As I slept, I thought that I had power in my dreams. Then I woke, and faced the living world. For a dream is measurable and finite, but that which can create a dream is inexhaustible.

—

You can't kill me, Veronica. J.D.'s smirk spreads over his face like slick oil and his voice rasps close. I'm you.

The boiler screams. She touches a bloodied hand against a metal can and looks at a misty reflection. She sees a single dark blur.

She smells popcorn. She's resting on a warm shoulder. Veronica wipes sleep out of her eyes. She's watching movie credits on the TV, white ants crawling over a background of black.

"Believe me, you didn't want to see how it ended," Martha Dunnstock says. "Whatever you dreamed, I'm sure it was better."

"Don't be so sure," Veronica says. She unscrews her flask and tips hard-bitter-cheap alcohol down her throat. "Care for a hit?"

Martha drinks delicately, sipping a few drops she pours into the lid. Veronica wonders exactly how bad an influence on Martha she qualifies as.

She'd rather an all-night movie marathon with a true friend than strap herself into a tight powder-blue prom dress and get pawed by Kurt Kelly and clap as Heather Chandler got crowned queen. That wouldn't happen now. Veronica and J.D. killed Heather, Kurt, and Ram. Then Veronica stopped her ex from blowing up the school, watched him disappear for good, befriended Martha Dunnstock instead.

Martha's restful. Kind, brave, trusting, likes movies.

Plus, she's a good kisser. Veronica tastes fake-cherry lip gloss and popcorn, drowns in the gentle melting kiss.

She wakes in bed with a splitting headache. She stumbles for a hangover cure, flinches at the milk and orange juice in her fridge. Better not open the drawers and feed herself drain cleaner, like the lethal cocktail she handed to her best friend and worst enemy.

No, I didn't hand it to her. It was all J.D. Veronica picked up the wrong cup. Killing Heather was an accident.

But which of us said, killing Heather would be like offing the Wicked Witch of the West?

"You slept too late, sweetie." Veronica's mom truly knows how to tut-tut, a fifties sitcom mother imitation that long outlives its humor. "I heard the movie at three in the morning." She touches a photo on the refridgerator. A ghost of a smile comes to her face. "I'm disappointed you didn't go to prom. You used to be outgoing."

The picture is a witch and an angel holding hands at Hallowe'en. Betty Finn was Veronica's best friend, before she sold her out for attention from a pack of violent morons and a pill of pure candy-coated poison.

"I had Betty over for croquet last week," Veronica volunteers. "Talk about wild parties. You won't believe what we did at the third hoop." She doesn't remember what happened at the third hoop. Talking to her normal friend was a brief reprieve before Westerburg went to hell.

Betty Finn. How long had it been?

She catches the look on her mother's face. Somewhere between anger and pity and a deep commitment to the utmost suburbian repression. It bothers her.

"You mean last year, dear. Betty went to boarding school. She won that scholarship for her photography. We had a tea party in the neighborhood, but you had a big date."

—

"Do you remember Betty Finn?" Veronica asks Martha. She has a mind to make new memories, so she's sitting with her girlfriend against the hedge. It would be nice if they had a blanket to lie on. Maybe a black coat. That's an interesting fantasy.

"Of course. She's your best friend. A Girl Scout," Martha says. "Who did you think was the summer camp photographer?"

Veronica wants to relax. Lose herself, mislay herself, drown herself. It's all the same thing really. She can't stop thinking a kaleidoscope of fragmented thoughts. Didn't Betty normally show her photos to her friend? Had Veronica once picked up incriminating material, kept it in that mess of bitterness and fake compliments she'd felt for all the Heathers?

J.D. had a photo of Heather Duke and Martha and blackmailed Duke with it. He wanted to destroy everything and the pair of smiling girls at summer camp were just his tools. It was all him.

"You know a lot more of that story than I do," Veronica says.

"Of course I do," Martha replies. "Your life flashes before your eyes, once you're dead."

—

Veronica liked that ad. What self-respecting, cynical, yes-I-read-Das-Kapital-cover-to-cover high schooler would admit to liking a lame TV ad? Something about the building-collapsing footage and pillars of black smoke calmed her down. Imagine a world where that happened to every building, every high school in America, everything turned to simplistic and appealing ashes. Destruction was the solution.

Bringing every state to a higher state. Big Bud Dean Construction. An intense older man with a shark's smile and runner's body presses the trigger. Over and over again.

"School project," she explains to the battleax secretary. A short tubby man who looks like he keeps a pod of beluga whale calves under his day-glo construction vest walks past. The woman stares at Mr. Random Employee.

"It's okay, Jo, I've got fifteen to spare," he says, cheerfully offers a hand. "Dean. Bud Dean. What can I do you for, little lady?"

He laughs a belly laugh rippling across his spare tyres. "No, I don't look like the guy in the ad. I get that a lot. He was expensive. Appeared in a Cinderella film. I'd say he was worth it."

Veronica's tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth. She points to a desk photo and gets a spiel about five daughters - lights of my life - and an impending college graduation and three grandkids.

If the demolition man had a son, he too would be capable of destruction on a massive scale. Veronica fantasized about transmuting Westerburg High and its crumbling corruption to ashes. Cut Chandler's head off and Duke usurps her power. Slit Duke's wrists and maybe Veronica takes the throne.

J.D. thought destruction was the only way. So Veronica fought her dark boyfriend to the death, and he arranged to disappear from her life in a cloud of smoke.

