4Hey y'all and welcome to Seasons of Liz! This was a collaborative effort between authors okinawasobas and l0chn3ss and the artist rainshatteredsky for Reverb 2017! check out her art on her tumblr page~ let us know what you think in the reviews and thank you all for giving us a read!
several thanks and much love to Rebornfromash and Psychadelicrose for their eyes and for their support
warnings: mentions of violence, dark themes, alcohol, cussing, depression
SUMMER
A bead of sweat rolled down the bridge of Elizabeth Thompson's nose, bubbling at the tip and threatening to drip off the end into her waiting lap, but she didn't notice. She barely registered the static of the television, the whir of the fan behind her blasting cold air on her neck, or even the chatter through the open window as her sister played outside in the yard; instead, her eyes were fixated on the events unfolding on the screen before her.
Liz wiped sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand and blinked for what felt like the first time in days as Buzz Aldrin took his first steps on the moon, the second human being to do so. Something in the back of her head registered this as the start of some new era, a giant leap for mankind and all, but it didn't seem all that important , so instead she picked up the glass of lemonade on the end table beside her, cold beads of condensation rolling down the glass to the table below, and frowned at the television as she took a sip.
People weren't meant to walk on the moon, that's why the moon was in the sky and her feet were planted on solid earth, and yet there they were, taking the first steps on the ominous grey rock in the sky.
(If she were more honest with herself, she'd admit that she didn't feel like she was on very solid earth at all.)
She'd only been at the manor for a few days, five tops, but she was already tired of all these people . The house was crawling with them; housekeepers that insisted on dusting the vanity in her new bathroom at all hours of the day, cooks offering pity snacks because they believed her "too skinny" and "malnourished," and of course Kid himself, with that pitying smile he kept giving when he thought she wasn't looking, more money than God and an obsessive compulsive streak that left her severely on edge every time she bumped into some unnecessary piece of furniture and accidentally shifted it just slightly too far to the left. There were too many goddamn people in this house, and the whole thing was an anxiety attack waiting to happen.
The room she was in now - wood paneled walls, a threadbare couch, and the square television she was watching - had become a refuge of sorts. At least here, she thought, the anxieties would be of her own doing.
She turned her attention back to what was happening on the screen. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounced around on the moon, talking center of gravity and body mass and other words she didn't understand, and the whole thing just felt so unnecessary that she almost shut off the television right then and there. But she could hear Patty's giggling through the open window as she skipped around the gardens with Kid, so instead she turned the volume up and took another sip of her lemonade.
Why was it that Patty had taken to Kid so easily? For as long as Liz could remember, it had just been the two of them, hiding out on the streets of Brooklyn, working odd jobs here and there to make sure they had enough to eat every night. Skinny, sure, but it was Liz-and-Patty, together against the world, and the hard streets of Brooklyn wouldn't be enough to stop them. As it turned out though, a rich, pretty-boy from Long Island was.
Blood is thicker than water, she thought bitterly to herself, her eyes shifting again to the open window where Patty smiled brightly at her new patron.
Liz stood up, and shut the window with a resounding, satisfying slam .
Luck be with them.
They met Kid on their regular hunt for dinner, and what they got out of it was more than any of them bargained for. It started like any other story—on a dark and stormy early summer night when everyone else was safely tucked into their homes while the only people who were still out were the ones looking for trouble. Following this pattern of events, that trouble came in the form of a robbery on the street in front of the opera house.
Patty was the one who caught the shrill, poking her head out of the Burger King's dumpster and wiggling her ears comically. She'd been tired of stale food and unhealthy options, but a beggar isn't a chooser, Liz reminded her. This time though, rather than taking the time to sort through what was edible and not, Patty leapt from the edge and made a mad sprint eastward despite her sister's yelling about the rain.
Liz followed, turning the corner just in time to see Patty stretching out her leg into a swift backwards kick aimed at a man's face. He ran straight into it; his nose rammed straight into her heel and fell from the recoil. A scream of pain alerted a few people standing by under their black umbrellas, and most of them chose to scram rather than to watch. Before she could scold Patty though, Liz noticed a pink alligator skin clutch under his arm.
Call her sexist, but a luxurious handbag had no business being with a grungy person on the male spectrum.
It wasn't Kid- if any of you were wondering. He came later in the story after both sisters presented the purse back to its rightful owner who slowly came running after the thief was already sent away to hell. Her thick, clicking heels signaled her arrival, and Liz held in a snort at the sight of the matching fabric to the bag in Patty's hands. That puff of laughter died instantly though when she realized that the woman's expression was not one of gratitude, but one of disgust.
She stepped tentatively to Patty though she seemed to be holding onto whatever expensive trinkets she had stuffed in her wet fur coat closer to her body. The latter returned the bag to the woman, and rather than giving a reward or even a thank you, she snatched it away without another glance behind her.
