Pretty Little Bones

If One Stupid Poem Could Fix This Home, I'd Read it Every Day

If One Stupid Poem Could fix this Home, I'd read it Every Day

Knowing Ava followed the tracks I made in the mud that was my life, I was always careful to try and take the high road. Sometimes her life started mirroring mine in ways that were so uncomfortable, it could only be made better by the fact that our situations couldn't have been more different.

Her parents split a few years after mine, and she took their divorce the same as she took everything else. She just stared. She didn't smile. She didn't laugh. She didn't cry. She didn't get angry. She just sat stoically and watched the world pass by, like a strange version of reality playing before her eyes. And as usual, she tried to make me out to be the hero.

Sure, her parents finally split after all the arguing, but at least hers had never yelled at each other. They argued quietly when they thought their kids weren't listening. And there weren't all the fights where her dad tried to dump her and her brother on her mom, but her mom only had room for one kid, so she got stuck with a half assed parent.

And yeah, her grandpa could be kind of mean to her, but he didn't live with her and treat her the way she treated herself. The way he didn't treat her own parent. Besides, he was dead. She didn't have to worry about him. She didn't have to sit and wait for the day he didn't wake up in the morning so she could finally know she was done walking on glass all the time.

And her mom didn't die and leave her brother with grandparents that deserved those stupid, novelty coffee cups declaring them the best in the world. So she liked to consider herself lucky, even though she wasn't. Not as lucky as she wanted everyone to believe she was.

And she liked to consider herself my protégé when she didn't even realize I had been her project. Whoever I was, she had built up in her head. I always said she was quite the little artist and that was mostly because the image of me she had in her mind was better than anyone could ever imagine. Sometimes it was like she was my own personal lawyer—she could get me out of any kind of trouble by talking about how great she thought I was.

He does drugs? No. No, he's just messing around. He's meeting new people and connecting with them on their own level so they have common grounds. Really, he's doing these lowlifes a favor by trying to understand them.

He drinks too much? No. No, he's highly functioning. And his grandpa drinks all the time, so it's just a way for him to try to understand that man. Really, he's doing it for the good of his family.

He doesn't do his homework? That's because he's already really funny and really talented. If he added great grades to the equations it really wouldn't be fair to the rest of the world. Besides, he's so busy taking care of everyone and everything. He already knows how to do this shit anyway.

None of it had to be true to anyone but Ava. As long as she believed what she made up, then the world was right.

Sometimes I did bad things just to watch her craft a new excuse for why it was suddenly an okay thing to do. After a while it wasn't even a rebellion for me to do things I shouldn't. It was just a game.

Other times it was a burden to have such a loyal friend. Sometimes I wanted to just be bad and when she tried to justify my reasons, I just wanted to scream at her to stop. It was a double edged sword to see Ava desperately clutching at the delusion that I was perfect. Years went by of the same old give and take before I finally realized that Ava wanted to put me on a pedestal because she thought I was the only other person in the world who could possibly get her out of the mess that was her life.

She couldn't have been more wrong.

All I could offer Ava was a glimpse of the kind of things she couldn't do. I could get over what happened when I was a kid. Ava could only pretend the things that made her who she was didn't bother her. She faked forgetting and invented the personality she believe people would attribute to her and no one else.

It always struck me as strange that she refused the excuses the world gave her, but she was more than happy to give excuses to the world that screwed her over more than once. I thought that, of all people, she would understand what it was like to be handed a reason for everything you did. She had to know what it was like to have your actions taken from you and all the credit for your behavior—whether good or bad—given to circumstances.

Because the truth was Ava had a shit childhood. And that shit childhood make a huge difference on the person she became. But she was still Ava. No one could take that from her, but it was her biggest fear.

She just wanted to be her own person and no one would let her do that.

So she just became a different person. And I always wondered if she ever looked back.

Sometimes she would get so upset with herself for being the person everyone expected her to be. She'd wake herself up screaming in the middle of the night and her dad never got mad. That's what the therapist said she would do.

It bothered her mercilessly until she couldn't take it anymore and she had to force herself to change. So she stopped sleeping. From the time she got to move back in with her parents after living a short spell with her grandmother, she stopped letting herself wake the house up with shrieks of terror. If she never slept, she'd never have nightmares.

And it made her emphatically happy that I never slept either. Besides, it was another opportunity for her to make me out to be the hero. Ava never slept, because she was being a stubborn little brat, in her own eyes. But I never slept because it's hard for a six year old to sleep outside during winter. I'd walk the three miles through the field between our houses just to find some warmth when she would stow me away secretly in her laundry room, where neither of our parents would even find out. And during the summer, she'd leave her dad's shop unlocked to keep me out of the weather.

For a while, it wasn't safe to cross the field at eleven at night just to leave a four and be back to my porch before the sun came up on our secret, so I took up sleeping in the barn. In the fall, the hay and the mouse fattened cats were enough warmth, but seasons change the way time does: too fast when you find comfort, and too slow when you're waiting to die.

Yet, there were times when freezing to death would have been nature's gift for me. At least I wouldn't have to deal with the grandfather Ava didn't have and put up with bullshit Ava couldn't even imagine. She'd rather have layed on the cushioned mattress of her aunt's bedroom than to constantly find herself without a bed at all.

When I was, nine and it was the dead of winter, I found a blanket buried in a pile of hay where I usually slept. It was Ava's very own. I knew because it was the one she carried around with her everywhere, always wrapped in the fluff. It had been on her bed the day before when I'd been at her house. Yet, she'd managed to sneak out to our barn and leave it just for me. So I wouldn't have to be so cold. So the cats and I could stay warm. That's just who Ava was. Even though it was her warmest blanket, she left it for me.

It smelled just like her dad. That was something her therapist had suggested before she quit going when she was eight. He said her parents should use smells to help her sleep better. He said that if she smelled the perfume of someone she trusted, maybe it would help calm her during her nightmares. So every week, after it had been washed, her dad would spray it with his cologne and leave it on her bed. And every night, she drug it around the house with her, moving from the couch, to the dining room, to her bedroom, all with it wrapped safely around her shoulders.

Until she gave it to me. For two weeks, the red blanket was replaced with a pink one that was much thinner and less satisfying. But she never once complained. And she never once complained that her favorite blanket was hidden in my barn, saving me from the harsh winter frosts. In fact, neither of us mentioned it until the night after I got caught, and she only brought it up because she blamed herself.

In truth, it had all been my fault. A careless mistake she couldn't claim, and yet she did. She thought she and her blanket were the reason I was banished from the barn and forced to hide out in the bushes until finally the coast was clear and I could take up my residence in her laundry room until spring came again. But it wasn't. She had nothing to do with any of the things that happened to me.

Ava never understood it, but she wasn't following me. I was trying to follow her. Even though it didn't really show, I wanted to have a good heart like Ava. Because for a long time, I thought a heart of gold could never get broken.