Angry violin playing.
Angry violin playing is a special sort of agony, which comes from the deepest, most purely refined part of the human soul. It’s a kind of pain that most people can never express, and that some people are lucky enough to go their entire lives without needing to.
Angry violin playing is a unique form of human lugubriousness, because it needn’t rely on the perceptions of its observer to help convey the emotion being portrayed. The violin is an evocative, heart-grabbing instrument, that needs no explanation.
Also, Roxie thought, it sounded an awful lot like a purugly being stretched to death.
She stood outside of Lexie’s room, with both fingers in her ears, wincing. Behind her, Sabrina coughed to be noticed.
“Oh, hey.” Roxie said, unenthused.
“How did it go?” Sabrina asked, voice raised slightly, to be audible amongst the banshee wail.
“Not bloody well, I should think.” Roxie assessed.
“How so?”
The rocker grumped. “I sorta came in and got ready to say my bit, yanno, over this whole ‘fing, and then here she comes with this white-eyed look, like she was going to take my head off.”
Sabrina’s eyes widened a bit. “And then?”
Roxie puffed out her chest. “Well I stood my ground, didn’t I?” Being parent to a child to who had all the same frightful powers as her wife, had always come with challenges--the greatest of these being that at any given time, they could snap your neck like a twig without even moving their little finger. She’d pretty much gotten used to that, in Sabrina’s case: either she was safe, and free to speak her mind as she pleased, or she’d be dead on the floor one day, and that’s all there was to it, so she hardly saw the sense in worrying about it.
There was something different about a teenage fury, however, and so while Roxie had told the truth when she’d said she’d held her ground, it was really more like she’d grabbed the closest thing she could and held it in front of her face like a flimsy shield. This thing had just so happened to be Lexie’s violin.
“But then she just starts bowing at the fucking violin like she’s going to murder it, and all the while she keeps right on coming, right in my face, and I keep right on backing up, coz of course, I’m like Wot in the bloody ‘ell is goin’ on? And the next thing I know, here I am with the door slammed in my face, and I haven’t even opened my fuckin’ mouth yet!”
“Lexie would have already known what you were going to say, Roxie.”
“Wot, like read my mind?” Roxie asked, with a shrug.
“Possibly.” Sabrina noted. “But more likely because Lexie and I have already discussed the possibility of you losing your temper over this.”
Distracted, Roxie shook her head. “No, luv, I don’t think that’s it...” Then, she seemed to pick up on the implication. “But wot the ell is that supposed to mean, any’ow?” She took a step to the side. “Like I don’t ‘ave every bloody right to be concerned about this?”
“Roxie--”
“Huh-uh.” Roxie interrupted her with a sharp cutting motion across her own neck. “You don’t get it. You fink you do, but you don’t. You’ve got bad blood wiv Billy, and that’s true, but it ain’t even close to wot I got. And don’t tell me that you know, because knowing something, and having lived it, those are two very different things.”
Sabrina pursed her lips, slightly, as though considering saying something, but then thought better of it.
Roxie, however, even if she wasn’t a mind-reader, had to get lucky sometimes. “And don’t feed me that bullshit line, about people all being different, eh! Its like mother, like daughter, and you know it is. Lexie ain’t ezactly like either of us, but she’s enough like both of us that I know just how this plays out.”
Roxie pointed a finger, “She’s smarter than I am, but that heart of hers, that’s close enough, and in love, baby, the brain don’t mean shit. If Lexie really has fallen for this girl, then there aint no other way. She’s my kid, and that means there ain’t no half-measures. When Lexie falls, she falls hard. She’ll put everything she has emotionally into it.” She prodded the finger sharply. “But that girl, that whore’s little fuckin’ shit-head of a kid, she’s gonna be just like her mum, you mark me! She’s gonna seem like everything Lexie ever wanted or needed, her best friend, and her only confidante. But deep down, just like her fuckin’ mum, she doesn’t really give a shit about anything. That’s who she is, and that’s just who her kid will be too.”
She got very close to Sabrina then, and pointed her finger from her wife’s collar to the floor. “And when she gets tired of our little girl, and drops her, that’s when things get real ugly. That’s what I don’t wanna see happen. So that’s why I’m standin’ ‘ere, and that’s why I’m gonna bust this up for good an all, right now, before it gets to that point.”
Sabrina nodded, but then, gently resting both hands on her wife’s tight shoulders, looked into her eyes. “Roxie,” she began. “I’ll let you do that under one condition.”
Roxie glared. “Wot?”
