Hello friends, fellow Celestial Herd members and, of course, The man, the myth, the space unicorn: Moonhorse. Except no substitutes.

Forgive my lateness typing up the next installment of foxy shenanigans but the last week I was down with a nasty case of food poisoning/some other unspeakable germs left by someone not washing their hands before cooking a rare steak that I foolishly ordered. While overdone steak is an insult to the culinary arts and the brave cows that gave their all to the cause, alas, I fear it will be sometime before I'm ready to have steak again. I have also have been posted as maid of honor for friend of mine that started out all well and good but she has been quickly spiraling into bridezilla-ness which may end up here as it's own saga come the start of June. I will be frankly be surprised if myself and the coordinator (a mutual friend) are still friends with her when all this is done.

While I may have been vomiting so much I pulled a muscle in my back while listening to bridal meltdowns, it was still preferable than what happened next with The Queen of Foxes.

As I stated in my last post, I had cut out Lily and her mother Jan when I left for college because a steady diet of drama and toxicity is worse for you than sushi that's been purchased from a gas station's room temperature food case in Calcutta, during a soccer riot. Save this one time. I was home for the summer and got a phone call from Jan. It had turned out that Jan had decided that the best thing thing to do for Lily's dark and mysterious teen angst was to take her out of public and homeschool her. Which turned out about as well you might imagine. There had, of course, been another blow up à la whatever the petty bullshit of the week was.

Only there was a twist this time... oh boy was there a twist.

Its seems that Lily had made a new friend while I was gone. Someone I knew well. Someone that she had called to pick her up that she would me with wailing and gnashing of teeth. That someone was my ex-boyfriend. AKA an abuser, manipulator, and rapist.

Scumbag, as I shall refer to him, had indeed come and picked her up when she called, or rather his mother did because he had no car, driver's license, or job. What he did have was an indulgent mother that he still lived with and would never say no to him. Thusly Jan turned to me once again to see if now I could deal with the situation at age 19. I mean, of course, 2 years is more than enough time to process all of one's trauma and become a qualified councilor ready for a hostage negotiation, which, with their mutual flair for the dramatic, Jan made it seem like it was.

Lily was apparently still in contact with her mother through all this and I agreed to Jan telling Lily that I was back at my parents for the summer and would like to hang out with her. When the weekend rolled around, Jan dropped Lily off at my parents' house and we piled into my car to do what any kids in the middle of nowhere did when they wanted a night out, we went to the mall in whatever midsize town was closest. The kind with a movie theatre and a food court... and yet again another thing showing my age but considering that out in the sticks everything is at least 20 years behind the times so maybe I'm not as near the grave as I think sometimes. I played dumb most of the night to knowing about where she was currently shacking up, all the while, Lily was looking subversive and trying her best to side step any questions about how things were going at home, albeit, very poorly. The only fact I can still count for as certain out of that whole evening was that I was a far better liar than oh-so-edgy Lily even though I had (mostly) grown out of my Trench Coat Mafia days, and while I may had no longer been wearing Tripp pants I was still partial to some knee high combat boots with plenty of buckles. And while I was no longer wearing clown white with deep purple lipstick, my eyeliner was still spot on. Granted with my tendency to develop sunburn in January from snow glare, I didn't really need the clown white even back in the red velvet vampire days. My only advice, don't read Anne Rice until you have full frontal lobe development kids.

The truth was finally confessed as we were eating dinner in the food court after we had browsed the delights of Hot Topic and Sleeping Tiger Imports as is standard practice for two goth-y teens having a night out. I reminded her of what Scumbag did to me, and Lily said it was because she had absolutely no where else to go, and Scumbag had been perfectly decent and his mom was always there, ect, ect, apparently his only crime thus far had to been to hide Lily's make up from here as he had proclaimed to her "I like you natural". I let my boiling rage that had been slowly simmering through the night out, giving her some of the finer points and details about who she was living with. I could call every single play and bullshit tactic this guy would and had said to make her emotionally dependent on him plus some of the more grim facts about what he physically did to me. Telling him 'no', no less than 3 times apparently wasn't enough. I eventually was able to spout off enough to her that she went home to her mother that night.

