Donna Daggit, aged sixteen, seven months, with the worst picture on her driver ID and a drawer full of burned CDs, is anything but a good girl.
Yes, she might have made it to the honor roll this year and keeps the majority of her clothes clean and ironed, and she takes tea to school instead of coffee, and she just barely missed the curve for the tennis team, but if you asked her mother, or Donna herself, she’s the worst child in history of Hatchetfield.
(What–e–ver. She won’t get it. The school counselor with blonde greasy highlights whose couch smells like wet dog doesn’t get it. All of the kids in her advanced classes don’t get it. No one gets it.)
To be truthful, there are a few things that might have impacted her mother’s opinion. She’s still failing over half of her classes, keeps falling asleep in class when she actually goes there and has unexplained blanks in her memory — maybe it’s the amount of alcohol she consumes daily, maybe it’s because her brain is just used to tuning out her mother screaming at her — and hanging out with Emma Perkins on the roof of her neighbors’ shed.
The last one, in Mother Daggit’s most unneeded opinion, is the worst one. Donna cannot count the times her mother found another undesirable trait in one of the only people that actually tolerated Donna’s presence around them and didn’t try to throw yogurt over her in the cafeteria.
(The bemoanings were drowned out by the time she blasted enough My Chemical Romance songs from her MP3 and saw Emma in the entry hall, thank you very much. She can’t even remember the wrinkles of the scowl on her mother’s face.)
So half past midnight, when she’s trying to force her old, creaky window open and hears a sudden shrill sound and then a slam from the hallway, there are two thoughts in her head:
Number one: She needs to get her dagger from her pillow case.
Number two: Emma got in through the hallway window. Again.
“Emma?”
She feels the nerves gathering in her throat as she stalks down the hallway. Fuck her parents for moving into a shotgun house, these goddamn halls will be the death of her. If she doesn’t get killed first, because she can’t see if it’s her weed dealer or someone trying to rob them.
Her hand is starting to sweat around the dagger’s handle.
“Emma, I swear—”
A figure appears from around the corner, and Donna has about half a second to decide whether to stab or get stabbed.
The knife swishes through the air, but the figure ducks it with practiced perfection, and giggles in such an Emma way Donna’s fear is immediately replaced with annoyance.
“What the fuck!” She whisper–screams, and Emma’s giggles “What the fucking shit, Emma. I will actually stab you one of these days. Your mother dropped you on your head.”
Emma shrugs, and leans backwards, in the way that makes her look like all of the guys she hangs out with and buys weed from — hips up front, hands in pockets, a smirk that tells you that they don't have a single coherent thought in their heads. Incredibly annoying, especially in Emma's case.
“Yeah, and I had—”
“One your mom joke more and you won’t see the light of dawn again.” Donna grumbles and turns on her heel, marching back to her room. She left the door open and the bedside lamp on, shit, if her mom saw it she would be on her ass all the
“So, are you going to invite me in?” Emma’s voice rings out from the other end of the hallway, too loud for almost one in the morning, and her boots boom on the floor. As if she cares about being invited in.
As if Donna hasn’t discovered her inside her room coming back from school. Multiple times. One time eating her goddamn chips she’s stored away for later.
That fucking cunt.
“What are you, a vampire?” She says, annoyance clear in her voice as she shuffles inside her room. She doesn’t close the door in Emma’s face, no matter how much she wants to do it, and the girl slithers by her. “How did you even get in?”
“Oh, fucking guess.” Emma snorts tiredly, flopping onto Donna’s bed, definitely messing up the multiple layers of blankets Donna has meticulously put on the evening before.
She snorts. “I’m not going to Jeopardy you, Emma.”
Unsurprisingly, by the time Donna turns back around, Emma has rolled into a burrito with two top blankets, only her head, messed up hair and reddened brown eyes peeking out. (Donna can almost feel her smile from where it’s hidden below the material, warming up the entire fucking room and making Donna want to run and hide and never come out of a fox burrow.
That’s what you feel about your weed plug. You just need to get the smoke and get her to leave before mother smells out the weed like a bloodhound.)
“Your mom needs to check the bolts on the hallway window.” Emma says, a leisurely bitchy-confident expression on the part of her face Donna can see, and there has to be something wrong with that girl, because no sensible person, even on weed, would try something like Emma just did.
“... You’re not fucking telling me you climbed to the second floor.”
Emma does not respond, just smiles at her with definitely not–all–there eyes. Glassy, reddened, like she's thinking on a separate level.
“Emma, you’re a stupid cunt. I hope you fall and crack your head open—”
“And you will snap the pictures and post them on MySpace, whatever, whatever, I get it.” Emma says, her hand waving dismissively from where it sticks out beneath blankets, curling up even further. On Donna’s bed. “Did you ever actually post them?”
She’s not going to answer that question. She’s not fucking going to answer that question and completely and utterly embarrass herself in front of her weed plug.
“You didn’t!” Emma squeals, almost with the glee of a three–year–old chasing bubbles, kicking her legs in the blanket cocoon. “You fucking bitch, you didn’t!”
Donna doesn’t grace this with a response. Donna doesn’t grace Emma falling asleep in her bed, in her blanket with a glance, much less fixing one of the blankets so they cover Emma fully instead of slipping down to her waist.
Donna definitely does not sleep on her pullout armchair. She definitely doesn’t wake up with a knot in her neck in an empty room with blankets folded in the corner of her bed.
She’s not the type of person to make sacrifices.