- -
Dawn got a new magnifying glass in her spy kit with the collectible
lunchbox. She decided she wouldn't carry her lunch to school anymore in
a square-shaped box with cartoon characters on it, but the magnifying
glass she did keep. It was a fascinating tool that could make ants look
gargantuan while still fitting neatly into the belt buckle of her jeans.
She carried it everywhere, examining everything.
She didn't know there were
things better left unseen.
--
"I don't think monsters can
be that bad when all you need to kill them is this stick thing," Dawn
said to Buffy in the kitchen one night. She sat at the counter, turning
the stake over in her small hands, testing the sharpness of its point
with her fingers. She touched it just slightly. As if she were Princess
Aurora and the thimble could prick despite her braveness.
Buffy gave her an annoyed
glance before continuing to rummage through the cabinets. "I hate it
when Mom does this. She just goes off to the gallery all night and
leaves us with nothing edible to eat."
"If you could cook, then
there's a lot of stuff." Dawn thought Buffy ate too much. She'd watch
her, sometimes, as she stuffed four pieces of pizza down her throat in
one sitting. Who could seriously work so hard they needed four slices of
pizza to fill their stomach when it didn't even stick out? Buffy was
like a skinny pig. She even snorted sometimes when she scoffed at Dawn.
"Why don't you learn how to
cook? I'm kinda busy with the whole high school, plus saving the world
gig."
Buffy was always bragging
about how she saved the world. Yeah, like cops and firefighters didn't
help, too?
Dawn rolled her eyes and
turned her attention back to the stake. She grabbed her magnifying glass
from her belt loop and began looking more closely at the chiseled wood.
She found what she thought was a spot of blood dried on. Blood dried to
look brown, she'd learned. After her nighttime nosebleeds, sometimes
she'd sneak back into the bathroom to magnify the tissues in the garbage
can. The red always turned brown, which she thought was a shame. Nothing
was more exciting or eye-catching than red.
Buffy's friend Faith wore
red lipstick all the time. Dawn watched Faith's lips carefully that
night she came over for dinner. She waited to see the pretty sheen rub
off with the intake of so much food. But even at the end of the meal,
Faith looked the same as when she'd come. Bad girls wear red, was
what Faith told her before heading out with Buffy to patrol. Dawn
pressed her naked lips together and stored that knowledge in her spy
notebook, where she kept all of her important life lessons. Nothing from
school, because school had its own notebooks. Nothing about her everyday
routine; she had her journals for that. This one was only for top
secret, special things Dawn learned about life. Things only she and a
couple other people could know.
--
Dawn followed Buffy the
most in her spy travels, tool kit and official headband in place to show
that she, too, had a calling. One day, she and her extra bright
flashlight could say they "saved the world", too.
Buffy hogged the bathroom
in the mornings, giving Dawn precious little time to brush both teeth
and hair. In her impatience one day, she abandoned the search for the
day's outfit, and dropped to the floor with her magnifying glass to the
faded footsteps in the carpet. She told Buffy she had fat feet, but that
only served to slow down the bathroom wait even further.
That afternoon, Buffy swept
her bouncy golden hair into a tight ponytail, hurriedly pulling every
strand through the elastic loop. Getting ready for patrol again.
Probably soon, Faith would stop by to bang on the front door and hurry
Buffy up. Faith had what Buffy called "fucked up priorities" one time
when she didn't know Dawn was in the room. It was strange that Buffy had
said that, because more and more, behind the magnifying glass, the two
Slayers were becoming as one in many ways.
Dawn counted the backs of
her teeth with her candy-hungry tongue and thought about having two big
sisters. Maybe Faith would be more fun and relaxed with her. She had
said one time that Buffy was uptight, which had made Dawn smile.
Something about Faith scared her slightly, but she liked the insults she
could dish out. They were so... bad. Like Faith didn't have a
care in the world what anyone thought of anything she did.
Last week, Dawn wanted to
be that way. It got her grounded in the end, though, when she said her
mother's parmesan chicken "sucked worse than potato soup".
