DISCLAIMER: I NEVER OWNED PJO. NEVER DID. NEVER WILL.

Chapter 10

"I Hear That You Like The Bad Girls"

Piper

It's you, it's you, it's all for you

Everything I do, I tell you all the time.

I swayed my head to the song playing on Lacey's iPod dock. Lana Del Rey's Video Games whistled it's sweet melody as I stared at the ceiling above me, slightly stoned, and counted the yous in the chorus. Images in my head flood in and I couldn't help but think about what it was like to love someone so much that everything you do was dedicated to loving that person, loving someone so much that it consumed your every fibre and loving someone so much their name becomes an incantation only spoken for the darkest, most sacred moments. I wondered what it was like to be happy and so full of merriment and content.

I wanted to remember a time when I used to be like that- when I used to give my heart as easily as I took others away but my memory couldn't trail to a day when I wasn't as fucked in the head as I was now.

Out of the sudden, my phone rang. I peeled myself from the bed, feeling the blood rush down from my head to the rest of my limbs, and reached out to the bedside table to see who it was.

Dad.

Fuck me.

"Hello?" I growled into the phone, expecting Jane that pesky assistant of his.

"Piper." It was actually my dad calling. The sound of his voice tinged a familiarity of home and I wondered what it was like to have a place properly called home.

"What?"

"I'm so sorry, honey, but I think the movie film schedule is going to go on for a few more months so I don't think I'm going to have time to come back for the Christmas break."

My heart sank. Of course, he couldn't. He hadn't been back for Christmas since I was eleven. Was I stupid enough to think this time it'd be different?

"Oh, okay," I tried not to sound disappointed, trying to sound cold, disaffected, mean even.

Don't cry.

Don't cry.

Don't you fucking dare cry.

"I see." I bit the insides of my cheeks, hoping the pain would stop tears from blinking down.

"You don't have to come back for Christmas break if-"

"Yeah, I got it," I barked harshly, squashing the tone of being upset away from my voice. "I'll just crash at a friend's or stay back at school or whatever."

"Okay, well-"

I hung up.

Then I cried.

"Stay away from my brother."

Thalia Grace stood by the school's back door threshold, glaring at me sitting by my allotted park bench, smoking as usual with a bottle of Jack, my notebook and a copy of Lolita cradled in my lap. In her customary leather shorts, fishnet tights, black tank top, and mountains of chains and silver jewelry, enough to haywire LAX's security systems. Funny enough, there was a time when Thalia and I were the best of friends. We dressed almost the same and we would wreak havoc all over the school, planning parties almost every weekend, getting high together until I, being the fucked kid I was, inevitably fucked it up and now she associated the name 'Piper Mclean' with 'gum underneath my shoe'.

"Sorry?" I snapped out of my reverie, pulling my ass out of my book, and lifted my eyes over to Thalia's short, curvy figure leaning on the door's side, lips pursed, arms crossed, looking pissed as all hell.

"Stay away from my brother," she repeated, clicking her teeth.

"Oh honey," I drawled, smiling sweetly, dripping with saccharine, "That's not my problem. I'm not coming to him, he's coming to me."

"Then ask him to fuck off," snapped Thalia, her anger swelling and growing like the rise in her chest and the sudden dark redness coloured her cheeks. She was never good at keeping cool, lips pursed, eyes beady and narrowed, slanted to the point where they almost looked like slits. Her dark hair was coiled into a top knot and sweat from the desert heat plastered on her skin like a thin sheet of see-through plastic. "I won't let you ruin him. I won't let you do what you did to Luke."

Luke- the name rattled my bones, letting a chill travel down my spine. She spoke his name with an inflection; like it still hurt her every time the word spilled out for her to hear. "Your brother isn't Luke," I said, "And what happened to Luke wasn't my fault. I didn't ask him to do that."

"But you might as well," snarled Thalia, bristling, stepping forward in impassioned anger. "Because you knew how much he loved you- and you- you just-"

"It's my choice to make whether I return that love or not," I argued, growing pissed, "It's not my fault he couldn't handle the rejection and decided to swallow a bottle of pills."

"You're a bitch." Thalia's hand flashed forward and smacked me across the face. The pain crackled across my face in snap moments, leaving left me staggering in composure, knocking my cigarette out of my lips. Before I could react, I heard her combat boot ringing as she stomped away back into her dorm. I ignored it, brushing her off, and lit up another cigarette as I continued drinking, unaffected by her words.

I was used it, really.

Bitch, they called me. Whore, they called me. For some reason, they seemed to think the words they throw at me might make me feel dead inside.

Too late, bitches.

Nights in the desert was excruciatingly cold. You think it wouldn't be, seeing as it was the desert. But I remember Miss Demeter explaining something about the heat escaping into space because of how there was no clouds in the desert, that explained the temperature drop.

It was so cold that I spent most of them drinking rather than sleeping in a massive sweater and pyjama pants. I watched the stars come on and go away, I watched the breeze move and dance and blow dust in the wind until there was none left. I drank so the burn of the alcohol chased whatever numbness I feel in my joints but no matter how much I drank, it couldn't chase away the numbness in my heart. I exhaled, the cloud of nicotine exploding in the dark in white mist.