“If you can tell me, honestly, even one single time, that someone told you what to do, in matters of the heart, and you listened to anything they had to say.”
Roxie opened her mouth, but then closed it. She had listened to her Pop, when he’d outlined what made a person worth being with forever, but then, she’d already kind of made up her mind, in that instance. If he’d have said the exact opposite, she’d still probably have followed through, come hell or high water.
“You sure wouldn’t be together with me, would you?”
Roxie ground her teeth together. “Sabby, I love you, but dammit, there are times where I can’t stand you a bit.”
“I love you too.” Sabrina said with a ghost of self-satisfaction in her smile, as Roxie conceded the argument. But then, she leveled a hand challengingly. “Well, dahling, if you’ve a better idea, please: be my guest.”
Sabrina shrugged, and tried her hand. She closed her eyes, and faced the sealed door with purpose, and then...
Roxie wasn’t sure what happened after that, only that there was a tremendous crescendo in Lexie’s hateful bowing, and that at the same time, Sabrina began to emit a strange noise of discomfort, which grew into one of stress, and then finally tapered up into the realm of a hindered squeal.
Roxie wasn’t sure there was a time she’d ever seen her wife staggered before, outside of maybe childbirth, but suddenly she was stumbling, and would have careened straight into the wall were it not for her wife standing there to catch her.
“Wot the fuck jes ‘appened?” Roxie gasped.
Sabrina blinked her eyes a few times, then looked doleful. “I’m...”
She cleared her vision, and then stood up. “I’m a bit chastened to find that in this instance,” she began. “...I was wrong and you were right.”
Roxie’s eyes widened. “Alright, so let's go put a stop to this, before it gets out of control, like I said!” She moved to turn, but Sabrina grabbed her
Sabrina held her wrist bracingly. “No, you don’t understand,” She cautioned. “It already has.”
Roxie and her wife sat at the coffee table, neither one really all that certain of where the plan was going, but deadly certain that it was going to lead somewhere messy.
Roxie snapped her fingers. “What about Lexie?”
Sabrina shook her head. “Not a concern. I’ve sealed off her room. She can’t leave, nor can she hear what’s going on outside it.”
Roxie looked over, questioningly. “Is that...alright?”
Sabrina tutted. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t inject your moral bias into the situation any more than was necessary. We’re talking about a person capable of as much wanton destruction as I am, on the verge of a breakup with her first sweetheart, Roxie. I don’t think imprisonment in her room for a few hours is all that objectionable when compared to the uncontrolled devastation she might cause otherwise.”
Roxie was still frowning, so she gave a tiny amendment. “If it makes you feel better, this is as much for her safety as it is for ours. And Tammy’s, as well.”
Roxie’s frown turned into a scowl at the sound of that name.
“When can you grab her?” Roxie asked.
“So this is kidnapping now?” Sabrina asked with a quirked brow.
“Leave it alone, Sabby.”
“Fine, fine. Question my integrity all you like, but the second I question yours--”
“Can you teleport her here, or not?!” Roxie snarled in frustration.
Sabrina crossed her arms, with a slight pout, but then sighed. She guessed she could understand Roxie’s apprehension, and truth be told it was a failed effort to diffuse with humor anyhow. She would never be gifted in that way, not like Roxie was. “I can.”
Roxie sat back in her seat. “Then let’s do it, right now.”
Sad Guitar playing.
Sat Guitar playing has a way of seeming autonomous, completely independent from the player, as if the instrument itself were the wounded one. Part of it comes from the fact that the blues pentatonic scale is so numbingly simple. Everyone learns it, first thing, just like how everyone learned to cry as a child.
These are the first steps in development, to which one always came back, no matter how sophisticated their talents or emotions become. A big blow, it always takes you back to square one. If you’re sad, you always cry, and you always play the blues scale.
There are certain things that just didn’t take a lot of skill or fancy fingerwork to do, and being miserable was one of them.
Tammy, though, was beginning to understand this more clearly than she ever had, over the past few days. And being that her understanding had been nigh on enormous before, now it just seemed simply stifling.
She wanted to take her guitar and sling it into the wall, but when she felt like this, there was a part of her that needed the outlet. If she wasn’t fretting and picking, and bending the hell out of those strings with her fingertips, she was sure she’d have to be screaming or breaking something to get it all out.
She’d already played until her fingers bled. Many times. That was the mark of a pro, after all, and so she wouldn’t accept anything less for herself. In fact, there were many times over the past few years that she simply wouldn’t stop playing until one of the pads on her fingers split open. Thats how she knew she was done practicing. That’s how she knew she was good enough to stand up there with a wonderchild like Lexie, and play along.
