Catalyst I: Girls That Hurt Together

Spoiler-Free Synopsis

Alex lives in a small town in rural southern USA, alone, in a dinky apartment bordering a thick forest. Her daily routine consists of her commuting to work at the town’s 711, going home, making lackluster meals and yearning. In a deep but quiet depression, she lives with little purpose and has nothing to reach toward. The more folksy in town have told word of the danger of the forest Alex lives by. That people tend to go missing there, that there’s a monster or spirit living in there—a killer of youngsters that moves silently in the dark, that lurks and picks to the bone anyone who wanders in deep enough. Alex admits she’s curious, but never enough to ask or god forbid, step in there herself.

One day, a strange customer comes into the store while Alex is working—a tall blonde woman with a large fur coat, sunglasses, and snapping gum, looking around the store like she’s never seen a 711 before. After a strange interaction, the woman leaves Alex tired. At the end of the day, a word of warning from her manager about a killing near their town (possibly by a recent mysterious figure in these parts, the "Crossbones Killer") has her leaving work numbed, contemplative and slightly on edge.

That evening, Alex decides to go into the woods. Just a little break from the world. This time, she’s feeling just brave enough to try to explore it, to see what’s in there—but a small part of her is secretly hoping that whatever thing is lurking in there, that chews on the bones of young men or girls or whatever, if it even exists, takes her too. Nothing much interesting happens on her excursion, much to her disappointment, and frustration at herself for even believing something could happen. “God. There is nothing here.”

Thwack. She’s knocked out.

Alex wakes up in the basement of a run-down cabin, with some unhinged, out-of-view person trying to play a game of "guess who" with her. Her memory, for once, not failing her, she guesses correctly: Natalie. Her old classmate and bully in high school, who we have been introduced to in flashback by this point. But this is obviously not the old Natalie, vain, bratty and condescending; something seems to have cracked in her. Alex finally gets a good look at her by the dim light, and it's an eerie sight: she's grinning, her head shaved, her clothes disheveled and dirty, her figure much less slim and delicate than before, her movements fluid and energetic—she's gotten stronger and, apparently, a lot less restrained than before.

What scares Alex the most, though, is that as much as she tries to deny it to herself, she knows why Natalie has kidnapped her. It's because of what Alex and her ex-boyfriend, Beau, did to her six years ago. And apparently, Alex is the last loose end to tie up.

"Hi, Lexy."

---

Alex and Natalie mean a lot to me as characters; to me, Natalie embodies a sort of female/queer rage that's indiscriminate and uninhibited, but that she's rarely faced the consequences of head-on. meanwhile Alex is a very bottled, untapped rage that takes a mental and physical toll. the kind that leaves you fatigued from all the continuous pressure of holding it in. they are both very unhealthy people, but in very different ways. of course the other side to this story is that they are really fucking gay and are barely restraining themselves from having sex w each other or whatever.

The Cabin

[pictures via pinterest]

Natalie's cabin is a strange place. It's alive. Natalie purports that Alex wouldn't be able to find her way home from here if she tried, and she's not bluffing. The cabin is...magic? Cursed? Whichever way you want to spin it; it is akin to a living being, with preferences and abilities, and exists outside conventional time and space. Most notably, seems to "move." Close the front door in a lush green forest, open it again, and you might be on a mountainside in a tundra. The cabin's essential being, its interior, inhabits the shells of other cabins around the world, and moves between them at will, ignoring all laws of space and matter. Natalie describes it best she can, as the cabin moving between "windows" of the same house; when you close the door and open it again, you're spinning the wheel of which window you'll end up in front of. It's a great strategic base when you're on the run from the law, and can't be locked down to one location; it's a nightmare for literally anything else.

The cabin also has the ability to develop a special link with its inhabitant(s), developing what can be described either as a symbiotic relationship or a sort of affection for the other. This manifests in cosmic favors such as skewing the odds for ending up at desired locations, preferred interior conditions, and most fucky of all, accelerated healing. Of course, it's like talking to a genie with this thing; these favors are not guaranteed, let alone guaranteed to work out as needed, and in fact can backfire tremendously (what counts as healing, anyway?). Alas, the cabin almost seems to view Natalie as its child, and whether she wants it or not, it's inclined to "help" her in whichever ways it will.

High School & Prom Gone Wrong

A core theme that is raised, especially in Alex and Natalie's history together, is class, social status and bullying. Ok that's multiple themes but they are interwoven everywhere they go. There's also misogyny in there somewhere too. What ev. Essentially, in the pressure cooker slash social pageant of American high school, everything failed the two girls and ended up pitting them against each other. While Natalie is in every sense the instigator because of her bullying, she ultimately became the biggest victim by the end because of what others could leverage against her.

The more you read and the more you discover about Alex's relationship to Natalie, and their history in school, the more you may feel she's kind of deserving of some of the bad things that happen to her. obviously "deserving" being a very subjective label. they were all what 18 years old at the time. still, some crazy stuff.