Chapter Text
Enid Sinclair wasn’t in crisis. She just wasn’t. Everything was completely fine. I mean, sure… she had just been publicly dumped in the most brutal way by her boyfriend of a year, who she wasn’t totally sure she even liked, but it wasn’t a big deal at all. In fact, she was already over it!
At least that was what she was telling herself as she walked rigidly like a ghostly Barbie doll, removing her heels, opting to carry them as she trudged to the bus stop. It didn't help that she was kind of drunk, having just escaped from a house party one of her friends had thrown in their new apartment.
The whole thing had been going great; Enid thrived in social environments. That was until she had been pulled aside by her equally drunk now ex-boyfriend, who was talking much louder than he realised. Thinking his thoughts aloud, how he felt she wasn't really into him, how he was tired of her trying to cover it up, in his own moronic way of talking. The whole party had stopped, staring at them like their favourite soap opera was on, and Enid was left to flee, her phone vibrating nonstop now with messages from her concerned friends. But she didn't want them to pity her, Enid Sinclair, who couldn't make anyone stay. So here she was, wallowing despite all her self-assurances.
She felt like a soldier coming back from battle as she fumbled through her purse to find her phone, grimacing further when she saw it had only five per cent battery left.
She tapped onto the bus with a forced smile, one that was so painful even the tired bus driver gave her a pitiful look at this hour of the night. She was trying to be self-soothing as she climbed the stairs shakily, walking all the way to the darkened back of the mostly empty bus, where nobody would be able to see how pathetic she looked. Without her phone… she wasn’t sure she could keep it together the rest of this bus ride. Enid threw herself into the window seat without much thought, appreciating the cover the darkness gave her.
She was left to think. Like sure… she hadn’t really been into Ajax like that… he was more of a placeholder boyfriend until she found the one. But getting dumped always still hurts. She was starting to wonder if it was her. Was she so awful… she couldn’t get a guy to stay more than a year? She would concede she was clingy… and needy… and obsessive… but if a guy were really the one, he would compliment all that about her. Not make her feel like it was wrong. Or question her feelings. That thought led her back to what he had said. That she didn't really love him. It stung. But in a way, he was right. Enid sometimes questioned if she could love.
She had a pattern, obsessive crushing, dating and ruining it somehow. It was like once she finally achieved her goal, all her feelings vanished, leaving her to try and make up for it through obsessive attentiveness. Could she love, or were all her feelings so fickle and shallow?
Enid felt, she felt like it was something integral to her being. She was such a feeling person that she cried when birds sat together, huddling with their partners in the cold, she cried when she saw a beautiful sunrise, when she saw children and their mothers, so happy with one another. Sometimes she thought all she was worth was her feelings, that it was the only thing which made her human. And if even those were fickle, what was she? An alien?
‘Is it me?’ she wondered internally as she stared out the blackened window, one which didn’t show much of the outside with the sky blackened, but her reflection.
She was taking in her dishevelled appearance, the streaked mascara, raccoon eyes and ruffled hair, when she noticed for the first time, the presence of someone else at the back of the bus. Two seats away from her, on the other window seat of this bus, sat another girl.
She was almost like a black hole. Sucking in everything around her, even light. Her corner of the bus seemed even darker than Enid’s. The intricacies of her clothing couldn't quite be made out in the absence of decent lighting, but Enid could spot the distinctive hairstyle of two braids and bangs which fell across her forehead almost perfectly.
The girl seemed to be wearing a thick, woollen coat, one that swallowed her form up. Her face, though consumed by the shadows, was relaxed, but gave the impression it was normally pretty sullen, not the jolly type. She almost seemed like a doll, and it left Enid to wonder if she was hallucinating such an odd person, or if she had actually been hit by the bus instead of getting on, and this was her passageway to the afterlife. She tried not to consider the fact that she could be checking out, looking like this, wallowing in her own sadness.
And despite all this darkness, the girl sat quietly reading, of all things. Enid briefly wondered if she had night vision or if she was pretending to read in an attempt not to be bothered. Then again… if they were already dead, then maybe everyone automatically got nightvision. Or… maybe not, considering Enid could barely see a thing. Not cool.