But now all that was over. Now all she had to do was sit here and play. Didn’t matter whether she was good or bad. Didn’t matter a damn.
So gradually, the playing stopped, and the crying took full control of the helm as she sat there in her bedroom, with her blood seeping into the fretboard, and her quiet sobs.
The band was through. Her and Lexie were over.
Everything was shit.
When she finally took her guitar off, hoping to just lay back and go to sleep, her sadness abruptly became confusion and cold shock
When she took her guitar strap off over her head, it was as though she’d pulled her head through a magical portal, and emerged into a totally different world. She was no longer in her bedroom, she was no longer alone.
Instead, she sat in a room with two women. People she recognized, but didn’t really know. At least, not so much that their faces were a comfort. The opposite, in fact.
A different person, who’d known a different life, filled perhaps, with not so much so much discord might’ve screamed, or at least flinched in horror or surprise at the least, at suddenly finding herself in Lexie’s family living room.
Tammy, instead, angrily wiped her face, and growled. “I can’t be here.”
Sabrina and Roxie both sat with arms crossed, on the other end of the coffee table. “That’s not even close to your biggest problem right now,” said Roxie, on the left.
It was only then that Tammy started to panic. “No, you don’t understand--”
Sabrina, on the right, smiled, but it was conveyed without real emotion. “Oh, I do,” she assured. “You can be assured that nobody will find you missing. Even if they did manage to get into your room, all they would find, was you, asleep on the bed, so far as they could tell.”
Tammy felt so frustrated, she just wanted to scream, but she didn’t dare. Her eyes looked for Lexie, and even she couldn’t tell if she were pleased that she didn’t find her. She’d done a very good job at her mother’s command, and for the sake of her brother, of crushing that small hope in her heart down to nothing. Stressed, she put her head in her hands. “What do you even want?”
“We’ve invited you here for a little chat.” Roxie clarified. “To discuss some things, with you.”
Tammy barked scornfully. “Invited?”
“In more or less those terms, yes.” Sabrina said, with a nod.
“Then I decline.” Tammy spat.
“You misunderstand,” Sabrina clarified.
“Your participation in the discussion is optional,” Roxie explained.
“Your attendance, however, was mandatory.” Sabrina concluded.
Tammy seethed. Who did these two think they were? They were clowns! Each of them was so embodied of different, cartoonishly opposite traits, that together they looked like a comedy act! “Am I supposed to be intimidated? ”
That was Tammy’s first big mistake, and she was sure, if she’d have pressed the matter even one inch further, it would have been her last, as well.
There was no violent outburst, and no cold silence that preceded the storm, either, like she might’ve expected from someone that was was purportedly so like her mother.
Instead, there was just a sort of sliding away of veneer, and a slowly exerted pressure that built until it filled the room, like in a horror movie when the orchestra strings slide up into the high minors and just vibrate there as the closet door silently swings open, granting you a partial view of the huge, toothsome monster, standing just behind it, right before the scene cuts away and the expendable character screams off camera while blood splashes the wall in frame-shot. Roxie’s anger felt that way. Huge, terrible, and unforgettable even as soon as it was gone. Because it was gone, very quickly, and she calmly sat forward.
“Look, I’m not sure what your mum told you about me, but let's get something straight right now, kid.” She reached out and put her fingertip to the table. “Whatever kind of awful, miserable things she told you, how ever despicable of a creature she might’ve made me out to be...”
Roxie’s eyes seemed blue like a sea-squall, and lightning threatened to crash behind them at any moment, even though she sat impassively. “The lies don’t even come close to ‘ow ‘orrible the truth is.”
“Which is, simply,” Sabrina elucidated in a very even voice that somehow grew more disturbing as it went on. “That you are seated before two very well adjusted psychopaths, with more reach and influence than society would appreciate, if they knew.”
“And right now, Tammy, you are sitting at a potential ground zero. Lexie is the keystone upon which all the checked insanity in this house rests. If it topples, because of you, and the whole balancing act comes crashing down, well, here you are, right where we can most easily make you pay for it.” Roxie grinned evilly. “So my suggestion is that you don’t puff your chest out too much, in front of us, because we’re far from intimidated by you, either.”
“After all, you’re already missing from your house, with nobody any the wiser.” Sabrina noted, as if it were simply an innocent point.
Roxie, however, drove it home. “How would you like it if you never showed back up?”
“Or if nobody ever remembered you being there in the first place?” Sabrina added, piling on.
