Pretty Little Bones

I've Never Made a Bet but We Gamble with Desire

I've Never Made a Bet but We Gamble with Desire

When I had moments alone with Ava I always wished they would last forever. I wanted to drive all night with her and spend afternoons doing the nothing that meant everything. More than my imagination could fathom, I wanted to spend every waking second with her just to find out that time had stopped.

That was the thing about Ava: she was always so close to dying that she lived lifetimes in a matter of minutes.

Every moment with her was so twisted and confusing that it fell nothing short of beautiful.

She could spend the night crying in my bedroom or laughing on some back road, lost but never more found, it didn't matter. Ava was what I wanted. All the weird little things she did. All the animosity and desperation that ran across her pale, tight skin, the thoughtfulness that painted those pretty pink lips, and the joyfulness that made her long, blonde waves bounce and shimmer. I wanted every bit of her.

Because she already had all of me.

Sometimes I felt like I was the one calling the shots, like I had a choice in how much she could take. Then she'd look at me with those eyes or say my name with that voice and I'd lose the game. She didn't even have to try. All it took was one simple phone call to make me dread the end of the night.

I knew that when she called to ask if I could pick her up from the church on the other side of town I was already gone.

He left her there—that boy that was so bad to her. He wanted to reconcile and she didn't want to lose a friend, so she went to church with him. And when she refused to get back together, he left her there without anything. No money, no jacket, no hope.

Nothing but me.

I always told her that no matter what, she could come to me. Any time of day or night she could call and I'd answer. It didn't matter how much trouble she was in or if she was simply lost inside her own body, I'd be there. And she'd taken advantage of my faithfulness on multiple occasions.

But this one felt different.

This one felt less afraid and more tired. At seventeen she was already tired of getting out of bed in the morning and painting that crooked smile on the cheeks that were suddenly starting to sink into her face. She was tired of covering the dark circles under her gray eyes—the ones that had once been bright and silver only to fade like the once almost white-blonde curls. She was sick of forcing laughs and faking excitement.

But mostly she was sick. In her head, in her stomach, in her bones. Ava was sick and she couldn't stop it anymore. She had gotten so good at lying that she even believed herself. Despite the fact that she kept getting smaller and smaller, she still thought she was in control.

Having that control taken away was her biggest fear and when I arrived to pick her up, she gave me a tired smile and a haphazard roll of her sick eyes as if to say "Boys. What are you gonna do?" before slamming the passenger's door on the cold. She was afraid of being left alone with herself.

"Sorry to ruin your Sunday," she said, the words barely escaping through her chattering teeth.

I looked over at her and tried in vain to figure out how he could have left such a tiny girl on the steps of such a big church in the freezing cold. Even after all she'd done for him he left. Just like everyone else.

Her hair was curled in perfect ringlets only slightly displaced by the wind. She looked pretty in her usual, chaotic way, but the girl sitting next to me wasn't the Ava I knew. It was like she was playing dress up and trying to act like her life was together. The little black dress—or maybe it was blue—was her costume and suddenly Ava was purposely transformed into the focal point. It was strange. She deliberately shied away from attention with her jeans and too big shirts covered by too big sweaters.