She strived to learn
Faith's secrets. How she stayed the way she was without punishment. But
in the meantime, there was more life to be examined. Dawn shined her
most important tool on the two butterflies flitting around the prickly
bush in the back yard. She looked for traces of red in their pretty
color patterns, but all she found was brown.
--
Though there was more
homework this year than she'd been accustomed to, Dawn still found time
to ponder the important things. Why ants were so small but could carry
their own weight. Why red turned to brown. Whether what Buffy did was
right or not.
"Nikki's mom works at the
big church by the grocery store," Dawn said, shoveling macaroni and
cheese into her mouth, and only losing a few noodles to the counter
below. "She says punishing is for God to do."
"Becoming a religious
fanatic now, Dawnie? That'll really help you not get boys when you get
older."
Dawn could see Angel's
strange face in her head, the intense way that he peered out at
everything. "Don't tell me how to get boys," she said resolutely. "You
don't know how to get boys anymore. All you know how to get is
vampires."
Buffy ignored this and
slurped a noodle loudly into her mouth. She loved this Kraft dinner
junk, but no one else did. Which was why Buffy always made it on nights
when Mom had to work. It seemed like Buffy wasn't going to answer, but
then she swallowed and said, "Hey, let God step in, I'm not stopping
him." She looked around just to prove her point. "Doesn't look like he's
here."
"Nikki's mom says he's
always there."
"Really?" Buffy's voice
couldn't have been less interested. Dawn realized this must be what it
was like to be one of her teachers whose words went mocked and ignored.
"I think he stays hidden while I do my job. I'm sure he has an excuse --
catching up on napping or something."
"God would call you a
coward for saying that." Dawn blinked as the words of her friend's
mother came tumbling out of her mouth as if they were her own.
"I think he's the coward,
and also, I think this conversation is over. Now get out."
"You can't kick me out of
the kitchen. I live here, too."
"Definitely don't need to
remind me of that."
Dawn glared at Buffy's back
while she rinsed her dish in the sink, then just set it there, as if
they had a dishwasher for nothing. Dawn wanted to say something, to say
so many things, but instead she fled the kitchen and its soupy macaroni
for the back yard where she found insects mating in the cool evening
breeze. "Eww," she said while she giggled and had to keep looking away.
--
Dawn could hear the window
opening late at night in the room next to hers; the shuffling of feet on
the roof until the body jumped down to the ground. She thought of
telling on Buffy, getting her grounded for once, but Mom would
probably just relent that it was "part of Buffy's job". Dawn was going
to get even someday. She was going to own all of the McDonald's in
California. She'd call herself the official food tester. And when she
wanted to eat cheeseburgers and ice cream cones all night long, she
could say, "It's part of my job."
The nights began to run
into one another, until Dawn started losing count of how many times
Buffy evacuated through her bedroom window. Dawn felt so goodie-goodie,
snuggling into her pillows while her sister careened off the roof and
into the night. Buffy stayed out later and later, until some mornings
she'd head off to school straight from patrol. And Dawn couldn't even
use her sneaky skills to inaccurately examine carpet footsteps and their
meaning.
She set down her tools one
morning and put them away, stashed in a big junk box in her closet.
There, her data could be kept safe while she found more dangerous tasks.
She wanted to find a way to garner enough attention that Buffy would be
whining for it back. She wanted to be more than a spy, or a tattletale.
She wanted to stay out all night long, too, and she wanted Faith's red
lipstick so she could be just as bad.
She decided the next best
thing to red lipstick was the red of blood. Blood, like Buffy never had
to see, since vampires just fell over with one prick of a stake and
smashed into dust. She went off in search of the dark liquid that hid in
her veins.
Dawn walked home with
Janice and her crowd of followers one afternoon when Mom couldn't pick
her up from school. They walked past scary old homes with gargoyles
protecting front porches and dead grass all around, starving for water
and green pigment. They even went out of their way to walk past Mr.
Johnson's large rose garden, where Janice whispered to Dawn and a couple
of the others that they should each steal a flower. Dawn kept her "what
if we get in trouble" little girl whispers to herself, and reached right
out to pluck the whitest rose in the bunch.
