But when I step through the tower door, it doesn’t smell like beer and weed and mildew. It smells luxuriant, heady, so sweet I feel like an old-timey cartoon character hooked by the nostrils.
I waft up the staircase. There are murmuring voices above me, faint strains of very un-Charm-like music growing louder. The highest room in the tower has always been empty except for the detritus left by time and teenagers: windblown leaves, beer tabs, cicada shells, a condom or two. It’s not empty tonight. There are strings of pearled lights crisscrossing the ceiling and long swaths of blushing fabric draped over the windows; a dozen or so people wearing the kind of gauzy fairy wings that come from the year-round Halloween store at the mall; roses absolutely everywhere, bursting from buckets and mason jars and Carlo Rossi jugs. And in the very center of the room, looking dusty and rickety and somehow grand: a spinning wheel.
That’s when I recognize the song that’s playing: “Once Upon a Dream.” The main theme from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, a waltzing melody stolen straight from Tchaikovsky’s ballet.
I am way, way too old for a Sleeping Beauty–themed birthday. I can’t stop smiling. “Oh, Charm, you didn’t.”
“I one hundred percent did.” Charm passes her PBR to the girl beside her and flings herself at me. She does a little heel-pop when I hug her, like an actress in a black-and-white movie except with more tattoos and piercings. “Happy birthday, baby, from your fairy godmothers.” She waggles her wings at me—blue, because Merryweather is her favorite character—and mashes a plastic princess crown onto my head.
Our friends (her friends) clap and hoot and pass me warmish beer. Someone switches the music, thank God, and for a few hours I pretend I’m just like them. Young and thoughtless and happy, poised at the first chapter of my story instead of the last.
Charm keeps it going as long as she can. She forces everyone into a game of Disney trivia that appears to have no rules except that I always win; she passes around pink-and-blue frosted cupcakes in a plastic Walmart clamshell; she plucks petals from the roses and flings them at me whenever my smile threatens to sag. Everybody seems to enjoy themselves.
For a while.
But there’s only so long you can hang out with the dying girl and her best friend without mortality coming to tap her knucklebones at your window. By eleven, somebody gets drunk enough to ask me, “So like, what are you doing this fall?” and a chill slinks into the room. It coils around our ankles and shivers down our spines and suddenly the roses smell like a funeral and nobody is meeting my eyes.
I consider lying. Pretending I have some internship or job or adventure lined up like the rest of them, when really I have nothing planned but a finite number of family game nights, during which my parents will stare tenderly at me across the dining room table and I will slowly suffocate under the terrible weight of their love.
“You know.” I shrug. “Just playing out the clock.” I try to make it jokey, but I can tell there’s too much acid in my voice.
After that, Charm’s friends slither out of the tower in cowardly twos and threes until it’s just the two of us, like it usually is. Like it won’t be for too much longer. Her friends took their speaker with them, so the tower is silent except for the gentle rush of wind against the windows, the crack and hiss of another beer being opened.
Charm resettles her fairy wings and looks over at me with a dangerous softening around her eyes, mouth half open, and I have a terrible premonition that she’s about to say something unforgivably sincere, like I love you or I’ll miss you.
I flick my chin at the spinning wheel. “Dare you to prick your finger.”
Charm tosses a bleached slice of hair out of her eyes, softness vanishing. “You’re the princess, hon.” She winks. “But I’ll kiss you after.” Her voice is saucy but unserious, which is a relief. Dying girl rule #3 is no romance, because my entire life is one long trolley problem and I don’t want to put any more bodies on the tracks. (I’ve spent enough time in therapy to know that this isn’t “a healthy attitude toward attachment,” but I personally feel that accepting my own imminent mortality is enough work without also having a healthy attitude about it.)
“You know it wasn’t originally a spinning wheel in the story?” I offer, because alcohol transforms me into a chatty Wikipedia page. “In the original version—I mean, if oral traditions had original versions, which they don’t—she pricks her finger on a piece of flax. The Grimms used the word spindel, or spindle, but the wheel itself wasn’t commonly used in Europe until the mid-sixteenth … why are your eyes closed?”
“I’m praying for your amyloidosis to flare up and end my pain.”
“Okay, fuck you?”
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to fit a spinning wheel in the trunk of a Corolla? Just prick your finger already! It’s almost midnight.”
“That’s Cinderella, dumbass.” But I lurch obediently to my feet, discovering from the delicate spin of the windows that I’m slightly drunker than I’d guessed. I curtsy to Charm, wobble only a little, and touch my finger to the spindle’s end.
Nothing happens, naturally. Why would it? It’s just a dusty antique in an abandoned watchtower, not nearly sharp enough to draw blood, and I’m just a dying girl with bad luck and a boring life. Neither of us is anything special.
I look down at the iron spike of the spindle, slightly cross-eyed. For no reason I think of the girl in that Rackham illustration, blond and tragic. I think how it must have felt to grow up in the shadow of a curse, how much she must have hated the story she was handed. How in the end all her hate didn’t matter because she still reached her finger for that spindle, powerless to stop the cruel gears of her own narrative—
Distantly, I hear Charm say, “Jesus, Zin,” and I become aware that I’m pressing my finger into the spindle’s end, burying the point in the soft meat of my skin. I look down to see a single red tear welling at the end of it.
And then something happens, after all.
2
THE ROOM VANISHES around me. The world smears sideways behind my eyelids, blurring into an infinity of colors. I figure I’m dead.
It’s a pretty solid bet: Generalized Roseville Malady has a lot of symptoms and side effects, but the most noticeable one is sudden death. I don’t want to go into all the jargon—Charm is the science nerd, bio and chem double major, headed for a prestigious internship at Pfizer—but essentially, my ribosomes are ticking time bombs. They’re supposed to fold my proteins into clever little origami shapes, which they’ve been doing, mostly, but one day they’re going to go haywire and start churning out garbage. My organs will fill up with mutant proteins, murderous fleets of malformed paper cranes, and I’ll drown in my own fucked-up biological destiny.
I figure that day is today. It occurs to me what a twisted sense of humor the universe has, to kill me in the highest tower in the land just as I pricked my finger on a spindle’s end. I wonder if I look hot, sprawled limp and lifeless among the roses. I wonder if that will be the very last thing I wonder.
But my vision isn’t going dark. The world is still rushing past me, colors and sounds and flashing by like riffled pages. I assume at first this is the life-flashing-before-my-eyes thing, but it seems longer and stranger than the twenty-one years I’ve lived.