Tammy wasn’t sure she’d ever imagined what an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” situation looked like, where her mom was actually the frying pan part of the analogy, but she guessed this must’ve been it.
She set her guitar in the crux of her arm, and tried to collect herself. She’d been teleported from a home that was ruled by an Arbok queen, to a pit of Sevipers. It was really six of one, half a dozen of the other, by her reckoning. Nothing had really changed. But what could she do?
“She’s thinking about how she can lie to us.” Sabrina advised her wife, as Tammy sat there, contemplating.
Tammy looked surprised, but then, more frustrated than anything, she shook her head clear and tried to think of what she could say to stop this.
“Now she’s thinking of trying to tell us what she thinks we want to hear, so we’ll let her go.”
Tammy’s face turned pale, but then she grit her teeth. If there was no winning with these people, she decided, then she would just be obstinate. Better to take her licks with her head held high!
“Now she’s thinking about--” Sabrina stopped cold, and Tammy burst into a wicked grin.
Roxie looked sideways, but Sabrina waved her off. “Nothing,” the psychic advised.
Tammy let the thought of Lexie’s fingers sliding down between her naked thighs taper off, and leveled her own glare. Even if she was unarmed in that particular conflict, there were certain things parents just didn’t care to know about their children, and Tammy knew from her own experience just where they lie. Sabrina’s look didn’t harden tellingly, but Tammy knew she’d stymied the psychic for the time being.
But then, the thought of Lexie had brought tears unbidden to her eyes, and she found her strength waning sharply. Tamara didn’t let them see her weep, but her mouth twisted out of shape, and she could only look at a spot on the ceiling. “I know you don’t like me. And that’s whatever. I don’t care,” she muttered. “ All anybody wants to do is make this about themselves, anyhow.”
Then, regathering herself, she hissed in a breath. “So, I guess you two will be pleased to know as well, that Lexie and I won’t be spending any more time together.” She burned, deeply, and in her heart, to see pain lash across their faces as she said so, but she knew that it wouldn’t. Her anger and hurt meant nothing in the face of their grudge. They were selfish assholes, just the same as her mom was. “You’ll be pleased to know, that now I have to pay for the mistakes that you made, and for the pettiness that none of you will let die.” She vaulted up, holding her guitar at her side like a readied rifle. “However you see me, that’s already decided, and that’s all there is to it, so why the hell do you even bother to bring me here, just to waste my breath! If you want your shot, too, then just take it!”
Roxie too, leaned from her seat, like she just might, but then, Sabrina grabbed her arm, and asked a very precise question. “Why,” she began, after her wife eased back against the couch, even though she looked fit to pop. “Did you stop seeing our daughter?”
Tammy froze. She knew better than to open her mouth about it, but then realized just a moment too late that simply by virtue of thinking about it in the Psychic’s presence, she’d said enough.
“Your brother. I see,” the Psychic noted.
Roxie looked bewildered, and then elbowed Sabrina. “Wot?”
Sabrina shook her head. “Billy has...coerced them into separating--”
“It’s not that simple!” Tammy barked at once, overtop of Roxie’s next question, but then, the rocker crinkled her nose at the teenager.
“Not that simple?” Roxie groused. “Why don’t you explain it to me, then, eh? Coz I don’t get it.”
Tammy shook her head. “Do either of you have siblings?”
Both of them looked at each other, and then at her, before shaking their heads. Both were only-children.
And that just figured, didn’t it?
“Then you wouldn’t understand, would you?” she spat. She slumped back down across from them in the hotseat, and put her forehead in her hands.
Roxie and Sabrina conferred with one another for a while, and after many minutes of this, Tammy began to question what she’d unwittingly set into motion! What would these people do? Not so long ago they’d not so subtly threatened to kill her! She couldn’t let them interfere with her family. Her mom would go nuclear! And not just on them! On her! On Ronny! And that was if something really nasty didn’t happen. She began to feel apprehensive, and then downright scared--but then she knew she’d have to shut that down. If she thought anything, or even contemplated anything, for too long, it would slip right out of her own brain, and into Sabrina’s. The best she could do right now, was interrupt!
“I’m thirsty,” she complained. It was a reasonable complaint, she supposed, at least the first reasonable on the came to mind.
She was surprised, though, when Roxie was the one to facilitate. “Sabby, put the tea on, please.”
The Psychic excused herself to the kitchen after a moment of silent conference. It was awkwardly placed, around the corner a bit, and she disappeared a moment later.
