BURNING HILL

“You’ve never seen Moulin Rouge?!” Lana gawked like she’d just witnessed an orphan in a prairie dress leaping from a church steeple, jaw dropping even wider. “I mean, that’s what’s so good about it. It’s, like, this whole other world, where rules don’t matter. And everyone’s so happy, even when they’re sad.” Some might say that Lana, herself, lived life like a musical, like anything could be solved with a twirl and the perfect costume. An ex had phrased something similar, in the past. Something along the lines of “you’re gonna have to start taking things seriously, you know, life isn’t a fucking movie”. But it was easier, following a script, cutting the worst parts in the editing room inside her brain, a big screen that only had room for smooth sailing. It hurt less. Besides, it wasn’t like anyone ever wanted to take a bite from a bruised pear – better to whittle the dark flesh, present them with something appealing, so ripe and sweet that she dripped down their chin. “Nicole Kidman looks like she’d eat me alive for sport. It’s so sexy. Honestly, like… that’s an iconic aura. Wanna just… catch it in a jar and sit it on my shelf. Like a night light, you know? I think it’d glow. Her aura would be, like, silver, like the moon. Werewolves fear her,” Lana rambled, blinking with a little fuzz already infringing on her peripherals, almost as if the world had taken a dusting of the fine hairs from the skin of a peach. She settled where Selene pat, legs kicked out and cowboy boots knocking, gentle against one another. Dorothy summoning her way home. Her grin was impish as Selene spluttered, bottle plucked for her to deliver a gentle kiss to the label, finger cropping up to etch it, after. “Don’t listen to her. Don’t do it! She doesn’t mean it. You is kind, you is smart, you is important,” she quoted The Help, bottle propped against a thigh where she’d doodled a game of noughts and crosses – or her version, at least, hearts and stars that glittered. Lana lost. It meant her opponent had taken her by the hand, lead her behind a wall to kiss amidst the fig trees. She hummed, at Selene’s question. “I got drunk off this really gross whiskey when I was nine. My dad’s friends were cool. Fun doesn’t always taste nice.” Something there, in that word. Cool. A lone thread spooling from the very last letter. Hastily stitched. Subject to unravelling, should anyone think to yank. “Anyways, can’t you feel it? Warm, and stuff. Makes your toes tingle. I bet this is what hedgehogs feel like when they curl up inside of bonfires. Or when you’re falling in love,” she rambled thoughtlessly, already in the process of pulling the absinthe to taste it again. It paused, by her lips, hovering like a firefly was a few feet over, glowing in the leaves. Lana wet her lips. “Don’t you think?” Blinking at her, wide and curious, she couldn’t help but ask it. Hot on her tongue. It needed omission, needed the air to cool. “Don’t you think it kinda feels like falling in love?”

Every word out of her friend’s mouth feels like the tip of a knife picking at her skin, just barely scraping, but drawing blood nonetheless. She wants to feel sorry for Lana without first feeling numb herself. But this is impossible; she is (as fucked as it sounds) almost jealous of the other girl’s dad and his cool friends. Selene is even almost jealous of the way Lana nurses the bottle like a child, swallows it down like her entire face is just a mouth. She wishes she had more mouth, which is to say she wishes she had more words. But she doesn’t, and instead, she sits there still on the warm ground, wondering what it would feel like to dig her fingers into the dirt. Would it be warm, too? Would it be living? There is an image, quite vivid, floating in her mind’s eye: she’s got her fingers two knuckles deep in her chest, feeling around all the ugly parts inside of her. Would it be warm there, too? How could it possibly be warm inside of a person like her? How could it be living when no one has ever cradled it? She thinks about the fact that mammals are warm-blooded, thinks about how the tips of her fingertips are always pulsing, but these are only matters of anatomy. Selene can’t help thinking that somewhere between her ribs, where her heart should be, there is instead a space that is cold and altogether unwelcoming. The thought almost makes her want to take the bottle back from Lana, but the long gulp she’d had earlier is enough to make her feel like her head is already spinning in little circles. And then the topic of love comes up and all she can do is feel her head continue to spin in circles and the coldness in her chest spread to the extremities of her body. She wishes she could stay like this, cold, enveloped in a case of ice where no one can touch her, where no one can melt her. But there is a shade of aquamarine that blinds her for a split second, makes her remember that her heart isn’t hollow but only forgotten, abandoned, and dusty with cobwebs. When had it been discovered again? When had the ice begun to thaw? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what to say. “I’ve never—” It is so hard to speak now; her tongue is just an icicle and it is so fragile, she is afraid of breaking it. So, in only a whisper: “I’ve never been in love. I don’t know what it feels like but…” She thinks about the sour taste of absinthe on her tongue, the feeling of nausea. “I hope it doesn’t feel like that. Do you really think it feels like… like… this?”