Well and truly emotionally exhausted by the end of that, I did my best to forget about it the rest of the summer. And I guess something worked because I did not hear or see Lily until a few years later.

Some more cringe confession from me, I used to be very thoroughly involved in the Renaissance Faire. Lily popped up again in this environment and the next time I saw her was at an early event when I was just starting to make some friends and she had begun to call herself Raven. Ironically though while naming herself Raven she also took to wearing a fox head that looked like it had come off of a sports mascot, I guess in a proto-Furry sort of way. Lily was also starting to get into trouble for wearing nothing but two coin-scarfs, the kind belly dancers wear over their skirts, around her chest and ass. Granted, Lily is a naturally petite and very slender person and someone most people wouldn't mind seeing just wearing a few see-through scarves, but Ren Faire during business hours is a family event.

While it can be very fun to visit and work at a Faire if you're with the right group, anyone that has worked a few of them can tell you that it has one seedy underbelly. I didn't interact much with Lily but I gathered that as she was now 18 she was living with a boyfriend/other friends and was whole heartedly diving into the after hours crowd and was swan diving fully into her own mania now that she was legally an adult. The after hours crowd can be lots of fun if one possess the maturity to distinguish the responsible adults with alternative interests from the ones that are just creeps but I have to say I had written Lily off by this point but she popped up occasionally in groups I was a part of and I would get the latest news on her life.

It was around this time that she was also making claims about having Bipolar and/or Borderline Personality Disorder, when asked who diagnosed her or who her psychologist was she would mumble about someone and how she wasn't suppose to give out information because the doctor wasn't taking new patients. Meaning that she had forgotten that we were from the same town and I knew her brand of bullshit and that she had looked up the symptoms and was trying to copy them because being crazy is a personality trait.

Besides trying to present with some kind of personality disorder the occultism had also thoroughly blossomed. One night she claimed that she was posses by a tree/tree spirit or such like, she would pick at her arms and rock back and forth quite a bit. Another time she claimed to be a conduit/proxy/whatever strange thing that can be found in the New Age section of Barns and Noble (Sweet Jesus will I ever stop showing my age in this story?) for the demon Lilith. Because of course she was. Any respectable person that's had a vampire phase in high school and has played Vampires The Masquerade always is.

But believe it or not, all this is not the worst part. Lily has always been a bit of a compulsive liar and not a very good one at that. Beside the supposed personality disorder diagnoses, and I'm sorry Moonhorse won't be able to read much of this on Youtube, but she began claiming she was raped multiple times in any given year. And this is not the kind of affair where a victim is abused and then not believed because of any number of factors, something I have intimate knowledge of, but so freaking over the top you would think a top never existed in the first place. From saying that she had been raped by random strangers 3 times in one year, she said in Facebook message to mutual friend, extremely casually, that she didn't make the deadline for something because she had been assaulted: "Sorry, I'm just having a hard time. I was in the parking lot last night about to go home and I got raped for the third time this year." To her pièce de résistance of bullshit: claiming that she had been raped by no less than 36 men in one night...

Besides that veritable mountain horse shit that a team of industrial sanitation specialists wouldn't be able to shift, Lily took to claiming to be raped by any person in possession of a penis if they were alone with her for more than 2 minutes. From places where she had spent the night to bathroom stalls apparently she just attracted perverts to her. I guess I now know why she wanted to know how I felt with sexual trauma.

I am going to assume everyone reading/hearing this will understand the blood boiling rage this still induces in me to this day. Shit like this is why victims of sexual and domestic abuse are not believed and the strawman argument of false allegations exists. Needless to say I thus avoided Lily like the plague, called out all the shit, and even warned my male friends not to get anywhere near lest they fall under her allegations.

Now that I am also thoroughly emotionally exhausted, I think I'll wrap this section of the story up here. Even after cutting her off, there were still doorways that Lily continued to darken. I guess in the end she did become that dark and edgy vampire demon she claimed to be a conduit for. Being a parasitical thing that emerged from the darkness to feed on whatever drama and attention she would stir up till retreating back into the shadows... and then to be let loose on a keyboard.