Chapter 3

Hiking. Restaurants. Shopping trips. Lilith could only stomach so much vacation. If given a choice, she’d opt out of all activities and just stay behind in the tent reading fanfiction, but of course no choice was given. If her stepmom and half-sis were to be believed, performative family bonding was stimulating to the human spirit, but the reality was just the whole fam getting progressively more upset at each other over the course of the day.

Lilith herself usually shambled quietly at the tail end of the group. She found perverse satisfaction in observing the escalating annoyance; her own mood was already too gloomy by default to be brought down further by any of them. Except maybe Sam, but aside from constantly pulling her hair, he’d been downright nice to her today, which was unsettling.

Dad always spent the entire trip trying to act like he really cared about outdoorsy stuff to impress Annette ... but he wasn’t fooling anybody, once the huffing and puffing and complaining started, and the day wasn’t even halfway through. As the CEO of a mid-sized regional importer of plastic cutlery and disposable containers, he didn’t get a lot of exercise in; Dad wasn’t fat, but he was definitely the fattest he’d been.

Similarly, he pretended like he was a present father-figure during these trips, offering unsolicited life advice to Sam and Ezra, which was pretty funny to listen to. Lilith never got advice, because clearly Ben Ripinski had no clue how to raise children of the female species. He left that to Annette.

Allie, meanwhile, was the one keeping everyone from eating each other alive by being plain happy and excited about everything, as usual.

When they finally returned to the campground after another one such pointless adventure, Samuel pulled her aside by her sleeve while Dad and Annette retired to the cabin. “Hey, Lilly, so y’know how there’s this big campfire every night where everyone goes to drink and get high and whatnot?”

“Yeah, have fun with that.” Lilith rolled her eyes. He couldn’t possibly be inviting her along? Socializing was a nightmare, and other people’s insistence that she engage in it constituted the bane of Lilith’s existence. Especially after a whole day of mandatory “fun”, there were about a hundred things she’d rather be doing.

“So anyway, I was thinking ... look,” he continued, as though he hadn’t heard her. From the corner of her eyes, she watched him ruffle around in his bag and produce the liquor he’d bought on Friday, the bottles with suspiciously bright and soda-esque looking contents, one pink, one blue. He handed her the blue one, keeping the pink for himself. “ ... I think tonight’s your night, sis.”

The bottle felt heavy in her hands. “ ... My night?” she asked. “What does that even mean?”

He pulled her hair, and she swatted the bottle at him with more force than strictly warranted. He wisely dodged; a second later he was on top of her again. “Yeah, tonight, Lilly,” he told her in a low voice. “I wanna see you drunk. You just need to loosen up a little. I guarantee you’ll have fun.”

Lilith bit her lip. It was very embarrassing that she was suddenly more inclined to agree just because he’d pinned her to the ground. Curse these feelings.

“... Maybe,” she allowed. “Can’t we just, like ... drink alone? Why do I have to go down there?”

“That’s just what people our age do, Lilly.”

Maybe he was right. Maybe tonight was ‘her night’, vis-à-vis her virginity etc.; she’d already crafted some one-liners pre-emptively just in case he’d object to things. “Yeah sure, it’s illegal. Big deal. So is smoking weed and underage drinking, buddy.” So she was well-prepared. And if she had to suffer a classic high school-esque gauntlet of terror before being able to shoot her shot, she could endure that.

Gravel crunched under Lilith’s worn-out combat boots as she bounded down the hill, off the campground, towards the creek. In the twilight she could already make out the fire in the distance; momentarily, she imagined herself walking straight to hell.

She scowled, clutching her blue-colored booze like a lifeline. Like all the liquor Lilith had ever tasted, it had roughly the flavor of cleaning detergent, in spite of the deceptively cute coconuts on the label ... but Samuel had bought it for her, and so, she drank it bravely, holding her nose. The bottle was already a quarter empty just from sipping in the tent; she’d hoped that would calm the blaring anxiety around peers and parties that normally prevented her from doing this sort of thing.

At the edge of the treeline, Lilith came to a sudden halt as she registered the fact that it was dozens of people down there. Multiple dozens. Pop music blasted over tinny Bluetooth speakers, and she was indeed put in mind of an outdoor high school cafeteria experience, only with a big fire in the center. That had to be one of the rings of hell for sure.

She fiddled anxiously with the belt loops of her shorts. Shorts! What on earth had she been thinking? She didn’t have the body to pull off this kind of outfit ... She’d tried hard to look nice tonight, her hair done up in two little buns, but she felt so naked without a big sweater or something to cover her arms—

A hug enveloped her. “Lilith? Hey! What are you doing here? And why are you wearing my shorts? Whoa, what is that? Booze with Gatorade? Wait ... are we finally hanging out? Oh my gosh! Yess!!”

Lilith winced. Her whirlwind half-sister’s sheer enjoyment of life always seemed a little unwarranted. “ ... I wanted to wear something cute, I guess,” she answered belatedly. “Silly me, I guess! I look so dumb.”

“Are you kidding? This looks friggin’ great on you! You can honestly keep ‘em if you want! Your have long legs and stuff! And I never wear those anyways!” Then why did you pack them, Lilith wanted to ask, but before she could articulate herself, Allie was already pulling her towards the crowd. “C’mon! I’ll find us a nice spot by the fire ... Also, can I have a sip of that, pretty please?”

Lilith probably should’ve seen it coming, but this whole campfire situation was clearly segregated by age. The older, cooler kids were in charge of the fire, the music and the general vibe of the situation. Since Lilith and her sister were neither old, nor cool, they ended up parked off in the periphery among the other little siblings.

Apparently her sister already knew half of them by name. Lilith stammered her way through various introductions, then quickly settled into the role of observer. It helped that Allie did three people’s worth of talking.

Meanwhile, Samuel was all the way over there—she could see him, but there were walls of sound and people between them. Maybe it was ‘cause of his facial hair, which made him look a bit older, but he mingled comfortably with people two, three years his senior ... and unfortunately, really comfortably with one redheaded girl in particular.

For the next two hours, Lilith just sat there scowling quietly, all jealousy and repressed rage, while taking recalcitrant gulps from her unholy blue concoction as if that would make things better, watching this bitch flirt with her brother.

The blue stuff did, in fact, make things a little better. The constant self-doubt in the back of her mind was muted. She found herself actually talking to her sister and these other kids, dropping a few quips that got a laugh out of all of them.

Regardless, Allie’s little friends left one by one as the hours passed, driven away by Lilith’s dark aura no doubt.

She held up her bottle, a little under half full now. The blue hue was weirdly pretty, illuminated by the campfire. It was probably a bunch of disgusting chemicals that made it that way.

Unfortunately, no matter how euphoric the booze was making her inside, her front-row view of what her brother was up to across the fire still got her sad and mad. Now Sammy leaned in to whisper something in Fat Red’s ear, and the girl blushed shyly in response. It was disgusting, and yet, Lilith couldn’t look away from it either. She took in every smirk, every giggle, every little flutter of Fat Red’s eyelids, and how she brushed Sam’s shoulders, his hands...

Ugh. She wanted to vomit.

As the night wore on, Lilith and her sister got to claim seats closer and closer to the fire, but that did nothing to improve her experience. It seemed that the more people left, the more of Fat Red got draped in her brother’s lap. He even started playing with the girl’s hair, as some kind of dark parody of when he’d played with hers.

Lilith chuckled darkly. And maybe it was the fact that she was close to piss-drunk, but she could swear he sent an evil little smirk her way, too. As if to say, look, Lilly, I don’t give a shit about you, you dumb, skinny little freak.