At the age of 14, she got a tattoo on her inner thigh pointing up that said, "Lucky you". She told her eighth grade Civics teacher, as they lay on his pull out couch smoking a blunt and flicking through his National Geographic collection from the nineties, that she got it for him, to remind him of his good fortune every time he went down on her. He loved that shit. Men his age usually do. They want to be taunted, reminded that they are old and unworthy and that while most of them are stuck fucking the same woman every night, a lucky few, like himself, had circumvented convention and salvaged their own dying youth by robbing the childhood of girls like her. But the truth is she had gotten the tattoo a few months prior, about a week after the accident and the reminder was for herself, about the fragility of life and sanity, the sanctity of time. She explained it to Matty once, while they sat on the kindergarten swings one Sunday, sipping on cheap whiskey stolen from his Dad's pantry.
"Can they still be called swings if they are frozen in place?"
"What should we call them, then, hanging chairs?"
"I don't know man, I just feel like when something is named for its purpose the name ought to change if that thing is broken you know?"
"So human beings, who no longer do anything, should be called human...nots?"
"Stop it, Matty. She's still a human being."
"She's lying in a fucking bed and the only thing she does is shit herself."
"But she's alive right?"
"Barely."
"We're so lucky, you and me. We took the same shit she did. I didn't even get high."
"Have you seen Alex?"
"No his parents shipped him off to some Aunt somewhere. I hate this shit. It's not his fault the pool was empty. It's not his fault she jumped."
"His party. His drugs. His fault."
"That's fucked."
"Life's fucked."
"At least she's alive."
"Barely."
Matty hadn't taken well to her new lifestyle. He thought it was wrong to feel anything any more, he thought they should all live in comas, pass the time like zombies, in solidarity. Or something. She wasn't sure of the logic. But she knew it wasn't what Zeni would want either. Zeni would want her to break things. To rebel. To fuck her Civics teacher. To run away. Zeni always talked about running away. Of escaping. And she did, in her own way, in the end.