THIS IS AN UNEDITED AND SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENT VERSION OF THE MISFORTUNES OF LOLITA. I AM PUBLISHING IT IN FALL 2021—PLEASE FOLLOW ME ON IG @/ls.akhter and GOODREADS (L AKHTER) TO STAY UPDATED. I am so excited to share TMoL with you again.
(please read the author's note at the end!)
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Lolita couldn't walk for a few days after she woke.
She couldn't put her feet on the ground long enough to stand up straight, and her words faltered all the time, twisting around her tongue but never leaving. She couldn't look straight at anyone, not the officers who tried to ask her questions about what happened-she couldn't even talk to them. Not her father. And especially not Frank.
The bruises on her face were wilted flower petals, blue and yellow, and her hands. Her hands kept shaking every time she spoke. Her voice was rougher than usual, and softer, and she swallowed her words a lot. Frank felt like he hadn't seen her black coffee eyes in what felt like years, and then he realized he kind of hadn't.
She wouldn't look him in the eye.
She'd woken up, but she felt out of reach, out of his grasp. The doctors put her on bed rest as soon as they realized she couldn't walk yet, and told the sheriff that he should walk her every afternoon for at least fifteen minutes. They did a thousand tests, and talked with the sheriff after each. Martha called Frank every day, telling him to come home now, she's awake, she's alive.
Frank was needy. He wanted to see her face light up when she saw him, but it didn't. He wanted to feel her smile against his neck when he took her in his arms, but there was nothing. Lolita was awake. Lolita was alive.
He should be happy. But he was needy. Selfish.
They-the sheriff and Akima and Evelyn-took turns as her crutch, walking her around the hospital. It was three days after she woke, that Frank got his turn. She never asked for him. She never called his name. He waited for her to, every day, he waited outside her door, sat on the chairs across the hall, but she never wanted to see him.
He felt like he was losing his head.
Frank remembered waking up.
He'd heard her voice and he remembered raising his head and his heart must've leapt to his throat because her hand was around his fingers, holding on like he wasn't even real.
"Frank?" she'd asked, and his fingers had tightened around hers without him even knowing and he'd sat up.
"Jesus Christ," he'd muttered.
Frank had gotten up, striding out to the doors and yelling for a nurse or a doctor or something, and then he'd gotten back inside, pulling her up almost carelessly, the wires that attached her oxygen mask to her face sticking underneath his arms as he'd wrapped them around her.
He'd said a thousand times then, I love you, I love you, I love you I love you I love you-and she'd trembled in his arms, her hands grasping onto his shirt, and her breaths made a trapped sound inside her mask and she cried and cried and cried and cried.
He remembered, now. She held on so lightly, like she barely even could, until the doctors ran in and he had to leave the room. He remembered how shaken she looked, god, she looked like an open wound, she felt like an open wound.
He remembered. She didn't say that she loved him back, the day she woke up.
He was too happy to even think of it then, but she hadn't, and now, now it crawled up his throat, the fear.
Could people change like that? Could she wake up and not love him anymore?
He remembered her holding the gun. He remembered Lana and Robin and all the blood that Lolita coughed up, all the cuts and bruises on her face-everything that had happened since then.
Was he not a little different, too? Was he not a little tainted? Did he not carry more than before?
He waited outside the door of her hospital room. His fingers shook. He knew his eyes were probably bloodshot and his hair was a mess and fuck, his entire body felt high on something, nervous and aching and afraid. But there was this thing-this feeling. Right around his heart. This stillness-this reassurance.
She was alive. She was here.
One of the nurses came out of her room and smiled at him, saying she was ready, and he ran his fingers through his hair, trying to comb it, or make it worse, or something. Anything. He felt feverish, and weird, and he kept thinking that she wouldn't recognize him, for some fucking reason.
She sat at the edge of her bed, her hair tied back loosely in a braid, her hospital clothes creased and blue like the sky. The sheriff sat with her, and when he saw Frank, he gave a nod.
Frank walked to them, looking at her as she breathed in and out and in. She got up, balancing one hand on her father's shoulder, and Frank reached out to take her by her forearm.
Her jaw clenched, and she let go of the sheriff's shoulder, dragging her feet as Frank walked, slowly, beside, her, holding her-but not too close. Not close enough.