Their contrast was as stark as an apple and a shot of cherry liqueur, Selene in her long, trailing dress, Lana in her predominantly sheer, baby blue mini, strawberry decal on her bra to cover each nipple. She pranced in red cowboy boots like Suzy trekking the wilderness in Moonrise Kingdom, intent on her adventure, bottle swinging precariously from a lax left hand – at one point, without the stopper, she’d surely have drowned a peacefully nestled moth. “Cairo. I wanna see the pyramids,” Lana declared, fully aware of the impossibility. She had a stick in her other hand that she swat around the place, fencing imaginary pirates like she used to down the corridors of her childhood home, silk scarf knotted like a sash, filling lonely afternoons when no-one could stomach to acknowledge her. Even then, she froze if she nicked her opponent’s shin. Hesitated long enough that her throat got slit. Died in dreamland, over and over, always a victim of a heart the size of Jupiter. “’Cause fields are their natural habitat,” she provided, no more useful than if she’d said nothing at all, finally rooting a sole in order to spin back and plot her steps backwards. “Haven’t you ever seen Moulin Rouge?” Lifting the bottle, she jostled it around, contents sloshing. “Absinthe. It’s, like, the keys to the kingdom. Magic potion. If we drink enough, we can see fairies. Maybe even Kylie Minogue with wings in a little green dress. Doesn’t that sound fun? Here,” came as she slowed, poppy gazing up at her like it’d recognised her lips as one of it’s own. Both seemed to glow, even in the dark. Lana loved red. Loved it’s multitudes. Angry or passionate or bleeding or lovestruck. Nobody knew the difference. Like a chameleon, she thought. Like her. Bottle extended, her face lit up with a grin – she’d worn something similar when her brother first gave her a beer, so wide it almost ached. “I’ll even let you have the first sip.” This was a lie. Lana had already swallowed three. “Total honour. That’s how much I love you.”

Though they’ve only been here a short while, Selene feels as though she can see her time in Tuscany stretched out before her—long and thin and fragile. There’s an aching realization, equal parts riveting and terrifying, that her reality is no different in Italy than in America. She’s the same person everywhere she goes, just as rigid and exacting, and she would always be this person regardless of where she went in the future; she’d be the same in Cairo, the same buried under dirt, the same melting into a cloud. And she doesn’t drink, doesn’t think absinthe really sounds fun, but this ache she’s feeling puts her in the mood to destroy whatever reality she’s been stuck in. She wants to believe she’s capable of change. But change requires bravery, and she hasn’t been able to pull that emotion from her gut since she was a child. “No. I’ve never seen it. I’m not really a fan of musicals. I don’t get it. I mean—just— why do they break out into song? In real life?” Her eyes scan the field for a spot where she can sit down without completely ruining her dress, but there is none in sight. “And there’s something about Nicole Kidman…she unsettles me....I don’t know why.” She keeps looking around as she speaks, swiveling her head left to right like a snake,  avoiding the bottle that’s being held out to her. She’s trying to work up the nerve to take it from Lana. By the time the other woman has declared to allow Selene the first sip, though, she finally grasps it by the neck and instead of bringing it up to her mouth immediately, hugs it close to her chest.  Fuck it, she decides. Now she’s sitting cross-legged in the dirt, beckoning her friend to sit down next to her. Tentatively, she takes a particularly large gulp and has to force herself to swallow instead of spit. “Fuck. This is disgusting—” she groans, basically tossing the bottle back at Lana. “That’s enough. Fuck. Gross. How do you drink this shit? Without wanting to puke almost immediately, I mean.”