Liz felt a little miffed; she wouldn't have gone after the man if she didn't foresee compensation, but Patty placed her hand comfortably into her sister's and smiled slightly, tugging them back into the dark alleyway from where they came, unbothered.
"Let's go, sissy," she said.
Before they could leave though, they heard another pair of footsteps in the rain.
The sun was stinging her, and she squinted at the sky even harder through her fingers. There were kids everywhere they turned, families and friends having a jolly good time. She wondered how fake their smiles were, how no one could truly enjoy this dreadful weather and harsh conditions. The harshest of it all? The people most definitely. Liz grimaced at the proximity of the lounging couple close to her site, keeping her group's belongings within reach and within her line of sight.
She was taking a break from strolling down the shore but there were still other things that troubled her other than the crowd. Her nose itched, and her feet hurt from the heat radiating from the sand. Patty's insistent shrieks of joy was jabbing more at her headache somewhere to her left. The roar of waves was threatening to consume her and her sanity. How much longer until she can't take it anymore?
Strangely enough, no one had packed an umbrella despite Liz's assumption that they would always be over prepared. She'd been careful to not ask for things that she knew she didn't deserve as well; extra accessories and even sunglasses were some of those items. They'd done nothing to earn it, but Patty was sporting swimming goggles around her neck and a snorkel in her hand. How the latter had easily asked for those gifts was beyond her and it made Liz uncomfortable to think about.
Kid had been sitting beside her in silence. He handed her a straw hat and she took it gingerly in her hands, tracing the edges and the woven design, playing with it and inverting the cap over and back again. He gently asked if she needed to put it on, but honestly? She didn't want his pity, his honey covered words and his sickly-sweet gestures. She handed it back to him with a scowl, remarking that the sun wasn't so bad. That maybe it was better for him to use it to protect his delicate skin. He shrugged it off, taking a long look at it and seemed to ponder what was wrong with it.
She knew that he didn't deserve her harshness, but she couldn't help it. She was angry and moody and irritable and cranky. The entire spectrum of a bad attitude was floating around her head like a cloud. Before she could apologize, Patty flounced back to their area on the beach, kicking up sand and shaking water from her hair. Liz moved away from her, tucking herself closer into a ball on her towel as Patty crossed over to Kid's. She took the hat from his hands and roughly placed it on his head, saying something similar to what Liz had just moments before, that he should be protecting his baby skin.
But this time, Kid laughed back at her.
Liz wondered why it felt so different to watch her sister and Kid interact, because didn't she do the same thing? She didn't know anymore. For the rest of the day until the early fade of the evening sky, she watched as they built a sand castle close to the shore where the water met the sand, yelling when the sea washed away their work but nonetheless starting again from scratch over the broken foundation.
Kid was meticulous with his work, clearing the remains away with a couple of sweeps of his toy shovel until the ground was smooth and aligned. Patty on the other hand was their powerhouse and trucked sand to their space from random piles close to them. She gathered buckets of water and wet sand that were ready for Kid to use too. They were placed evenly surrounding them into an organized semi-circle that Liz couldn't make sense of. In the middle of it all, Kid took off the hat and plopped it onto Patty, who readjusted it over herself and flicked her bangs back behind her ear.
Liz continued to dig a basin with her feet a little way off from where they were, letting the water pool in and the sand within to turn to mush. While she didn't want to get her hands dirty anymore, metaphorically or physically, she was tempted to dig her hands into the waters. With a finger instead, she stirred the surface a little every time a wave filled the hole and she kept pushing the sides to make it bigger.
When she deemed it to be an appropriate size, she dipped her hand in to cup some of the sand below. She could feel the grains becoming stuck under her nails, but she decided to forget about it for the day. She poured it back slowly onto a little cove within her basin where no water rested on top to make little towers, repeating the motion until she had a few erect. One was shorter and wider, and it reminded her of Patty. There was another one that was just a little higher than the first tower, thinner but stood taller and straighter—that was Kid.
Finally, there was one that was clearly taller than the rest, but its middle dipped and curved the rest of the length. It looked like its head was hanging low and dripping sand from the top down to the ground. Though it threatened to fall, it miraculously held on by some means. If that wasn't how she felt now…
A sand flea poked its head out of the muck, and she was surprised at its arrival. With a little water cupped in hand, she picked it up in the middle of her palms. It played dead as if she didn't just see it swim around moment ago. She threw it back into the basin where it took the chance to burrow itself deeply, away from her, but her hand hit the tallest sand tower, collapsing it without noticing.
If only she could do that too, she thought while watching the flea disappear from sight. To hide and to bury her head into some place dark where the sun and its radiance can't find her. She didn't heed any more attention towards Patty or Kid, at least until it was time to return for supper.
It wasn't so much that Liz hated walks (lord knows when you're on the streets all you do is walk), it was just that Liz hated these walks.