She wrenches her mind back to this tubby Mr. Dean defining explosion and implosion, offering a pamphlet with a shoddy print job for her school project. She shakes his hand and says goodbye.

—

She spills cold water on her head. She's fully clothed in the school shower. She spreads out her arms like a martyr, like she did after Heather died.

"Heather Chandler is one bitch that deserves to die," J.D. says, a darkly handsome boy spread out on a black coat in the moonlight.

"You read my mind," Veronica accuses. She holds him close despite everything. No. Wait. I just wanted to see her puke her guts out. Didn't I?

"I gave you everything you wanted," J.D. hisses. "Then said goodbye. Is Martha not enough for you any more?"

—

She goes on a six-hour shoe shopping marathon with Heather McNamara. They sleep over afterward. Heather cries on her shoulder again, thanks her for the pill incident. Then she tells Veronica what Ram Sweeney and Kurt Kelly did to her, that night in the cow pasture.

Veronica listens, frozen. Date rapes and AIDS jokes. It was worth joking about. A throwaway line for a guy who chased after her drunk and skidded on a cowpat. She was annoyed and contemptuous of Kurt, never scared of that moron. She'd heard grunting in the dark as she left and gave McNamara a share of that contempt, stupid cheerleader rutting like a cow in heat. There were better things she should have done. Threatened them with a gun. Rammed them with her car. Called the cops.

"Are you sorry Kurt and Ram are dead?" she asks.

"I want to be. Does that count?" Heather McNamara asks. "Ram could be sweet ... sometimes. It just hurt when we had sex."

"You need to transfer out of Mizz Phlegm's sex-ed," Veronica says. She pats McNamara's back. "It's okay. Good to know some good came out of their ... suicides."

Of course they'd have attacked Veronica, a girl alone in the woods who'd propositioned them beforehand. Sluts don't get to change their minds. They needed shooting. One through the neck, one through the pig's testicle that passed for his heart. Veronica remembers the hot recoil of the pistols in her hand and the smell of smoke. She scribbled their suicide note.

She wanted them dead.

"Maybe they were just confused," Heather McNamara says. "It's better to believe people are confused than they're bad on purpose."

"Best to know the difference," Veronica says. "Then you know who to kill."

McNamara's laugh is nervous. "But you wouldn't. I feel safe when I'm with you." She huddles closer.

Veronica ought to ask her, someday, if she ever though Martha Dunnstock felt safe. She doesn't see Martha in school any more.

—

"Martha?"

"It's okay. You and I never were close. You wanted to think of me as a friend."

"I wanted to save you."

"You knew me about as well as you knew your boyfriend. No wonder we're both in the same state."

—

Heather Duke is covered in blood. Red streaks cover face and arms and bare shoulders, splatter over the elegantly draped black bedsheet she's wearing. A toga.

"Are you okay?" Veronica asks.

Duke's scowl is suspicious and her voice rings with command. "What do you want?"

"Heather was shitty to you." The words rush out of Veronica. "I knew but never said anything. None of us did. If the world is a better place without Heather, maybe it would be better without the rest of your shitty friends."

"God, Veronica, you sound like Big Fun lyrics. They're not hot any more, so you can forget about the stupid petition. I've got to rehearse."

"You don't remember the boy and the petition, do you. You don't remember the photographs." Veronica reaches out, catches a bloody hand in both her own. "Do you remember Martha?"

Heather snatches back her hand. "Of course I do. It's not fair. Hell, you think my dad would let me move out of boring old Sherwood and go to a new school if I were stupid enough to play in traffic?"

Veronica stops, gobsmacked. She thought Martha was dead. She'd love Heather to explain it again like she's five, repeat that Martha Dunnstock is still alive. Show her not everything in Sherwood is shit.

Heather raises her bloodstained fingers to her lips and licks off the blood. "Tastes good. Cocoa, red coloring, and confectioners' sugar. Then the secret ingredients. Martha and I cooked it together at summer camp, put it in a bucket over the camp counsellors' door. Want a lick?"

Veronica smiles, declines, thinks At least she's eating again.

"You'll come to the show. Four bucks a head, all profits to Sherwood Historical Society," Heather demands. "Theater is magic. You've no idea how cathartic it feels to wreak your bloodthirsty revenge and feast on pies made of human flesh."

It seems signing up for the drama club suits her. So does the role of Tamora, Queen of the Goths. Shakespeare and Heather Duke fight for star of the stage, and it looks like the living girl's winning. Veronica says a friendly goodbye.

—

Dear Diary,

I'm more fucked up than I thought. I changed reality when I wished for Heather's death. The boy I believed gave me the power was my own wish all along. I conjured phantoms of the dead and those who were never alive, dismissed when I no longer needed them.

I killed Heather, Kurt, and Ram.

Maybe killing J.D. and resurrecting Martha meant something, like a desire to stay off the murder wagon this time.

Let me dream of shoe shopping and Pre-Calc this time. Perhaps I'll send Betty a postcard.

—

"Is it real? Is any of this real?"

J.D. looks out at her from the mirror and smiles. He's already drifting away, dissolving in a cloud of cigarette smoke and fog. "Maybe nothing. Maybe everything."

—

End Notes

Appeared in a Cinderella film - Kirk Scott (Bud Dean) was the Lord Chamberlain in The Other Cinderella, a reinterpretation of the story for a ... mature and discerning audience.

Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare's first and arguably bloodiest tragedy. The Julie Taymor film is excellent.