RE: Trailer Trash, 6 pt 9 (Patreon)

“Tabitha,” Elena looked up at her friend. “Why exactly was Erica Taylor so out to get you?”

“Well,” Tabitha hesitated, appearing for the first time to be gathering her thoughts. “Erica and Brittney Taylor have a younger sister, Ashlee. She should be our age. In fifth or sixth grade, she was… she was like me, like I was. Kind of a social outcast.

“I was overweight and… well, my clothes probably smelled like body odor and I had no clue how to interact with other people, they terrified me. Ashlee Taylor on the other hand was a very pretty young girl, except… she had this mild case of amblyopia. I...I think that’s how you refer to it.”

“Uhhh pretend real quick that we have no idea what that means,” Alicia prompted.

“Amblyopia is… when one eye doesn’t develop quite properly,” Tabitha explained. “One of Ashlee’s eyes was—only very slightly—misaligned, but everyone treated her like she was—”

“Ashlee, with the lazy eye,” Elena suddenly remembered. “From Laurel Middle, I remember her. Wait, she was the Taylors’ sister?”

“Okay, lazy eye,” Alicia nodded. “That’s—yeah, okay. I knew this kid Norman in Fairfield Middle who had that, eyes that pointed in different directions. People were mean to him, always called him crazy eyes, they—”

“Amblyopia,” Tabitha insisted firmly. “Listen—I know we’re in 1998 right now, but please just call it amblyopia. Please.”

“So—what, you’re saying being politically correct about everything actually gets to be a thing in the future?”

“Short answer; yes,” Tabitha answered bluntly. “Long answer… that gets extremely complicated with how societal norms ended up progressing over time. I mean, Elena. Just put yourself in her shoes. Imagine growing up disadvantaged, growing up with people constantly saying cruel things about you—for something you have absolutely no control over. Imagine how often she gets reminded of being different from everyone in an undesirable way.”

If Ashlee’s sisters are actually Erica and Brittney Taylor, I imagine the reminders are constant, painful, and… yeah, downright abusive, Elena thought, feeling a pang of guilt. I... wasn’t exactly nice to her back then, either.

“Okay, so this Ashlee has Amblyphobia,” Alicia summed up. “How exactly does that—”

“Amblyopia,” Tabitha corrected. “And, yeah. Anyways, Ashlee and I were friends. Friends by virtue of the fact that no one else would ever be our friends. I kid you not, not only were we the last two picked whenever the class had to form teams in Laurel, but when the choices got down to the two of us, the teams stopped wanting to pick anyone.”

“Jesus,” Alicia snorted, quickly covering her mouth and immediately looking horrified. “I—sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s actually not funny.”

“It turned out the Taylors lived nearby to my trailer park,” Tabitha pressed on. “We didn’t ride the same bus, but they lived in the neighborhood just behind that Hardees near Sunset Estates, close enough for me to walk to. They were, um. This Taylor family was… things were bad. I didn’t realize it back then, but when I look back on it with the hindsight of living a fairly long life…

“I think all three of the Taylor girls were living in fear. Ashlee, she got the worst of it because of her sisters. She, uh, she couldn’t let herself be touched without flinching back and recoiling, I asked her one day if she was okay—she gets evasive, I was a dumb kid who didn’t read social cues and kept asking about it, and... she finally pulled up her shirt and showed me.

“Bruises. Really bad bruises. Fresh ones atop old ones, some of them were so dark, and—um. Never where it would show when she was wearing clothing, but— yeah. She was being beaten. Maybe daily. I don’t know. I don’t even know if the parents were, um, in on it or what, I just remember that she was terrified of Erica and Brittney.”

“Jesus…” Alicia murmured, sharing a concerned look with Elena.

“In my original timeline, we were playing on their trampoline when… okay I’m fuzzy on the specifics after all this time, but Erica and Brittney came out and start being mean, one of them ends up shoving me off the trampoline. Because, I think to them, pushing us around was okay to them, fair game because of who we were. Only, my fall’s unexpectedly bad, severe head trauma and parents will have questions bad, so they panic and threaten us into silence about it.

“After forty-seven years, I don’t remember a lot of those details so well,” Tabitha said in a small voice. “What I do remember was that they promised to make life a living hell for Ashlee, if I didn’t stay away and keep my mouth shut. I remember… I remember seeing Ashlee sort of go quiet and withdraw completely into herself, and that was the first time dumb thirteen-year-old-me actually connected all the dots in what was going on. How Ashlee always had bruises for no reason, and always acted the way she did.