As though they had both been waiting for her to leave, both leaned forward. Roxie, because she wanted to spit venom, and Tammy because she wanted to deal with the lynchpin of her problems directly.
“Listen, you little shit,” Roxie hissed. “Don’t ‘fink I don’t see wot you’re doin’ here. I watched your mum play the woefully wronged victim too many times to have the wool pulled over my eyes.”
Tammy shifted in her seat, whispering her own accusations. “You don’t understand anything, and you’re not half as tough as you think you are. You can’t keep me here without Lexie’s mother to help you.” She drove that phrasing home sharply. Tammy knew that was what her mother had accused them of, was constantly saying about Lexie, whenever she was in ear shot. She had to assume it would piss Roxie off royally, to make the implication herself that the rock-star and her children were not blood related.
And she was on the money. Roxie, momentarily, couldn’t speak. She seemed like she might bite down on her own tongue, but then she simmered to a slower boil again, and like before, Tammy noted well, it was the deliberate calm that followed which was truly the frightening part. When Roxie reclined in her seat again, and crossed her legs, with both hands placidly stacked, it was her demeanor that seemed more frightening than anything else. “If you care to test that theory, I invite you to.”
She looked taut but patient, like a bowstring caught, not in the hand of an archer, but in the latch of a compound crossbow. Tammy knew couldn’t let her stay that way. What she needed, was to get Roxie worked up into a good frenzy.cv xec
“Well, get up right now and I’ll whip your ass good, you shrimpy old hag.”
Roxie bit, and hard, scrunching her face up on the spot. “OLD? Wot--”
That was when Tammy did a very desperate thing. Nobody in this house understood what kind of problem she would be dealing with if she let this go on. Nobody understood why, because nobody but her cared about anything but themselves! Not Lexie’s parents, not her own. It was so unfair, so cruel, and so... inescapable, that this was all she felt like she could do.
She had to get out of here, get home, throw herself bitterly at the mercy of her mother’s court, and somehow explain that this hadn’t been her choice, but at the same time--as much as she wanted not to--deflect or absorb as much of the blame for it as she could.
Their parents would be at full-blown war, otherwise, and she couldn’t put Lexie through that. And that was quite aside from the fact that she would no doubt earn her brother a one-way ticket to a hell he didn’t deserve, if she didn’t let the toll fall on her own shoulders. What was going on now was bad enough, but if taking a little more meant that it avoided all that, she’d take the beating she would no doubt have coming when she got home and spilled all.
But first she had to get home. And the way home, provided she didn’t wait for Sabrina to come back, went only through Roxie. So, therefore, she knew, there was only one road open.
She would have to clean Roxie’s clock. That was all there was to it.
The guitar in her hands was at full extension before either of them knew it. She didn’t want to kill her, but, Arceus, it had to be a solid knock to the head, didn’t it? She felt all of the scalding anger in her heart power through to her arms as she swung.
She looked down with remorse behind the fear and fury in her eyes.
Roxie looked back at her like she was truly stupid.
That was when the guitar changed shape in her hands. What had before been the solid length of fretboard in her hands, became somehow angular, and weird. Where it should have whipped across the table and clipped Roxie in the brow, instead, it doubled back on her. The sharp strings under her fingers seemed to undulate wildly, and pull sharply, leaving stinging lines in her hand.
She turned, to see what was wrong with it, and that was when she saw it’s eyes and mouth. Two horrifying eyes of alnico, huge and slit-like, narrowed angrily at her, as a mouth of sharp, copper-colored teeth erupted through the pick-guard.
She pivoted as the guitar-body swung towards her, and managed to get her off hand over the bridge, and clutch the body desperately near the strap button. She was screaming, howling, with sudden and animal fear, as the body bowed towards her, that metal mouth snapping and crackling. The thing shook in her hands violently like it was trying to wrench free, and suddenly she found herself more than willing to throw the impossible thing.
But she realized after trying desperately to, that she couldn’t. The strings, which had broken free, twirled and lashed at her arm, spiraling tight around it like fine metal tentacles. That wasn’t the only place, however. The more she pulled, the tighter and more insistent they strings became, and no where so forcefully as about her neck and head.
She pushed and reared, and struggled, but the strings bit her skin and robbed her of her ability to resist with hundreds of searing abradements. She could feel that mouth lurching in, hear it’s crackling, crunching sound.
Then she felt it’s hard metal teeth sink into her face.
She screamed like she had never screamed, with a kind of fear that was imbedded deep in mitochondrial memory. One that had not resided in the lexicon of human paranoia for thousands and thousands of years, and was made all the more potent by needing to be dredged up by the exact stimulus Tammy now received:
Fear of being eaten alive.