↳ SELENE BETANCOURT PERSONALITY / PSYCHOANALYSIS

the cold has come around a bit into the cracks of old wooden cottages within the callouses of your heart

He isn’t sure which is worse – the contents of Selene’s admission or the way she says it, like it’s not an admission at all but a casual statement of fact. It’s raining. I don’t like tomato soup. I myself am not known and I am not liked. She seems at peace with it, and Will can appreciate that – he’s made peace with uncomfortable things himself, can speak them aloud as if they never meant anything, but there has always been something wrong with Will, something he thinks he might have been aware of before the teachers started pointing it out, some inability to feel paired with brief spells of too much feeling, with a twitchy awareness, with an impulsivity that had burrowed bone-deep into him and had never been pried free, and he’s grown into this but Selene… Selene, in Will’s opinion, doesn’t deserve this sort of nonchalance. He’s sorry that it’s overtaken her. And he isn’t actually surprised, which somehow makes it worse. He’s been sensing this. Maybe because of their conversation on the roof. She’d all but admitted that as she’d grown she had been forced out of her own life, into the role of an observer, of a ghost. On the roof Will was unmedicated and that had resulted in a sort of rawness but he’s so under the influence now that he probably can’t be seen from outside it so it’s a bit of a surprise when this strikes at something in him. He finds he doesn’t really know how to respond, so he lets whatever words that well up out: “People are bullshit. But I like you.” He can’t claim to know her – that would be a lie, and she’d catch it. He may not know her, not yet, but he’s sure of that much. He’s staring at her hand again. He thinks she’s looking at his face but he doesn’t look up to check, just stays suspended in the moment thinking about what she’s said and looking at her hand. He does look up when she suggests that he stay up with her. She’s noticed that he doesn’t sleep. It’s not exactly a secret, and besides, he looks like the sort of person who doesn’t sleep, or so he’s been told, but Will feels stupidly pleased that she in particular noticed it. “Yeah, yeah, I’m always on the fuckin’ roof. I get it. But yeah, uh, I can do that. I’d be fuckin’ honoured, actually.” He’s not exactly smiling, but there’s a hint of a smile in his eyes and at the corners of his lips. Selene still seems out of it and he wonders if this is the reason for her admission, for her trust in him. He adds her dislike of tomato soup to his mental list of Selene facts. “I swear to you,” he says, “I will never, in my life, make you eat tomato soup. Except in extreme life or death circumstances which are probably never gonna come to pass.” The waitress that works the night shift drifts by and takes their orders. Will orders the ginger chicken, and, pointedly, not the tomato soup.

Selene has not stopped thinking about the way Will’s mouth moved when he said I like you. It has been at least two hours since then, and she can still see his lips forming the words. She repeats it like a prayer in her head: I like you, I like you, I like you. And maybe a lot of other people would be overthinking this phrase for other reasons—what does it even mean, really— but her train of thought is much simpler. When a little girl’s mother tells her I don’t like you, it casts a spring of dread in the pit of the daughter’s stomach for the rest of her life. It’s an existential dread, sure, but who doesn’t entertain a bit of that every now and then? The dread she sits with is more personal, a small dagger inscribed with her name, constantly reminding her that this pain is hers (and only hers) to bear in solitude. No one wants to be near a girl with a stab wound. No one wants to be in the splash zone. The blood is hers, and it's red, and she hates it. But I like you from his mouth is something like a bandage. And that’s the thing about Will, isn’t it? He makes her sit in her own skin, yeah, but he also makes the skin feel like it could almost be bearable. He reminds her that her skin is hers, even more so than her pain is.  Hearing I like you from him reminds her that maybe she could like herself, too. At some point, maybe a point far beyond where she can see. But eventually. She has been so preoccupied thinking about all of this that she doesn’t even realize what is happening when she lets him into her room. The thought doesn’t even come to her fully until now, when Will is already here, and she is already under a thick green comforter, feeling heavy. No one ever comes into Selene’s room, for the same reason that she doesn’t really have real conversations with a lot of people: she’s afraid. She almost panics, for a moment, but then I like you is playing her head like a lullaby and she sinks further into the mattress. Her eyes, fluttering open and shut, remain stubbornly on Will, her voice just a mumble. “You can read my books. Or use my laptop. I don’t care. Or, if you want to, uh, lay down I--” Her head nods vaguely towards the empty space by her side. “I don’t mind either. I don’t take up a lot of space, I mean. Anyway.”   For a moment, she wonders what he thinks of her room. Meaning she wonders what he is thinking of her, whether he thinks she’s weird. She props her pillow up against the headboard, so she can lean her cheek on it and still look right at him.“Thinking of getting a poster of Gödel to put right above my head,” she jabs a finger up at the ceiling above her. “You know? So every morning I can look at him and say fuck you, Kurt. What kind of a name is Kurt?”

