(Author's note: This story has been percolating in my brain for months, and it finally exploded into multiple chapters last night. It was inspired by the fantastic song One Thousand Sarahs by Eddie From Ohio. It follows up on Kurt's comment to Finn at the donut shop in Waking Dreams, that "I think Sarah can do what you do... someday." The question of Sarah's sexuality has not yet been determined, perhaps not even to Sarah, so stick around.
There are no significant spoilers in the first chapter, but BIG SPOILERS for Bending in the Archer's Hand in future chapters, so keep that in mind if you are behind in the Donutverse.
Sarah has been perhaps the most favorite character of the whole Donutverse (second would be Toby, I believe), so I'm glad to provide her with her own story, at last. She will also feature in the next Donutverse story.
Enjoy! -amy)
The club posters had only gone up on the walls of Lima North Middle School the day before, and already they were covered with graffiti. Frances stared at the black marker scribbles in frustration, then started to take down the posters one by one.
"What are you doing?" Sarah asked, stopping beside her. She had on a purple cardigan over a grey ruffled skirt, Keens with knee-high rainbow socks and a knit Ugly Doll hat. From her earlobes dangled miniature crystal skulls.
"Somebody ruined my ecology club posters," Frances huffed. "I'm taking them down."
"Why?" Sarah tapped the wall with the toe of her shoe. "Seems like they're just going to ruin the next set you put up too."
She was probably right, but Frances didn't want to admit defeat. She scowled. "I don't want them to think they can get away with it. Besides... I can't stand to see them up there. It just makes me angry."
"You're only going to make them do it again," Sarah pointed out, calm and rational as anything.
Frances stared at the floor, feeling the tension in her arms and back. Why did Sarah have to be right all the time? She was so infuriating. Sarah would never know what it felt like to be ordinary.
Frances knew she was ordinary; she didn't need anybody reminding her of this. Her whole day was chock full of reminders, from the blank stares of other students as she walked down the hall to the disdainful sneers of the popular girls in the bathroom as they applied their liquid-powder coverup and glitter lip gloss. Her mother would never buy her glitter lip gloss. And even if she did, Frances would never manage to wear it without feeling like an idiot. Sarah sometimes wore glitter lip gloss, but on her it would never seem pretentious. People would just think it was cool.
That's what irked Frances most about Sarah. She completely defied categorization. She wasn't popular, even though most everyone respected her, and she wasn't a jock, even though everyone knew if she was up in kickball that people should stand out of her way. She wasn't a nerd, though she was a member of Science Decathlon and could hold her own in a debate with Mr. Loughner, who scared the bejesus out of Frances. She wasn't fashionable, though nobody looked cooler in their clothes than Sarah did in her eclectic combinations of vintage and kitsch. She wasn't tall, but she stood as though she were.
And she wasn't even that pretty, but her eyes were intense, and she had a hilarious laugh that made everyone want to laugh along, and a strong voice that made people sit up and pay attention. Boys and girls, though Sarah didn't seem to care too much about boys, even though plenty of girls in the sixth grade did. Sarah was slim and small and hadn't yet gotten round at the hip or butt or bust like Frances and some of other girls had. Frances wished she hadn't either. It caused the boys to stare at her in a way that made her feel uncomfortable.
But Sarah didn't care about girls, either. She didn't travel in the packs that visited the restroom together, or identify with any of the rival groups. She was a loner, an independent being. She didn't seem to need anybody or anything and it just made Frances so... so... irritated.
Frances looked at Sarah's striped toes protruding from her Keens. "Aren't your feet cold?" she snapped, trying to sound derisive. "It's December."
"No," she said, wiggling her toes.
Sarah didn't seem to care at all when somebody spoke to her like that. It didn't make her angry or want to cry or any of the things that Frances felt when people put her down or laughed at her. Frances didn't get that. It made her feel even more angry - and somehow guilty, like there was something wrong with her for not knowing how to handle people the way Sarah could.