Sabrina, in the kitchen, sometimes marveled at the way the human nervous system worked. She hated to be so harsh, but then, desperate or not, nobody laid a finger on Roxie without her sayso. And sayso she often gave, when Roxie was being as rude as she was currently, as she made every effort not to interdict herself in her wife’s conflicts, as a rule, but...well, it just wouldn’t do to allow someone to knock her wife’s head off with an electric guitar, was all.
Tammy found herself seated again, as though she had never gotten up--because she hadn’t--and immediately dropped her guitar in revulsion. She sucked in a great gust of wind, and then another, when she found the first unable to relieve the desperate lack of oxygen, as she slapped herself in the face looking for bite marks that weren't there.
She kept doing this, over and over, unable to cry out, or speak or do anything but clutch at her own chest, until Roxie kicked something toward her under the table.
A tiny waste-bin thumped against Tammy’s legs, which she immediately seized and vomited directly into.
Roxie smiled at her the whole time she was retching, legs still casually crossed. “You’ve got guts, I’ll admit. But no brains to speak of. Do you really think my ego is so big, that I’d feel the need to go toe to toe with you over some cheap insults?” She giggled. “Wot would that prove?”
Sabrina returned with tea. She laid a cup before Tammy, who was still hunched over the bin, and sat beside Roxie, to whom she offered another. “And did you really believe I couldn’t stop you from thirty feet away? I mean, I did teleport you here from your house halfway across town.” She, who had refrained from the drink at this hour, folded her own hands nearly. “Why don’t you drink your tea, and try to clear your head,” she suggested.
“And possibly get the taste of bile out of your mouth,” Roxie offered sneeringly.
Tammy only looked at the two of them, her eyes dulled over the rim of her wastebin, and remained shaky and silent.
Sabrina cleared her throat. “Now, we’re sorry for--”
Roxie protested immediately, “Like hell!”
“I am sorry, that we’ve had to be so drastic with you, Tammy.” Sabrina corrected with a glare toward Roxie. “But what you need to understand right now, is that, while I do sympathize with what you’re going through, it’s important for you to realize, as soon as possible, that whatever threat your mother is holding over your head, that’s nothing compared to what we are capable of.” Sabrina explained. “And the sooner you do, the sooner we can begin to speak in earnest.”
“Yeah,” Roxie agreed. “Instead of you feeding us a load of bullshit, and tellin’ us it’s a steak dinner.”
Tammy clasped the edge of the bin, and finally, tears did begin to roll out of her eyes, as much as she didn’t want them to, and as much as she hated herself for letting them. “I don’t--” she choked on a sob. “I can’t--” and another. “I can’t see Lexie anymore! I already swore I wouldn’t!” What more did they want? What more could she possibly give them, other than the perpetuation of their stupid little grudge against her mom, vicariously, through her? How many times did she have to be the martyr?
“You’re confused, I think,” Roxie snorted.
“That is not our solution, Tammy. That is our problem, precisely.”
The conversation, as it unfurled thereafter was one which Tammy was sure she would look back on as the most tense, and fretful of her life. Discussing anything with Sabrina was a lot like playing a game of five card draw, in the dark, with tarot cards, where the stakes were metered out in truths and secrets, rather than chips and crumpled bills. Likewise, talking to Roxie was like being robbed in broad daylight by an invisible man, who kept insisting that you were a liar, and had more hidden away in your shoe, even after he’d taken everything.
They would ask her a question, and then before she could explain it, Sabrina would nod sagaciously, like anything forthcoming was already irrelevant, and at the same time Roxie would squint her eyes expectantly, then loudly scoff as though her entire diatribe were fabricated top to bottom.
But how could it be? Sabrina was sitting right here with her! Why did Roxie keep accusing her of lying? Every time, her anger flared, and her eyes watered, and she had to sit there and do nothing. It got so bad at one point, that at one point, she’d just sat back in her seat and clasped both hands over her face, rather than go on, tapping both feet to keep from weeping in stunted rage.
“She’s very frustrated.” Sabrina noted, with a tone that Tammy could tell, indicated that she thought she was really being helpful.
“Maybe if she spent a little less time hedging in, for the sake of trying to keep herself from being caught in a big fat lie, and a little more time telling us what really happened, this would all be over with.”
“...Now she’s thinking about hitting you with that guitar again.” Sabrina said, listlessly.
And it had gone on and on like that, pressure mounting as Tammy tried to stay in front of the oncoming wave, and ride it back to shore, which now seemed no nearer than it had before.