“I was kidding! And she did it and it threw me off guard! Clearly if I were to stage a fall I wouldn’t have bruised my ass on purpose. It hurts to sit down, Selene. Your pain is my pain,” Jade throws her hands in the air in surrender. She frowns at the tea stain, which somewhat makes Jade look like she had peed her jeans and makes Selena look like she was sprayed with a light hose. “I’m sorry. I can get you another tea,” she sighs. She isn’t sure if she’s apologizing for the running into Selene or apologizing for being a terror. Regardless, she means it earnestly, which she doesn’t often do, mostly because no one usually takes her seriously anyways. Her guilt is like that of a little kid’s. “Are you… feeling okay after that mess at least? Good on Will and Anna to play Mulder and Scully and find you.”

 there is a pause in time where selene stares straight at a point above jade’s head, like maybe if she stares long enough one of them will disappear. she isn’t sure she cares which one of them it is. there is, for a moment, though, a snippet in her mind of a cartoon jade falling into a comically placed blackhole on the pavement where she stands. she has to bite down on her lips to stifle a laugh. “you’re... strange,” she says, finally, with a certain resolve. she doesn’t want to think about jade’s bruised ass. instead, she shrugs at the suggestion, shakes her head curtly. “no, it’s fine. i can just make some more in my room.” despite her irritability, she’s grateful for the offer. people don’t usually apologize to selene. so, for good measure, she adds, “thanks, though.” whatever part of her demeanor softens at the apology quickly dissipates at the mention of the trap room. or, more specifically, at the mention of a certain person. will’s name kind of makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand upright, and she’s glad that this isn’t noticeable. if it was, she would almost be embarrassed. “yeah. i’m fine. will, uh, took care of me. after the party, i mean. i had a concussion.” her eyes still focus above jade’s head, and not right at her, and the tension she hadn’t realized was built up in her shoulders lessens as she watches a cloud in the sky float above them. “hows your, ah, bruised ass?”

It goes unnoticed, when Selene pushes the bottle back towards Leo’s chest, expertly avoiding actually taking a gulp of anything herself. Even if he were dead sober, Leo wasn’t a particularly observant type, and Selene is distracting. The sort of distracting that makes it obvious nothing else is drawing his attention in a silent library, Selene attempting to direct his focus to the tasks at hand, tutoring forgotten so that he could poke pens at her cheek or tap against her knuckles like a toddler tugging at pigtails, “Oh - my turn!” he croons, downing a mouthful of tequila, action followed by his tongue waggling and face twisting in distaste, “Wow, do I love the taste of hay with my booze. Reminds me of the bayou!” The wrong kind of Southern, but it was all the same to Leo. Her hands on his shoulders makes his brows rise, prolonged blinks showing a poor attempt at trying to focus on Selene’s face. It’s a bit difficult all things considered - he’s drunk, of course, but pupils the size of saucers show just how high he is, too. There’s a hazy edge around Selene, like a halo, and Leo would make a joke out of it if he wasn’t sure he was the only one who could see it, “Huh?” Given his reaction, it’s as if Selene had just told Leo she was on the run for murder. His face contorts again, similar to the way it’d been when he’d most recently had a shot, but this time his jaw hangs open in stunned shock, “Are you down a kidney or something? What’s that about?” The question would’ve been personal no matter the context, not that that’d stopped Leo before. When she pushes him in the direction of the bar, he lets her after a few encouraging shoves, though his mind’s still stuck on her confession, “Wow. Braver than the Marines,” he finally decides, arm coming up and over to wrap around her shoulders casually, “I can’t have any, or I’ll turn into a mermaid,” The second half of his sentence is garbled by his terrible impersonation of an Australian accent, “I already have plenty in my body, anyway. Aren’t we made of, like, 95% water? I don’t get why we need it so fuckin’ bad, like. Just literally look inside of yourself? Woah - deep. The human species is, like, actually kind of pathetic. Drink water, eat food, learn to walk. Cry, piss, sleep. Repeat. Sad. So what’s with the no drinking thing? Are you even, like, having any fun?”