Sarah looked at Frances' calf-high boots. "Those are nice," she said.
"Thanks," said Frances politely, before she moved on down the hall to the next poster. Her mom had bought the boots for her. She bought all Frances' clothes, made sure she was dressed appropriately, that she had all the correct things to wear so she wouldn't stand out too much. Sometimes Frances wished she could wear something different, but she knew it was too risky. If she wanted to stay comfortably in the running for the popular crowd, she had to dress right, and act the right way, and be the kind of person people wanted to be friends with. Not like Sarah.
Frances stalked down the hall toward the next offending poster, cursing it under her breath, and watched Sarah dig in her oversized bag for something. Sarah was alone in the hall, which wasn't surprising. She was friendly enough with everyone, but she didn't have any friends. Frances never saw her hanging out with other girls at the mall. Frances always ate lunch with the same group of girls, the same girls she'd been friends with, the girls in Sunday school and Girl Scouts and class government, ever since fourth grade. But Sarah ate lunch with different people all the time, kind of rotating tables, kids from the yearbook or from the volleyball team or from band, even with seventh or eighth graders. And she didn't usually talk to anyone anyway. She was mostly doing things like reading a comic book or painting with watercolors or playing a recorder on a string around her neck or something else crazy like that. Frances' mother would never let her wear a recorder on a string, and Frances never would have been brave enough to play it in front of everybody, even if she had.
Sarah's mother apparently didn't care much about what Sarah wore, or what she did, or anything. It was almost as though Sarah's mother didn't exist, except for the things Frances' mother had told her friends, things Frances had overheard when she wasn't supposed to be listening. "Ruth Puckerman's dating another new man again," she'd hear, and the disapproval in her mother's voice was as bad as she'd ever shown about something Frances had done. "Hope she hangs on to him longer than the last one. I swear, she goes through men like tea bags." She had heard the word, spoken in a hushed tone, always preceded by a pause - slut - and it felt like a terrible slap. It made Frances feel thankful to have the mother she did - and then worried, if anyone ever talked about her mother that way. Not that her mother would be dating anyone; she barely spoke to her father, but at least they were still married.
Sarah's father had apparently run off to be a rock star or something insane like that. It was no wonder Sarah had been allowed to pierce her ears three times on one side and four times on the other. One of them was even way up at the top, and Frances shuddered every time she saw it, because it had to have hurt. She'd once seen Sarah thread a chain through the piercing and down to dangle from a loop at the bottom, and she didn't even flinch. It had given Frances a crazy kind of crawling feeling in her gut to watch her do that. Frances wouldn't be allowed to pierce her ears - even just the regular one pierce in the earlobe kind of piercing - until she turned twelve.
Frances took down two more posters and watched out of the corner of her eye as Sarah found the thing she was digging for, which happened to be a battered cell phone. She flipped it open and called a one-dial number, then chattered happily to someone named Kurt. Sarah never got picked up by her mother from school; instead it was usually her brother, the one with the scary mohawk. Sometimes it was other boys, one who was almost too pretty to be believed, and another who was tall and had dreamy eyes. Frances wondered what it would be like to have a brother.
The next poster wouldn't come down, and Frances tugged at it, bending her manicured nails over the edge, and the card stock ran along the corner of her nail, slicing into her flesh. She hissed, jerking her hand back as the sting began, and blood immediately began to well up from the paper cut and ran in a rivulet down her wrist toward her white angora sweater.
"Tip it forward," Sarah said, and Frances looked wildly at her. Sarah snapped her phone closed and tucked it into one of her voluminous pockets as she strode toward Frances, holding out her hand. She took Frances' arm and bent it at the elbow so her hand dangled loosely from her wrist. The blood retraced its path along her arm, avoiding her sweater sleeve, and dripped instead off the tip of her finger, making three large splashes on the hallway floor.
"Put it in your mouth," Sarah advised.
"W-what?" Frances stuttered, blinking stupidly at the red line flowing down her skin. It didn't look real, the color, or the way it kept coming out of her finger, spilling over like that.
