They die in the end. But they don’t know that. But now you do!
What do you care? You haven’t even met them yet. Maybe you’ll make a point of doing your best not to like them. After all, it’s my job to make sure that you do, and your job to put up with my job. If I do my job well enough you might not even notice that it’s happening.
What if I told you that these were star-crossed lovers? They weren’t. They’re actually close childhood friends that bonded in the wake of Character A, Beatrice’s, mother’s death. Character B, Anthony, found himself drawn to Beatrice’s grief. What an ugly name, isn’t it?
Anthony thought so at first, too. In his defense, he was young. No taller than middle rung in his father’s kitchen, his cheeks bursting with jovial youth and stained with applesauce. Beatrice was about his height, though she doesn’t remember it. Her earliest memory of them together was when they were three. She had gotten separated from their two families, on the way to a secluded wood to bury some kind of treasure. She wailed inconsolably, terribly frightened and consumed by isolation.
Towering white maces surrounded her at all sides, their crystalline endpoints jabbing her in the face, almost blinding her in one eye. In terror she shut them tightly, screeching for mercy. The screams she let out shook her little body, snot and tear drops mixed amongst each other in streams the color of sickly eggshells, her tiny fists curled up so tight that her fingernails dug into the tender of her palm. When she felt that she could almost cry no more, a firm hand grasped itself around her wrist.
Four year olds have no concept of love nor hate, they only know things that make them smile or make them less hungry. Things that help keep warm and things that drown them in cold, the respite in a scorching summer’s day. Beatrice felt the same feeling she did whenever her mother held her close, only the hand that grabbed hers didn’t belong to a parent. It was little Anthony, his face aged by determination like a cut of salted beef.
Teenagers had a better sense of love than four year olds did, and far more nuanced than that of twelve year olds. They were fifteen now, which meant that puberty had made them grow in all the wrong places and planted the nastiest thoughts in the most fertile soil. Anthony sported a face cratered with acne and a mustache that would bar him from a school zone. Beatrice’s smile was laced with chainmail and bright, neon rubber bands. She was about half his size and twice as smart. It was almost natural that they went to homecoming together, as friends of course, simply because they had known each other for so long and lived right next door to one another and also because Christie wanted to suck Bryant’s dick behind the water fountains during the hype music and Beatrice and Anthony were part of the same friend group of each respective party.
The summer before college, the last summer any of them would see each other, they kept telling themselves, weighed heavily upon them. Maybe it was Hollywood’s fault for romanticizing graduation and the transition into university life. Perhaps the school was to blame for emphasizing the sheer finality of everything, with a parade down Main Street and a huge prom that tore up the local hotel’s banquet room. But maybe it was the Catholic guilt they both shared, the shame that kept all those nasty feelings bottled up nice and safe in the crumpled edges of Kleenex tissues and squared away in the shower head linings. That shame, that embarrassment didn’t seem so powerful anymore, and thoughts that were once squelched decisively underfoot lingered on just long enough to make their presence known, to make the obvious uncomfortable.
Everyone else could see it. Their parents had seen it for years. How could they not? They raised the kids, gave them every opportunity to love one another and see each other not as the kid next door or My Friend With the Xbox, but as Men and Women. As adults. As someone that they liked and who might just like them.
So on fifth day of the second to last week in July, they agreed to meet up at the local fair. It wasn’t a date, no. Everyone else just mysteriously and conveniently cancelled on them. It wasn’t like Anthony asked his friends to bail just as Beatrice begged her friends to do something else. And it wasn’t like both groups weren’t in on it, all without our two love birds being none the wiser.
Under a sky painted with a million stars, Anthony could only focus on two.
The muzzle flashes of two semi-automatic pistols, fired indiscriminately into the crowd. He felt nothing and Beatrice felt everything, her tiny arms catching him, what was left of him, before his weight grew too much to bear and she was thrown on to her back. Then she felt nothing too, as one type of screaming quickly turned into another.
I told you they died.
