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There are ways to talk to Ginger. She says: "What are you gonna be?" - and at first Brigitte doesn't think much of it.
"What?" she says, rolling over in her bed, blinking to clear her gummy eyes. She'd been so asleep she'd nearly been dreaming.
"It's a stupid question. Answer it."
But from that tone of voice, answering wrong is going to mean silent treatment from tonight until well past tomorrow morning, probably, and Ginger stomping around and slamming doors. One way of talking to her is physical, and Brigitte stretches as if she isn't wondering furiously about where and how badly this conversation might go - Ginger sounds awfully sneering - and leaves a hand outstretched in the space between their beds, reaching.
Ginger makes a grinning sound in the dark and bedsprings creak as she stretches herself, and then her hand is caught in a splinter of streetlight, held out towards Brigitte's and just visible as making a clasping fist.
"We ought to move the beds back together," Brigitte murmurs. "Piss Pam off." Some separation is 'healthier', apparently, and Mom had decided to start them off by ensuring their beds stayed apart. Healthier than being happy, sure, that made sense.
"I think about it, sometimes," Ginger says. Her voice is smug and dreamy. "Stuff like beds, how big they're going to be, in what kinda place. Like bus tickets so we can get further away. If we get out instead of dying, there's going to be practical shit to take care of. You'll be good at that. But there's also ... what are we going to be? --and I'm not talking shit like waitresses or crack dealers, all right?"
Ginger's not usually in a mood to lean towards the life option much, lately. Brigitte's too close to sixteen for much wilful blindness about how likely they are to scrape up money to leave Bailey Downs. Besides, what's really going to be different anyplace else in the world?
"Thank God," Brigitte says. "I was thinking why are you start talking like we're in grade school career orientation."
"Well, I'm going to crack and be crazy - that's one answer." Ginger's hand makes loopy motions in the light. "But what I really think I'll be is mutilated."
There are plenty of answers to that. The idea has the familiar feel to a lot of stuff they've talked about before. Is it any worse than the ways they've thought of to die?
Ginger's really telling the truth here, though. It's easy to tell. She's thought about this, and thought it could come true, and it's something she hasn't told Brigitte about in all the time she was thinking. Not a dare of an idea like she sometimes threw out - an intellectual puzzle, just for you, Ginger would say in her Brigitte Voice.
Is she going to ask Brigitte to do the mutilation for her?
It's not an answer when Brigitte climbs out of her bed and into Ginger's, it's a necessity. There isn't a second between her starting to move and Ginger throwing back the covers to make space for her. They wind around each other, though Brigitte does it with more purpose than just trying to be comfortable on the single bed mattress. She wants to touch Ginger's skin and try not to imagine where the marks were supposed to go.
"I'll make sense of that, for you, since you're not playing along," Ginger says, less maliciously than she might. "We're gonna get hit by the curse, you know, unless we do something. The hormone brew's coming along to conspire against us and turn us into everyone else. If we want to keep potential, we're going to have to consider doing something practical, just like we think about saving up or buying the right kinds of rope, and pills, and..."
"'Practical like what - a backyard ovary removal? Stapling you shut?"
Her face is against Ginger's collarbone, and she feels that grinning sound.
"It's a lot to think about, right?" She's enjoying what she's doing to Brigitte. It's obvious in her voice and the hand stroking her back. "But that's me. What are you going to be?"
"Dead at the scene," Brigitte snaps. She thinks, I'm going to find us something. Something else. She closes her hand in Ginger's hair and - just a little - yanks.
There are ways to get Ginger quiet. Brigitte's never sure when she'll manage it - by laughing when she's breathed in a lot of smoke, by talking about a book that means something. This time she gets a smack and a sharp yelp of words before Ginger unexpectedly lets her conversation go, but that she can hardly hear anything over a hissing in her ears as she imagines breaking Ginger open with no corresponding breaks in herself.
*
"We're going to be a sacrifice by luring the Beast of Bailey Downs out of the woods?" Ginger asks. "That's your plan?"
"I'm telling you, I saw it when we were out the other night. And this is one way to do one way to do what we want," Brigitte murmurs. She's not too worried about her sister making them leave - Ginger is fascinated with watching the blood from the butcher's counter at the supermarket ("Blood pudding's part of our grandma's cultural heritage, and she's coming to visit") dripping from both their hands, and the silver knife she made Brigitte hand over to her.
Change comes, one way or the other. Some of the old books she found say it's better when you face it. Court it.
The howl rises - not too far.
"We're not going to be human," Brigitte murmurs, at last, and Ginger scoffs because she thinks that's not literal, not practical. Well, fine.
The important thing is still, always, that they'll be together.