CHAPTER ONE
girls who play with fire

IT TAKES APPROXIMATELY THREE MINUTES to drown. Seven for certain death. Once you start to inhale water, the body triggers an auto-response reaction to close its air passages. Everything begins to shut down. The body will struggle for air but the primal need to breathe will not be granted because the airways are blocked. Usually, by this point, you might be flailing above water. In a very short time you will submerge, and within minutes you will die unless a rescue is made and efforts to resuscitate you commence.

By the two minute mark, Sawyer feels her lungs burning, begging for air, but she holds on, determined to make it to the third. Submerged underwater, Earth is a million miles away and she is a cluster of cells in the dark again, an embryo suspended in lifeless stasis, an only child of the only universe its ever known. Submerged underwater, she hears nothing but the metronome of her heartbeat pounding in her ears, the blood in her veins roaring with the fury of a storming ocean, the water sloshing around the ceramic bathtub. Beyond the door of the bathroom she's barricaded herself in, the world outside this throbbing ventricle is disconnected, of fractured pieces of memory and fragments of distorted sounds. Faint sounds plugging her ears, homage to the water pipes running through the walls of their apartment building, the neighbour's record player crackling through the white noise, a bustling relic of her family getting ready for dinner, muffled by the bathwater and the blood rushing to her temples.

In this emotionless cavity, the sounds from the outside perforating the tranquil on the inside are mere echoes, inconsequential reminders of a before and an after she will not suffer. Not here, at least. Here, she is untethered, a lone particle with no sense of gravity floating in the middle of space, unburdened with mortality and humanity and this moment of quiet in the chaos, of the water being louder than the thoughts in her head, of existing outside of her ceaseless brain feels like the only moment of peace she's ever known.

For a secret second she wonders if she should try staying under until the seventh minute. If dying from drowning might put her in this thoughtless state forever. A state where she feels none of the anger prowling in its flesh prison, a tiger too big for its cage, sharpening its claws, ready to tear the Earth apart with its canines once the chains slack and the bars slip. Solve all her problems at once. Revulsion racks her spine and she chokes on the air she can't breathe.

Curled up in foetal position, Sawyer presses one hand against the side of the tub to steady herself, anchoring her body down down down. The other hand clamps tenaciously over her nose with marked resolve. Her eyes are closed and behind her eyelids she counts the seconds while her insides start to sear with a blinding heat. Hold on hold on hold on. Twenty more seconds. Twenty more seconds and she'll finally break her current record. Twenty seconds and she will allow herself to resurface.

Three minutes. There contained the savage discipline she's been working towards this entire summer, honing the brutal craft of curbing herself from succumbing to the primal need to obey the body, even if it hurts, even if it the black tinged her vision and she slips away and, anyhow, what's so terrible about slipping away? Moving between a topography of universes, dimensions, parallels, inhibiting new bodies, new words to live by, new tongues to shape your person with, that doesn't sound like such a tragedy after all. Adventure is what keeps the soul alive and when you've been grounded for a whole two months and three days, slipping between circadian universes fabricated from the domesticated homespun routine of life—like a child might imagine her dolls to be animate, the air pouring out of the plastic pot to be tea fit for service at the garden party—is all you have and all there will be.

So: three minutes. The only accomplishment she could celebrate for herself, albeit, alone, knowing nobody else would share this triumph. Three minutes. She's almost there. She can feel her heart jamming in her teeth, the old bray of please, please, come up for air, that she ignores because she's come too far to stop now. Fifteen more seconds. The alarm would ring at any moment.

Around her head, her hair floats like black smoke and she pretends she is at sea, a mermaid in her glass cage, watching the scintillating bubbles escape her lips into the sun, the round, bright bulbous light shining above the waves like champagne. Seven seconds. She's been keeping count. Determination numbs the burning sensation in her expiring lungs, snuffing out the feeble hope of her thundering heartbeat that her Roman resolve might crumble from within and she might gasp into mortal existence once more. Four seconds. Her head has been spinning, spinning, spinning for the past minute but she pushes through. Three seconds. Two seconds—

A rough hand clamps down on her shoulders and she's jerked out of the water before she can count the last second.