"Girls, all girls should
learn more about flowers because every girl should have a favorite, and
for a reason," Janice told them all. She was so wise sometimes. It was
like she knew everything before she needed to. Even some test answers.
Dawn left the group, as she
was headed a different way from there, and held onto her rose with her
thumb and forefinger until nosy neighbors were out of sight. She bit her
lip, anticipating pain and not liking the idea, as she pressed her small
finger pad to the sharpest thorn on the flower's stem. She gasped in
short hisses at the pain as her skin was pricked through. But then she
smiled through the gathering tears at the glorious red that spilled
over. Something about it was freeing and dangerous, and at that point
those seemed like the two very best things to experience.
The entire stem was stained
by her blood-pricked fingers by the time she made it home. As she waited
for the red to turn brown, her first time of waiting it out, she reached
her house's door. Deftly, she closed it behind her with shoulder
maneuvers and walked toward the kitchen.
"What's that all over your
hands?" Buffy asked, setting down the dishcloth she was wringing through
her own hands. Her face seemed restless; Dawn pretended not to notice.
She was very busy with her experiment.
When Buffy grabbed onto
both of Dawn's hands, she cried out from the pain of the Slayer-squeeze.
The blood, which had begun to crust over into scabs, now rushed from her
wounds anew. She hissed and snatched her hands back.
"That's going to get
infected," Buffy said, dropping Dawn's hands so they could flail at her
sides. "Come on. Let's get you washed up."
As she followed her sister
up the stairs and down the hallway to the bathroom, she spread her
aching fingers and thought of the rose. She wondered how something so
beautiful could hurt you so badly. She lifted her eyes to her sister,
who was ransacking the bathroom for antiseptic and a band-aid. Buffy was
the queen of hurtful beautiful things. But then she always had words as
rough as her hands to make Dawn's admiration of her beauty dissipate.
Dawn wanted to be like her
sister sometimes, but she didn't want her to know it. She'd die before
she let Buffy know that she was a hero, and not just when it came to the
forces of good and evil, vampires and stuff. Buffy secured the band-aids
too tightly around Dawn's fingers, cutting off the circulation and
turning her finger pads a strange purple. "Owe, owe, owe," said Dawn,
but her cries went unheard as Buffy finished taping her up and went back
to her own much more interesting life.
--
Dawn was out back, eyes
carefully following three beetles up the trunk of a tree, when she heard
voices approaching. She hurried to the fence with its holes between the
planks where she could see without being seen. Or so went the theory.
Out by the street, she saw
Buffy walking slowly. She watched her sister's fingers intertwine with a
larger hand. Angel's. The air was cold and part of Dawn wanted to give
in and go warm herself indoors, but part of her "job" as the newly
crowned spy was to always be there when something was happening, even if
it meant standing in the chill of the night and convincing herself over
and over that she was not afraid of the dark.
She cringed when her mother
stuck her head out the back door and called for her. "Bedtime!" Joyce
announced, eyes traveling all over the backyard in search of her
youngest. Dawn ducked behind the fence post, ashamed to have been
caught.
Buffy and Angel's heads
turned toward the yard, and Dawn's face flushed red when Buffy
explained, "She's going through her annoying 'I look like Harriet the
Spy' phase. She's everywhere, all the time, just watching me."
Even though no one could
physically see her embarrassment, Dawn clapped her hands over her face
and crouched low against the fence. Her mother called out that she had a
five minute warning, and then disappeared inside the house again. Dawn
waited for the figurative dust to clear, then used her band-aid-clad
fingers to help push herself up into her previous position, staring at
Buffy and her big, strong boyfriend.
Buffy was talking so
quietly that Dawn couldn't identify all of her words. "...wish you could
stay," was at the tail end.
"I should get going," Angel
said, softly plucking Buffy's smaller fingers from his as if opening
flower petals from their core. There was no argument said out loud, but
Dawn knew her sister and Angel had some kind of silent language between
them. They shared a few tender kisses before Angel disappeared with his
trench coat as dark as the night.
Dawn was half disgusted by
the affection displayed. There was nothing grosser than her sister
kissing somebody. But on the other hand, a part of her ached to be cared
for that way. And a deeper part of her wondered if she ever would.
