Chapter Text
“Alright, girls! Practice is over! Let's go home and rest up for the game tomorrow. Remember, the bus checks us out at 1:15!”
The cheerleaders all scurried off before the cheer manager turned her attention to a certain team member.
“Amy? Can you come talk for a second?”
She asked, looking over to a slightly annoyed girl standing a couple of feet away.
“What's up, Jo?”
Amy questioned, completely straight-faced.
“Coach wanted me to speak to you.”
Jo spoke, slowly grinning.
“If it’s about my English grade then I could explain the D+”
Amy interrupted as Jo furrowed her eyebrow.
“Not that… It’s about your attitude. What’s the point of being a cheerleader that never smiles? All the girls agree that the only thing you ever look like you wanna do is leave.”
“There's no way you have any right to talk about my attitude.”
“At least I have an excuse. Do you really think coach does anything when it comes to this team?”
Amy scoffed
“See what I mean! Personality matters as much as skill. Nobody wants to see a girl doing a triple backflip looking like her whole family just died.”
“So is she kicking me off?”
“Nope. Just a warning.”
Jo walked away, but not before turning back to her.
“Also Amy, this is coming from me,”
Amy stared at Jo before she spoke.
“Lay off the chips for a while.”
Amy stormed off to the school parking lot, scrambling to find her car keys at the bottom of her bag. She had a lot going on and didn’t need the bitchy cheer manager calling her fat or telling her she had a “bad attitude”. She was debating driving her jeep into oncoming traffic just to kill herself and maybe a single mom and her two kids if she was lucky, but decided against it. Amy pulled into her driveway, got out of her car, and slammed the car door behind her. As she stormed into the house, Amy scanned the kitchen for any kind of dinner. Whenever their mom is out for some kind of business trip, her twin sister, Samey, is in charge of dinner unless told otherwise.
“Not even a frozen pizza? That lazy bitch.”
Amy spat before storming upstairs to her sister’s room. The upstairs was quiet, unusually quiet. Normally, Samey would cry in her room while blasting her Arctic Monkeys vinyls at this time of night. But she didn’t hear any sobbing or Arctic Monkeys, which led Amy to take a look in her bedroom. Amy sped over to her sister’s room and swung the door open only to see nobody there.
“She’s probably smoking weed in the woods or whatever the fuck she does.”
Amy scoffed and slammed the door behind her.
Topher was lying on his couch, going through the channels on his TV. His mom couldn’t afford much so the most they had were the QVC channels and some shitty reality tv. He caught one of these reality channels while flipping, just to, unfortunately, see a rerun of Ridonculous Race. Seeing Don’s face made his blood boil and Topher turned to look over at an old picture of him at the zoo back when his parents were still together. He tried. He tried so hard to seem important to his dad after he left for hosting that he forgot who he was and humiliated himself on international television. As tears started welling up, Topher quickly shut his TV off and threw the remote to the side. He was interrupted from silently sitting on the ground by the buzzing of his phone.
[INCOMING CALL]
[AMY ❤️]
Topher wiped the single tear on his face and picked up the phone.
“Hey bitch.”
Amy remarked.
“Hey.”
“I know it's a little late but can you drive over real quick? Jo’s been pissing me off.”
Topher looked around his living room before speaking again.
“Yeah, I’ll be there in 10, what did she do this time?”
“I'll tell you when you get there, thanks.”
Topher grabbed his mother’s car keys and left his front door. He pulled into Amy’s large, circular driveway and hopped out of his car. He noticed a large lump on her front walkway when walking towards Amy's front door. Topher assumed it was a pile of leaves, or a dead animal of some kind, but curiosity got the better of him, so he inched over to the figure. As soon as he locked eyes on the big lump on the ground, reality set in. That wasn’t a dead animal. It was a person.
It was Samey.
Or Sammy? Topher really couldn’t remember. He didn’t talk about her much, and neither did Amy surprisingly. Amy spent most of her life bossing her around until the island. They both started arguing a lot more and eventually stopped talking to each other. He never knew it got this bad. Topher stood looking at the ground, stiff and almost as lifeless as the girl lying beneath him. He was so focused on the corpse on the ground that he didn’t notice Amy storming through the front door and heading over to Topher.
“Are you coming in or what? Why are you just standing around?”
Amy noticed the horrified look on his face and looked down to see the lifeless body of her twin sister.
“Ohh…So that's where she was.”
“Oh… Oh my god.”
Topher muttered, still looking down as Amy’s face barely changed.
“She could’ve at least put a pizza in first.”
Topher slowly turned his head to Amy, who was still completely unphased.
“She’s dead!”
He shrieked as Amy tensed up more and slapped her palm against his mouth.
“Dude shut up. What if somebody hears and thinks that we did it?”
She quickly moved her hand off of Topher’s mouth.
“Well, I don’t know Amy. Did you push her out of a window? That doesn’t seem too off-brand!”
Topher said shakily.
“No. Clearly, she beat me to it.”
Topher was horrified.
“This is all your fault.”
Amy muttered.
“Excuse me?”
“Maybe Samey wouldn’t have killed herself if you weren’t gay.”
He was unsure if Amy was being serious or not.
“Because I rejected her back on the island? Why would she still be upset over that?”
“Looks like someone hasn’t seen the scrapbooks.”
Amy chuckled as Topher turned around and pulled out his phone.
“Are you calling Scarlett? I bet she’d know what to do with a corpse, she's so crazy.”
“No, I'm calling 911.”
The phone buzzed until an operator picked up, which prompted Topher to take a few steps back while speaking to the police.
“I’m with a friend, and I believe her sister just committed suicide. She’s lying on the pavement.”
He put his hand to the microphone as Amy started calling to him.
“Hey Toph! Do you think I could use Samey dying as an excuse to get out of cheering at the game tomorrow?”
Amy whisper-yelled with a smile before he turned back to look at her.
“Can we talk about this later?”
Topher whisper-yelled back before resuming his conversation with the paramedics.
“Yeah. The address is 1224 St Helen Drive…Okay…How do you check a pulse?”
After a couple more seconds of standing, He walked back over to the unconscious girl lying on the ground and gently pressed his fingers on the inside of her left wrist, which was covered in scars. Topher brought the phone to his ear as the lady spoke to him.
“Do you feel a pulse?”
“I-i think?”
He pressed his fingers onto her cold wrist before being startled by the sudden jolt of Samey’s body, only to realize that it was just the result of Amy trying to wake her up by kicking her.
“Dude. Stop.”
“Sorry.”
Amy said with a shrug before she knelt to whisper in the ear of her unconscious sister.
“Mom’s gonna be so pissed. Im so gonna kick your ass if you wake up.”
Just as Amy got up, the two heard the sound of an ambulance pulling up to the front of the mansion and watched the paramedics bolt out of the truck to retrieve Samey. As the girl was being lifted from the concrete, Topher couldn’t help but look at her state of her. Samey was wearing black shorts and a grey tank top, which you could practically see her ribcage through. The rest of her body was covered in scars. While most of them were average, there was one that caught his eye. She had a name carved on the side of her right leg.
“TOPHER”
This freaked him out more. Maybe that rejection was worse than the abuse. Maybe Amy was right about her. Did she mention something about a scrapbook?
Topher felt sick.