Tesselate

CECILIA

Cecilia lay still and unmoving in the bathtub. All but her face was enveloped with water. Her pink floral pyjama shorts floated loosely around her thighs and her white cotton shirt became transparent, revealing her bra. She stared at the ceiling with heavy eyes, noticing the paint had begun to peel.

An empty wine glass sat on the window sill above the bathtub. The mixture of different alcohols she had drunk came from a stash of empty wine and whisky bottles on the top shelf of the laundry closet. Cecilia knew her mother, Linda, was far too short to ever reach there or bother to look. Blotches of orange light from the setting sun danced on the frosted glass window, seeping through the leaves of the garden beside the house. Her mother would be home soon, she realised.

Cecilia waited patiently for the arrival of death.

She’d had enough of life.

Dizziness set in, and she wondered if it was the result of the alcohol or the fact that she had swallowed half a packet of Nurofen and fourteen of her mother’s sleeping pills. She began to wonder how it had come to this. She used to be so happy. How had she become so pathetic? So weak?

But she realised she had always been weak. Cecilia always struggled to talk to people, something made obvious by the way her face would light up like a flame. The thick layer of makeup on her skin didn’t make her feel any more confident. She avoided arguments, keeping a straight face when she would overhear other kids talking about her at school. She was vulnerable to the thoughts that would scratch and tear at her and, at times, she was scared of herself. But now she finally had the courage to end it all.

She was ready.

Cecilia knew Linda would be sad, possibly heartbroken, having to drag her daughter’s lifeless body out of the tub.

Poor Mum, she thought, feeling guilty.

Then she thought about what her dad would think. Perhaps he would finally understand why she acted the way she had during recent years. She hoped he would feel an overpowering regret for all the times he had failed at being her dad.

Fuck Dad, she thought.

Cecilia thought about what he might say. Probably nothing at all, she thought. He would most likely react to the news with nothing more than a slight wince, with emphasis on the ‘slight’. She doubted that he would talk about it or bother to show up to her funeral.

“And fuck you,” she whispered as she gritted her teeth and stared at the deteriorating paint on the wall.

She half-expected the words to give her some sort of relief or hope even, but if anything, they left her breathless. Any action was a struggle now. She could feel it. Her stomach began to churn and ache. She thought that she might vomit.

That would be lovely, wouldn’t it — to be found in a bath filled with the revolting contents of your own stomach?

Then she wondered why, of all places, she had chosen the bath for this.

Perhaps because it was the place Cecilia would always find herself sitting to get away from everything, whether it be filled with water or not. It was here that she wrote in her journal to try and make sense of her cluttered mind. Perhaps she chose it because she just simply liked baths and how they always seemed to make her feel better when she was ill.

Cecilia concluded it was the perfect place to take her last breath.

She wanted to sit up and aim for the sink but she had no energy to try. Her arm felt like a 20-kilo spaghetti strand. Her eyes felt just as bad and they fought her to go to sleep.

She gave in and closed her eyes, trying to focus on the red and black specs until she drifted off to sleep. Cecilia had lived her last months the way she would die.

Alone.

MOLLY

It was three in the afternoon. Smoke hung like a cloud above her despite Molly’s attempts to aim her exhales out of the window. Her back rested on the black frame of her queen-sized bed. She wasn’t proud that her clothes were lying in every direction possible, even draping off the shelves lining the walls, but she didn’t care.

Molly wore a white men’s shirt; the owner of it, she wasn’t sure. The shirt fitted better as a dress, going well with her ruffled purple pyjama shorts and last night’s makeup. She had woken up some time ago but had yet to check the time. Molly assumed it was only ten in the morning and was sure she still had time to make her plans for the day.

She held her old Powerade bottle, now a DIY bong that had begun to turn brown from the green debris which lined the inside. She tapped on it lightly with her index finger to the beat of the music playing faintly from the stereo while she refilled the cone piece with more weed. She was in a trance, humming along, as flakes fell on her bed.

Molly’s mother, Patricia, worked on weekdays, while Molly spent this time — in between resting and socialising — ‘looking for a job’. Last night, she had driven to see her friend, Cody, a rich girl the same age as herself. Cody lived by the beach in a house that was practically a mansion. She tended to throw parties spontaneously which was how last night had concluded. Most of the people who hung out with Cody also had that habit. There was no living slow with them — no time to stop and think.