"Your finger. You have to stop the bleeding." Sarah clamped down on Frances' wrist, hard, and Frances made a noise of protest.
"That's gross. Don't you know what's growing in your -"
"Put it in your mouth," Sarah said, her voice low and harsh, and she bent Frances' elbow and laid the bloody finger on her lips, and Frances' mouth closed over the finger immediately, her eyes riveted to Sarah's. "Do you have a band-aid?"
Frances, tasting the copper tang of her own blood, shook her head. There were no words for what she was thinking about Sarah just then, but not one bit of it was good.
Sarah sighed and looked away, releasing her gaze, and Frances staggered back a little. Sarah immediately took her elbow and helped her to sit on the floor, disregarding Frances' short skirt and the dirty linoleum. "Wait there."
Frances couldn't have moved if she'd wanted to, so she just sat against the wall, feeling the ridge of the cut with her tongue, not really wanting to but unable to stop probing it, making it sting. Sarah walked back down to where her bag was sitting and slung it over her shoulder, bringing it back to sprawl on the floor next to Frances. She dug around in the outside pocket until she found a metal box of band-aids. They had pictures of Tweetie Bird on them.
"Let me see," Sarah said, taking her hand and pulling it out of Frances' mouth. It slid out with a little pop, and Frances protested again. She thought vaguely that it was weird that she'd objected to putting it in, and now she was objecting to taking it out, and what did that mean? But Sarah was holding the finger up to her eye, inspecting it critically, fiercely, as though she could fix whatever was wrong with it just by glaring at it the right way. Then she pursed her lips - today devoid of lip gloss - and blew on Frances' finger, right on the skin around the cut, and up and around the pad, and it made Frances flinch and shudder, what she was doing, but she couldn't ask her to stop. She couldn't say anything at all.
The blood was coming out of the cut again, but Sarah was peeling off the wrapper on the Tweetie Bird band-aid and pressing it to the wound, pressing hard enough to make it hurt. It really did hurt, it stung something awful, but Frances was still mute, under the spell of Sarah's ministrations.
Sarah held her hand up by the arm, like a torch. "Keep it above your heart," she said. "You should wash that out when you get home."
"Okay," Frances said. Her voice sounded funny to her ears, always higher than Sarah's, but right now it was much higher, and a little shrill and anxious. Sarah's eyes traced a map of Frances' face, looking for something, and she tightened her lips.
"You have a ride home?" she asked, her voice softer now.
"I'm walking," she said. "Just around the block."
Sarah shook her head. "Nuh-uh. We're giving you a ride." She took Frances' arm and towed her down the hall. "Come on. Let's get your stuff."
"My locker's -" Frances started to say, but she realized they were already there, that they had walked right to it, and she looked at Sarah, confused. Sarah was looking back at her in what seemed like amusement.
"Dude, we've been in the same class together since kindergarten," she said. "I think I know where your locker is by now. Alphabetical by last name, right? Preston... Puckerman."
The word dude sounded strange coming from Sarah's lips, in Sarah's silky voice, and it shook Frances out of her spell a little. She caught herself smiling at Sarah and switched back to a scowl. "I know," she said. "Of course."
Sarah waited while Frances got her stuff, then led her out to the parking lot, taking her arm again, the one attached to the bleeding finger currently held aloft like she was making an important point. Aha, said the finger. She wasn't sure what she was supposed to be realizing, but one very obvious thing was clear: Sarah was a bossy pain in the rear end, and she wasn't going to cut it out until Frances did something about it. She just wasn't sure what she should do.
They found a shiny blue SUV waiting for them at the curb, and Sarah helped Frances into the back seat without hesitation. "This is Frances," she called to the driver. "We're taking her home."
"Her home or ours?" said a light voice, and Frances looked up in surprise to see the driver was the beautiful boy who'd picked up Sarah at least once before. He took note of her declaiming finger. "Are you okay?" he asked her, nodding to the band-aid.
