Pretty Little Bones

Come On and Use Me

As she shifted to get up, I closed my arm around her hand and pulled her back down. Instantly my actions had backfired and when I realized I had succeeded in making her feel guilty, I ended up making myself feel even worse. I told her I'd take her home and she grinned at me.

"Thanks," she said, resting her chin on her shoulder, passing off a cautious glance as a sweet, innocent gesture. She didn't want anyone to see her leave, because what she really wanted was for no one to know she had been there at all. It was part of her magic. Ava didn't drink. She didn't party. She didn't do drugs. But somehow she could relate to everyone that did in one way or another, because they never actually saw her doing those things. So they pretended she didn't and she let them believe that.

Ava would be what anyone needed, because she had the rare ability to be there when they didn't notice her. As the whitespace, she could do anything and everything and never get caught.

We stood up to walk and I posed the question again, only this time more aggressively. I didn't so much care anymore how her entire night did, but mostly just the last two or so hours.

"Not here," she said, again looking around nervously. "I'll tell ya later."

Sometimes I wondered if she just assumed no one ever remembered anything she said, because she always promised we'd talk about things later, but we never did unless I brought the subjects back up. Countless times I'd ask her important questions and she'd shrug them off. "Not now, 'kay? Later." "Not here." "Not today." "Not a good time."

Never the honest to God truth, here and now, in front of Jesus and everyone. Always later. But later never came, unless it showed up in my calendar or on my watch. I hated bringing up the same conversations over and over. It felt like smashing a lightbulb and flipping the light switch over and over again just to make sure it wouldn't accidentally catch the right fuses and light up.

So I was surprised when she actually answered when I asked her again, a few minutes later when we were driving toward her house.

Her face was blue and white in the glow of the radio and she shrugged once. Her blonde waves rolled down her shoulders and she swiped a long, pale finger under her eye, wiping off a stray smudge of mascara that the cold night had frozen on her cheek. "I dunno," she said, slowly. "It's just not really working out."

She reached across the cab and turned the radio up only for me to immediately turn it down again to ask her why. Sighing, she turned the heater up, needing some kind of noise to at least slightly drown out some of her thoughts.

"We want different things."

Immediately I could feel her watching me from the corner of her gray eyes, trying to judge my reaction so she'd know whether to stay silent or laugh like she'd intentionally made a horrible joke. She chose the latter, giggling nervously. Her answer was bullshit and she knew it. She'd been caught.

I told her to stop screwing around and just tell me the truth. The cab grew colder despite the heat and I could feel her body tense next to mine, like she thought if she tried hard enough, she could fall through the seat and onto the pavement. She could let her blood get smeared across the yellow lines and soon enough she'd be one of those weird stains on the road people thought were just shadows, but they'd really be her. They'd be the last remnant that even hinted at her existence.

"You're gonna laugh at me," she said. The headlights seemed to rise from the pavement and reflect off the stop sign as I put my truck in park at the intersection and turned to her. Putting my hand over my heart, imitating the whimsy she'd tried to poison me with, I swore to her I wouldn't laugh.

Her pretty pink lips twisted into a grin that was half mischievous and half embarrassed. In the silence of the moment, I could almost hear her heart start to pick up pace and keep time with the beat she created when she used the toe of one sneaker to pull down the heel of the other. Beneath her feet, beneath the floorboard, we could feel the truck shake lightly. The engine hummed in the background like it was the ambient noise against which she was setting her soundtrack.