He was only supposed to walk her around the hospital, but he wished he could've taken her outside. The summer light outside made everything golden and good. He would show her flowers and point to the sky. The world is better with you, I love you, I love you.
She wouldn't look at him, even now. Her shoulder bumped his with every step, and she winced sometimes, and he wished he could go back. Not to when it was simpler, because it never fucking was-but to when there were words to say.
They walked down the hall, quiet and Frank felt like he was reaching for something. His entire life had just been that-reaching for something but never quite getting to it. So now-now he thought if this would be one of those things. If he would keep walking with her without saying a word, without changing anything, without saying to her what he wanted to say every day till he died.
Stay. I love you. Stay.
The hallways got quieter, and he wasn't sure how long had gone by. She looked down at the floor the whole time, and his hand grasped her arm in the same place. He felt like someone was pulling at his insides, when they turned to walk back to her room.
"Can I-" his throat closed up. She looked at him, not fully, but she looked at him. Her bruises marked her face like war paint, but the look in her eyes made his heart twist.
"Yeah," she whispered, and he swore her smile pulled out all the strings that tied his heart together.
He caught onto her other arm and pulled her close, one hand around her shoulder, and the other her waist, closer and closer and closer.
"I understand," she said then, quiet. "If this gets too hard. I get it."
"What are you saying?" he couldn't process her words, at first. She was so close. When he did, he leaned back. "What are you doing right now?"
Her eyes stayed on one side of his face, never looking straight at him. "I'm trying to make this easier. I'm telling you that you can go, if you want. I don't hold you. You can go."
Frank was quiet for a while, making her look at him, into his eyes, his fingers along her jaw. Her face and lips and hair and god-her eyes. "There was so much blood," He said.
She let out a breath she'd been holding, and he still hung onto her. Just another minute. Another year, another lifetime. "You gave me the gun and then I held you like this, and then you coughed up blood, and there was more blood from your knees and head and your face had so many cuts. And you were grabbing at your stomach, and you fell to the ground and I swear I did too."
Lolita began to cry, then. She shook in his arms, gasping for breaths, her head at his shoulder, her hands hugging her torso.
Frank leaned back, the side of his face brushing hers, and she looked at him, her eyes reddened and welling with tears, her lips flushed. "I lost it when I saw you fall. I carried you to the paramedics. Your blood was on my shirt. When you got to the hospital, I waited for you here, every day, until the day you woke up."
She watched him, tears running down her face, on a race to fall to the ground. His throat threatened to close up, but he spoke anyway. "I waited for you to look at me again, the way you used to. I would always wait for you. So-look me in the eye when you tell me to leave. Look me in the eye and tell me how you're making it easier."
Lolita put her fingers over her mouth and cried, her breaths heavy, and god, he swore someone was cutting his heart out with a dagger. He almost forgot that he was still holding her so she wouldn't fall, and his fingers loosened as she leaned in and rested her head on his shoulder.
"You still love me," she cried, her words muffled by her tears, and he closed his eyes, his arms wrapping themselves around her on their own accord. "How-Frank-"
"Did you think I'd stop?" he asked.
She half laughed, brushing the back of her hand against her mouth, and winced, holding her stomach, where the stitches were still healing. Frank took her hand and they sat at a bench, and he remembered when she fell asleep beside him when his father was at the hospital-a million years ago from now.
They were quiet again, and Frank reached for her hand, brushing her fingers with his. Lolita's first instinct had always been to push people away-he understood why. That was how people reacted to love when life robbed them raw. That was how he used to react, leaving before being left, all the while looking for someone who would make him want to stay. Reaching, pulling back.
But now, he just reached and reached and reached. He would bring down the sky for her. She made him want to stay. She gave him peace.
"I would've shot her," she said. They'd been sitting quiet for how long, he didn't know. He'd been watching her, as she calmed her breath, wiped her cheeks dry. "In that moment, I would've."
"I know."
"Does that change anything for you?" she asked and there was that thing again-she wouldn't look at him. "What if I'd done it? Would you still love me then?"
Frank leaned his head back against the white speckled wall. He felt braver, the words falling from his lips without hesitation. "I know you think that you pointing that gun at Lana makes you a bad person," he looked at her. "But I don't. You should know that. I think I'll always see you as the only good thing in the world."
