CHAPTER 50 — The Weight

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Simone Goode, up to no good, gave her a wan smile, then walked quietly to the kitchen. The dancer spent five minutes packing Chinese food into their second-hand industrial fridge, then walked slowly and calmly back into the living room, where Eppie sat on the sofa with her ukulele.

 

“Hi Eppie,” the girl said in a tired, measured voice. Simone wore her dance casuals, but they were not cheap like the K-Mart adjacents Eppie wore to practice. The tights were branded, and the high-quality elastics conformed around Simone’s figure like a second skin. They looked comfortable, settled, unperturbed. “Thank you for looking after the girls. Would you like a glass of water?”

 

Renée left to get them water. The little girl set a jug of warm water with two mismatched glasses between them on a crayon-covered coffee table, then informed them she would go to bed.

 

Simone kissed her sister goodnight.

She poured out a glass of water for Eppie.
Her hands were shaking.

“How much do you know?” Simone asked. “William said you lost your memories. You didn’t even know who he was. Much less what he did.”

 

“Renée told me some stuff.” Eppie received the glass. She spilt water over her sleeve. Her body was far more honest than her state of mind.

Why the hell am I nervous? Eppie berated herself. I am the victim here.

 

They sipped from their cups.

 

“I am sorry,” Simone broke the silence. “I didn’t mean to push you from the roof.”

 

Eppie didn’t know how to respond to something so… honest and uncomplicated. She would have preferred excuses. Hearing those words now, it occurred to Eppie that Simone might have been rehearsing this moment for months.

Eppie was sorry that she genuinely needed the [System] to tell her that Simone was sorry. It wasn’t that she was bad at reading people. It was that, for better or worse, she had never experienced genuine contrition from anyone.

 

As CFO, she had fired more people than she had hired. That was one of the reasons why she rose to power. Her ability to “trim the fat” was second to none. In those final meetings, when she asked people, be they middle managers, project managers, or even junior executives, to justify why she should keep them, they would lie through their teeth. “Sorry” in her world had nothing to do with remorse. It was a survival mechanism, a trigger prompting an LLM to spew platitudes, hallucinate numbers, or offer garbled pleas that someone else should go instead of them. These people were not sorry. They were afraid of consequences.

 

There was a line that Eppie often used in her former life to mock these unrepentant corporate loafers.

 

“What is remorse?” she would say with a cold sneer. “If you had no choice?”

 

For Simone, the sorry was a form of acceptance. Catharsis. The full stop at the end of a long chapter of her life. She made a choice. Now she was remorseful.

The rest was up to Eppie, the friend she sold.

Only now, Eppie wasn’t so sure.

 

Could Neo Fontaine, safe in her [Persona], rich with the knowledge of another world, remain on her high horse and say that Simone should tough it out in Broadway Manchester? Should she remain here, in this two-bedroom house, sharing a room with her little sister? Should she just give up her dancing, her prestigious position at LAPA, and just get a job at a Chinese culture club? Should Denise be making better lifestyle choices? Should Renée or Cora take some responsibility for their sister’s actions?

 

“Before I accept anything,” Eppie forced her voice to remain level. “I want some details clarified.”

 

Simone nodded, her hands turning the mug in a circle.

 

“Tell me what happened on the roof,” Eppie said. “And tell me what the deal is with the locker. My old locker. The new one as well, while you’re at it.”

 

There was a long pause as they waited for the sound of cars passing. The walls of the Goode’s house were not well insulated.

 

“Where shall I start?”

 

“The Dancia shoes”, Eppie picked her point of entry. “Were they worth your friend’s life?”

 

Simone leaned down, picked up the shoebox where all of Cora’s pictures were kept, and turned it over.

 

Dancia London. The inscription was faded, but a body could tell that it was a part of a very expensive, handmade item. The box itself was more luxurious than anything the Goode family had owned. That’s why Cora had kept it for her artworks.

Fuck. Eppie felt her heart give her the heebie-jeebies.

 

“I didn’t have a job back then. Last spring. I was obsessed with the tryouts. I thought that a TV station might see me perform at LAPAGANZA, pull me out of a lineup, and life would change for the better,” Simone said, caressing the box.“Then I lost my shoes, my only good pair. Mum said she couldn’t afford another, not for another week. I needed them in forty-eight hours. The school had no spares. My assessment could be delayed. My place in the show could be affected. I could become the understudy.”

 

“Then William came to me. He said that Valorie saw my plight, and she just happened to have shoes she wasn’t using. He said Valorie had closets full of the stuff. He gave me the shoes unconditionally. But there were conditions.”

No shit, Sherlock… Eppie kept the expression from spreading to her face.

 

“He told me why I was being bullied. He told me that it was because of you, because of Mio. Mio stole something from Val, he said, so he took care of it. Instead of disappearing into obscurity like a good girl, Mio had stuck around instead.”

 

“Because of me,” Eppie said. Because I was her support. “I know that much.”

Did Simone help as well? Mio hadn’t said as such, so Eppie wasn’t sure. The likelihood was low, though. Mio was too self-aware to bring in yet another victim.

