(Ariel: unedited)
The first thing that caught her eye was not the blood. It was impossible to miss – splattered across the floor, misshapen markings that looked like handprints smudged along the floorboards. But her gaze flickered over the wreckage, assessing the shards of broken china beside the bed; the broken window shade, dangling limply from its cords; the crushed flowers; the rumpled sheet. The sports jacket, hung by the doorknob; the black skirt, gauzy fabric in shreds; the untouched tray of cafeteria breakfast. A muffin, a Styrofoam cup.
It all looked as lifeless as the girl curled in the center of the bed.
A boy was hunched beside her. His hands covered his face, but the cropped hair, bound back by a bandana, and the thick silver ring on his forefinger, appeared familiar.
That was all she could think. At first. A room in shackles, a stranger at the bedside, a set of clothing torn almost beyond recognition.
But after the initial numbness dimmed, weight lifting from her eyelids, the horror of the situation struck her. Ariel teetered in the doorway, head spinning and nausea choking her. How could she enter? How could she accept that still, motionless figure as a reality?
Katrina. Katrina. Katrina.
Her thoughts blurred together and danced about her brain, jumbling the words sitting silently in her mouth. She didn’t realize she had stumbled forward until the boy looked up, face slackening in warning. And then, suddenly, the room had tripped upon its side and she was staring into Price’s cold obsidian eyes. His hands were hot on her waist.
“Are you okay?” His voice was surprisingly gentle, belaying the tautness of his jaw. A muscle flickered in his cheek as she struggled to stand, hands grasping for the front of his jacket.
The fabric was sliding beneath her fingers, and she felt like crying, because she was falling again, and everything was wrong wrong wrong. But amidst her swimming confusion, Price anchored her back to the ground and pulled her into a standing position. He tucked his more securely about her.
“Are you okay?” He repeated.
“Katrina.” The words flew out before she could contain them. Out of the corner of her eye, she say the boy turn his head sharply. Suddenly, the pieces fit themselves together. The chiseled features, the discombobulated attire. Who else would wear a Highland Hills ring and hiking boots? “Mcclain?”
“I don’t think –” Price began, but Ariel pulled herself from his grasp.
“It’s Mcclain,” she said, as if that explained everything. She tried to smile at him as she approached, but her limbs and her mind were still disconnected.
“Hello, Ariel.”
“Hi.” She joined him at Katrina’s bedside, trying to avoid Price’s surreptitious glare. Her friend looked like she was dead – her skin was icy to the touch, and the pulse in her throat seemed nonexistent. Bandages mummified both wrists. A needle was stuck into her forearm, running into a machine that reduced her heartbeat to tiny red spikes. “What happened?”
Mcclain sat back down. The chair squeaked beneath his weight, but he didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were intent upon Katrina. “She broke the pot.”
In that moment, Ariel realized why the full details of the room had not hit her, full force, upon entering. Because once the details emerged, stark and palpable against a blood-stained background, they hit her with enough force to send her to her knees. She sank down, the tiled floor sending a chill through her body.
It wasn’t quite pain. It was regret. Hard and strong enough to make her eyes water, horror clogging her throat shut. One Katrina became Four Katrinas, fragmented into the blurry squares of her vision. Her heart was racing so fast that it pounded a beat through her temples, tap-dancing on her skull.
She had known. She could have stopped her. The ceramic pot. The empty smile, the blank-stamped eyes. The thinly veiled promise lingering in the lines between her parting sentences.
This was her fault.
Weeks ago, Katrina had almost mowed the two of them straight into the center lane of traffic. They had been joyriding in Randall’s old car, drunk on bourbon-coffee and ugly secrets, singing and laughing and suddenly screaming.
That day, Ariel had felt unstoppable.
Until she wasn’t in control anymore, and things were spiraling around outside of her, and she couldn’t halt the destruction that she had set into motion. This crossed her mind now; Katrina had been an unstoppable force in life until things had become too much to bear. Too hard to handle.
Too quick, too painless, too erratic, to stop.
“Why?” It was a silly and ridiculous sentiment to choke out, but it was all Ariel could do to remain standing, staring at the shadow of her best friend. She felt Mcclain’s gaze boring into the side of her skull, riddled with accusation.
“You tell me.”
“No. It’s not –” Ariel started shaking her head. She was crying again, and she hated the weakness that closed about her like a cage, emotions rattling through her veins. “Why didn’t they take the pot away? How could they – how could we –”
“Ariel.” Price was leaning over her shoulder. In that awful, mournful moment, he shouldn’t have made her heart spike higher than any of those dancing red lines; but the second his skin brushed hers, she felt sick. Self-induced cardiac arrest had seized hold of her. “…you gave her a choice. Isn’t that what she wanted?”
“I shouldn’t have left.” She clutched for something and somehow found his calloused hand. “This is my fault. Mine. I knew what she was going to do with that pot, and I walked out the door anyways.”
