strange little girls
Prudence
Gina told herself it was for the best as she slipped the bills from her not-father-in-law's wallet into her coat pocket. Angelo would be better off without a fucked-up recovering junkie for a mother...and lately, she was losing the battle to be both. This way, at least she could be the latter by giving him a better life, even if she fell back into old habits.
She just hoped he'd understand someday.
Gulping air, she blinked back the tears that stung her eyes and noted the number on the phone. She'd call when she was safely lost in the crowd.
Temperance
Cindy had promised Daniel she'd try to make things better.
Of course, nobody had ever conveyed the message to Ed. He continued to make her life as miserable as possible. Some days it took everything she had not to drown her sorrows.
In the days after her return from Australia, she hadn't had everything to give. They'd been the hardest: nights spent tossing in sweat-soaked sheets, crying into her pillow; days wasted wishing Daddy would come and kiss away the pain like he had when she'd been his little princess.
She still hated Hawaii. She felt certain she always would.
Faith
First the postcards came once a month, then with decreasing frequency, but Alice knew they would always come. The postmarks were never the same twice: Salt Lake City; Sacramento; Seattle; nearly always someplace with an 's.' There was never a return address. Sheryl and Rick didn't want to be found.
Alice didn't mind; she understood. She buried her record as Sheryl had told her to, and waited.
A few days after her 18th birthday, Alice received a card. Inside was an address and money for a bus ticket.
Alice smiled as she packed her bags and bade her parents farewell.
Hope
Jessie knew she was lying when she told Carly they would get out of the woods alive. She also knew how important it was that her friend (/the last of them alive/) believe her.
She wouldn't let Carly die. After all, it was Jessie's fault they'd all been here in the first place.
"Just a little bit farther, Car...."
Her encouragement sounded fake and she knew it.
Then the other woman looked up and her eyes lit with something akin to hopefulness. The tree against which she had been leaning was a fire tower's leg.
Maybe they would make it.
Charity
It had been quiet tonight..too quiet. Tru knew it wouldn't last.
Shortly after 3, Gardez proved her right by wheeling in a body. "Guy was shot. Girlfriend confessed to everyone she could, even me. Said he was beating her."
Tru nodded and began taking his vitals before Gardez had even left, anxious to get it over with. Upon finishing, she put him into locker 23 and went back into the office.
Just before 6, Tru heard a voice cry for help. She opened every locker except 23, but it kept calling.
She decided it had been his time after all.
Justice
She wasn't nearly as blind as her girlfriend's namesake. Sissy had seen all too clearly the way she flirted with The Idiot, as she'd come to think of him, and she was hurt.
Sissy didn't believe in getting mad. She'd get even. Not that she liked dick in any way, shape or form - even strap-on - but she'd be damned if she'd let the little bitch get the better of her.
"...but I could go for some hot, thick Sicilian," she purred, fighting down the bile that rose as she bared the abnormally long expanse of her toned abdomen.
Fortitude
Hours turned to weeks and weeks, days, as Faith lay on her cot. Dark and forboding, it had nothing on the corners of her mind, filled with nightmarish visions of knights and scabby things that might once have been monks.
Over it all would come her: always beautiful; always falling and landing with a boneshattering crunch that she could never hear over the sound of her own screams.
They'd come for her then and pump her so full of drugs that even Slayer metabolism couldn't keep up, and she'd forget.
Then she'd wake and it would begin all over again.