Pretty Little Bones

I'm Writing the Report on Losing and Failing

I'm Writing the Report on Losing and Failing

Ava's game was pills. She ate pain killers like they were candy and no one ever called her out on it, because hardly anyone knew. And those who did had no place to judge.

The funny thing was, it was okay for her to shame me for doing heroin, or smoking, or drinking too much, but it wasn't okay for anyone to accuse her of abusing prescription drugs. She honestly didn't think it was a problem.

Ava had been dealt a losing hand when she was just a little kid and it left her living daily life in some varying degree of pain. I never knew a time when she wasn't at least mildly hurting, and neither had she. And all the things that happened as she grew up didn't help in the slightest. So she started self medicating.

She came by it honestly enough. Her dad smoked cigarettes until she was seven. Her mom baked away family problems, filling their home with pies and cakes until she finally left, cleaning out the aroma of stress and deception when she went. Ava's brother lost himself in whatever was the latest phase at school, slipping in and out of favorite television shows and video games as often as the days on the calendar came and went in dashes of red exs.

And Ava did pills. It started with some worthless over-the-counter shit. The pills that did stuff for everyone except people that actually needed pills. That was the first time she was allowed to take things for herself. After her surgery at seven her dad had fed her with the medications she was prescribed and he made sure she didn't overdo it. Ava saw it as a weakness and stopped taking them before she was ready. She said she'd rather hurt than have her dad think she couldn't handle pain.

But as she got older, the migraines didn't stop. Not after one pill. Not after two. Not after three. At first she was careful, taking only how much the label advised. But when they stopped working, she started making her own rules. Then she turned eleven and suddenly it wasn't just the occasional pains from an old surgery, or the tension headache from insomnia, or the migraine from stress and piss poor genetics. It was the kind of pain she couldn't talk about with her dad and didn't want to talk about with the mom that had left her. It was the kind of pain the girls at school talked about excitedly for the first year, then with great annoyance every year after.

She never talked about how badly she hurt for at least one week out of every month and that was part of her problem: she never let anyone know she had a problem. Her mom left and she didn't have anyone to teach her what was normal and what wasn't. So when the other girls complained about their cramps and PMS or whatever else they decided was wrong with them once a month, she stayed quiet. Ava decided if all the other girls could handle the pain, so could she. What she didn't realize was that her pain wasn't normal. Her pain was her body's way of telling her something was seriously wrong. And even though Ava was the best listener in the world, she never heard a word her body said. Not even when it was screaming for help.

She held out for almost four years before finally the pain was too much for her. At first she faked sick on days when she couldn't get out of bed. But as she got old, she didn't have to fake anymore. The pain would have her doubled over in the bathroom, retching up the dinner she didn't eat. Finally it got to be too much—enough that her dad noticed. So she confessed to her grandmother that she didn't think she was like other girls and the doctor confirmed.

Ava had a chronic pain disease: endometriosis. They said it would be with her for the rest of her life. If she was even able to have kids, she'd have to do it early. If she wanted to ease the pain, she'd have to end the chance to have kids before she ever even had the opportunity to want a family. And if she wanted to grow up before she had to make extremely adult, irreparably permanent decisions, she'd have to live on a stead diet of pain pills. Fifteen year old Ava chose to wait.

At the time, we all thought she just didn't want to commit to never having kids. It made sense—it's not fair to ask a fifteen year old to plan out her entire life when everyone else had the chance to just live it. And even though I found it a little strange—she'd been telling me since we were seven that she never wanted kids—I didn't question her. I thought she'd have plenty of time to grow up and change her mind or solidify her wants. I thought she'd grow older and figure out who she was and what she really wanted from life. But that wasn't what she was doing at all.

Ava chose the pain killers because she was punishing herself. She didn't want the easy out. She didn't want to go ahead and make the decisions she'd struggle with all her life. Ava wanted to be in so much pain she could hardly walk. She wanted to sleep in the bathroom, dry-heaving for three or four nights every month. She wanted to always toy with the idea of having kids she didn't want. She wanted to be miserable.

Ava wanted to make herself suffer because she thought it was what she deserved.

At some point, while she was behind the closed doors in her aunt's bedroom, Ava decided she must have been a very, very bad person to deserve what she got. So she took every chance she could to punish herself. And no one even seemed to notice.

So as the years passed, Ava swallowed pills like water and no one said a word to her. Even though she took the pills for her endometriosis at least once a week, no one questioned it. But to be fair, they didn't know she still took the over-the-counter stuff too. Only I knew that, because she trusted me to trust her. I don't know why I didn't try to stop her. I guess I didn't realize what a problem it was.

Sometimes, if she'd taken all her pills and still had tears in her eyes, I'd give her mine. The ones I kept hidden away in a drawer, too afraid to take myself. Too afraid they send me back down the rabbit hole of needles and regrets. Despite Ava being the one with a chronic pain disease, I was the one with the good shit.

And every time I gave them to her she'd repeat the phrase I'd told her on the only night she ever saw me high. With a drooping grin she'd whisper, "You only share the good shit with people you care about, huh, Carter?"

I always laughed and agreed with her. It was something I'd learned in the years I'd spent taking drugs of my own. You only shared the good shit with people you cared about.