Mcclain let out a low hiss, wind rushing through his teeth. He sounded like he had just been punched, the wind knocked out of his sails and turned upon him. “It was here yesterday?”
She scrubbed one hand viciously over her face. Leftover mascara turned her skin black; dark with sin. Thick with guilt and a strange, terrible sense of abandonment. “The second pot was here yesterday. Or so she said.”
“She’s been seeing doubles.” Carefully, Mcclain rested his palm over one of Katrina’s bandaged wrists. It almost looked like a show of ownership, and Ariel felt a twinge of jealousy.
“You weren’t here yesterday. Have would you know?”
“I’ve been sitting here since Friday. Of last week.” His glare pinned her into place. “I drove home yesterday for a change of clothes. Where were you?”
“Babysitting. Passing out in my bedroom.” Ariel felt the color drain from her cheeks at her slip. When had she decided to acknowledge it? When had she decided to realize that she had a ‘problem’?
“So you’re the second half of Kat’s dangerous duo?”
“There is no ‘dangerous duo’. And she isn’t ‘Kat’. It’s Katrina.”
“You know,” Mcclain continued, smiling faintly, “she talks about you a lot.”
“Katrina.”
“Fine. Katrina. I’m not on nickname basis yet?” He shook his head. When he raised his hand to push his bandana out of his eyes, his ring gleamed at her. Everything about him screamed powerful. He looked too gutsy, too straightforward, to have been one of Katrina’s castaways. Almost sinister, a characteristic that he slid beneath a full-lipped smile. “Even after all this time I’ve spent looking after her.”
He insulted their friendship, and then he insulted her faithfulness. Ariel wished that he would disappear. Sink through the floor and vanish into thin air. Who was he, to burst into their lives with the force of a wrecking ball? Did he realize that Katrina had been perfectly fine – recovering – until he appeared?
“This is nothing.” She said. “All this time you’ve spent with her? This means nothing. I’ve known her for years. I don’t need to justify my visiting hours to you.”
“Interesting sentiment of friendship. It isn’t what she told me.”
“Of course you wouldn’t –”
“Ariel.” Price whispered. He squeezed her hand. “You came here to check on Katrina.”
Not to fight with Mcclain. Who, exactly, is the enemy again? Her stomach twisted at the silent reminder. It was a bad morning to be faced with such questions. Who was to blame? The victim, or her conspirators? She tried to focus on Katrina’s face. Her beautiful hair, red as the sunset, dimmed under cover of the florescent lighting. Her wounds, bound and concealed only temporarily.
And as she did, she realized that it was not Katrina whom she hated. Her friend was constrained by her addiction, defined by her instability, but she had planted herself firmly beside Ariel for years. When the rest of the world fell away, Katrina had been there to pick up the pieces. Pull out another cigarette. Help her smoke the pain out of her lungs.
She hated herself: the green-eyed dervish of jealousy, one that had churned and spun like a top in her stomach when she saw Mcclain smile down at Katrina’s sleeping figure. She resented her own weakness, her feeble willpower. Her complete and utter failure to walk through life as a normal human being. She was not merely weighed by her flaws – she lived vicariously through the pain they inflicted.
She took a deep breath and faced Mcclain, her hands still tightly tied to Price. “Thank you for staying with her. She needed someone.”
Then, ignoring his murmured, mocking thanks, she moved around the side of the bed to stand beside Katrina’s crossed arms. She sank back on her heels, gaze intent on her friend’s face.
“Okay.” She said quietly. “Okay. I’ve made my promises, Kat. Time to break yours.”
***
It was half past twelve when Katrina finally opened her eyes.
Price and Mcclain had left Ariel in the room, stumbling reluctantly down to the cafeteria for food. The morning cup of coffee had dissolved quickly, and while she felt the growing pangs of hunger, she hurried the boys out of the room.
If they heard her stomach growl, she was finished. She would be forced – for the second time in as many days – to eat something substantial. But it was distracting, idling her time in a quiet, empty room, listening to her body rebel.
Until Katrina blinked groggily, stirring beneath the sheets.
Then she had entirely too much to focus on.
“Babe.” Her voice cracked. She didn’t look angry anymore. Just hollow. Always hollow. A sadness lurked behind her half-smile, one that Ariel had come to recognize after years of witnessing her shifting guilty conscience.
“Hey.” Ariel whispered.
“Redemption didn’t treat you well enough?”
She had imagined these very words, but never in this context. The thought brought tears to sting at the back of her eyelids. “Well, for one thing, you weren’t there. Who else could keep my secrets?”
Katrina started to laugh. It sounded empty, somehow, and turned into a cough halfway through. “Not I.”
“Wrong answer.” Ariel glanced at the monitor dangling behind the hospital bed. Her heart rate was stabilizing, beats rising from their dull cadence. “Feeling dead yet?”
“No. Unfortunately.”
