Pretty Little Bones

She Sure Is Gonna Get It

She Sure Is Gonna Get It

Before Ava let me in on the one she kept, I never knew there could be so much magic in secret keeping.

To her, it wasn't about being a hypocritical liar; it was about being a storyteller. There was a reason for everything and that was the way she liked it. That was how she dealt with not being able to understand what was happening in her mind: she made up excuses.

Everything happened for a reason.

When she kept suffering injury after injury, they were all connected. Because she pulled a ligament in her knee, she walked strangely to combat the pain. Subsequently she cracked the bones in the top of her foot from the new way of walking. It wasn't because the muscles were deteriorating. It wasn't because she passed out from a lack of energy and smashed her foot. Because to her, that didn't make sense. She thought she was perfectly healthy.

She was in control and there was nothing dangerous in that, so she made up fairy tales. She spoke poetry about her happiness. It was all so strangely beautiful. Just like her. She couldn't accept the fact that it was her mind. She didn't want to believe that she was doing it to herself.

But when she got sick, Ava had to acknowledge the truth. As the nurses kept stabbing needles in her arm and checking her vitals countless times, they pressured her. She panicked. It was like she was a caged animal the way her gray eyes flashed back and forth between me and the nurses. Me and the nurses. They said they didn't understand what was going on. Ava was never a sick girl. She never had anything wrong with her and suddenly they couldn't keep her body from shutting down.

Every word was like another nail in the coffin of her secret. Nervously, she would pick at the hospital bracelets on her wrist until a nurse would slap her hand away. So she'd move to fingering the threads of the blankets on the bed until an assistant would ask her to stop. Then she'd look at me and back at the nurses. Me and the nurses.

I gave her my hand and she started grinding the knuckles together, watching the way they changed colors when she put pressure on them. Ignoring the commotion around her, she picked at the callouses on my fingertips and traced the lines on my palm. I was the only constant in the room that smelled sterile and screamed confessions from the lifeless white walls. The secret must have been killing her. It was eating away at her again and she had nothing left to hide it with. 

Thinking back on the moment, I thought that maybe I had actually heard when her composure broke like little pieces of glass. Angrily, she sat chewing on the inside of her pretty pale lips, feeling her bones crack under the pressure. Then, suddenly she just snapped. Before anyone knew what was happening she blurted out the four words that changed her life. 

And suddenly nothing was the same.

Everything about her was familiar. I knew every inch of her skin and all the depths of her mind.

Except that.

I didn't know that.

For two years, she'd tricked me and I hated myself for not knowing. Of course it wasn't me. It was her. She was the one crying for help. She was the one being ignored.

When the nurses left Ava turned to me desperately. If she could have cried, she would have. "Please don't tell anyone," she said. "Please."

I told her it wasn't up to me.

"Please," she begged. "Everyone already thinks I'm weird."

She was wrong. So wrong. No one thought she was weird and that was a stupid reason to hide a serious problem.

Again she shook her head, letting the blonde waves fall in her gray eyes. "I'm okay now," she said. "I'm not doing it anymore."

I didn't believe her. But she was so broken and scared that I had to.

"D'you think I'm crazy?" she asked, her gray eyes glaring at the bands on her wrist.

I shook my head and told her she was just a victim of rumors and sickness. She smiled. Her pale lips stretched across her face, making little frowns in the skin under her tired eyes. I told her to lay back and go to sleep. I promised I'd be there when she woke up and she nodded.

Carefully, she leaned back in the large bed and suddenly I realized just how small she was. She was lost in the thin, gray hospital gown. Skin and bones and scared.

Her gray eyes flittered shut, but she never went to sleep. Ava never slept.

Quietly, nurses would walk in and check on her or the old woman sleeping in the bed across the room, but she never opened her eyes. She didn't run her long, pale fingers through the tangled blonde waves or pick at the red and yellow hospital bands. She simply laid quietly, wishing she'd never said anything. Wishing she wouldn't have let the nurses know. Wishing she hadn't been so scared of dying.

The next morning, she was released from the hospital with orders to rest and take the antibiotics prescribed to her. She smiled politely with her thin, pale lips and thanked the nurses as they barked orders and gave her back her clothes.

On the way home, I started to really notice Ava. I saw the way she shrank back in the seat and picked at her fingernails. I watched the way her rings gleamed in the early morning sun. Then, slowly, I started to notice how focused her gray eyes were. Although she was avoiding my gaze, she was fixated on her pale skin. She looked at it with so much disgust and discontent, like she wanted to peel it all away. Like she was ashamed it.

Suddenly I realized how much she hated herself and I didn't understand. Just like her, I couldn't comprehend why she'd want to destroy herself. What had she done so wrong? Why did she hate herself so much? That scared me. For a girl that seemed so happy, she wasn't happy at all.

It was a long, quiet half an hour, but somehow we made it. Somehow we were still connected from the night at the creek and all those nights after, even though I'd never noticed the skin and bones she had become. Those nights had kept us together for almost three years. I could still feel her. She was still very real to me.

But she must have felt like nothing but a ghost until we pulled into her driveway. As she looked at the red brick house and the gray gravel driveway, something clicked. She whispered to me in a voice that didn't even sound like her own.

"Do you think this is all just a dream?"

I noticed the contrast of white on white.

"No."