Her eyes snap open as she breaks the surface, coughing and spluttering. Chest heaving violently, she sucks in desperate lungfuls of air, quaking hands clutching at the sides of the bathtub. The disturbed water sloshes around the tub, spilling over and splashing onto the tiles. When the chill finally seeps into her skin, she sees everything in pieces, a silhouette eclipsing the light, a tan face, brown eyes fraught with concern, frantic hands thrusting a towel around her trembling body. Panting hard, Sawyer cuts her eyes to the person standing in the bathroom. It's Wyatt she sees and the rage that floods her veins boils her blood. An electric energy hums beneath her skin, restless. It wants her to hit him. She wants to tear his eyes out.

   "Sawyer—"

Eyes flashing with the scathing promise of murder, Sawyer snatches the towel from around her shoulders and snarls, "Why the fuck did you do that?"

He flinches, as though the acid in her tone had burnt him. It makes her want to hit him even more. "I thought—"

One second. She was almost there and he had to ruin everything. A fresh wave of anger flushes her skin in a glowing heat and her pulse throbs between her teeth.

   "Get. Out."

   "Sawyer, I was just trying to—"

   "What? Help?" She seethed, flinging the towel in his face with more force than necessary and drawing the shower curtain shut. When she looks down, her hands are shaking. From anger or from how long she's pushed herself under, she doesn't know. She balls them into fists, knuckles blanching, fingernails digging deep into her palms. A sharp pain lances through her skin but she doesn't release them. She welcomes it, this pain. It gives her something else to focus on. I don't need your fucking help. You're the last damn person I want any help from.

On the other side of the curtain, Wyatt shifts in anxious discomfort. "I thought you were... Mom wanted me to come get you for dinner and you've been in here for ages and I heard the water— I tried calling your name and knocking but you didn't answer and I just... and I came in and you weren't moving and I saw the timer so I got scared and I thought..."

A pinching guilt poisons her gut. He doesn't want you dead, a critical voice in the back of her head muses, but you'd wanted to tear his eyes out on more accounts than he deserves. If the roles had been reversed, would you have pulled him out of the water too? If it ever came down to it, the standing answer was no, she wouldn't have, because there was a sick part of her that would have wanted him to drown for two reasons. One being that she wouldn't have been bothered to, and the second being that, if she could get rid of her brother without dipping her hand in fratricide, her mother would have one less prominent example to constantly compare her to. But, of course, Wyatt had to be the good guy in their sibling dynamic. Of course she had to play the role of the unjustifiably spiteful sister.

Clenching her teeth, Sawyer rakes a hand through her wet hair in frustration, wincing when she tugs on a few knots catching on her fingers. Still, she can't distill from her tone the bitter resentment that'd dug its grudging claws into her voice like a stubborn lodger in a crumbling five-star inn. "You thought I tried to drowned myself?"

   "I may have jumped to conclusions." At the very least, he had the decency to sound sheepish.

She rolls her eyes.

   "Get out."

Without having to be asked twice, he does, shutting the door behind him, plunging the room in silence.

After four minutes of wallowing in a jaundiced self-pity for the abrupt interruption, Sawyer clambers out of the tub and dries off before slipping into her clothes.

There are girls who spend their summers in bathing suits and perfumed clouds of lemonade bliss, licking sugar off their cherry flavoured lips, contemplating existence at the bottom of swimming pools. Then there are girls like Sawyer, who spend their summers running around cemeteries with muggle friends where nobody would look, burning comets of cavalier youth, immortality in the cheap thrills with an audience of stars. Girls who lie in bed during the day, only to rise at night with the moon. Girls who spend their summers playing with fire, unafraid of getting burnt.

So the situation is this: if Sawyer hadn't met up with her muggle friends from around the neighbourhood, she wouldn't have gotten into trouble and grounded because of it.

   (In all actuality she thinks she might be slowly losing the feeling in her body from being shut in like this. Existing in stasis, floating through the day, going through the motions of living but also not living.)