“Well, it worked,” Tabitha admitted in a bitter voice. “I kept what I saw to myself. I didn’t go back and see Ashlee ever again—I was terrified. I knew, deep down, how horrible it was to not tell someone about it, but… with who I was back then? I felt like no one would care what I had to say about anything. Girls like Erica and Brittney, their words had more weight to them, and somehow parents and adults would believe them first and not me. Never me.”

“So, when you came back in time, this time you did something about it right away?” Alicia guessed.

“I… no, I didn’t,” Tabitha admitted with difficulty. “Not immediately. I— I know it isn’t an excuse for inaction or anything, but… right when I came back to 1998, I was not fucking coping well. With the, um, the transition. Reliving certain horrible, uh, everything. I spent the first several months pretty much just obsessively cleaning things and exercising. Trying to, um. Regain any semblance of control around my own body and my immediate environment. I won’t blame you if you think less of me for that.”

“No, no,” Alicia said quickly. “I, uh, I shouldn’t have just assumed that—”

“It’s okay,” Tabitha gave her friend a forced smile. “I, um. A lot of little things came back to bite me because of that. My neglecting interpersonal relationships, and, uh. Private misunderstandings between me and my mother. What happened all those many years ago with Ashlee and them—I honestly had it all just walled off and repressed. Didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to acknowledge it. Wanted to pretend that my do-over was this completely fresh new start for me. I mean, isn’t that what a do-over’s supposed to be?”

Elena watched in confusion and disbelief as tears of regret formed in Tabitha’s eyes. None of this was making sense to her, but certain nonsensical portions contained slivers of real truth to them—Elena could see that, now. Time travel was impossible, but it was clear that some of these situations had actually happened, or at least Tabitha actually believed they happened.

It’s a coping mechanism, Elena realized. It has to be. Some of these bad things really happened, but she formed some complex about revealing it to anyone, and it got twisted up in her head into this… fanciful story. But, there’s TRUTH hidden in there. Whatever happened… it really fucked her up.

If not for her own recent experiences, Elena didn’t think she’d have been able to relate.

“So, um. This time through,” Tabitha cleared her throat and continued, “I think it was my new look that changed things. Changed the way the Taylor sisters bullied me. All along, I think Ashlee was hiding their things and blaming it on me—she was too afraid to directly confront them, and it must have also been... kind of retribution, for me abandoning her. Originally, I was bullied in high school because Erica and Brittney thought I’d taken some of their things. This time, it got worse, because they thought, I don’t know—that stealing things from them this time really benefited me. To the extent that I became prettier, confident enough to lose weight. Afford new clothes.”

“They felt threatened,” Elena agreed. “I can see now why they had a more personal stake in needing to take you down a notch with the rumors and everything.”

“Take her down a notch?!” Alicia hissed. “Fucking hell, they did a lot more than—”

“I know. I know. It wasn’t that extreme at the start, though,” Tabitha shrugged. “I think just the tiny little differences in timelines were enough of a change for the situation to… escalate, this time through. After getting pushed on the bus loop and getting the fracture, I faced some realities about myself I didn’t really ever want to face. Came clean about some things. When a woman from the school board drops by about my withdrawing from school, I tell her about Ashlee’s bruises.

“I’m guessing they discovered them right away, and someone or other separated Ashlee from her family while they sorted out what’s going on,” Tabitha said. “Erica in particular panicked, showed up at the Halloween party where I’m supposed to be—”

“You weren’t supposed to be there,” Elena grimaced. “I—I shouldn’t have told everyone you were going to go. I just thought that—”

“‘You think you can fucking take our sister away from us?!’” Alicia recalled. “That’s what Erica screamed when she was going ballistic. That didn’t make… any goddamn sense all this time. Not until just now.”

“Yes. That. So, Erica Taylor kills me, and—”

“She didn’t kill you,” Elena cut in. “Just. Don’t ever say that.”

“I… I think she actually did,” Tabitha said slowly. “Because I definitely shuffled off my mortal coil somehow. Like, a few seconds after I blacked out there on the floor of the lakehouse, I started the timeline over again from the waking up in MRI. May of 1998. Again.”

“Wait—you what?!” Alicia exclaimed.

“I, uh, I didn’t handle it well,” Tabitha let out a nervous chuckle. “At all. I, um, I thought I lost all of our moments together. Things and circumstances that came about by happenstance I couldn’t recreate. And, I couldn’t handle sorting things out with my mother all over again from the beginning, and, well. I didn’t have to.”

“What happened?!” Alicia demanded.

“I’m not sure,” Tabitha said after a moment of thought. “Some sort of… damage from the previous timeline—this timeline—carried through, somehow. My nose kept bleeding, I had these intense sort of migraine episodes. I’m… pretty sure I ended up having an aneurysm and dying mid-conversation with my mother. All at once it was like… like reality stuttered, and it went from being a movie about my life to suddenly cutting away to a surreal making-of montage. Behind the scene movie bits, with weird dream nonsense stuff mixed in.

