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At first, she thought the twin pine pillows were finally giving out on her. The small white feathers didn't feel unusual to see when sleeping on cheap pillows for over a year. And with the way she was sleeping (heavily, restlessly, and drunk most nights), she felt it checked out.
It was odd that the pillows seemed perfectly intact, though. No feathers poking through the fabric and no holes to be found. There was one drunk night where she vaguely remembered processing something about the pillow texture feeling off, but she couldn't place why. She passed it off as a baseless drunk revelation.
But then her face started itching. So her drinking skyrocketed.
For some reason, it looked like her vitiligo was spreading, though she wasn't too sure since her vision kept swaying. But her face was hurting. Badly. Trying to scratch at the pain left her fingers bloody and face still fucking itching, and the pillows kept fucking shedding except now there was blood on them.
She placed an order for more wine on Uber Eats.
Hours/days/weeks of scratching must have left her skin raw and sensitive. She couldn't touch her face without bursting into tears, but when she scrunched her face as she gave in to her tears, the pain blossomed even harder this time. She doubled over, giving into these body-wrecking sobs and unbearable pain of loneliness and forgetting and hurt and anger. Mostly, though, as she drank wine that she subconsciously processed was saltier than usual, she knew this was karma.
She should've never come to King Falls.
She should've never pushed aside Pippa. She should've never cut off Jack. Or Sammy. She should've never gotten into journalism. She should've never let herself get this fucking far. This agony, this debilitating pain, reminded her why she should not be here. And just how badly she hurt everyone around her, and just how badly she wanted her friends back.
In a brief moment of clarity (she had run out of wine, and Uber Eats stopped delivering in this stupid town after 12 am), she realized the radio was on. Airing a familiar voice. For a moment, she let the familiar timbre of an old friend wipe away her tears and wrap her in warmth. But then the voice said “quitter,” and she knew.
Taking a hiatus after Mike started drawing whiskers on his face and wearing cat ears and fucking disappearing was an obvious choice. Pippa had rightfully been freaked out (over the disappearance, not the Phan outfit), but Lily was a professional who would not let an intern playing fucking dress-up send her running. So she sent Pippa home right as her pillows started screwing her over. Then the itching started, and she pulled her drunk ass together for an hour to type a bordering professional hiatus announcement. It was good enough. How long ago had that been?
But here was Shotgun. Calling her—Lily fucking Wright—a goddamn quitter, as sharp, cold pain began to cascade down her face to her back. Any vague comfort from his voice vanished in an instant. She knew he was stubborn and that she made him act more cruel than usual, but it had been so long since she had been forced to remember this fact. And it gutted her. It pierced her heart and sent agonizing burning straight through her back.
She wrangled her mind into focus, pushing away all her pain and leftover wine and channeling every ounce of anger she had left into dialing a number she definitely didn't know by heart and stringing together the most piercing sentences she'd ever had before. She didn't remember much after that.
Her wine stash had magically replenished, and apparently, her pillows had exploded in camaraderie with her raging headache. She crawled her way out of bed and pulled herself through the stark white feathers and empty wine bottles littering the floor until she reached her sweet, red headache relief. Draining the whole bottle in a pro move thankfully alleviates most of its aches.
God, her room looked like a crime scene. She crawled over to the room phone, prepared to ask for new pillows. But she glanced at her bed and froze.
Her pillows looked fine.
Her bedsheets were drenched in shades and patterns of red, while long white and blood-covered feathers lay innocently, tauntingly, over the gory scene. The feathers weren't from the pillows. She gagged violently.
Grabbing another bottle of wine, she steeled herself to stand and face her reflection. For some reason, standing was excruciating. When she finally braced herself on the sink and looked up, she reeled back in horror.
That wasn't her.
The features and patterns and any connection she had to her family were overshadowed by the feathers on her face and huge fucking white wings on her back. Like anyone else, she had her weird Tumblr phase, but it was not persistent enough to make her dress up as a bird (debatable) in the middle of the night.
She reached for the closest wine bottle and took a swig. Swallowing took more effort than she remembered.
Lily watched her reflection reach up and make contact with the feathers. She watched as her hands prodded at the soft, tender feathers and scratched away dried blood. Her reflection did not reveal the end of the feathers, somehow glued or stuck by blood or pressed onto her face.
Instead, the feathers were buried underneath her skin.
What the fuck.
Lily inhaled sharply, the action sending a wave of pain across her entire body. She took another gulp of wine.
Okay, so maybe this wasn't Twin Pines shitty motel pillows disintegrating on her, and maybe it was blackout Lily's idea of a prank. A shitty art project meant to spook her in the morning, as she's known to do.
Lily was too fucking sober for this.
If she was still Lily anymore.
Never in all her years of self-loathing had she hated her reflection enough to make taxidermy out of her own face, if that's what you would consider the feathers embedded in her skin. Piercings and tattoos were one thing; she had collected a handful of both throughout the years, after all, though most were relatively easy to hide save for the stud in her nose. But those she’d planned to get. Digging grimy ass feathers into her skin was another.
If she squinted, the feathers looked like they could just be vitiligo.
But of course it wasn't.
So, if this wasn't a freakish coincidence due to shit quality pillows or a self-made body modification project, then what the fuck happened?
Probably the same thing that happens to everyone in King Falls. She lost her fucking mind and has started seeing things. Lily downed the wine bottle.
This is a problem for sober Lily, who would no doubt overanalyze (read: spiral over) every detail of this new development. But current Lily doesn't plan on seeing that other girl anytime soon.
That Lily could unravel the fear current Lily was trying to mentally waterboard with her wine: the fear that the feathers that distorted her face shape and vitiligo and entire being made her look less like Jack.
And fuck. After everything she’d been through, she’d found some semblance of comfort knowing she could look in the mirror and see traces of her twin. That he'd always be with her regardless of where either of them went.
But Jack didn't have any fucking feathers on his face, did he?
Lily emptied the bottle in her hand and rubbed her eyes to clear her vision, tactfully turning away from that thing in the mirror. Thank God she restocked her wine at some point, because she didn't want to think anymore. Not about the feathers, her drinking habits, the heavy and sharp pain in her back she adamantly refused to acknowledge, the disastrous state of her room, her empty wallet, the hollow pit in her stomach that sucked up any semblance of self preservation she had left, her dead brother, or the fact that she definitely had to talk to… anyone really. But probably Sammy.
Opening a fresh bottle of white this time, Lily let herself haphazardly collapse on the floor. She belatedly noticed the lumps and sharp pains she had and sprawled herself over and resigned herself to more pain to worry about later. The dirty clothes, empty glass bottles, and old takeout digging into her skin were currently the least of her problems.
She really was a fucking disaster of a person, if she was still even a person anymore. The feathers in her skin and alcohol flooding her bloodstream definitely qualified her as something other by now. And that's if being a lesbian didn’t qualify her as that already.
Maybe she'd get alcohol poisoning from too much wine and rot away in this shitty Twin Pine motel and never have to find out.
At least that would stop the itching.