All of them would remind me that I don’t know exactly how long I’ve got, that Generalized Roseville Malady is still largely unstudied, that new treatments are being tested as we speak, etc., etc., but the fact is that nobody with GRM has made it to twenty-two.
Today is my twenty-first birthday.
My relatives are all over for dinner and my grandma is drinking like a fish, if fish drank scotch, and my worst aunt is badgering Dad about crystals and alternative therapies. My cheeks hurt from fake-smiling and my poor parents are doing their very best to keep the celebration from feeling like a wake and I have never been more relieved in my short, doomed life to feel the buzz of my phone on my hip. It’s Charm, of course: happy birthday!!
And then: meet me at the tower, princess.
* * *
TOWERS, LIKE WICKED fairies, are pretty rare in Ohio. We mostly have pole barns and Jesus-y billboards and endless squares of soybeans.
Roseville has a tower, though. There’s an old state penitentiary out on Route 32, abandoned in the ’60s or ’70s. Most of it is hulking brick buildings with smashed-out windows and mediocre graffiti, obviously haunted, but there’s an old watchtower standing on one corner. It should be exactly as creepy as the rest of the place, poisoned by decades of human misery and institutional injustice, but instead it looks … lost. Out of time and place, like a landlocked lighthouse. Like a fairy tale tower somehow washed up on the shores of the real world.
It’s where I always planned to die, in my morbid preteen phase. I imagined I would dramatically rip the IVs from my veins and limp down the county road, suffocating in my own treacherous proteins, collapsing Gothic-ly and attractively just as I reached the highest room. My hair would fan into a black halo around the bloodless white of my face and whoever found me would be forced to pause and sigh at the sheer picturesque tragedy of the thing. Eat your heart out, Rackham.
God, middle schoolers are intense. I no longer plan to make anyone discover my wasted body, because I’m not a monster, but I still visit the tower sometimes. It’s where I went after high school to ditch track practice and get high with Charm; it’s where I made out for the first time （also with Charm, before I instituted dying girl rule number #3）; it’s where I go when I can’t stand to be in my own house, my own skin, for another second.
I switch off the headlights and coast the last quarter mile down Route 32, because the old penitentiary is technically private property upon which trespassers will be shot, and park in the grass. I pop my eight o’clock handful of pills and make my way down the rutted lane that leads to the old watchtower.
I’m not surprised to see the orange flicker of light in the windows. I figure Charm dragged a few of our friends—her friends, if we’re being honest—out here for a party, rather than hosting it in the hazardous waste zone she calls an apartment. I bet she brought red plastic cups and a half keg because she wants me to have a legit twenty-first-birthday experience, completely ignoring the fact that alcohol interferes with at least three of my meds, because that’s the kind of friend she is.
But when I step through the tower door, it doesn’t smell like beer and weed and mildew. It smells luxuriant, heady, so sweet I feel like an old-timey cartoon character hooked by the nostrils.
I waft up the staircase. There are murmuring voices above me, faint strains of very un-Charm-like music growing louder. The highest room in the tower has always been empty except for the detritus left by time and teenagers: windblown leaves, beer tabs, cicada shells, a condom or two. It’s not empty tonight. There are strings of pearled lights crisscrossing the ceiling and long swaths of blushing fabric draped over the windows; a dozen or so people wearing the kind of gauzy fairy wings that come from the year-round Halloween store at the mall; roses absolutely everywhere, bursting from buckets and mason jars and Carlo Rossi jugs. And in the very center of the room, looking dusty and rickety and somehow grand: a spinning wheel.
That’s when I recognize the song that’s playing: “Once Upon a Dream.” The main theme from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, a waltzing melody stolen straight from Tchaikovsky’s ballet.
I am way, way too old for a Sleeping Beauty–themed birthday. I can’t stop smiling. “Oh, Charm, you didn’t.”
“I one hundred percent did.” Charm passes her PBR to the girl beside her and flings herself at me. She does a little heel-pop when I hug her, like an actress in a black-and-white movie except with more tattoos and piercings. “Happy birthday, baby, from your fairy god mothers.” She waggles her wings at me—blue, because Merryweather is her favorite character—and mashes a plastic princess crown onto my head.