Then, as abrupt as could be, their conference had ended, with her stammering in the midst of explaining why all the things had culminated the way that they had, finally, with her mother pinning a lasting threat, when all others had been ineffective, where violence and scorn had failed, when Sabrina held up her hand. “That will do fine, Tamara.”
Roxie, again, only shook her head and snorted derisively.
“Please, give us a moment to speak in private, if you would. You can step out on the back patio if you like. I will take you home shortly, once we’ve decided how best to resolve this.”
Home, Tammy thought, as she stood up shakily. What was that going to mean, after tonight? She’d said so much she ought not to have, that it made her stomach feel like lead. She reeled when she considered the repercussions, and the danger contained therein. By the time she’d made it outside, there was only thoughts of disaster and misfortune on her mind.
Roxie and Sabrina weren’t going to fight for her. They wanted reprisal at her mom! She bit her lip, and worried her hands together. What would they do? What if they called the cops? What if they did worse? The second her mom got wind of that, she was deader than dead, and that would only be if she managed to convince her mom that she was the one responsible--which of course she would have to do, in order to protect Ronny!
It felt like forever before Sabrina came out to see her, and she wheeled, in expectation of the Psychic.
What she got instead was the other mother, no less fearsome, and twice as repugnant. Roxie slid the glass door shut behind herself, and stood there, quietly for a minute.
Then, surprisingly, she leaned against the doorframe. “Got a jay?”
Tammy blinked, then shook her head. “I don’t smoke.”
Roxie tutted. “I could use one,” she remarked, but then shrugged. “Sabby’d have my arse for it, though.”
Tammy didn’t know how to respond, so she didn’t. At least, not at first, not until she remembered the panic she was in. “Look, I know you and my mom have beef with each other, but you can’t just interfere like some in-home mediator! It’s going to get my little brother--”
Roxie waved her hand. “Look, don’t you ‘fink I know that?”
Tammy paused, honestly bewildered. “Then what are you going to do?”
Roxie sighed, and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “To be honest with you, I’m not rightly sure yet. But the fact remains that I’ve got to do something, dunnit?”
Tammy went to open her mouth, but Roxie slapped the air until she was quiet again. “It’s got nuffin’ to do with you, at all, kid. I appreciate that you might feel conflicted about it, but honestly, I don’t see it as my problem. What I’m concerned with, chiefly, is my daughter’s ‘appiness.” She pointed, sharply and without hesitation. “Upon which, your mum is now treading, whether she knows it or not. If it were just you she were making miserable, I’d have been more than content to let the sleeping Lillipup lie, as it were, but...”
She gave Tammy a meaningful look. “We’re well past that now, I should say.”
Tammy gulped. “I...I don’t want my mom to...”
Roxie made a face, and held up both hands. “Eh, woah! Look, kid, we were just having a go at you, awrite?” She rubbed the back of her head. “Wot we can do, and what we will do, are two entirely different ‘fings, eh? Me and your mum go way, way, waaaaay, back, awrite? And as much as I’d like to strangle her with an extension cord, I ain’t found reason enough to do it, yet, and still haven’t.”
Tammy felt her heart decalcify from it’s paralyzed state. Again, tears leapt from her eyes, without her wanting them to. She threaded fingers into her hair, and looked away, straight up into the sky, willing them to stop.
Roxie let out a great, dissatisfied sound, like she were sighing over the sum total of her not so fond memories, all at once. “Your mum and me...” she chuckled, “Well, she probably didn’t ever tell you, but, there was a time when I was... so in love with your mum. She were, more to me than a best friend.”
Tammy opened her mouth, gapingly, not because she was surprised. She’d always suspected something like that, but to hear it was quite another thing entirely. It was viscerally more shocking, and easily a thousand times as awkward to hear it from Roxie. Especially because, given her unique circumstances, her next fear was that Roxie would say, terrifyingly: “And actually, I’m your real mom!”
Tammy actually heard Sabrina from all the way inside once that thought made it to her, she laughed so loud. Roxie gave a strange look over her shoulder, but then pressed on. “But your mum...” She sucked in a breath, and then blew it out, shaking her head. “Well, to be honest wiv’ you, I’m not so sure you mum really knows how to love someone. Or even how to be loved by someone.”
Tammy felt like the words were deafening in their truth. She wasn’t exactly sure she’d ever heard her mom use that word. Certainly not without irony in her voice. For all her invested effort not to cry, she found herself sucking her lips in between her teeth to keep them from wiggling about.
