Chapter Text
To her dismay, the morning’s two-out-of-three coin toss averages out as heads. So, instead of swallowing half the bottle of Uncle John’s expired Vicodin and crawling back under the covers, Casey celebrates her 18th birthday by replacing the notebooks and textbooks in her backpack with her sketchpad, a travel toiletries kit, $120 in cash from John’s wallet, and a change of clothes. She leaves her debit card on the bedside table, along with her phone, which reads Sun, Oct 1st, 2017, 7:13am.
The Philadelphia Zoo opens at 9am on Sundays. Although the metro passes the zoo every miserable morning on her way to school, Casey has never been inside. The posters of new exhibits and animal factoids have taunted her for the past three and a half years . Casey has never had the mental or emotional capacity to have real interests–art is more of a cross between a genetic talent and therapeutic outlet than an actual interest–but she suspects that if she’d had a different childhood, one where her father lived and she wasn’t littered with scar tissue both inside and out , animals would likely be an interest.
All of her life up until this moment, Casey has been prey. How exhilarating would it be to be a predator? Just for a day? And then she would leave. She would go anywhere else, even if it had to be deep, deep underground. But before she did, just for one, one day, she would look upon predators, and imagine that she was one of them.
John is passed-out shit-faced drunk on the couch, as is per-usual on a Sunday morning. Although there is no need to be quiet as she leaves the tiny tattered apartment, she tiptoes anyway, slowly and delicately shutting and locking the door. She drops her set of keys on the mat before taking the stairs two at a time.
Casey expects her pulse to quicken at this point, for beads of sweat accumulate on her back at the naughty, bad thing she’s doing– the last time she’d ran away, she had been eleven. He had caught her before she was even two blocks away. The scars from that day crisscross along her ribcage– but it doesn't happen. She’s just as tired and indifferent today as she is on any given Sunday, and ready to throw punches for a quad-shot mocha.
The bus stop provides little comfort from the brisk cold, even in her many layers, and the rush of warmth that flows over her as she climbs into the metro is akin to a breath of new life. Casey curls her lithe frame into a window seat towards the back of the bus, hugging her backpack in her lap. She watches the city slide by, baffled and relieved at how routine this feels. Philly is wrapped in winter coats in fuzzy boots, preemptive measures against the snowfall that isn’t due for another two weeks at least. Casey understands this though. She is all too familiar with shielding herself against storms that could come out of nowhere, tearing at her clothes until she’s naked and frozen, helpless to powers outside of her control. It’s always best to be prepared.
Casey pulls the cord a block away from a zoo-adjacent coffee shop that’s caught her eye every morning since her first day of high-school. Oh, the amount of times she’d fantasized about playing hooky to drink black coffee and sketch all day–but no, Casey is a good girl, a good girl who leaves for school early and always stays late, with a perfect report card and nothing but praise from her teachers–at least, she was, until this year, when she wasn’t anymore.
Why not lose her shit and yell at everyone? Why not stab a pencil through the hand of the boy who grabbed her boob from the desk behind her? Why not? What’s one more steak knife across her belly? What’s waking up one more time to John on top of her, surrounding her, inside–
Anyway. She forgoes the mocha for a sugar-free, nonfat, quad-shot butterscotch latte. It tastes like new beginnings, and it’s the best $10 she’s spent all year. Casey sips her coffee in one of the high stools at the window, overlooking the zoo across the street. She doesn’t have her phone and can’t find a clock in the coffee shop, so she waits and watches for the gates to open. The latte is half way gone and lukewarm by the time they do, and she takes her time to stand and push in her chair. Now her heart is racing at a rhythm she knows isn’t from the caffeine.
Casey is surprised at how long the line is on such a cold, random Sunday, until she notices the sign regarding a new big cat exhibit, snow-leopards through today until the end of February. Now that’s a predator she can appreciate. A vicious wildcat that wears more layers than she does, and thrives in the most brutal conditions. As she exchanges $45 for a day pass with a sour-faced college student at the ticket counter, a poetically tragic idea takes root in the recesses of her mind. She stomps it down, reminding herself that the coin came up heads. She can flip again tomorrow, but today, she has to abide by the coin.
Her dad used to say that by flipping a coin, you’ll know what you want the outcome to be when it’s in the air. Casey knows what she wants that coin to give her permission to do, but she also needs it to tell her not to.