taking to leo is like being in the front seat of a roller coaster: you think you know what’s about to come next, but then you don’t, because what comes next is actually much worse, and you can’t tell whether it’s the most fun you’ve had in your life or if you are about to die. selene almost wants to take the tequila from him, it would be for his own good, but at this point she feels that this is akin to taking a pacifier from a baby. she can’t quite get herself to do it. instead, she pushes through the crowd of people with him wrapped around her shoulders, trying her hardest to maintain balance. he’s taller than her, weighs much more than her, and on top of this he is very drunk. she doesn’t really know how they get to the bar unscathed. “no. both my kidneys are squeaky clean. thanks for the concern, though. reminds me i need to go for my annual check up,” she speaks in a softer voice than usual, one she reserves for small animals and little children. “you’re going to need water if you want all of your organs to remain functioning, cleo. mermaids need water too, you know.” her australian accent is decidedly much better than his when she says cleo, but he’s wasted, so she decides not to hold this against him. with one hand she beckons the bartender forward and mouths water to him with a tired (and yet amused) expression on her face. painfully detaching his arms from around her, she hauls herself up on a stool by the bar and tries to gently guide leo into one as well, though even with much effort this proves difficult. he’s a grown adult, she thinks, he can figure out how to sit by himself. instead, she props herself up on her elbows, the wet surface of the counter under her skin. “you ever consider a philosophy major? some amazing ideas you got there. if only you could put this much fucking effort into calculus. you’d be the next gödel. except i hate gödel, so maybe not.” selene almost thinks they’ve left the conversation about her drinking habits far behind, but suddenly it is back again, and she sinks deeper into the counter, her arms now splayed before her. her cheek rests on her forearm. she can kind of feel the wetness of the bar almost touch her face, but she doesn’t really feel like moving. it smells rancid. “i just think it tastes gross. why would i drink something that tastes gross when lemonade exists?” she’s biting the inside of her cheek right now, eyebrows furrowed. “i have fun. sometimes. are you saying i can’t drink lemonade and have fun? that’s very discriminatory to lemons. do you have a prejudice towards lemons, leo?”

Tweed blazer slung over a bralette, Darby had gotten a raised eyebrow from the librarian checking student ID’s at the entrance as she buttoned the center button. She had gone to the library with the intent of catching up on work, but, easily distracted, she headed towards Selene, slight nod of her head in greeting. She rubbed at the turquoise eyeliner under her lids, smudging the blue slightly. “Finally recovered from my hangover. Although I hear you got stuck in some sort of trap door?” She questioned, looking at the girl quizzically. “Hear Jade and Will did too. You guys should have just left her down there. Been like sorry, goodbye!” She joked, her distaste for the Vassar girl dripping off her airy, breezy tone. Settling into the offered chair, Darby sat criss-crossed, leaning her elbows on her calves and putting her head in her hands. “Speaking of Will, how’s my favorite little Italian? Miss that weirdo. I want to boop him on the nose.”

even selene can’t help the small breath of laughter that leaves her lips. she tries to keep it down, though, because she knows the librarian (she’s friends with her, really, however sad that sounds) and sometimes the elderly woman lets selene check out more than the permitted amount of books, and she doesn’t want to ruin this good thing she’s got going on. when she speaks then, she tries to keep her voice just above a whisper. “yeah... it was weird. i was in there alone for so long and suddenly? everyone was there. so weird.” at the mention of will she looks back down at the book in front of her, tries her hardest to maintain a  stoic look on her face. she wonders why she even has to try. it is easier to not wonder, actually, because her mind starts going into unknown territory. instead, she tears her vision away from her book and makes herself look at darby and shrug. “i don’t know. he’s-- i don’t know.” momentarily, she shakes her head, and she thinks she’s gonna stop speaking, but curiosity gets the best of her. “have you noticed how his eyes always change color?”