 

“He said if I didn’t stay away from you, I’d be punished too, for associating with Mio. I was sure he was lying.”

 

“Why?” Eppie tried her best to assess the events in chronological order. Unfortunately, when it came to Eppie’s memories, neither [Wisdom] nor [Memorisation] helped.

 

“Mio had already dropped out,” Simone’s voice quavered. “I only knew of her from the two months you guys were close, when you started feeding the cats around campus. Mio was just gone, they said. That’s when I realised that William did something to Mio. Now, he’s after you.”

Because I knew of the recording.

“Do you know what William did to Mio?” Eppie’s voice grew coarse. “That Mio had a recording of her… trauma?”

Simone shook her head, then nodded her head. She was, in Eppie’s eyes, oxymoronically penitent and defiant. “You don’t ask William more than he tells you.”

“But you knew there was a recording,” Eppie’s voice increased in volume. “You took proof from my locker, Simone. Why did you do it? For the Dancia shoes? Just… shoes? Who told you there was a recording?”

Simone’s eyes flashed. There was anger in her sadness. There was resistance.
It was a look of indignity. The indignity of a girl brought before the High Court of Salem to explain that Witchcraft was real, that their choice was to confess and burn, or drown in a barrel.

“You told me,” Simone said, her eyes unyielding. “You told me to do it.”

“I…” Eppie was expecting all kinds of mental acrobatics, but she had not expected this. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“How? WHY?”

“They bullied you for a month, around June, through to July,” Simone’s voice would have been too quiet to hear had Eppie not possessed supernatural hearing. “After I left, you had no other friends. You would frequently lose notes, workbooks and textbooks. Sometimes they would be in the bushes around campus, and you had to go find them. There would be gum on your bag and clothes. You would trip more often than not while going through the halls. You stopped showing up to arts blocks. You had meetings with Dr Cooper and Costello, but you refused to talk to them or see the school counsellor. You lost weight…”

“And you know all this because?” Eppie suspected she knew the answer, an answer she did not like.

“You came to me,” Simone was a whisper now, her eyes peeping out from her long lashes at her friend. “You asked me to help you one last time. You told me there was a recording. You said you had never seen it and never had it, but William wouldn’t believe you. He said you were protecting Mio to the bitter end. He said he admired your tenacity. It was more fun that way.”

Simone’s voice grew flat. Very flat. The flatness of someone retelling some great disappointment.

“You told me—you told me you didn’t give a shit about Mio anymore. You just wanted your life back. You said you’d do anything to give him Mio, but you didn’t know how. Mio was gone. Mio didn’t trust you.”

Eppie closed her eyes. She didn’t need the [+Causality] at the edge of her vision to know that this was true.

“The irony—the irony was that you couldn’t even prove you didn’t know. You had nothing, but you couldn’t prove you had nothing, because William didn’t believe you.”

There it was. The truth. The truth sucked. The truth had knocked on the door of her righteousness, took it from her heart, then ran away into the darkness, into the pines, where the sun doesn’t shine. Her vengeance was a farce.

“You begged me…”

“I get it,” Eppie couldn’t take the story much longer without a violent desire to harm her [Persona]. “So what happened?”

Simone exhaled a breath she had been holding for five months.

“You showed me how to get into your locker,” she said. “You told me how it was already broken. You planted a diary inside. You told me the middle pages had everything. That Mio had told you about the recording, that you’d written it down, that you didn’t have the tape, but your diary was the proof you knew it existed. You said—”

Simone’s eyes were unrelenting. “You said that if William could see. If he believed the diary, then he would stop bullying you. He would know how much you regretted helping Mio.”

“And you did it, for me,” Eppie touched a hand to her temple. She was sweating. She was drenched.

“I gave the pages to William. He read it,” Simone stared into her cup. “I thought I was saving you. I really did. I thought…”

Eppie suddenly understood what Othello felt, the desire to be roasted in sulphur.
Simone was not her Emilia. Her [Script Analysis] trembled. She was her own Emilia, a dumb broad who didn’t fool Iago for a split-second.

They both stared at the cups while their emotions found distractions and avenues to hide behind. Eppie wondered if this was the right time to throw herself out the window, only there were these brightly painted security bars. Such was the malaise of poverty. A sinner couldn’t even defenestrate herself.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Simone didn’t make an immoral choice.
Eppie had made a miscalculation.

“Did William accept this?”

“He laughed,” Simone answered. “He threw the pages in the bin. He said it didn’t matter if you didn’t have it. You were the last person to contact Mio. She owed you her life. Mio, he said, was a good person. Eventually, she wouldn’t be able to stomach the guilt. She would contact you, and then…”

The silence that followed was the kind with answers no one wanted to imagine.

So it was never about bullying her—Eppie moaned, the pain escaping from her lips like steam from a bubbling kettle—but Eppie was too naive to understand. She was just fifteen. She only knew yesterday and tomorrow, because she really was just a kid.

It was about William. It was always about William. The diary was a test, and Eppie had failed spectacularly. Instead of exoneration, she had incited William to new heights of sadism.

Eppie had walked into it.