She used to roam constantly, aimlessly down the streets of Brooklyn, baby sister in tow, discovering new alcoves in the city's alleyways, laughing when a (literal) street rat would poke his nose out from a garbage can when they walked by. Liz swore she knew Brooklyn better than anyone else in the city by way of getting lost every other day, but always with Patty's pinky tucked into the crook of her own.
No, it was these particular walks that Liz couldn't stand. Kid insisted they accompany him on his daily walks, where he always walked the exact same path the exact same way, never deviating to the extent that Liz swore there were indentions in the sidewalk from Kid's perfectly synchronized steps. She hated the order of it all, the way her entire life had gone from a schedule of her own making to a schedule of Kid's making.
Worst of all was the way Patty kept one hand in the crook of Kid's elbow, and the other dangling just out of reach.
So one evening, after Kid had retired to his study for the evening and Patty was sufficiently distracted with some damn thing, Liz grabbed her jacket and slipped out the front door into the cool summer night.
She didn't dare stray far, that first night. She just looped around the block a few times, down some side streets in front of similarly manicured lawns and neatly aligned flower beds. Still, the aimlessness of it all was satisfying to her restless soul, so she wandered a little farther the next night. The night after that, she wandered all the way into town. Soon she was out every night, slipping out of the house after supper when it seemed as if no one was paying attention. It wasn't that she was avoiding home necessarily. She just didn't quite like Kid enough yet to accept that she would be mooching off of his growing inheritance, and so she preferred to spend her time away from him.
He was a rail thin boy with a smooth baby face and fair skin as far as Liz could tell. Despite the weather, he was half wearing formal clothes that didn't looked like they belonged to him; Black tie never seemed to fit the look of children, and his white dress shirt was barely wet from the rain. His hands were folded behind him and his shoulders were squared. Although he seemed to be fifteen years old, he had a power stance that Liz knew he had perfected down to his toes.
His approach was lighter than the (going away) pitter-patter of the woman in the fur coat. Liz wondered if he was trying to be quiet, but it seemed like he wanted their attention desperately. He was a little out of shape as far as she could tell, and she found out later that he had darted out of his car and ran across the street to catch the sisters before they disappeared again.
Breathing heavily, yet still resolved to hold his formal stance, he explained his proposition to them earnestly. By the middle of his little speech, the shakiness in his voice reminded even though he had a chance to breathe; was this nervousness she sensed? He double backed quickly when he realized he hadn't given out his name.
It was Darthemeus Kedderson Jr., and it was apparently a pleasure to meet their acquaintance, or whatever.
Liz rolled her eyes, but Patty matched his introduction with more zest than he had given, reaching out to shake his hand. At her response, he seemed to relax more, smiling more naturally rather than keeping his stiff upper lip. The kid looked to Liz expectedly, and she was less than eager to follow their lead. Still, she felt Patty's insisting eyes on her from her right, so she extended her hand just the same.
"Liz. Same surname. A pleasure."
He rolled her name in his mouth, and then joined them together with Patty's into a singular phrase, testing it out and smiling more when he liked the way it sounded. Before he could get too far though, he caught himself and became rigid again. His former explanation came back, and honestly, all that Liz caught was that he was rich, and that he wanted them off the streets.
And by off the streets, he meant he wanted to be their warden. Was that even legal?
Upon hearing his generosity, Patty's eyes widened. Want radiated off her, and Liz knew that there had been little else that she'd wanted over a home to call her own. It all seemed too suspicious, too good for comfort, like a trickster was ready to pull the rug from their feet once they got too comfortable. Life had its way of doing that.
Rather than sharing her hesitation and suspicion, Patty urged her to accept, giving Liz the final decision. She shook her sister's hands excitingly, pleading with every swing.
To rub salt on the wound, Kid gave a firm, "I'm at your service."
It did nothing to satisfy her. "We have nothing for you."
"But I have everything to give you both," he responded smoothly.
"What's the catch."
"I'm bad at ball but I'm good with a pitch."
Again, with the effortless jargon. The more he spoke the less inclined she was to trust him. There was a vibe that came from him that she didn't like—he was a business man, wasn't he? Greedy and tempting and cunning, they knew how to coat their words with sugar and to empty pockets better than a common thief. Corporate men wanted nothing else than to extract what was profitable and to eliminate what wasn't.
So why didn't Patty catch onto his pyramid-scheme? Instead, it seemed like she hung onto his every word and caught the honey that dripped from his tongue. She was hooked onto his fishing line, and Liz felt like she was reeling her in with every pull.
Against Liz's silence, he repeated that he wanted to help them, no strings attached. That was all, truly. Please take his offer, he would like nothing more.
That was what truly sold Patty- his sincerity.
They'd lost, except it didn't really feel like a loss just yet. Liz figured it would settle in soon as she let out a rough 'ok.' But only because Patty still hadn't eaten that day, and maybe also because despite the temptations, she was still the best judge of character that Liz knew.
