“You know.” I shrug. “Just playing out the clock.” I try to make it jokey, but I can tell there’s too much acid in my voice.

After that, Charm’s friends slither out of the tower in cowardly twos and threes until it’s just the two of us, like it usually is. Like it won’t be for too much longer. Her friends took their speaker with them, so the tower is silent except for the gentle rush of wind against the windows, the crack and hiss of another beer being opened.

Charm resettles her fairy wings and looks over at me with a dangerous softening around her eyes, mouth half open, and I have a terrible premonition that she’s about to say something unforgivably sincere, like I love you or I’ll miss you.

I flick my chin at the spinning wheel. “Dare you to prick your finger.”

Charm tosses a bleached slice of hair out of her eyes, softness vanishing. “You’re the princess, hon.” She winks. “But I’ll kiss you after.” Her voice is saucy but unserious, which is a relief. Dying girl rule #3 is no romance, because my entire life is one long trolley problem and I don’t want to put any more bodies on the tracks. (I’ve spent enough time in therapy to know that this isn’t “a healthy attitude toward attachment,” but I personally feel that accepting my own imminent mortality is enough work without also having a healthy attitude about it.)

“You know it wasn’t originally a spinning wheel in the story?” I offer, because alcohol transforms me into a chatty Wikipedia page. “In the original version—I mean, if oral traditions had original versions, which they don’t—she pricks her finger on a piece of flax. The Grimms used the word spindel, or spindle, but the wheel itself wasn’t commonly used in Europe until the mid-sixteenth … why are your eyes closed?”

“I’m praying for your amyloidosis to flare up and end my pain.”

“Okay, fuck you?”

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to fit a spinning wheel in the trunk of a Corolla? Just prick your finger already! It’s almost midnight.”

“That’s Cinderella, dumbass.” But I lurch obediently to my feet, discovering from the delicate spin of the windows that I’m slightly drunker than I’d guessed. I curtsy to Charm, wobble only a little, and touch my finger to the spindle’s end.

Nothing happens, naturally. Why would it? It’s just a dusty antique in an abandoned watchtower, not nearly sharp enough to draw blood, and I’m just a dying girl with bad luck and a boring life. Neither of us is anything special.

I look down at the iron spike of the spindle, slightly cross-eyed. For no reason I think of the girl in that Rackham illustration, blond and tragic. I think how it must have felt to grow up in the shadow of a curse, how much she must have hated the story she was handed. How in the end all her hate didn’t matter because she still reached her finger for that spindle, powerless to stop the cruel gears of her own narrative—