The thick crowds give Casey permission to camouflage on the edges of everyone’s vision, and she meanders from group to group, trailing close enough to blend in but far enough to go unnoticed. Magical is too vague of a word to describe the nature of the park, but it’s the only one that comes to Casey’s mind. The zoo is designed so that it is the people who are encaged, not the animals. At the safari exhibit, she watches a baby giraffe and a newborn warthog boop noses. There are workers holding birds of prey scattered about the winding paths, and zookeepers that lead elephant calves on rope leashes. Wolf cubs sleep in a pile against their mother’s belly.
The monkeys are a bit too loud and chaotic for Casey’s taste, and the screeching evokes a bubbling panic in her abdomen. She pivots quickly, eager to retrace her steps away from the fence, and collides face first with Claire fucking Benoit. Claire, who is more firmly built than her, remains upright while Casey falls backwards onto her tailbone. “Shit!”
Claire scoffs down at her. “Watch where you’re going, skank.”
“Fuck off,” Casey replies, clambering to her feet. Her tailbone feels broken, but this isn’t anything out of the ordinary for Casey.
Claire’s partner in cruelty, Marcia, appears seemingly from the void at Claire’s side, the same look of disdain distorting her otherwise beautiful features. “What are you doing here?” The superiority in her tone is just as unnecessary as always.
“It’s my birthday.” Casey isn’t sure why she tells them this, and despises herself the timid vulnerability she just let slip.
“Awwww! And you decided to spend it at the zoo?” Claire is smirking now, and Casey wishes she knew how to vomit on cue without her finger or a popsicle stick so that she could puke on Claire's perfect Jimmy Choos. “How adorable! What are you, six?”
Casey’s sixth birthday was the last she’d spent with her father. Uncle John had come over to celebrate with them. Casey wanted him to leave, but she didn’t know how to tell her dad, didn’t know how to put words to why she now wouldn’t meet her uncle’s eyes and only responded to his questions with one word sentences. That was the night she saw Uncle John pour something that looked like water in her daddy’s 7-Up, and he’d taken a long swig before she could tell him. That was the night her favorite person in the whole world died from a “heart attack,” and she was too young to know what it all meant. That was the night she’d gotten scars in the back of her throat and inside her–
“What are you doing here?” Casey retorts, now kicking herself at how much like a six-year-old she actually sounds.
“Snow-leopards.” Marcia says bluntly. “Biology report. Duh.”
Right. The snow-leopards. Casey had been saving that exhibit for last. “This is the monkey enclosure, sweetie, not the snow-leopards. See how that sign says ‘monkeys,’ and how they’re monkeys and not snow-leopards?” The backsass is half-assed and clumsy, but it’s hard to think of something witty when you just broke your tailbone and the girls who bullied a freshmen into slitting her wrists in the girls bathroom last year are ruining your perfectly good coin-flip outcome.
Claire slaps Casey across the face, hard, new acrylics slicing through her cheek like butter. Casey doesn’t flinch or even make a sound. She was too optimistic to assume that she’d make it through her whole 18th birthday without being struck.
“Hey!” All three girls turn their heads. One of the zoo’s maintenance workers has emerged from a side door. His eyebrows are drawn together, and his mouth is set in a very thin line. “Bitch slapping isn’t permitted in the park.” He has a thick New York accent, with a flamboyant undercurrent of sass and charm, despite his apparent rage.
Marcia and Claire exchange a look that Casey knows all too well, having attended classes with them for nearly six years. They step in front of the maintenance man, one on each side. “I’m so sorry, sir,” Claire starts, “it won’t happen–” She and Marcia each grab one of his arms, and in unison, slide his hands under their shirts, each clenching them around one of their breasts. They hold him against their bodies for a couple seconds before abruptly releasing him and sprinting down a gravel path, howling with laughter.
The man is frozen stalk still, staring down at his hands in abject horror. In that moment, multiple different things surprise Casey, as she is all too familiar with grown men’s hands on underaged girls breasts. Firstly, the man doesn’t look smug or pleased, he looks terrified. Second, he didn’t try to fight the girls off, or chase them down after. He stands utterly frozen, just as she has under her uncle’s hands, too many times to count.
And third, the most unnerving of all to Casey, is that his face changed . Casey is an expert on abruptly changing facial expressions. If she hadn’t been watching the interaction this entire time, she’d have thought the man had a twin who’d abruptly switched places with him. His jaw is set differently, the lines on his face seeming to have moved around, and he’s squinting now, reminding her of her father without his reading glasses.