Lolita opened her mouth to say something, and then closed her eyes, leaning her forehead against his shoulder.
"I would've done it too," he said, quietly. He would've. If they had done to him what they'd done to Lolita-he didn't even think he would be alive. She was stronger.
"I feel like I'm still there," she muttered, softly, feverishly. "Things were good. I thought everything would be good, but they took that away again. Things keep becoming bad. I just wanted to be happy. Why am I never happy?"
Frank pulled her closer, and Lolita leaned back, looking at him, desperately. "I'm never really going to be okay. The doctors think I'll have PTSD-I have nightmares now, about them. I'm always going to be like this. Isn't that ironic? That even after so many times when I tried to scrape Lana and Robin and all of them from me, I'll always carry them with me now, even more than before?"
"Lolita," he said.
"I don't want to be like this," she said.
Her voice shook when she spoke. She grew more and more tired. Frank didn't know the answers to her questions. They weren't even questions. She was afraid and stuck and so was he and it all felt unfair. It always had. It was unfair. She was a sad story. He was a sad story too-but she was his story, as much as he was hers. She would always be his, she would always be the looped memory playing in the back of his head, no matter where he went.
They walked back slowly, and she fell asleep soon after her head rested on the pillow. Before she did though, she said go home. He kissed her forehead, and she closed her eyes before he could say he was home.
--
At school, everyone asked Frank questions.
It disgusted him, he felt nauseous when he looked at them. People who had always looked the other way when Lolita had been bullied for years suddenly had begun to care. Even Mr. Gullet had chosen to retire after the sheriff's department interrogated him about his ethics. The school had been closed for three days after that day-because of the crime scene.
Liam spoke to him before practice, offering his help in any way that he could, and Frank could barely talk to him. He felt like he wasn't real-after what had happened in this very school, coming back after so many days didn't feel real. He could still hear Lolita's screams in his head. He was still on that couch in the hospital, waiting for someone to wake him up and tell him things would be okay. He walked around hazy, all the time. He wondered if he would ever fully recover. The only solace was that she was awake-he wasn't sure where he'd be if she wasn't.
The sheriff's department sent officers to take both Lolita and Frank's statements as soon as she was well enough to go home, and Frank kept remembering how shaken Lolita had been when she spoke about that night-he remembered how she looked like she was swallowing her tears the entire time she spoke.
"They grabbed you from behind, yes?"
"Yeah," she'd said. "Robin did."
"How do you know it was Robin?"
"I saw his hand," she'd said, trying to speak with detachment, but her voice shook. She had even been trying to give details as she spoke so the officer wouldn't ask too many times. "Looked like a guy's hand. He pressed a napkin to my nose. I don't know what it was."
"Mr. Reynolds confirmed it was a chloroform type substance that he and Lana had concocted up, finding the recipe on the internet," the officer had continued. Frank had barely listened. He'd sat at the chair across the hospital room, watching her brush away the stray hairs that had gotten out of her braid. The sheriff had sat beside Lolita, holding her hand. "And so, after you woke-"
"I heard them arguing. They'd tied me up against a pillar, it was dark, I realized we were inside the school when they turned the flashlight on. And then, Lana started saying things and kicked me a few times," Lolita had swallowed the lump in her throat, her jaw tight. She'd spoken quickly, one word running into another. "Robin was in for the first few times she hit me, but afterwards he got uneasy, told her to stop."
"When did she bring out her gun?"
"Robin kept yelling at her, telling her to stop because I was bleeding and he untied my ropes-" she'd closed her eyes, and then opened them, glancing at Frank. "Lana got really angry. She took the gun out of her bag and pointed it at us."
"When did the sheriff arrive?"
"Maybe twenty minutes. Maybe an hour, I don't know. Time was slow," her voice had cracked, and the sheriff had closed his eyes, holding her hand even tighter. "I kept talking to her, saying anything, and she kept kicking me and screaming and hitting and I let her so she wouldn't use the gun on me."
"Mr. Novak arrived, and you took the gun from Lana," the officer jotted down in his little notebook with lightning speed.
"I don't know how," Lolita had said. "I wanted to live so I stood up and took the gun and I punched her across the face in the process."
"Frank," Talia called now, as he was walking by.
He walked to her, leaning one shoulder against the lockers. He felt tired. He wanted to go home-sleep-see Lolita. She stayed at home, studying for the exams she still wanted to write-she still wanted to graduate this year.
