Oleander Bruises

" It was never a matter of will she do it, but how she'll do it. "

Indy Mae Oleander was seven years old when her mother lit herself on fire, filled up the tub with gasoline and dead flowers, slipped right in holding the match like a prayer in her hands.

Her father followed suit before the ashes had time to cool.

She was wading through the constellation of his brains a few weeks later, the ceiling fan swirling around the scent of gunpowder and prickling goose flesh along the curves of her small body. Her vomit had splattered from her gasping mouth and onto his limp shoes, the stained floor — the sick sizzle as it hit his skin, as it mixed with the cold dead sea of his insides. There had never been anything warm about him.

Where were girls to go when they were made like her? When they came from a home with such horrifying secrets?

She was a little honeybee, wings ripped off and left to cling to the curved bottom of her glass bell jar. She grew like a wildflower between the weathered floorboards of a haunted house, and her eyes had been made to see the things that crept silently screaming behind closed doors: the secrets too gruesome to spill, the pictures too haunting to paint. The baseboards here were soaked with blood, like her watercolor bruises — they didn't wipe away.

At twelve came the startling truth: there had been girls before her. Girls who went inside Oleander House and never came back out. Girls with blonde hair and porcelain skin, with eyes that could only see her father's ghost. Her older sister had been one of them. There were no survivors, no one left to tell their stories, only the terrible knowledge that her father had been a monster long before Indy ever understood what the word meant.

Afterward, she was raised by her grandmother in a little cottage tucked against the forest. Her grandmother was kooky in the way some women are; a little witchy, a little wild, the sort who read fortunes in coffee grounds and spoke to the birds as if they might answer. It was there, beneath the pines and the summer fireflies, that Indy learned how to live quietly with ghosts.

At seventeen, homeschooled by her grandmother and the epitome of reclusive, Indy has grown into a ghost girl; paper-faced and silent. She has learned to stitch herself up after every tear, has grown into a mismatched quilt of parts that don't quite go together. Like this, Indy knows that she was always made for the hurt.

For the blue.

Open her mouth to suck in a breath and only memories rushed in, enough to drown in. Good thing she was made for the drowning too.

Soaked in sadness with no way out, it is the summer before senior year that Indy begins to meet local boy Jared-Cameron Fisher in the oddest of places: the gravel pit of the outdoor vegetable market, all dusty southern heat and the thick honey-sap of summer. The town library, between the stacks, the whispering of pages and words traded without a mouth ever opening. The watering hole after she had taken a drug-laden swan dive from the rickety wooden bridge above.

And for the first time, someone doesn't look at her like she's broken. They look at her like she's alive.

What begins as an unlikely friendship slowly becomes something messier: the terrifying intimacy of being known.

Jared-Cameron begins to understand that Indy isn't simply a girl who wants to die, she's a girl who has never learned how to live. She has spent years building herself into something no one could reach, has perfected the art of disappearing while still standing in the room.

What she doesn't know is what to do when people refuse to let her go.

Jared-Cameron doesn't know how to save her, and Indy isn't sure she wants to be saved in the first place.

Because sometimes the hardest part isn't convincing someone to stay, it's convincing them that there might actually be something worth staying for.

Summer was supposed to be her end.

Instead, it became the beginning of everything.

"I'm trying to let him know what I'm about to do. I'm hoping he can save me, even though I realize he can't." – Matthew Quick, from Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock

TRIGGER WARNING !

childhood sexual abuse, ptsd, depression, suicide, self-harm, murder, torture, sexual assault, horror, mental illness.