Pretty Little Bones

Is this More than You Bargained for Yet?

Is this More than You Bargained for Yet?

The morning after Ava and I drank away our problems at the creek, we wound up at my house. She had told her dad she was staying with a friend, forgetting to mention it was me. He liked me just fine, but he didn't like his daughter messing around with guys.

Especially not after some of the rumors that went around the high school. And especially not after a picture of her with her shirt open at a party ended up on a social media site, making her a slut overnight.

So she lied. She was good at lying. Everyone was so wrapped around her finger that we believed every word that slipped out of her pretty pink lips.

I'm fine. Don't worry about me. Everything's okay. I love you.

In fact, she lied so much that she started believing some of them.

I'm just tired. I'm not sick. I love you.

Even the lies that didn't matter came to a meaningless existence from her lips. That morning was no exception.

It was like waking up without having ever gone to sleep that morning. We drifted into sobriety about as easily as falling through ice on the coldest day of winter—at least for her. She wasn't used to drinking and her lack of a tolerance made her incredibly sick.

The headache built up slowly and then suddenly became so bad that she couldn't remember if it had been there the whole time or not. Unfortunately for her, it probably had been.

That was always another constant in her life: headaches. She had lots of those. They came as frequently as the lies and only existed when she slipped up and let the hushed nuisance out.

All morning she sat in the bathroom, shivering and holding her head like the end of the world was coming and she was ready for it. I tried to comfort her at first but she wasn't in the mood.

"Get out," she said, pinching the bridge of her nose, turning her fingernails white and her flesh pink. "I don't want you to hear me throw up."

I laughed, low and soft. Leave it to Ava to worry about the most normal part of a hangover. "Please just leave," she said again, this time through her hands, fighting every muscle in her stomach not to convulse.

Desperation wasn't a good look on her. I left.

But an hour later when she was still sitting in the dark, dry heaving and shivering, I decided to step in.

"Leave," she said, a look of utter disgust on her face.

I told her no. I was bored and she was going to have to entertain me. What I didn't tell her was that I knew she was faking. She'd had the equivalent of one beer in the entire night and hours had passed. It didn't matter if she still had a headache. There was no reason for her to not be sobering up yet. No reason at all.

What I didn't know was that as right as I had been, I was also completely wrong. She wasn't exactly faking, but she wasn't hungover. She was doing it to herself.

At the time I didn't know she had a problem. I didn't know it bothered her how many calories beer had. It bothered her how careless she'd been.

It took her telling me straight across a year later that that afternoon she'd been making herself sick. She was doing it to end that headache. The one that told her she hated herself.

No, I didn't know it then. I just thought she was too scared she'd have to go see her aunt's husband. So I entertained her loosely scripted episode.

Her legs were stretched across the tile floor, the denim pants loose and wrinkled. When I sat down on the edge of the bathtub she pulled her them under her and curled into a tiny ball.