Though, in the same vein, if her mother hadn't nagged her about focusing more in school, if she hadn't asked Sawyer to take a peek into Wyatt's clean room and perhaps pick up a thing or two about non-chaotic organisation, if she hadn't made a point of passive-aggressively vacuuming outside of Sawyer's room at seven in the morning sharp without fail, if she hadn't scheduled a daily admonition for lazing around in bed like a useless pig until noon everyday, if she hadn't used the terms 'lazy' or 'pig' or 'useless' in any string of sentences she could come up with to critique her daughter, Sawyer wouldn't have stormed out of the house in an irritable hurricane of ire. Subsequently, she might not have gone to meet her muggle friends at their usual gathering spot in the cemetery, ranted about her passive-aggressive mother and perfect little Wyatt, got them all fired up to do something reckless for fun. Like running around their filthy little city in Halloween masks and setting fire to a police car. She might not have tagged the side of the police station facing a dingy alleyway with a montage of spray-painted penises. But she did, and the impulse was just there to act on, and up till now she still doesn't know why she agreed to do it. Or why she actually followed through with it. And why she'd let one of aforementioned muggle friends—Levi Ackerman with the crooked smile and the devil's eyes—kiss her with his hands covered in paint that'd smudged all over her face like warpaint, except that it gave her a kick to feel something other than the anger scorching her insides.

Perhaps the axiom that seasons change but people don't might've held some truth after all, and that might be why Sawyer's mother, Eleanor, had refused to lift the ban on Sawyer out of mistrust. Rightfully so, considering her daughter had been returned home in a police vehicle, caught redhanded—literally, there's been red spray paint all over her hands—for arson and vandalism. Every time leniency had been imparted and another chance had been offered to Sawyer, she'd just go and blow it all to hell anyway, so what did it matter? No third, fourth, fifth, hundredth chance would rectify her atrocious behaviour in the long run. So the charms had been reinstated to prevent Sawyer from attempting to break out, and the rules had been simple. Which meant she'd stayed indoors for the whole stretch of the two months, rotting in her bedroom and not speaking to her mother, deflecting her father's jokes to lighten the situation that cannot be lightened, not as long as she holds onto calcified grudges that don't ever leave, asking herself again and again, the same question that's been hanging around her neck like a tightening noose, again and again, why are you like this?

Throughout this cold war, summer had come and gone and the days until school reopened slipped through her hands like sand in an hourglass and Sawyer had spent the majority of the week before she was contrived to return to the dreary halls of Hogwarts wishing she hadn't wasted her entire holiday under house arrest, staging her own budget adaptation of Rapunzel, imprisoned in her room because her mother believed the word of a policeman over her own flesh and blood. Part of her knew she had to apologise. The other part refused. That latter part, the indignant part, won. So she dedicates the remainder of her summer learning how to hold her breath forever as though she hasn't been doing the very thing for almost fifteen years.

At dinner, Sawyer sits next to her father, in the seat diagonally across Wyatt so she doesn't have to look him in the eye, and the farthest from her mother as though putting distance would soften the sting of any passive aggressive remarks she might have to deliver. As usual, the events of tonight's meal is premeditated. Wyatt will do most of the talking, her father will jest, and her mother will counter like the devil's advocate and Sawyer will unreservedly dissect the lasagna on her plate as though it is a substitute for her homophobic Aunt Pam's face.

   "So," Elijah Lee begins in declaration through a mouthful of chewed-up lasagna, earning himself identical disgusted looks from his children and a mirthful laugh from his wife. "Last day of summer. How's it feel to finally be back to work tomorrow?"

Waving his fork in midair, Wyatt is the first to bite. "Technically, classes only start Monday, so I'd say the holiday effect still hasn't worn off."

   "You're saying you wouldn't know until Sunday?" Their mother asks, arching a perfectly sculpted brow.

Wyatt shrugs. "Maybe. Either way, I'm not sad about going back."

   "That's good," Elijah muses, beaming proudly at his son.

   "He means he's definitely not sad that he gets to see his boyfriend, Oliver, again," Sawyer muttered darkly, slanting her brother a wry look over the rim of her glass as she took a sip of water. Narrowing his eyes at the snide remark, Wyatt sticks his tongue out at her. Under the table, her foot collides with his shin.

   "Knock it off, Sawyer," their mother warns, fixing Sawyer with a disapproving frown. "Let's hear your thoughts about going back to school."