Roxie, placing her hands to the bridge of her nose, seemed like she might lose her cool, as well. “And anymore, I just find myself sick to my stomach when it comes to her.” She waved a hand in Tammy’s direction. “And then here you are, hanging around Lexie, now.”
Tammy could have spat. “I’m not my mother!”
Roxie did actually spit, right on the ground between Tammy’s feet. “And that means I just ‘ave to like you? Don’t be a twat. Even if you weren’t who you are, you’re still sniffing around my daughter, you little cretin!” She sneered thuggishly. “And seein’ as you are who you are, I’d like to chase you out of here with a fucking tire iron.”
Tammy wanted to roar back, to tell her quite abruptly that she’d done a hell of a lot more than just “sniff around”, but Roxie’s next words made her bite her tongue.
“But the truf’ is... I’m actually a bit dismayed to discover, that even after a two hours of trying to provoke the worst out of you,” she began contemplatively. “I haven’t been able to find even one single good reason to hate your guts.”
In spite of herself, Tammy felt it best to object. “I tried to brain you with my guitar.”
Roxie, letting Tammy know that she was dealing with a person whose sense of right or wrong was morbidly skewed, only shrugged. “Yeah, well, stupid as it was; when you’re the oldest, and also miles and more the dumbest person living in your household, you tend to forgive people their little idiocies for thinking they could get away with something in the presence of a psychic. So long as you learned a pertinent lesson. Odds are you’ll need it.”
Tammy thought she was missing the point, but knew better than to object a second time. In fact, she almost have assumed Roxie was implying something with that last bit. She should have known better to smile, though, because the rocker quickly wiped it off her face.
“Don’t get cheeky wiv me.” Roxie growled, though Tammy could tell it was mostly out of embarrassment over letting her gruff facade slip.
Sabrina slipped through the door then, having finally made her arrangements. Roxie spun, and retreated into the house just as soon as she’d left it. “Are you ready?” the psychic asked.
Tammy found her nervousness suddenly renewed, when she was asked. “W-what are you going to do?”
Sabrina shook her head. “Tonight? Nothing. But I should expect very soon Roxie will want to take action.”
The teenager shook her head. “Yeah, well that isn’t exactly comforting! What am I supposed to do when that happens?!”
Sabrina chortled, and crossed her arms. “What makes you think that you need to do anything, Tammy?”
Tamara shook her head vehemently. “When my mom finds out it was me who told you what was going on in the first place, and completely loses her shit on me and my brother, what then?!”
“Nobody is going to hurt anyone.” Sabrina assured. “Not physically, anyhow.” Tammy found herself shuddering at the implications. So it would be something similar, she imagined, to how things had gone for her when she’d taken a lunge at Sabrina’s wife.
“I don’t exactly want--”
Sabrina, was now, it was easy to see, becoming slightly irritated. “Tammy,” she began plainly. “Do you want to be with my daughter?” When all the young girl did was blush, the psychic smirked. "...Well?"
Tammy blinked, wondering if this was to be blackmail of a different sort in and of itself. She told the truth, because it was the only thing she could say on the matter, regardless of what her obligations were. “Yes!"
“Then you’re asking for a fair deal of my trust, aren't you? Wouldn’t it be fair, and proper that I recieve a bit of yours? I will keep you and your brother out of harm's way, that much I can handle.”
Tammy nodded grudgingly. She didn’t enjoy being so tense and questioning, but there really were a lot of delicate variables. “What about my mom, then? Think you’re just gonna brainwash her or something?”
Sabrina held up both hands. “The task of convincing your mother, believe it or not, belongs to Roxie, not myself.”
Just then, Roxie herself came back outside in a rush. “Oh, good you haven’t left, yet.” She held out a cumbersome thing at arm’s length. “Here.”
Tamara gasped when she realized she’d nearly forgotten her guitar. She took it by the neck. She was wary enough to spin it over in her hands, making sure the pickguard and pickups were still just that. She could hear Sabrina let out a stifled hum of laughter in her throat.
“Thanks,” she said, a bit distrustingly.
Roxie only smirked. “You’re gonna need it, for when The Misfits play their next gig, aren’t you?”
Tammy, for all the things she’d began the evening thinking about, wouldn’t have told you in a million years that this was how the night would end.
She slung the guitar back over her shoulder on its strap, and then smiled at Lexie’s mom, in a way that was not so unlike Roxie Toxic herself might’ve at Tammy’s age, before she threw up a set of Giratina horns and said the first thing she’d said in days that actually made her feel human and happy:
“Hell yeah!”