Pretty Little Bones

Come On and Use Me

At the time she was dating a much older guy. He was twenty-one and had his own place while she was seventeen and a walking travesty. They'd known each other for nearly four years and had spent a lot of time together considering he was her brother's best friend. It was a relationship her brother had blessed that started on good terms and ended on even better ones by her careful hand at meticulous planning.

But it set the precedence for a pattern that followed Ava into every relationship she ever attempted—except the ones she tried when she crawled into my bed.

Having someone old enough to know she was impressionable and someone ingrained to look for mental instability, she was lucky he knew not to push her into situations she wasn't comfortable with. He knew to back off when she pushed herself too far.

He knew she wasn't an affectionate person, but she was stubborn as hell.

Maybe he wouldn't push her, but she'd shove herself any direction they wanted—even after it suddenly took a turn onto what wasn't the path she wanted to be on anymore. It was like she was stumbling down a road drunk, wearing heels, only to sober up when one of them broke and she realized just how lost she actually was.

The only way to make sense of it was to compare Ava after she snapped to Ava coming down from a high like the one that put her in my arms on the football field that night in the rain. Only when she panicked she crashed fast and she crashed hard.

And she lied about everything to keep herself from getting hurt worse than she already was. She hid away her problems, and sometimes herself, and when she came back she'd be good as new.

But the thing about Ava was, she could disappear and it was a simple fact that if she didn't want to be found she wouldn't be.

That was how I found about her first true public panic attack: the guy she had hanging on her arm for the month—her brother's best friend—came to me at a party in a panic of his own asking if I'd seen her. Apparently she'd claimed to be feeling sick and had gone for a walk for some fresh air nearly two hours before he started to worry.

He knew Ava well, but not well enough to know that when she wanted to get lost even I couldn't find her. So I sent him in the direction I knew she probably wasn't and sat around waiting for Ava to find me. That was the game she liked to play.

It wasn't long before she came slinking back, almost walking out of the air like a ghost that had one foot in reality and one in the afterlife. With enough stealth to make a magician jealous, she snuck up behind me, slipped her arm through mine, and sat down beside me, never once attracting the attention of the people around us.

Pretending I didn't know about the amber alert her current man of the month had put out on her, I casually asked how her night was going. We hadn't talked to each other much since school that afternoon and it wasn't weird that I hadn't been keeping tabs on her that evening. Ava made her life look fragile on the surface, but underneath, she was the puppet master and the strings we all thought we were pulling to make her dance were actually our own.

"You think you can take me home?" she asked, only slightly ignoring my question. "It's about curfew."

I don't know why, but for some reason it annoyed me. Of course she could come to me at any time for anything, but that didn't mean I always wanted to drop my entire life for her whims, even though that's exactly what it meant. I wasn't annoyed with her, I was annoyed with myself and she was unfortunate to get the lit end of that match. I asked her why her man of the night couldn't take her home.

"Sorry," she said, not bothering to hide her hurt. "I just felt bad that I kinda blew you off after school and thought we could hang for a minute. But it's cool. I shoulda known you were busy. Sorry."