S1 Week 18 Bonus Story: Variations on a Theme

Guardian Angels

Welcome to Trainwrecks, a free-to-read fiction serial that follows a group of six Seattle-adjacent friends from the year 2004 to the year 2015. Join Luna Cruz, Sebastian Velasquez, Dimitri and Victoria Hale, Duke Kingston, and Jasmine Nolan as they stumble their way from adolescence to adulthood, falling in love, making mistakes, overcoming their pasts, and staying together through it all.

Friday posts are for paid subscribers. For $5 a month or a discounted rate of $50 a year, readers will get four bonus stories that delve deeper into each individual character’s history or the narrative’s current events. You do not need this content to understand the main story.

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Content Warning: Mentions of attempted suicide

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October 17, 1977

There were patterns on the hospital room’s acoustic ceiling. At least, that’s what sixteen-year-old Whitney Celeste had begun to think after hours of staring at those little black splotches. If she went without blinking long enough, they disappeared, one by one, reappearing only when she was forced to blink again, like stars winking out of an inverted sky.

Her wrists hurt. Their ability to ache and itch at the same time impressed her. The doctors had bandaged them too tightly, trying to keep her blood inside. Funny, she’d been so relieved when she’d decided to die that she’d assumed she wouldn’t feel anything when she took the knife to herself. But annoyingly, she had felt something: the sensation of being caught between a rock and a hard place. Fear of dying. Fear of living. How did one go on like that without losing their mind?

Her doctors assumed her mind was already lost. She could hear it in the way they suggested medications and treatments and rest, see it in their pitying expressions. Only crazy people tried to kill themselves, right? It made her mad. She wanted to rip up their medical charts and scream in their faces that she wasn’t crazy, she was just tired of life being the same lonely, miserable chore, day in and day out.

Anyway, she couldn’t return to school. She knew that much. She’d be eaten alive by everyone who’d driven her to the knife in the first place. They’d either be entertained by her suffering or disappointed that she hadn’t succeeded, neither of which would restore her enthusiasm for life. But her parents, God bless them, couldn’t afford to send her anywhere else. A new art school had opened on Mercer Island recently: Remington Academy of the Arts, a haven for painters and writers and musicians and actors and dancers like her. Whitney had studied the glossy brochure front to back with stars in her eyes. But she knew her family’s financial situation too well to dream of being enrolled there.

What did that leave her, then? She could run away. She could drop out. Make her own way in the world. It would break her parents’ hearts—neither of them had gone to college—but since dying was out of the question, she was short on options.

And then the sound of clomping footsteps drew her attention to the door. A shadow stood there. No, not a shadow but a girl, dressed all in black. Leather jacket, leather skirt, studded belts, fishnet stockings, combat boots. Half a dozen earrings glinted in each ear, and black makeup lined her eyes.

Whitney recognized this girl, but she didn’t understand. Why was Makoto Hirashima, her high school’s most notorious senior, in her hospital room, glaring at her surroundings like they’d personally offended her?