She walked into Buffy's
room without knocking after she finished her nightly routine. Her pink
pajama pants tripped her a bit, as the legs were too long, but she
managed to land on Buffy's bed, thus escaping any more scrapes that day.
What started off as
questions for Buffy soon turned into an interrogation of sorts, about
boys, and how to tell someone you like them "in a way that'll make them
like you back -- even if they didn't before."
Buffy turned around in her
vanity chair to confront her little sister face-to-face. "Who is it
you're talking about, and why am I having to endure this conversation at
nine o'clock at night?"
Immediately Dawn scoffed:
"Like I'd ever tell you." Oh, that it's Xander! she longed to
exclaim. She'd only met him a couple of times, and Buffy never let her
actually speak to him, which was good, because she tended to stumble
over her words when she was nervous, and she guessed that usually boys
didn't go for that. "Mom says not to ask you those kinds of things. I
think it's because you kill things so you wouldn't know about love and
stuff. 'Cause all you do is hate."
Buffy's eyebrows furrowed
as she was obviously insulted. "I -- I don't... kill things." She
gathered a new thought quickly. "I vanquish them."
Dawn shook her head. "Those
ladies on 'Charmed' vanquish things. You just look them in the
eye and kill... You don't recite poems or anything."
Buffy's expression
darkened, and she pointed to the open door. "What kind of shows are you
watching? Dawn, I don't have time for this. I've got Slayage stuff to
do, I don't have to listen to you and your insults, which by the way,
are completely of the suck." She did then as she did nearly every night:
continued to point out of her room until Dawn gave up and left. This
time even without Mr. Gordo in her usually sly clutches.
--
There came one night when
Buffy didn't make it home at all. Dawn yawned as her digital clock
changed every sixty seconds. Her eyes were closed in slumber while
Buffy's absence waned on and on. Mom made waffles in the morning, and by
the time Dawn was awake and tasting them, Buffy had left again.
--
Buffy thought she was so
special, with her job that didn't pay a thing, and that she couldn't
even tell people about. Dawn had been sworn to secrecy on Buffy's
"calling", but sometimes she found it really hard not to blurt out all
that it frustrated her to know. She wanted to tell someone cool about
it, and see them laugh and agree that being a Slayer was like Halloween
all year 'round; but without the candy.
Dawn's sister was always
stealing her Halloween candy -- she had been since Dawn could remember.
Last Halloween, when Buffy started eating out of Dawn's bag without
asking, Dawn started stealing Mr. Gordo from his place on Buffy's bed.
Every few days or so, his absence was noticed, and Dawn's room was
searched by her mother while she hovered in the corner with angry storms
in her eyes.
"Buffy should give me back
my candy if she wants her pig," she insisted, but it was no use. It
seemed that Buffy always got her way. And she had the nerve to say that
things were the other way around.
"You can't steal him,"
Buffy said, her voice as snotty as Dawn's sixth grade enemy. "You don't
even know what that pig means to me."
Dawn faltered just slightly
in her big words. "I wanted him. So I took him. Now I have him and he's
mine."
Buffy was frowning and
mouthing the words "take, want, have" to herself. Then she shuddered and
gave Dawn a big frown. "Next time you take him," Buffy said strongly,
her words deadly with promise, "you'll be sorry. You'll even say
you're sorry."
"Ugh." Dawn folded her arms
across her chest. "You can't make me do anything I don't want to."
"Oh yeah?" Buffy raised an
eyebrow, hugging the stuffed animal immaturely to her chest. "Get out."
And with that, she shut her bedroom door.
--
Mom was going to have
another late night at the gallery. "I want you two girls to be good to
each other," she said to Dawn and the absence of Buffy. She was always
giving Dawn instructions for the both of them, ignoring the fact that
she was supposed to be relaying them to an older sister, who couldn't
once just be there in the first place. "You think I don't know, but I
hear you two fighting every other sentence."
"Buffy starts it." Dawn
chewed on the inside of her lip.
"I hear the opposite from
her." Joyce leveled her youngest with her eyes. "Just do your best to
keep the peace."
