Published in Edition Five (2024) as part of the Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune column

“Baby, you're a vampire, You want blood and I promised. I’m a bad liar with a savior complex.”
- Phoebe Bridgers, “Savior Complex”, Punisher.

Soon, you learn that you can't save those who will come after you. As I stared at my sister’s golden curls, her pink cheeks, her flatly appreciative smile, I noticed an air about her that I hadn’t seen before. The sun shone through the bathroom window, she showed me her brand new hair straightening iron. That year I’d had my heart broken by a Carhartt-wearing 21-year-old who didn’t care if I lived or died. As the Philipa Perry quote goes: he had great cheekbones, but he didn’t have much respect for me. Thing was, he didn’t even have great cheekbones – he was just some guy. I was 19, and I had a great imagination.

We had gone out once, as friends, and it was very clear very quickly that not only did he not have any other interest in me, but he also didn't really care about being my friend. About anything, not even myself. And he wore these… fugly jeans. It didn’t matter in the end, he had a girlfriend the whole time. I just remember thinking: I'm never letting this happen to my sister. My body slid down in the sink,  I tugged at the lace on my shirt to try and make some conversation in my body, get my blood pumping somewhere productive.

My sister had this tendency to dress like an Eminem-Avril Lavigne love child. Her naturally curly hair was currently being straightened into a bunch of mousy brown twigs, dead at the side of her face. She wore heavy eyeliner with highlighter in the corner of her eyes and balanced her delicate features with the heaviest clothes she could find. Big windcheaters, floppy track pants. Every day was the same. Sometimes the shirt was a tight t-shirt, sometimes a camisole if it was hot outside. But she’d always put a jumper over. She talked like if the girls from Thirteen were Australian, had seen one too many Sofia Coppola movies and had decided to wholy abandon girlhood.

What finally made me stop texting my beloved Dickies-wearing dickhead were my sister’s words. See, my sister had an arsenal of witty and original one-liners that she would let loose at any moment. These included but were not limited to:

Valerie, you have no friends.

Valerie, you’re so ugly.

Valerie, what the fuck are you yapping about?

Valerie, you’re so weird.

And last, but certainly not least, “Valerie, fuck off!”

            But that day, I was telling her about him. It was the 10th of January, two days after Elvis Presley’s 89th birthday. The day Thomas Paine published Common Sense. The day that the Treaty of Versailles took effect. Birthday of Pat Benatar. Deathday of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel and David Bowie. But for us, an unremarkable day. We were in the bathroom ‘cause it was stinking hot outside. My baby sister was in the bathtub, fully clothed, surrounded by tiles. I sat in the sink, hoping it wouldn’t break off. She was wearing baggy jeans that fell down every time she stood up.

“He watched my story, he didn’t like my post and he hasn’t DM’d me back.”

“Okay. There’s your answer.” she said, seeming to pick some lint off her baggy t-shirt. “That’s all we need to know.”     

“Damn!” I shuffled around in the sink, trying to make myself fit, “we are living in a sassy men apocalypse, I guess…”

“Goofy boy. Men are so dumb.”

I looked her in the eyes. Her pretty pink cheeks next to the marbled-white tiles. My baby sister just… complimented me? I think? I was honored that she thought he was goofy for not liking an Instagram post. My beautiful baby sister loved me, deep down.

That night I had the first in a series of recurring dreams. We’re in the bathroom. Me, my mother, my grandmother, her mother and my sister. There’s a bang that’s distinctly front door-like. I heard the clanging sound that the stained glass in the front door of my childhood home used to make whenever my dad came home. The door slammed. The chain jumped up and down a couple times while whoever had just come in stomped up the hallway. My mum shut and locked the door and told us to get in the bathtub, behind the opaque curtain. It wasn’t my dad. It was a shooter. I knew, because it was my dream. There were sounds everywhere. There was more than one shooter. There were three that I could count. One outside the bathroom door, guarding it, saying things like, “You’ve gotta come out sometime!” even though the lock on the bathroom door in my childhood home is very easily unlocked. The second was outside the window, trying to climb a brick wall and get into our house somehow. My mother leaned over and said, “See, this is why we don’t have a back door.” There was another shooter somewhere else, but I just didn’t know where. Or, maybe that one was more of a feeling.

There was banging on the bathroom door. I saw it wobble back and forth, the way old pieces of furniture are wont to do. My mum yelled, “Get in the bathtub!” again in her very best stage whisper. Everyone piled into the bathtub. My great-grandmother, my grandmother, my sister, my mother and suddenly there was no more room. No room in the bathtub. Suddenly, I felt my cheeks firm up, or something. I felt the bone stick through. I looked in the mirror. I had great cheekbones today. But the shooters were gaining on that poor old bathroom door. Part of me wanted to be found, but not as much as the other part of me wanted to be gone. Sink into the floor and die, away from these dangerous men. I would follow ten bears into forests larger than Australia before I’d stay trapped in this bathroom.

“Valerie, what are you doing? Hide, idiot.” Perhaps her final one-liner.

But she was right. I had to get moving. I couldn’t go out the door or the window, and the bathtub was full. So I could either cram myself in the toilet, climb the sink, or…

It hit me.

I opened the door, and stood behind it, closing myself into the corner.

“What the fuck, Valerie!” No, that was her final one-liner.

Soon you learn you can't save those who come after you.