Either way, it was distracting, something to focus on, rather than her impending romantic doom and spiral over how she was destined to be alone forever.
She stared long enough that the girl sensed it, tilting her head slightly and fixing her soul sucking eyes onto Enid, granted, with a bored stare, one that said ‘can I help you?’, but it probably really meant ‘what the hell do you want’. But the feeling of being looked at by her, seen, it was intense. Enid wasn’t sure if that was in a good or bad way yet.
“What’cha reading?” Enid tried to ask smoothly, but it was really pretty hasty. She could already tell the other girl would rather not socialise on the bus, but she still had ten stops to go, and it was all she could do not to become hysterical. What did she have to lose by talking to a stranger for a little while and then never seeing them again? Enid could socialise; it was her special talent. She could slip into it like a glove, a shield. And drunk Enid, well, her boundaries blurred; she was bolder.
“What’s it to you?” the other girl questioned dryly, her gaze already leaving Enid to return to the book.
“Morbid curiosity?”, Enid quipped back weakly, unsure how to chameleon her way into the right form. What kind of vibe would this girl require?
She heard a tired sigh emanate from the other side of the bus as the girl closed the book and turned her body closer to Enid’s direction. Suddenly, Enid regretted ever opening her mouth, as she was under such intense analytical scrutiny that it made her squirm. She could almost feel the sensation of cold eyes, flicking over every part of herself, making their own conclusions and forming opinions, judging her.
“Frankenstein.” The other girl said in a monotone voice, finally, apparently satisfied with her appraisal of Enid’s existence.
“Oh, the monster one?” Enid replied excitedly, a particular green and grumpy visage coming to life. She had admittedly never read the book; she was more of a movie girl, but knew of the character pretty well. How different could they be?
“Have you read it?”
“Well… no, but I mean it's Frankenstein, the scary, evil monster, right?”
She received a pretentious scoff in return.
“Don’t use me as an outlet for your clear emotional crisis, okay? I am not willing to lend an ear nor a shoulder to weep on. Keep your sorrow to yourself.”
Ouch. Enid could recognise a clear dismissal when she heard one. Her second harsh reality check of the day. Who was she to be talking to this perfect stranger, bothering them until they relented and spoke to her? Maybe she was as bad as Ajax thought, not worth keeping, not worth even speaking to. And so she accepted the rejection with a stiff nod, hoping the darkness could hide the trembling of her lips and the hideous contorting of her face in tears.
She huddled into herself, pressing her body closer to the window as if to give the other girl as much possible space away from her. She was almost considering moving seats downstairs before she heard another sigh from the girl who had gone back to her reading.
“The monster in the story isn’t evil. The gross oversimplification irritated me.” A begrudgingly softer but still dry voice spoke out into the darkness, causing Enid to turn her head back in that direction. The girl was looking at her again with those swimmingly expressive eyes. They were sincere.
“Could you… Talk about the book for a while, please?. Just until I leave?”
Another sigh.
“It’s a story about a man who attempts to create life, man, taking the power into his own hands. He assembled all the finest parts for his creation, but the moment it came to life, he was repulsed by it. He cast it aside, trying to erase it from his life and move forward. The monster was left alone, forced to learn how to be human on its own by watching people secretly, becoming parasocially attached to them. Once they laid eyes on the monster, they too rejected him and cast him aside. The monster was so hurt, so broken that all emotions turned to rage, resentment toward its creator. It hunted Frankenstein down, trying to force him to make a companion for the monster, or he would kill and haunt him forever. The doctor partially built the companion before changing his mind, tortured by the possible repercussions of his actions. He destroyed it. In turn, the monster was miserable, killing those dear to the doctor in spite, and eventually fled. Frankenstein chased him across the world, until losing him in the Arctic and perishing after telling the whole tale to a sailor. Only then did the monster rest, satisfied but aungished, and end his own life.”
Enid was crying by the end of the dull recount, overcome by sudden emotions she didn't understand. The monster… it didn’t sound evil? Why did she think it was in the first place? Why did it sound so relatable?