Their booth is by the window and when Will looks away from Selene her reflection swimming in the surface of the glass is what catches his eye first – even when he averts his eyes he sees her – before he looks past their mirror selves to the limited light outside. She’s talking about tomato soup, which is somewhere she arrived at via speaking of the colour red as if she’s got an aversion to it – not that she’s said as much, really, and she is still wrapped in red. Will only sees the implication out of the corner of his eye and he can’t be sure that it’s real. He’s looking at her again and he can’t be sure when he started. Not that it matters. Why is he wondering? He tries to relax into the moment. Ordinarily, this comes easily to him. Here, he is overly conscious of her hand on his arm, of her hand moving away, of her hand on the table. His instinct is to meet it there with his. He ignores his instinct, smoothing it over with whatever force necessary. “As long as you like pasta,” he says, when what he really wants to ask is: what did red ever do to you? “In case you couldn’t tell, I’m not a fuckin’ doctor, so take all the shit I’m about to say with a grain of salt – maybe a whole pillar of salt – but I think, uh, you gotta wake up every once in a while? And then you’ll be fine. I mean, it’s not the end of the world. I don’t think.” He wonders if it would be strange if he offered to wake her up, check on her every few hours. If it would be crossing some boundary. They only just met. Well, that isn’t true – they’ve been existing on the edges of each other’s circles for a while now, but they’ve barely spoken. A shared knowledge of Godel is no guarantee of trust. They’ve laid no foundations. Will doesn’t expect her to believe he isn’t terrible. Will doesn’t expect her to believe anything of him. Did he sound harsh, before? He can’t tell. He has a feeling he always sounds harsh, and that people either see through it or they ignore it or else they assume that he is harsh. Is he harsh? He doesn’t know the answer to that, either. But that isn’t the point, the point is what Selene sees. Why is the point what Selene sees? “You’ll wake up,” he promises her. “You got anyone that can check on you?” Intentional ambiguity isn’t necessarily how he was raised, but it’s the closest he can get to offering her help without feeling like he is treading directly on a boundary. Without skipping a beat, he adds: “Calamari’s a good choice. And I’ll, uh, I’ll get something else, and you can try it if you wanna.”

Under the almost arresting force of his gaze, Selene deflates. A low breath forces its way out of her mouth like she is releasing some grand tension from inside of her. She’s not a vulnerable person; she was never allowed to be. But she is an honest one.  Her honesty is brutal, more to herself than to anyone else, and she feels the words she says next like a lingering bruise: “No. I don’t. People don’t really know me? Don’t really like me? Both, I think.” The words would have sounded painful, if not for the way she utters them. It comes out of her mouth simply, as if she were reciting a soliloquy to a secret audience, and not laying her own truth out on the table like a losing hand of cards. Maybe the words make her sound like a loner. But that’s what she is, and it’s easier to wear it like a badge than hide from it. She looks now at his hand, not hers, and wonders how many others it has held. It’s not a thought of jealousy, or of possession, but of curiosity. Her entire life has been an exercise in solitude–– even when she fucks it is almost as if she is being touched through cellophane. That is, it is as if she is not being touched at all. She wonders what flesh has been caressed by Will’s hand, what pulse he has felt between his fingers. She flinches. She ignores it. Her vision is blurry for a second and she blinks it away, focuses her eyes instead on the birthmark nestled high on his left cheek. This is good. What she is going to say next she can’t bear to say looking into his eyes, whatever color they may be. She may be honest, but that doesn’t mean she’s brave. She’s never claimed that. “You could. Wake me up, I mean. If you wanted to. I know you don’t really… sleep?” For a second, she thinks she is going to flinch again. Or flex her hand, or do something equally embarrassing. Instead, she keeps speaking, at least to reassure him that she isn’t some sort of stalker. “I mean… because. You know. The fucking… the fucking roof. You’re always there.” But it turns out the birthmark isn’t really a good idea, because now she cannot string her words together quite right. What would his birthmark feel like, under her fingertips? She blames this new thought on the drugs. It’s definitely the drugs. Or the concussion. Her pulse is racing, out of anxiety or fear, or something close to both. She never said she was brave. What would it feel like, his fingers on her pulse? Suddenly she feels the need to talk about food, or else she thinks her vision might blur again. “What are you ordering?” She blinks. What would his hands feel like on her eyelids? Suddenly, she has to resist the urge to close her eyes. “Not the tomato soup, I hope.”