Are You Awake?

|The language of lies|

Cari couldn't remember the last time she had told her mother anything other than lies. Or she could, but that wasn't since before she started school. She used to be the kid who always told her mother anything. If she had done something she knew she would get in trouble for doing, she would still tell her mom, which was something Noreen really admired her daughter for. She didn't know what made Cari tell her everything, but she for sure hoped it was something the brown-eyed girl would continue doing, it made her feel trusted.

But once Cari started school, that changed. Eventually the only one who knew of the blonde-haired girl's secrets was the mirror in her bedroom. It wasn't like their talks gradually stopped either, they just suddenly stopped one day and the only thing that came out of Cari's mouth after that day, was lies. The brown-eyed girl still remembered that day. The day her smile stopped radiating love, the day her eyes lost their light and the day her brain stopped letting her vocalize the truth. She remembered the day she lost control and her mirrors stole it.

Noreen did, too, just not as vividly as her daughter did. She remembered how Cari quickly came towards her awaiting car one day with her gaze at her feet and went straight to her room the second they got home. Usually, Cari would run towards the car with a wide smile on her face, telling her mom everything there was to know about her day at school and anything else that could possibly come to her mind. But not that day.

That day was the first day Cari had come home from school without as much as a word spoken to her mother, before she ran upstairs, out of her mother's sight, and towards the mirror that used to stand by her closet in her bedroom. She took her newly bought, pink sweatshirt off and threw it onto her bed. She had just had her first PE class and the first ever comment on her body had been made by a girl in her class, who apparently though Cari was "too fat to get into that shirt" after the class when she was getting changed, and she had to check it they were right.

At the time Cari didn't know if it was true. She wanted to protest and tell the girl, who she later found out went by the name Rebecca, or Reba as the quickly growing popular group called her, but when her friend Claudia nodded along with the girl's comment, Cari closed her mouth and threw her pink sweatshirt on with her gaze glued to the floor. No one dared to go against Rebecca either. No one said anything. So, Cari quickly packed her things up and ran towards her mom's car with a few unshed tears in her eyes.

That was the first time Cari ever faced what would eventually become her biggest bully – her soon-to-be biggest enemy of them all.

That was also the first time Cari ever told her mom a lie. It was the first time she felt like the truth would hurt her mom more than a lie would. Earlier in her life, the blonde-haired girl thought the pain in her stomach after telling her mom anything only a little bit away from the truth would hurt more than actually telling the truth and, if she had done something wrong, take her punishment as, like her mom said was, the good girl she was.

But when she sat down in the back seat of her mom's car that day, after running away from the other girls in her class with her head down in fear of showing her mom the tears she was so desperately trying to keep at bay, she felt like the truth would leave a worse pain in her stomach that the lie that slowly fell off her tongue would. "My tummy hurts, mommy. I think I ate something bad," Cari had told her mom silently, clutching her stomach with her left hand tightly to show her mom just where it hurt. It was only half a lie, Cari had told herself. Her stomach did hurt, yes. But Noreen didn't need to know why it really hurt. That was Cari's secret to keep.

Cari's first ever confrontation by the mirror and the girl in the locker room was the beginning of the journey that would eventually turn Cari into who she was now. It was the beginning of Cari's daily visits and 'secret sharing's with the mirror in her bedroom, later her bathroom. It was the beginning of light teasing in the girls' locker room at school and the beginning of losing the strong bond she once shared with her mother. It was the beginning of Cari's process of learning the new language that seemed to become more natural as days, weeks, moths and eventually years passed by. The language of lies.