Dawn sighed as Buffy came
in through the kitchen door just as their mother was exiting. When
Buffy's mind seemed elsewhere, Dawn tried to be playful. She hovered a
thumbtack over Buffy's head and said, "You're under attack."
Buffy wasn't as amused as
she should have been. She swatted Dawn and her tack away.
Instead of making one of
her grossalicious dinners that utilized the microwave more than was
natural, Buffy headed upstairs to her room. Dawn was bored, listless,
and followed. She stood in Buffy's bedroom doorway as her sister sat
before the mirror and began fixing the small details of the make-up on
her face.
Though she kept it to
herself, Dawn loved to watch those older than her do grown-up things. It
was one of her favorite pastimes to sit cross-legged on Buffy's bed and
watch her apply foundation, eyeliner, mascara, and more. Buffy had a
style that was distinctly different from their mother. Where Mom was
subtle with swipes of earth tones along her eyelids and thin layers of
lipstick, Buffy went buck wild sometimes dressing her face up like a
doll's. Buffy's make-up personality was much more showy, and it was the
one Dawn preferred, though you'd have to torture her with 'Saved By the
Bell' reruns to get her to admit it.
Buffy was curling her
eyelashes with the device that Dawn was afraid to let near her own face,
and asking why Dawn was always bugging her while she got ready. Why she
had such strange fascinations.
Dawn ignored her and began
talking while she watched from behind Buffy on the bed. "There's this
new girl at school, Janice? And she is like so cool, she puts on blush
and lipstick after the last bell rings at school. She's the only girl my
age who knows how to do it right. She says it's only hard if your face
isn't right for the colors you have."
Buffy's reflection in the
mirror showed that her eyes darkened with annoyance at having to hear
about this particular girl again. "And once again, you eat up every word
this new girl says. It's pathetic, Dawn, the way you tell me that you
and everyone else just follow Janice around."
"You mean like people used
to do for you?" Dawn deadpanned. She raised her eyebrows so that Buffy
could see them in the mirror. Dawn remembered how it was, sitting in the
back seat of Mom and Dad's car in LA waiting for miss "May Queen, May
Queen" to tear herself away from her gigantic posse.
Apparently popularity had
an expiration date.
Buffy swept excess
eyeshadow from her trembling eyelids. "Nobody likes a know-it-all,
Dawn," she said, and nothing further for thirty seconds. "Besides, that
me is a world away now."
"Like, in outer space?"
Dawn asked her, perplexed.
"Sure," Buffy answered with
a giggle. Dawn didn't get Buffy's humor any more than Buffy got hers. It
seemed like Buffy was always laughing at things that weren't funny.
Especially her own little jokes. Dawn never laughed at them, nor did she
tell her sister that sometimes she recycled them to impress people at
school. "You're such a goody-goody," Buffy told Dawn without turning
around to face her.
"I -- I can be bad. Super
bad. You don't even know," Dawn told her immediately, stung by the words
Buffy threw at her too often.
"Nope, I don't," Buffy
said, disinterested.
"I could be badder than you
if I tried."
"Don't."
"So you can and I can't?
Why? Why?" She would keep pecking at Buffy's nerve endings with the
repetition if it weren't for Buffy's quick answer.
"There are a lot of things
in the world you don't know about."
"But of course you won't
teach me. Boys at school are mean -- why can't I punch them the way you
do to people?"
Buffy gave a tired sigh. It
wasn't often that Dawn saw Buffy showing signs of tiredness. She was the
Energizer Bunny's pal, going, going, staking. "Because you're Dawn, and
not me."
"Story of my life..." Dawn
said under her breath.
"No, that would be written
in the many Hello Kitty diaries under your bed."
Dawn immediately grew
serious. "How do you know about those?"
"It's not cool to be bad
the way you're thinking, Dawn. Not cool to kill things, not cool to
watch them die."
"But you do --"
"Enough." Buffy stood, her
face perfected, fluffed her hair just right, and exited the bedroom
without seeming to care if Dawn followed her. "When did Mom say she was
coming home tonight? I need to get out."