“Why are you crying?” a disgusted voice questioned from the shadows, not having anticipated this response.
“The monster's story, it's so… sad.”
“Not evil?”, the girl said sceptically.
“It’s… weirdly kind of relatable.”
Enid almost swore she saw the ghost of a smile flicker over the other girl's face when she said those words, looking at her with something of approval before she spoke again.
“I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.”
It seemed like a direct quote, though she couldn't quite be sure.
“Been there.” Enid tried to quip, but the weight of the words hit her harder than she expected, drawing her mind away from Ajax and back to her mother. What an oddly apt story to suit her at this moment. Cruel yet serendipitous.
What began after that was almost a game.
The girl would summon a quote, without even looking at the book, and they would discuss it. Enid wasn’t sure if she was providing some fresh perspective on anything, or if she was just being humoured by a secretly kind stranger, hidden behind that unfriendly exterior. And once the other girl seemingly grew tired of discussing one quote, she would move on to the next.
″...if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear,”
“That one doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t think it's logical.”
“It’s perfectly logical, I find it exceedingly helpful in the day-to-day.”
“No, I think that even if you can't inspire love, you shouldn't cause fear out of spite.”
“A pathetic sentiment.”
“Hey, not all of us can be like you, okay, Grim Reaper. Some of us don't want to be feared.”
"Fear is useful. Love is only a shackle."
“Wow, who hurt you?”
“Nobody. It's more practical to be feared.”
“Well, I don't fear you.”
“You should”
Enid was laughing now, her head thrown back in an easy smile, almost all her worries from earlier swallowed up in easy conversation, strange bonding over the outcast monster, one they both seemed to resonate with in one way or another.
She had been opening her mouth to reply in a teasing way, some thought forming about inspiring love in her head, when her bus stop finally approached, like a disappointingly abrupt end to their scarcely built common ground. She felt a little sad, leaving this girl she didn’t know, but who somehow understood her so well.
“I- this is my stop. Thank you… for talking to me. It really made me feel a lot better. I’m Enid, by the way.”
She had said all of this while getting up, gathering her bag and heels and garnering the will to walk away. Enid turned to the girl, expecting an acknowledgement, an offering of her name, a goodbye, something. What she got was a blank stare and a curt nod, before the girl began to open her book back up, avoiding her eyes.
Ouch again. Maybe she was wishfully fabricating the connection with someone who seemed to feel so little, as Enid never could. She almost envied the indifference; her existence would surely benefit from it. If she weren't shackled by all her fake emotions, maybe she could be good, kind. It was kind of ironic.
But it was as she had almost crossed the whole length of the bus, ready to descend the stairs, when she felt a tap on her back; footsteps she hadn’t heard apparently had followed her.
As she turned back, she saw a hand with now visibly black painted nails, offering her the very book which had been sucking her attention.
Enid looked back up at her, confused.
“You’re giving it to me? But it's your book.”
“Books are to be read, not hoarded, Enid. I’ve read it over a hundred times. I think you’ll find more use in it.”
Enid couldn't suppress the shit eating grin which overtook her face, hearing the other girl say her name, as she gently accepted the book, holding it like her prized possession, like it was made of gold. It might as well have been. And the way her name had been spoken…it hadn’t sounded like something new being tested. It came across smooth, familiar, as if she had said it hundreds of times before.
“Thank you…”
The girl failed to pick up the cue to insert her name, the warning yell of the bus driver about leaving soon snapping her out of whatever daze she had been in.
“I’ll call you my fellow monster, then? Hopefully, I'll see you around!”
She received no reply, her sign to exit the bus as soon as possible, accepting the brief interaction for what it was, a positive sign that chance meetings did still occur, and that she wouldn’t be alone, not unless she let the misery consume her.
Enid felt lighter as she stepped onto the cold pavement, but her head turned back up to the second-floor bus window on an impulse. There she met those same dark eyes, watching her with some different emotion than before. They stayed fixed on her until the bus moved on, Enid standing there like a statue as she watched it go, something longing in her chest.
She hoped they’d meet again.