hand here? Something really trashed this room.”
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