I have no idea, thought Frances, but she said, "Yes, thank you."
"I'm Kurt," said the boy. "Where do you live?"
She gave him directions, and he nodded again. Frances watched then as Sarah leaned across the front aisle of the car and gave Kurt a great big hug before fastening her seat belt. Then she turned to the back, checking Frances' belt before saying, "Okay," to Kurt.
Frances felt dizzy, because the Sarah of school who walked through the halls looking like she didn't need anybody or anything didn't quite fit with the Sarah who'd hugged this boy, just now, and smiled at him like she'd never loved anybody quite like she loved him. She didn't fit, and yet she did.
"How do you know each other?" she asked, because it was on her mind, and because she felt like she had to say something, other than who the heck are you, and what did you do with Sarah?
Kurt was mostly focusing on his driving, but the look he shot Sarah was too long and too meaningful to miss. Sarah shrugged.
"I'm her brother's boyfriend," he said.
"Oh," Frances said. She felt the sweat start behind her neck and drip down her neck, just as the blood on her finger had slid, and she put a hand up to her neck to stop it before it could freeze on her skin. Boyfriend. She could imagine her mother having a few words to say about that.
Sarah hopped out of the SUV as they pulled into her driveway and helped her into the house, and there was no way Frances could legitimately tell her not to, because she didn't want to tell her - she kind of would have given anything to have Sarah stop touching her - but it seemed like such an ordinary thing, she didn't feel like she could.
"You'll be all right," Sarah said. "Remember, above your heart."
"Okay," Frances said.
Sarah went back to the SUV and got in on the passenger side door, and Frances felt herself slip out of Sarah's life as easily as she'd entered the car. Sarah drove on down the road, on with the beautiful boy, Kurt, back to her brother who had a boyfriend, while Frances stood on her porch, her ordinary self, changed only by the ache in her finger and the sense that she was missing something important.
"How was your day, honey?" said her mom, opening a can of diet soda and setting it in front of her at the table. "What happened to your finger?"
"I got a paper cut," she said. The image of the blood welling up and traveling toward her sweater reverberated in her memory. A little blood stain would not have been the disaster of the century, but would have at least been crucially important - would had been, at least, before she'd been touched by the words put it in your mouth and Sarah's hands on her. She drank the soda without tasting it and got out her homework.
It was a quiet night, just the three of them, her dad coming home from the office a few minutes before dinner was ready, smiling tiredly at her mom as he set his briefcase on the floor. She watched them kiss perfunctorily, and wondered how she could possibly explain to her father about the Sarah in the car and how she was the same and yet different from the Sarah in the hallway. He would never understand, she was certain. She barely did, herself.
She ate her dinner and sat on the couch, lost in thought while the television played, until her dad's stubble-rough skin brushed her cheek as he kissed her. "You getting ready for bed?"
"It's not even - " she said, and then fell silent as she spotted the time on the clock. Nine-fifteen. It followed her upstairs, taunting her as she brushed her teeth. She took a big, steadying breath, looking at herself in the mirror.
That's me, she thought, touching the person reflected there. Her face was the same, her straw-blonde hair and her blue eyes and her still-crooked front teeth behind the wire of her braces. It was the same - and yet it wasn't, the mirror image of herself, beckoning to her, saying try me on, come on, the water's fine. Try me on for size.
Frances changed into her pajamas and turned off the lights upstairs, then folded herself into her chilly bed and huddled, shivering, under the covers, until eventually she warmed up enough to fall asleep. But even then, her obsessed brain wouldn't leave her alone, because Sarah was there, too, Sarah was in her dream - hundreds of them. They were multiplying even as she spoke, saying Sarah, completely uselessly addressing them all at once. She didn't know how to get them to leave her alone. She didn't even know how to tell the real Sarahs from the others. Then came the terrifying idea that they were all real Sarahs, and she woke with a start.
As she woke, she was chanting a repeating refrain: not Sarah's name, but the words I don't like her and you can't make me.