“I sat in a Perkins I remember from the future, and talked with my friend Julie. Then the girls I remember bullying me in middle school and high school—including middle-school Elena, that’s probably what I meant when I asked you which Elena you were—chased me through an endless parking lot nightmare. I ended up getting in a junkyard F-22 fighter jet that got mixed in from this other fever dream I had once, and tried to escape. I think it worked maybe, because I got pulled back to my original timeline, in 2045, where they were trying to pull me out of the MRI that was breaking down.”

“Wait, wait, what?” Alicia pressed fingertips to her temples as she tried to follow along. “You went back to the future? Were you able to grab more information about things? Lottery numbers, stock market shit? Times and dates of stuff? How do you know which of all that stuff was a dream and which wasn’t?”

“I... don’t,” Tabitha shrugged. “Not for sure. All I have, um, is my interpretation of the experiences to go off of. I feel very confident that the timeline starting over was really happening, but, like I said… in the middle of talking to my mother I think I just kind of croaked or something. Bleed on my brain? Everything after that was very inconsistent and dream-like.”

“Wait, so you didn’t go back to the future? Or, no?” Alicia asked.

“I… maybe?” Tabitha held up her hands. “I feel that I did, but I can’t say for certain. At the time, I was, um, freaking the fuck out. Like, flailing and fighting hospital staff and trying to climb back into the dream, or the other timelines, or anything but being stuck back in 2045 like none of this ever happened.

“It worked, maybe, because I think my brain was hemorrhaging and it seemed like I watched my future self, um. Pass away. Most of the dream or nightmare or whatever seemed to... drain away at that point, and I was just kind of hanging in the empty darkness when I heard Hannah calling out to me.”

“So… when you put it like that, it’s like maybe all of that was a coma dream,” Alicia suggested. “Right?”

“It’s certainly possible,” Tabitha spread her hands in a helpless gesture. “But, I think certain parts of it were real. The timeline restarting at the MRI, I think all of that—a day and a half, maybe two days of that really happened. I mean, aside from the headaches, I was very cognizant of everything around me. Aware of my surroundings, thinking at my usual capacity, and everything—everything was very real, as real as this is here right now. It was distinctly different from the dream-like portions where—”

“Can I just be real blunt?” Elena interrupted. “I’m not… gonna call you a liar or accuse you of making up this whole wild story, or anything. But, isn’t the whole ‘time travel’ thing maybe this Uncle Vampire sort of metaphor for you to, uh, express some traumatizing situations you wouldn’t be able to otherwise?”

“You’ve read Uncle Vampire?” Tabitha asked, eyes lighting up.

“I—uh, yeah,” Elena confirmed. “I didn’t pick it out. My Mom wanted to kind of see how I dealt with more mature reading.”

“Uncle Vampire?” Alicia asked, throwing each of them a look. “Is that... anything you two wanna share with the rest of the class?”

“It’s a book about a girl who seems to think her uncle is a vampire,” Elena explained. “But, that turns out to be a metaphor for—”

“Wait, wait—don’t spoil it!” Tabitha interjected, waving her hands. “Don’t spoil it. Alicia, I can find you a copy at the library. I want you to read it for yourself.”

“Uhhh, okay,” Alicia agreed. “Vampires are cool.”

“That one wasn’t,” Elena scowled.

“Let her read it for herself,” Tabitha insisted. “But. I see what you’re getting at, Elena. No, my situation isn’t a metaphor for something else—I have actually, honestly traveled through time from 2045 to here in 1998.”

“Then…” Elena felt her throat go dry as she saw Tabitha’s look of resolve. “Then, I can test you. There’s like, a million different ways to test your knowledge, on millions of different little things you should know in advance, Tabitha. Are you really sure you’re ready to get into this with me?”

“Yeah,” Tabitha gave her a self-assured smile. “I am. Because you’re my friend, and… your trust really is that important to me. Ask me anything, anytime. Whenever you want! I know I won’t remember everything, but I absolutely remember enough to convince you.”

Elena had been riding the ups and downs of an emotional roller coaster for this entire hospital visit. Meeting Tabitha’s steady gaze now, an irrational spike of fear jolted up in the pit of Elena’s stomach. Fear that against all odds and rationality, her friend Tabitha actually... might be telling the truth.

But, there’s no way. There’s completely no way… right?

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/// Struggled with this one for a while because I wasn't sure about having an entire chapter be just recap exposition. It (possibly) still works if it's interesting enough to read and still adds to the story.