Trapped in Forever

43 ~ The Girl with Daisies in her Hair

Roxanne’s life felt like a secret I couldn’t quite tell, couldn’t whisper the words that no one knew but me, murmured those sentences that would change everything, alter facades and shift her place in their mind, and I felt like I held the key to those secrets, those unsaid words and unfelt sentences that even I couldn’t quite look in the eye, afraid they would be too bright or too daunting, dismembering my image of her, with blond hair spilling down her shoulders in tumbled waves, a pink sunburn tinting her shoulders with the pale, white line of her tank top strap running across her skin, and that casual, nonchalant smile she pulled her lips into when the lens of a camera pointed toward her countenance. She would become something else if I looked too closely into what she did before she died, how she stared mindlessly out of windows, or how the tank tops slowly turned into long sleeved sweaters, curling the hems into her fingers. I always thought she wore them because it was winter, because she was cold, because her dad was being stingy with the heat or something, but now I remember things I didn’t. I remembered that hot pink Bic razor without the blade on the rim of the bathtub or that she wore so many bracelets on her wrists that night, when she applied her dark cherry lipstick and said it would be fun, and that who knew, maybe I could get myself “someone special.”

And maybe I did, but not that night, not at that party with the pounding music that throbbed in my ears and felt like my own pulse racing down my veins, tingling my fingers and toes, not there. There, if anything, I lost someone special. Somehow, that led me to find someone special, someone who wasn’t really mine to call special.

She was like a flash of light beaming in the darkness, bright and sudden, hurting your eyes and stunning your mind, and all you wanted was that simple, peaceful darkness back, but then your eyes adjusted and the light was easier, and okay, and then it went out, suddenly, once again, forever without warning, and all you wanted was that light to come back on, to hurt your eyes and stun your mind. That light was so bright, so close to your own eyes, that you never realized that there were dark corners of the room, hidden away from you, with cobwebs gathering in the corners and razor blades with dried flecks of blood stuck to the silver blade. Maybe the light was so bright to stop you from looking there, to stop you from seeing those insecurities that maybe she herself didn’t see, or maybe it was your own fault for never piecing it together. For never noticing the longer sleeved shirts or missing razors blades or far-off looks, like she was dreaming of a distant land, already planning her escape there. Sometimes I wonder if she ever thought of me, or her father, or even Orion, when she would think of that distant, far-off land, hazy with fog, and what would happen to us, or if she even cared.

Maybe all she wanted to leave, to run away from those girls at school who laughed at her, who wrote messages about her in permanent marker on the grayish bathroom stall doors, calling her names she didn’t deserve, names that had nothing to do with pica or the chalk, and away from those guys who laughed too, but in a different way, like they were torn between being turned on or disgusted, who chanted obscene things when she stood there at the top of the banister on the second floor, almost completely naked, the glints of their camera phones catching in her eyes. Whatever became of us, the ones who never laughed, who never took pictures or videos, or thought of her as anything other than Roxanne, was nothing to her, like a speck of dust on her view of the world.

Maybe she wanted to escape from us just as badly as she did them.

Maybe she wanted someone to notice these little details, like dropping breadcrumbs on the dusty dirt path of a forest trail, leading us toward future events, begging us to notice, to notice what she was doing, how she felt, what everyone else was doing to her. Maybe I was supposed to notice the Bic razors missing the blades and show someone, slip into my pocket and show a school nurse or even my mother, or grip her by the wrist and force her to roll up her sleeve to reveal the scars I wanted to believe didn’t exist. I almost didn’t have to. My mom tried to keep those pink, healing scars away from me, murmuring it to my father when she thought I couldn’t hear her in the other room, the clinking of dishes underwater as she said, They said the coroner found scars on her wrists. Some of them looked almost healed. Do you think Amanda knew? And my father would silently shake his head, I’m sure, and replied back, No, I don’t think so. She would have told us.