Delia and Trinity had not always been the dark ones of the group, though they had become that together. When they were young they were both bright girls, inseprable ininseparable in their youth, they would wear the same cloths, do each other hair. They were together so often that people always thought of the pair of them, for not many had seen then apart. They were also trouble makers, and for this Trinity was the guide, the one who would push them both over the threshold into some sort of trouble. Once they had come home soaked from head to toe from an attempt to find gold nuggets, once they had come home covered in bug bites and wood ticks from when they had investigated an old barn which turned out to have an infestation. Once they came home out of breath and with candy which they had stolen from a general store, No one had noticed them take it but the chance that someone would got them so excited they ran home as if someone was chasing them and they giggled like mad as they ran. Their parents had found out and given them a severe punishment for this. There were many "Onces", many adventures, but they had been one too many.
As they got older the adventures changed, at first they were normal, Trinity would hook them up with some upper class men for a date, Trinity would get them into a club by a back entrance, and promptly kicked out. Then one summer evening something unexpected happened, they were out on the town when they discovered a homeless woman, who Trinity had the bright idea to try and spiff up. Though Trinity was a trouble maker and an instigator she was not a bad person and when she saw someone in pain she had compassion, as did Delia, it was this that they shared. So they took this woman and bought her some cloths from the local goodwill, listened to her ramble, found her some soup and crackers from their homes. To Trinity she was a project, she could be fixed, though she rambled and rambled, and was badly in need of a shower, she had no doubt she could fix her. They even found her a house which had no one in it for her to squat in. All of this was the most exciting thing the two girls had ever done, and for two weeks they trained this woman in secret towards not being homeless anymore. For the girls it was like my fair lady, and they were Henry Higgins.
Then one day, they went to the house to find it full of people, strung out, laying in the halls half awake. The smell was of a locker room that had been shat in. The woman had opened her "home" to these people in exchange for a hit of heroin, turning it into a drug den. The people were rotten, thin, pale, ragged, one of them grabbed at Trinity to feel her soft skin. Delia was consumed with fear more so than she had ever been, and then they found her. It could have been the smell that lead them to her, but that was too thick in the room already. It was the flies, the buzzing of the flies which were already making a feast of her on that hot summer evening. She had died as she slept, but now was just a body, a failed project and a feast for worms. They had known her, had listened to her Thank you's and rants about life, which made little sense to 14 year olds but at the very least were entertaining. Now dead. She didn't look like a person now, more like a thing, a stuffed version of herself, the image would haunt both of them.
For Trinity it was the image of the dead woman which would stick with her, haunt her dreams. She would see it in things, find herself doodling it in class, it was a thing that did not make sense and she kept it inside herself, only letting it out in her gothic persona which she took on shortly after. She didn't want to let people close again, she didn't want to see that sort of death, though she surrounded herself with reminders of it, though they were fictional. The fictionality of them was like a shield, close enough to be what they were a reminder, but not quite as real as the truth that she now knew.
For Delia there was a different reaction, Delia who was always more introverted, more interior, she swallowed the pain, she made feeling something, or over feeling her shield. She didn't want to allow herself to be happy or light, because she now knew this pain that was out there. She felt the pain of the world had invaded herself, she felt it was right for her to feel pain over it, it was just for her to feel pain. She sought out music about it, read about it, she wallowed for a year. She wrote poems about that day, about how felt, she rarely smiled. Her parents worried and finally sent her on a retreat with Nadine, who was a girl they hoped their daughter could learn from, pretty and proper and happy, On the retreat it all came out, she told the story and had a good long cry. It was from there that counseling was sought, for both the girls, yet by this time enough time had passed to make an impression on a social image and on a personality. It was decided that it was unhealthy for them to wallow in what had happened, that if they were to be normal people one day, and not be broken by the experience, or worse end up living out the old woman's experience one day, they would have to try to be happy, they would have to try and move on. What they had become was unhealthy, Trinity was not a normal Goth, in love with an ideal of Darkness as they lived an alternative lifestyle. she was hiding behind it out of guilt and horror and real experience, one that could corrupt her and drive her insane if she was not able to let go and find a way to move past it.
Delia was not an idealistic emo, trying to feel emotions which she had not earned yet, leeching off of feelings of others, she was feeling something within herself too much, and so she would have to work to build something to counter balance this pain, to find a light side of life again.
So it was decided that they should slowly, carefully, try and be "normal girls" and part of that was forgiving themselves, and part of that was doing new things, filling their time with something light. And So they were both to try out for cheerleading.....
Neither of the girls had fully memory of this, and it was a blessing to them both, something their parents would see as progress, but both of them felt within them a tear, an awareness of a pain and discomfort. Unlike their former selves they would not feel so connected to it, instead thinking it was an after effect of their loss of gender.