Slowly, he tears his eyes away from his hands, still holding them out in front of himself numbly, as though they’re covered in feces. He looks at her now, squinting harder. “Are you alright?” Even his accent is different too. He is no longer the sexually confused Brooklyn fashionista, but now a stoic, gravely underground criminal from Boston.
I am so not okay, you don’t even know. “I’ll be fine.”
He nods once, turning back to the side door.
“Are you alright?” Casey finds herself asking.
The maintenance man freezes. “I’ll be fine,” he replies tersely. He pulls a yellow handkerchief from his pocket, and before Casey can wonder who the hell still carries handkerchiefs around, he uses it to open the door back to the maintenance tunnels. And then he’s gone.
And so is Casey.
***
Fuck the heads outcome. Casey doesn’t care anymore. It doesn’t matter, none of it matters. Why would it?
They made it too easy anyway. The snow-leopard enclosure is up on a fenced tall hill with the exquisite creatures below, lounging on rocks and tree branches. She’s genuinely surprised that the cats haven’t made a bid for escape, but then again, they don’t know they’re prisoners.
It’s late enough in the day that the initial excitement of the new exhibit has worn off. Claire and Marcia stand a couple hundred feet opposite her, backs against the fence as they stare down at their phones, heads together, giggling. Casey is already standing on the lowest rung of the fence. She continues to gaze down at the gorgeous cats. They’re so fluffy and cute, she could almost imagine cuddling up to them, napping in their warm fur. But Casey knows that it’s the things that look the most harmless that are in fact the most dangerous.
She isn’t afraid, or even anxious. The fall will knock her unconscious. She won’t feel anything. And her body won’t go to waste, rotting in the ground. It will provide sustenance for these majestic beasts, these predators who have no idea how powerful they really are, no clue that they could wreak havoc on this entire zoo with just a couple calculated leaps. It’ll be quick, painless, and poetic.
Her right foot is on the second rung of the fence when she sees him again. It’s the maintenance man, the dark,
handsome
stoic Boston criminal–she can tell from the set of his shoulders. He wears glasses now, square frames that make him look even more
handsome
stoic. He’s carrying…something, a mask, a spray bottle, and…
Casey is off of the fence and sprinting across the grass, lungs burning from the cold. She’s dizzy and uncoordinated, swaddled in all her layers, having eaten or drunken nothing but the latte this morning. By the time she reaches him, just moments before he’d be within distance of Marcia and Claire noticing he was there, she promptly collapses on the ground at his feet, dry-heaving into the dirt.
“Hey. It’s you.” The maintenance man kneels next to her, balancing on his toes to avoid getting dirt on his work clothes. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I know…I know what you’re…” Casey’s words come out as pathetic gasps as she forces herself to her knees.
“Easy.” The man places a hand on her shoulder. Behind his glasses, his eyes are a pure, sharp blue. He studies her for a moment, and those eyes become pained. “Your clothes. They’re filthy.”
Well obviously. Casey decides to ignore his out of place comment. “I know what you’re trying to do,” she splutters breathlessly. “Don’t.”
“What they did–”
“Was super fucked up, I know.” Casey hoists herself back to her feet. The man’s eyes now look everywhere but at her face–at her many sweaters, her leggings, her tennis shoes, her hair. She keeps her focus on his eyes though, trying to catch his gaze again. “Trust me, I know. But you can’t.”
The man is now staring at her wrists, which had become exposed when her sweater sleeves had been pushed up during her fall. She abruptly pulls the sleeves back down, but knows that it’s too late.
“You’re like me…” He mutters to himself. “You gotta understand then why I hafta do this.”
Casey looks from the man, to Marcia and Claire, to the snow-leopards, and back to the man. “Take me.” She says abruptly.
“What?”
“Take me instead.” When she tilts her chin to meet his eyes this time, he’s looking right back at her, expression wrought confusion and a trace of wonder. “I won’t fight,” she adds. “I’ll be good.”
Casey looks down at the snow-leopards once more, and when she turns to face the man again, there’s a profound understanding in his eyes. He knows what she was about to do. She knows what he was about to do. He isn't disgusted by her. She understands him. They can help each other.
“Alright,” he says softly. “Come with me.”
Together they turn their backs on the snow leopards, and Casey follows the maintenance man across the grass, through a metal door, and down into the underground of the Philadelphia Zoo.