PEARL

TWENTY-SEVEN

TRACK 27
TOUCH ME I'M SICK
MUDHONEY

i had to split this one in two bc she got Big but you can all breathe a sigh of relief bc after this part it will be the last ida chapter for a while

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IDA thought that the way to the woods and lake studded with as many stars as her description-drowned cheeks seemed to have freckles felt much longer than it had when she was running through the former towards the latter hand in hand with Nate Gold like the coming-of-age queen. 

The gravely (Ha! Not.) un-rosy reality of his and her arguing, Winterson's dead weight, Rowan's mysteriously-grief-giving back and Nicole's symptoms of shock were all to blame for that. 

As her Mary Janes soldiered on over tree roots and her shoulder muscles screamed in a not-so-startlingly anti-feminist manner, Ida had that thought again – the one along the store-bought cynical lines of Damn, I really am carrying a real dead body that would entice movie-makers worldwide to rejoice at her apparent acceptance of her dark-humoured, stormy-faced, teen-lead station.

(There were a lot of other things that the ridiculous rose-red realness of hauling said bedsheet-bundled body was making Ida think, but in the interest of RSI, pursuing the perversely-fast plot pace and swerving the cesspit, neither she nor her author decided to go into much detail about them.)

Miracle as it may have been, they finally laid the unwholesome load down on the daisy-dotted ground, and it was unwrapped (Continuing with the grotesque Christmas gift analogy, I see.) by a still-wincing Rowan as Ida and Nate hunted around for nearby stones to certify a successful sinking.

(Good, but how about: to guarantee a good Virginia end for Winterson, which it had been rather intelligent of Ida's writer to hint at in the previous chapter via her pseudo (?) suicidal thoughts.)

It's not like he'd fit inside an oven.

Nicole shakily sat on the grass while the hunt for said convenient and never-before-mentioned stones commenced, hugging the blood-spotted bedsheet that was half-draped over her thin-skinned shoulders. In retrospect, Ida thought, it would've made a lot more sense for her and Nate to have pinched a towel from the laundry cupboard in place of another sheet, but Nicole didn't complain.

She didn't do anything, for that matter, even when Rowan left Winterson's unveiled corpse to wait for its inexplicably-sourced stones and joined her and the dew. She didn't do anything when Ida and Nate returned from their brief trip back inside the surrounding forest with handfuls of the stones that were getting a Hell of a lot of screen-time, by the sound of it, or when Rowan slipped an arm behind her to quickly adjust the now-brown-stained bedsheet with a careful Latex-covered hand.

She didn't do anything when the continuously and likely-meant-to-be-cutely arguing stone-bearers knelt and proceeded to pile their fare atop the small pyramid of possessions, plastic gloves and matchingly-bloody cleaning cloths resting on the nurse's punctured chest, or when it started to rain.

Because obviously it started to rain.

"Wait," Rowan called, as needlessly quiet as ever – more so, actually, since they were bang in the middle of a vast expanse of woodland with metres of presumed meadow bricking them off from humanity on one side and layers of red brick (Not going to comment.) doing the same on the other – when Nate and Ida prepared to repackage their perverted parcel. "Maybe, uh..."

He looked at Nicole, who was looking at the tar-black lake like another butchered body.

"Maybe Nicole should go in the water first. Before...he does. To get the blood off."