I saw it as the cold and the heat in the desert as being two extremes. The desert in the day was the girl who was too happy, the girl who deluded herself into a fantasy of being happy. Sure, she didn't have much and life generally sucked but she was happy and the world was bright, so bright that it looked like a beach photograph, too saturated and drenched in it's harsh vibrancy. She was in a world of light and warmth and nothing could possibly go wrong.

That girl used to be me.

There was a time when I was sober. Back to the days of my childhood when my mother wasn't a bitch who cheated on my dad and my father found spending time with me a better hobby to do than his stupid Hollywood career, I used to be really happy.

But then my dad found my mother fucking the next door neighbour in the master bedroom, which led to screaming and fighting and of course- a divorce because that was the only way my father could ever look at my mother again without throwing or breaking something.

That happy girl was such a long time ago, I almost forgot she existed once upon a time. That happy girl was Piper Mclean- me, the girl who grew up too fast and way too sad, who realized that friends and relationships and love make everything in life ten times harder so I do everything in my power to get rid of them before they could even touch me.

Because that happy girl knew what love did to people and what people do to people. That happy girl saw it firsthand. After the divorce, Tristan Mclean was never the same. He became depressed and drank and smoke and too much of a fuckup to take care of a little six-year-old girl, crawling into a shell of a human being.

It wasn't until five years down the road, he got clean. He sobered up but the damage was done because the broken one now was me.

I was that happy girl, I guess you can say, who had faded into another extreme. That happy girl, who transformed from day to night, a night so cold you couldn't feel your toes, a cold that freeze everything and leave nothing behind.

And I don't plan on leaving anyone alive.

Not even me.

"Fuck, she's tanked again."

I stumbled out of the Girls' Bathroom, carrying out a rather inconspicuous green bong from the stall and staggered to the sink. One of the girls from my grade wrinkled her nose at me, an expression of distaste recoiling her features the minute she registered the smell of weed rising from my clothes. But weed wasn't the only thing I took in the last span of thirty minutes after my dad decided to cannonball my hopes of seeing him for Christmas. Sometimes, I wondered if the mixture of pot, ecstasy and cocaine would one day kill me.

Maybe I wanted to die.

"Piss off, Drew," I growled at her and smirked at her friends. "Why don't you mind your own fucking business? What would your boyfriend say if he knew you were fucking Jake Mason in the janitor's closet every Thursday afternoon?"

Drew's face clouded with anger, snarling: "Shut up, you bitch," she hissed, and turned to her group of cronies: "She's lying! I don't even know what she's talking about."

I barked a laughter and smiled viciously at Drew, who quailed as I gripped the bong's handle like a weapon. "I might be a slut or a druggie but at least when I cheat, I'm not afraid to admit to it."

"Go away, Mclean," Drew bristled, "Can't you take it that nobody wants you here?"

Nobody wants you here. I don't why I felt everything so deeply. My face remained impassive, unmoved as I jeered and scoffed but every word seemed to break each bone, push the knives into my lungs even deeper. "You're so sad, Drew. I'm so tired of talking to sad people."

I'm so tired of being sad.

I began to walk away- not very straight, though, hobbling as I swung the bong messily towards the door but before I could make it there, I fell. The girls laughed at me but I didn't care, just got back up, flashed them the finger without even looking, and head out, hands on my temples, trying to make sense of the colours around me as it all blurred to me.

"Piper, Piper, are you okay?"

No.

I looked up and saw Jason carrying books, on the way to somewhere- I'm sure. We were in the common room. It was relatively empty and quiet, hollow like my hollow soul. "I'm…" I struggled to enunciate, "fine."

Jason shook his head, his glasses jittering with him, "No, you're not. Come on, I'll take you to your room."

I sighed, laboured, clutching the green bong tight to my still pulsing heart, "You don't have to."

Being the irritatingly Nice Guy Jason he was, he slid his arm around my shoulders and gripped me tight in his arms to support my wobbly legs, which had turned to jelly. He was stronger than his frame let on. I could hear his heart beating and feel his chest rising and falling with a steady pace. "No, I insist."

I wondered how many times he would have to do this- save me out of my own mess.

He gently placed my face on his shoulder, so tenderly as he escorted me up into my dorm, lacing his fingers in between mine for support so gently, so tenderly, like I was glass on the verge of cracking and splitting apart. And I thought how I didn't deserve that sort of tenderness, that gentleness.

I didn't deserve being treated lovingly because, under the haze of medicated wonder, boys like Jason Grace cannot love girls like me.

I couldn't have nice boys like Jason Grace. I couldn't have saints like Jason Grace, because I was the devil in a pretty dress and because I didn't deserve them. I deserved people like Lit, people who pump me with all kind of narcotics and use me for sex and treat me like the piece of shit I was.

I deserve it because I don't deserve to love or be loved and I certainly don't deserve to have Jason Grace loving me.

The last part actually hit a massive spot to home because I think that Piper's 'bad-girl' image all dwindles down to the fact that she's a very sad person, who doesn't think she deserves any sort of happiness at all. I feel like that kind of sadness, that kind of self-deprecating thoughts comes from being manic-depressive and that's what Piper is, a mental illness at most and I pray to most the portrayal of that kind of severe depression comes somewhat realistic.

Whether she gets better comes from Jason, a support system, because I don't think anybody else would better understand why Piper is the way she is. Reading this while listening to some Lana Del Rey will sure help accomodate the story a little more so :).

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