   "Frankly, I'm quite torn, mother," Sawyer says, cuttingly. Her smile is brittle and humourless and her eyes spark with a vindictive glint that always presented itself when she was wired for a fight, and tonight, she was feeling particularly combative. "You see, on one hand I'd love to finally get out of this house because I've seen enough of its insides, but on the other, I'd rather jam my toes in a blender than go back to school. I hate everyone, but I hate Dumbledore most of all for sticking me in weekly therapy, as if he's actually doing anything to help me. What's worse is that I can't even get permission to leave the Quidditch team until I'm more emotionally stable, like, what the fu—"

   "Language," her father cautions.

   "—udge does that even mean?"

   "It's supposed to be your emotional outlet, darling," her mother says. "You've said it before, you feel better after you hit things and the only recreational activity that fulfils that prerequisite is Quidditch. Plus, we've seen results. You've had far less outbursts than in your first year."

   "Did you not hear a word I just said?" Sawyer exclaims, stabbing her fork into her lasagna. "I hate my teammates. They're all so...so preppy. And the Captain's basically useless. We're disgusting."

   "You don't have a choice, Sawyer," her father says, voice gentle, as if he were handling a child. But Sawyer was not a child. Irritation flared up in her chest, a bubbling volcano ready to blow.

   "There is always a choice."

   "The alternative is to drop out," her mother says, dabbing a corner of her pursed lips with a napkin, "is that what you want?"

   "Yes, actually, it is." Sawyer pins her mother with a goading look. "There's no point in me staying if I'm lagging behind everyone else, if i'm always getting in trouble for something." She also knows she isn't actually trying. Just coasting through her academics, because she's given up on content that was just too boring or difficult to digest. Which was, ultimately, everything except Transfiguration. If it's on text, nothing registers, and every time she tries, she only scrapes by with a mediocre score, so what's the point? She's never getting to the top. Not like the others.

   "You're just not applying yourself, darling," her mother counters, calmly taking another bite out of her lasagna. "You do have potential."

She's heard that platitude a million times. It haunts her constantly, a ghost she can't shake and she's sick of it. So sick of hearing words founded on backless beliefs that she slams her fork down and says, "that's bullshit and you know it."

A statement that is met with an abrupt silence that stops the world spinning, to which her mother scoffs and her father frowns, perplexed, like the idea is so ludicrous it is barely comprehensible.

   "And where will you go if you don't finish your education? Hm?" Her mother asks, a patronising lilt to her tone, "what business will take you if you bear no qualifications?"

   "There's always Quidditch," Wyatt says, shrugging, and Sawyer wants nothing more than to forget he's just sitting there but he'd just defended her and she can't ignore it.

   "Wizard sports isn't a real occupation," her father reasons, and Sawyer tries to respect his perspective but he's a muggle and muggles will never understand what it's like to know magic. To bear the knowledge that they hold the power to stop a person's heart with a few ill-meant words or move the sunlight out of their eyes with a wave of a wand. To feel the world tremble beneath their fragile bodies when a sentient willow tree beats the shit out of incoming fire. To taste the sky on their weightless skin when they're rocketing to the moon on a broomstick a third of their weight. Although the less elitist part of her, the one deeply ashamed of such thoughts about superiority as though she were less human and more god and therefore less prone to earthly duties than the common muggle reminds her that Elijah Lee might be a muggle, but he is amazing in different ways in a sense that he knows how to solve problems through massive brainwork that a wizard might be able to mindlessly accomplish with a spell and a flick of their wand so magic means nothing if the other party could rely on intellect and doesn't intellect mean the apex of power?

   "It is if you're good," Wyatt counters, waving his fork around pointedly, as though it'd register with their muggle father. "and Sawyer's one of the best."

Sawyer's grip tightens around her knife.

   "Oh?" Her father raises a brow. "why haven't I heard that one before?"

Glowering into her plate, Sawyer refused to meet her father's curious gaze. "Because it doesn't matter if I'm good if I want nothing to do with wizard sports."

"Doesn't matter," her mother says, with a dismissive flick of her fingers, "you're not dropping out unless I see reason to."

That, Sawyer supposes, is the sound to which she resolves to get herself expelled.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.
lmao no one cares but here's an update
also to whoever actually reads this: yall mind like commenting what you liked? what u didn't? i'd love to hear your thoughts / opinions