It had been a few days since she'd left the hospital, and she would call him, sometimes in the dead of the night, sometimes in the middle of the day, when she felt like the walls of her home were closing in on her. Panic attacks-the doctor had said. She would call him, and if he was in school, he would soothe her with his voice, and if he was at home, even in the middle of the night, he would meet her at her door, hold her till she'd breathe normally again.
"How is she?" Talia asked.
She would check in on Lolita sometimes, and Frank liked her the more for it. She never asked to see her-she'd finally realized that some things were better left unfinished for now.
Cora came to stay with them, midway through June, when the leaves were all green and bright-graduation was only a few weeks away.
Tom welcomed her with open arms, called her Coraline like he always used to, and she smiled so big every time he did that Martha started to take pictures.
Frank and Cora and Tom and Martha had family dinners too, and it all was so good that he had to mutter everything will be great to himself, until he started to believe it halfway.
Football season was over, and he was glad it was. He found himself reading more, and oftentimes he'd study with Lolita for their exams, and it would be a nagging reminder that he was staying another year and she was going to Michigan State.
You have me, Frank Novak. You have me.
She had said she would stay, in the letter she'd written. But she'd written it so long ago-so now, he didn't ask if she would stay. He was afraid. The things that connected them were tainted with that night, they were both different, a little more fumbling, more desperate, clinging to each other to make it last.
Lolita brought it up, one night, when they met in the dim hallway in front of their home.
She was breathing hard, and he spoke to her, closing his eyes and holding her as he leaned his back against the wall, half asleep.
Lolita was the same-in her words and touch and love. And yet-she was darker. She would be, for a while, he realized. She would avert her gaze more, would smile a little less than before, and whenever she heard Lana or Robin's names, she would flinch. She wouldn't speak about that night anymore. The days went by fast, now. Too fast. He felt like he was losing something every day.
"I know you read the letter," she whispered.
"Hm?" he couldn't hear at first, and his lips were pressed against the corner of her forehead.
"I know you read the letter," she said.
"I did," he smiled.
She leaned up and pressed her lips to his, her cheeks damp underneath his fingers. They kissed, fumbling and feverish and sleepy, until she leaned away, breathing hard, her jaw tight.
"What's wrong?"
"I'm sorry," she whispered. She was shaking again.
"Why?" his heart sped up, and he knew. He knew what she would say.
"I'm so sorry," she wiped her cheeks violently, and then flinched when she hit a nearly healed bruise. "I love you."
"It's okay," he tried to say, but he couldn't.
"I love you," she said, looking at him, finally. Her eyes shined in the dimmed lights, the tears falling past her cheeks. "I can't stay here. I'm leaving after graduation."
"It's okay," he finally said, after a long silence. He wish he'd said it better, but his voice sounded weak in the dark.
She said I love you, I love you, I love you- again and again and again.
--
First off, there will be at least another chapter, an epilogue of sorts. Second, sorry for the delay, thank you for reading. I'd really like to know what you think of this chapter!!
It was hard for me to write this because a) I was rewriting the story, b) I didn't like the other ending I wrote (those of you who read chapter 24 when it was posted a few months back). I was trying to give them a happy ending, which was wrong of me. c) I wasn't sure that Frank still loved Lolita, or that Lolita still loved Frank. If you read the entire story, you'll notice that both of them are different in this chapter and the previous. Which is why I really want to know if this chapter was good/if I should improve anything.
Two things I want you to consider: Frank is clinging, grasping for anything to make Lolita love him like before and Lolita is running from everything that ties her to "this place". Which might include Frank. Do you think that was portrayed well? Be considerate of the fact that both of them went through trauma so they will be a little /off/. Hopefully I can tie that up in the next chapter/s.
Do you think their love is the same?
Lastly, I was hesitant to post anything because I'd been getting into arguments with a few folks on here regarding some parts of this story. I was wrong to not write, I should've focused on those of you who continue to support me (even after a three month long wait for this chapter).
I'm also thinking of another story, I actually began to write it at first as an alternate universe type thing where it would be from Lolita's POV in college, if Frank had died in that car accident A WHILE BACK. But I'm changing the characters now, and the plot.
The next chapter will be up this week, along with the video hopefully!!