Daphne

Daphne Hawkins had dropped her gloves. Again. The third pair this year.

Christ.

Standing on the tip of Alliance Lake Pier, she rubbed her hands together despite the warm morning, and gazed out at the water's glassy blue surface.

The breeze lifted her lacquered brown hair and cooled the back of her neck like it always did.

She used to love it here. Her secret escape.

The lake's reputation for being creepy and riddled with rapists was what made it so perfectly peaceful. Everyone was too scared to come here, no matter how big the crowd. Growing up, Daphne had considered the lake her personal retreat. A place where her distress and sadness came to die. Where emotions could be set free. She came here to study, or cry when her cat died, when her parents fought, or when she simply wanted peace from the strains of high school where she couldn't be seen or ignored.

On this early spring morning, Pogo pining for his ball to be thrown, Daphne found herself back here because of Jacob; a misfit, a person, a boy. Not a freak, not the Elephant Boy or Slice n Dice. Just Jacob Lee Birdan; an angry, scarred, ugly boy.

My friend.

Daphne had explained to her therapist days earlier.

I was fond of him. I was a quiet kid too who was nice to everyone and always intrigued by him. The athletic guys at school viciously tormented him, Simeon Haynes and his henchmen. Even before his disfigurement.

That warm night, back in 1992 when Mrs Birdan's car blew up and crashed over the side of South Bridge into the river, the news spread like fire in a paper store. Daphne couldn't face going to her funeral. And school was only bearable afterwards thanks to the water bottles of vodka she gulped in the girls bathrooms between classes, disguised by mouth spritz and perfume. After twenty-five years, she still smelt the smoke, heard the screams, the sirens. She still woke up in the night to that metallic crash. Concealed by the altitude of her Manhattan apartment, Daphne had slept, popped pills and drank her guilt away for the best part of three haunting decades.

In the days following the accident, locals and neighbours lay flowers on the rickety steps of the Burden's shit-hole house on Truman Circle. People who before would never have even looked at Jacob and his mother, all knowing too well her sinful methods of making money. Teachers gossiped over coffee and cigarettes in the faculty lounge. A special ceremony was held in the school auditorium which included a speech from Principle Green about fate & togetherness. A contrived event designed to prove a point and for Principle Green to flex the school's conscientious muscles.

Fucking stupid.

Simeon Haynes and his apish disciples sat behind me that day. I wanted their skulls to dissolve and pour like salt from their ears. Especially Simeon. How could he be immune to guilt or remorse? They were overjoyed by the excitement and misfortune of Jacob and his dead mother, killed on impact.

Daphne listened to the birds waking up around her, that timeless sound of her youth. She remembered how the jocks mumbled loathsome remarks about his mother and what Jacob's face probably looked like now. They chortled, whispered and giggled loudly, their shirts irreverently untucked with hair swept back, long and centre-parted, hanging like silky drapes around their foreheads. They punched each other, playfully indifferent polluting the air with their cruel arrogant defiance.

I hate myself for it, Daphne thought to herself, her eyes fixed on a tangle of weeds in the water beneath the pier. But even then I wanted Simeon, the asshole. Well, not entirely. I'm the asshole who said yes when he proposed on graduation night, just months after the accident, after the blood-bath of prom where Jacob had demonstrated his talent for revenge.

It was July of '92 and Simeon's beer-soaked mouth pressed against my neck as he held me over the bonnet of his father's Aston Martin, a macho, American mess of big shoulders, aftershave and Budweiser.

My God, I was such a shallow idiot, caught in the tacky storm of new popularity.

Daphne had gotten skinny just before the accident thanks to a stomach ulcer. This, followed by one hedonistic week of shopping and mimosas at her grandma's up in Montpelier, transformed her from flavourless bystander to ultimate teen supermodel. Granny Gwen had bleached her hair over the kitchen sink. In a sun lit cloud of menthol smoke and tap steam, she scrubbed Daphne's head with her crimson talons. "Boys eyes catch only gold." She kept saying as she rinsed her burning scalp. She arrived at school after Spring Break transformed, instantly making herself the pursuit of Bluebird High's in crowd, all of them dazzled and intrigued by her breath-taking metamorphosis.

I became a swan and left my best friend behind.

So, 3 weeks after spring break, when Daphne had established herself as beautiful, popular and worthy of Simeon; the rich quarterback - the accident happened. And soon after that, outcast Jacob returned to school, his face hidden behind an old clown mask, traumatized and orphaned.

He became so invisible and I'd become so... well, visible. So much so that he seemed to vanish from my senses. A lot of things did, I guess.

Daphne tore her tearful gaze away from the landscape and down to Alliance Lake's glassy surface. No longer did an average mousy girl look back, but an empty woman pushing fifty. Despite her overflowing bank account, Daphne's quality of life remained cheap and temporary, lit up momentarily by the swipe of a credit card or the swish of a surgeon's knife.

During the final days of high school, I couldn't look at Jacob. Every time her passed me in the hall, waving a flirtatious hand or staring me at from the back row of class or the corner of the cafeteria, I felt his eyes on me like a rash. Whether it was fondness or knowing, I couldn't tell. I stopped wondering, blocking out my guilt and the nightmares of his mother smashing into the steering wheel, the river filling up the car while Jacob burnt and bled, with wine stolen from my mother's liquor cabinet. One thing was for sure, Jacob Lee Birdan was in love with me. The scarred boy, refusing help and any psychological recovery by shielding his mangled face behind the grinning mask. Something we all simply accepted, imagining his pain.

I don't know.

Daphne shook her head and turned back, heading up the pier toward the grassy banks of the lake. Pogo trotting about with his ball.

Why would I question it? I went from science club to cheerleading. People I didn't know knew ME. I mattered. My opinion mattered, my grades soared and Simeon's future glistened with athletic promise. I went from being compost to the biggest rose in the garden.

The breeze picked up, Daphne looked forward to a nice hot bath in her parents retro bathroom when she got back. Possibly a Bloody Mary as long as Dad didn't see.

I wasn't the one responsible that night. Nevertheless, I am still the one that never came forward when the police came knocking on doors all those years ago. Has my chance for atonement gone?

But Daphne's inner monologue was cut short as she reached the end of the pier; on the ground, placed with care along with a familiar plastic clown mask, Daphne found her gloves.