Pretty Little Bones

We Go Together or We Don't Go Down at All

We Go Together or We Don't Go Down at All

Ava always believed that I wasn't afraid of anything. But I came by it honestly, because after I grew up, there was nothing left to be afraid of.

It was a lot like learning to swim. The farther you'd go, the deeper the ocean would get until you were left with the choice of treading water or drowning. Even with lungs full of dirty, salty water I could sell lies to the poorest of people; they were the ones who never paid attention.

Ava wished I had taught her to be fearless instead of teaching her how to tell stories. How to say I'm fine when she wasn't even okay. When she got so good at lying, it wasn't fun anymore. Practice was forced on her from all the curious onlookers, dying for a piece of gossip to slobber over at the dinner table.

Maybe I was the one who taught her to cram her emotions into all the empty spaces she could find. Until she came along with her treasure chest of horrors, like a freak show in a haunted house, I was the small town scandal.

When it was her turn, the words were eerily similar, like a bad movie that kept being played over and over, because no one could be bothered to switch the tape. We were artists on the same old record: the greatest hits of childhood tragedies.

See, people always said that Ava and I were the exact same person, just mirror images. And they weren't wrong. We were exactly the same in every way except one: I was a liar and she was a runner.

I never pretended bad things didn't happen to me, but she tried to escape them.

And that made all the difference.

While I spent time learning how to float, letting the currents take me where they wanted until the gossip simmered from waves into wakes, Ava kept trying to get back to shore. More often than not, she was trying to hit rewind, but just managing to put her life on a replay loop. The record spun over and over.

I knew all the lyrics to make it scratch enough that the story was always blurred. The I don't knows and the I can't remembers. All the good lines I taught her when she was five and she mastered them in the span of a single breath, knowing there wouldn't be time to spare when she was running away. Time was never time at all.

Nothing was ever what anyone thought.

But it wasn't like she had a choice. She had to lie. She'd seen me go down that road before and knew it was best to learn from my mistakes. It wasn't some magic trick or some circus act. We didn't tell lies as a game or even for self-amusement.

It was a survival technique.

I don't know what happened. Guess I fell down.

It was an accident.

It doesn't hurt.

Nothing happened.

I tripped.

I fell.

My fault.

It was kind of funny, but mostly of sad pretending to be so clumsy when, really, life was nothing but walking on a tightrope.

And I taught her the best trick in the world: if you keep your head down and watch your feet, it's easier to keep your balance. Making the circus act as lackluster as possible was like putting up a safety net and, in turn, the spectators gave up on the show. No one wants to see you fall if you're not going to completely shatter when you hit the ground.

That was why she started clinging so tightly to me. I knew how to be okay with the bad things and I could be okay with her.

Everything in our lives aligned in some strange, star-crossed phenomena that set our worlds on the same path. She hid behind me, scared to slip on a wet stone or catch a current at a bad angle and be swept away forever.