That’s the way Molly liked it.

After Molly decided that she was high enough to start her day, she hopped out of bed, stepping over the endless amounts of rubbish and clothes all over the wooden floors before heading towards the hall.

Molly came from a rich family herself. She would say wealthy, but Molly had once heard that wealth was a term meaning that money ran in the family and was inherited and passed down; however, from what Molly knew, her parents had started out with nothing. They worked hard and perhaps, their drive came from their need to give their children what they themselves never had.

They had a which was incredibly large. If you were at one end of the house, someone at the other end wouldn’t have the slightest clue that there was anyone else home — which was often an undeniably scary thought.

Molly’s parents also gave her a car (worth almost thirty grand) and left money on the counter every day. Patricia and Molly’s dad, Richard, (when he was home) were generous, and Molly was grateful for that, but she would be more than happy to trade them for parents who could clearly distinguish the difference between money and love.

“Next week,” she said out loud, assuring herself that she would take the whole looking-for-a-job thing seriously.

This announcement was becoming all too familiar. But until then, her plans were to get high, eat, receive attention from boys via social media and text messages and wait until someone declared what the plans were for the evening.

The munchies had begun to set in so Molly headed straight to the kitchen, put a pan on the stove and prepared the ingredients to make an omelette, using anything she could find in the fridge. As Molly reached for a plate from the cupboard, she noticed the digits 3:27 on the microwave. She continued to stare at them in confusion, sure that it was still morning. Then her mind wandered so far in thought that she forgot why she was staring at the time in the first place. It wasn’t until the seven changed into an eight that Molly broke from her trance.

“Oh shit,” Molly muttered to herself as she recalled that it was Thursday.

Her mother came home from work early on Thursdays which meant that she was due home in approximately half an hour and Molly was currently higher than a satellite. She ran back to the stove, flipped the omelette onto her plate, scoffed it down, threw the dishes into the dishwasher and ran back to her room. Then she ran back to the kitchen because she hadn’t turned the stove off or grabbed the thirty dollars sitting on the bench. By the time she arrived back to her bedroom, her head was spinning and as she stepped into bed, she knocked the bong water over.

~

It was like Molly and Patricia weren’t even living together. It was half-past five and neither Molly nor her mother had acknowledged each other’s presence, although this wasn’t unusual.

Molly still hadn’t replied to any of the six texts on her phone. Pete was asking her if she would like to go to dinner, Michael had written that it was great meeting her last night and Cody was asking if she could come over so that they could have a girl’s night.

Molly couldn’t be bothered replying to any of them, but the last thing she wanted was to have a plan-less night: getting high on her own, avoiding her mother, and web surfing. Except that the thought of listening to Cody discuss other people and the number of likes on her Instagram photos didn’t appeal to her very much either. Cody bitched about the boys in her life, but practically jumped on them when they were in close proximity to her. It was getting tiring for Molly.

Molly unlocked her phone; her wallpaper was a picture of herself and Cody in their matching purple bikinis, posing with their arms around each other at a pool party, laughing at something that was going on to the left of the camera.

Marcus on the keg stand ...? Molly thought to herself, trying to recall.

Cody was her best friend — or the closest thing to it anyway. She had stayed with Cody when she got kicked out of home almost two months ago for back-chatting her mother. Cody jumped at the opportunity to be ‘roomies,’ offering Molly her own bedroom inside her mansion. After a month, Molly reluctantly returned home, following a visit from Patricia who came bearing gifts and an apology.

Molly had compiled a scrapbook of her and Cody’s adventures from that summer which she flicked through from time to time. The pictures brought back happy memories. The two of them had spent their days by the beach and their nights at parties. They hadn’t had a single responsibility. They were in complete bliss, living in their own world consisting of boys, alcohol and weed. Their only worry was eating too much and looking fat in the bikinis that they always wore.

Maybe Molly was bored.

Maybe she wanted somebody she could be her worst with, and not this flawless image she had created for herself which she had to live up to. Or maybe she was just high and overthinking her mere existence.

Whatever the case, she concentrated on finding a particular name on her contact list.