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FREYA
The shrill ringof my phone rips me from sleep. I groan, rolling over in bed, my mind foggy. Daylight bleeds in around the edges of the blackout shades, making me squint as I silence the phone.
My skin already prickles with discomfort just knowing the sun is out there, waiting for me. Always waiting.
Xeroderma pigmentosum. A mouthful of medical mumbo-jumbo that boils down to one cruel fact: the sun is my enemy. I can’t repair the damage from UV light like most people can. The rays that most people soak up without a second thought tear me apart, cell by cell.
This is why I’ve learned to live in the shadows, to embrace the night. My day starts when other people’s ends.
To most of the world, I know I must look like a creature of the night by choice. Like I’m leaningwaytoo hard into the goth aesthetic. But no. A life lived in the shadows and the darkness was decided for me long ago, when my symptoms first started manifesting. I was four.
Apparently, my great-grandmother had the same condition, which comes with the bonus of making meten thousandtimes more likely to develop non-melanoma skin cancer, and two thousand times more likely to get melanoma.
Like,thanks, genetics.
I reach for my phone, trying to blink away the haze of sleep, the weight of my past clinging to me like a second skin. I think about how I used to be normal once—or as close to normal as possible when your last name is Lindqvist.
When I was little, I had a nanny that would read me bedtime stories about princes and princesses, and fabled kingdoms, and sorcerers’ curses.
I used to think that’s what plagued my family: a curse. Maybe even several of them. I knew far earlier than I should what my father did for a living, and where the big mansion, the cars, the lavish trips, the pool, the help, the nannies, and all the luxury came from.
There’s a reason I don’t use the name “Lindqvist”, and it’snotbecause it weirds out people who are unused to anything but “U” following “Q”.
My father was a terror: a ruthless, uncaring, mafia strongman. And if the way he ruled over his own family was any indication, I can only imagine how awful he was to the outside world.
You see, I never once thought ofusas the fairytale kings and queens from the bedtime stories. No, I knew my father was the evil wizard in the black tower, who fought the “good guys”.
And because of that—my father being the monster that he was—I knew young that we’d been cursed.
It was the only explanation for the cards we’d been dealt.
My issues with the sun. My mother dying so young. Learning that I too, like my brother Nils, had inherited further darkness from our father.
Huntington’s disease attacks the neurons in the brain, causing them to slowly break down and die. Your arms and legs stop working correctly. So do your lungs. You lose the ability to think or live in any real capacity. It kills you, horribly and painfully, sometimes as early as forty.
There is no cure.
Yeah. My family is so terrible that I gottwocurses: the sun wants to kill me, and my body will finish the job anyway, probably in the next fifteen years.
No one, not even Anni, knows.
My mother was the last tether our family had to anything resembling “good”. Dad ruled the house with the same iron fist he used to rule the Lindqvist criminal empire. Nils was the golden child, following in our dad’s footsteps: cold, cruel and merciless, just like him.
Me, I was the burden. The sick girl destined to die young, the one who would never be strong enough, fast enough, ruthless enough. After my mother passed, I don’t think I ever even felt like I was part of a family. More like an unwanted houseguest that was being “allowed”, begrudgingly, to overstay her welcome.
I was thirteen when the verbal abuse and the general disdain my brother and father held for me turned into something far darker. More evil.
More…physical.
At first it was waking up with my heart in my throat, my father silhouetted in the bedroom door, reeking of vodka, watching me.
He never came further than the doorway.
But Nils did.
There’s a reason I’m twenty-six and have never sought out physical intimacy with another person.
I mean I like theideaof sex. Iwantsex. But the hands that touched me even when I said no, and the threats of even worse if I told anyone, chased away any thoughts of actually exploring those desires with a partner, even now.