Dawn drifted into the hall
to see Buffy's body trying to work off its own energy, her leg muscles
flexing as she hustled down the stairs. Dawn knew Buffy would leave her
even before Faith came by to convince Buffy to disappear into the
darkening night.
--
She was all alone in the
house. Dawn chose to keep her mind off of the fear surging through her
body with every door that creaked, every light switch that was turned
off and hidden from her searching hands. Instead of rehearsing the way
she would tell as soon as Mom got home, she went to Buffy's room which
she was never supposed to enter on her own. She picked up a tube of
lipstick and set to work on her babyish face.
Buffy came home before Mom
had a chance to hear the abandonment story of the night. Dawn confronted
her sister in the upstairs hallway. She waited for Buffy's eyes to fill
with awe, but something else occupied them instead. Dawn teetered on the
pair of Mom's high heels pinching her feet, trying to keep the
ill-fitting miniskirt from Buffy's closet smoothed down. She'd looked in
the mirror just moments ago, and liked what she saw. Even though no one
else could probably stand to look at her gaudy face.
When enough time passed and
there was no response from her sister, Dawn asked uncertainly, "You
don't think it looks good?"
She was waiting for Buffy
to tell her that she was magnificent, how she was the most sophisticated
looking sixth grader there ever could be. She was dressed like a bad,
bad girl, and she couldn't wait for confirmation of the fact.
What she got instead from
Buffy were these defeated words: "Dawnie, it looks hideous. Go wash it
off."
"Do I look really, really
bad, then?" Dawn asked, deflated.
Buffy's voice was cracking,
and in the shadows of the unlit hallway, Dawn swore she could see a tear
on each cheek. "Not the way you want. Dawnie, please. You don't want to
be bad. Just be a kid while you can. I wish I would have."
The bathroom sink was
unsympathetic as Dawn cried from the pain of the soap in her eyes while
she scrubbed at the clinging eyeshadow. Buffy eventually came into the
bathroom, hearing Dawn's pained and disappointed wails, and used one of
her fancy make-up remover towelettes to take the sting and the make-up
from Dawn's eyes. Dawn's tears stopped, but Buffy's did not.
When her face was scrubbed
red and raw, the skin under her eyes bloated from the harshness of the
soap, Dawn sighed and sat on the edge of the bathtub. "Buffy?" she
asked, feeling her way along. "What... Buffy, what's wrong with you?"
She could hear her sister's words again, coming back to her. Just be
a kid while you can. I wish I would have.
Buffy looked more broken
than bad as she took Dawn's hand in a rare gesture, and led her to Mom's
bedroom. Something about Mom's bed, the smell of it, the bigness of it,
had comforted both girls since the comfort of their father split.
Buffy sat on the bed, tears
continuing to fall. Dawn thought Buffy was seeing something other than
Mom's bedroom walls with her eyes. It looked like Buffy was reliving
something that Dawn could never see herself. Buffy gestured for Dawn to
come fill her lap, and though reluctantly, Dawn did so. There, her big
sister held her like she hadn't done in months. Her warm tears fell to
wet Dawn's newly scrubbed neck.
Drowning in the
misunderstanding of it all, Dawn's words came bubbling up from within
her. She promised that she would be good, and stop trying to be so bad.
She promised to try without understanding the why's of it.
Hearing Buffy's pain come
out through ragged sobs and sniffles, Dawn watched tears of her own
glisten in the window's moonlight. And she thought, maybe for the first
time, that being small-scale could be the way to stay. Danger had
colored her sister's face pink like a fever that night, and Dawn had to
admit she was okay with not knowing what it was Buffy saw behind the
eyelids she now had closed. Buffy drifted off to sleep behind Dawn, arms
wrapped around her to trap her and keep her right there. She didn't
struggle to leave, or tell Mom about Buffy's bad babysitting the next
day.
She placed Mr. Gordo back
on Buffy's bed after school without being prompted to do so. She stayed
away from dark red lipstick and rose thorns to draw blood. Now, she used
her magnifying glass to peer at Buffy from a room away and wait for her
sister to find a genuine smile again.
- -
end