“You know,” Ariel told her lightly, “I really can’t live without you. I mean it, Kat.”
“Thanks, babe.” Katrina tried to reach up, but fell back with a grimace. She looked irritated as she raised her arms to inspect her wrists. “God, these bandages hurt. And they’re so thick.”
It was the worst time to start crying. Yet Ariel felt the lingering tears unleash themselves anyway, rolling slowly down her face with disturbing warmth. She felt vulnerable, exposed.
“That’s what happens when you try to kill yourself.” She said. “Honestly, Kat.”
Katrina was silent for a moment. Contemplating. “You knew.”
“I didn’t want – I thought you would at least—”
“Consider staying alive?” Katrina grimaced. “My odds aren’t good enough.”
“How do mine look?”
One quick, sharp assessment, and her friend cut her open, dissecting her frail figure and verifying a sneaking suspicion. “Dead even.”
“Dead even. Do you have a soul?” Ariel’s shoulders shook as she wiped her tears away, partly from laughter and partly from frustration. “Is this just one great big joke to you?”
“Life’s a joke, babe. The trick is learning to enjoy it.”
“Well,” Ariel said, “I commend you for the lovely job of rendering your life comical.”
She had spent hours worrying about her friend, and then, when she awoke, she was making jokes – about her bandages, about her attempts, about her life. She was suddenly more than a motionless figure; she was a slicing critic, covering her pain with one brilliant smile.
But she was tired of being angry, and sad, and tired, and eternally hungry. Despite her best attempts to disguise her twisting, churning stomach, she felt dots swimming across her vision when the door banged open and Price and Mcclain entered, carrying a handful of food apiece.
Price set his spread – two cups of coffee, a bag of potato chips, and a few cups of fruit jello, stacked atop each other – on the bedside table. “Hungry?”
Ariel tried to ignore Katrina’s inconspicuous gaze, boring into the side of her head. She wondered why Price kept insisting upon mentioning food. And hunger. If he knew the truth, why did he keep tormenting her with it?
His jaw tightened as she met his gaze. His eyes were dark and ringed by purple circles, lashes half-lowered across his pupils. “You ask that a lot.”
“It seems to be a universal emotion.”
“You know,” Katrina interjected, “Ariel happens to hate green jello.”
“That’s new information?”
She gave him a signature smile, full lips curving upward. If she was trying to draw Price’s attention away from Ariel, she was doing a terrible job. He was still fixated upon her, fingers clenched so tightly around his coffee cup that he almost looked like he was reigning himself in.
“It’s my favorite. Fun fact of the day.” Katrina rolled her head sideways, staring up at Ariel with an unreadable expression. “Babe, you wanna grab some for me?”
“Green?” They both hated green jello. It was the exact same color as the green tea pills when vomited up. Thick, transparent, and foul-smelling.
“Yeah. Green.”
Her skin prickled as she moved around the bed. She had to pass Price to reach the table, and as his shoulder brushed hers she felt an almost palatable jolt of energy. It was staggering. And, in a way, horrifying. The longer she spent around Price, the more he became magnetic. It was an acknowledgement that behind her bones still beat a human heart, and that was not a fact she was ready to contemplate.
Katrina accepted the plastic cup of jello with a smirk on her face. “Forgot my spoon, babe?”
Ariel glared at her. “Eat with your fingers.”
“But,” she raised her wrists, “I have all this baggage.”
Mcclain snorted. He leaned his elbows on the edge of her bed and gave her a winning smile; one that was faintly derisive. “You could be a study in contradictions.”
“I’ll take it as a compliment, babe. Ariel? Any spoons?”
Ariel glanced quickly over at Price. He was still staring, eyes narrowed. The table behind him was empty, save for a cup of half-eaten jello. She felt the beginning of a blush work its way up her neck. “The cafeteria ran out.”
Katrina rolled her eyes. She settled the jello on her lap carefully, trying not to jostle her bandages. “It’s downstairs, to the left.”
“What?”
“The cafeteria,” she repeated, “I need a spoon.”
“They’re –”
“Fully capable of giving me a spoon?”
Ariel sighed. Anything to escape the tension seeping through the room, hovering over her shoulders like the makings of a rain cloud. “You want coffee, too?”
“Sure. Two cream. Splenda.” Katrina flashed another smile. Her practiced charisma, courtesy of Mcclain’s hovering presence, was beginning to surface again. She almost looked plastic, sitting there with her head tilted and her eyes darting back and forth.
“Anything else?”
“If you can find the morphine, then sure. Bring me the vat, babe.”
Ariel turned to leave, until she noticed Price squaring his shoulders, setting his empty cup down upon the table. “You aren’t coming, are you?”
He cracked his knuckles. “I’m out of coffee.”
“I could just bring you another cup.”
The corner of his mouth curled up. He shook his head, scattering dark curls across his brow and into his black, indecipherable eyes. “Too much to carry,” He pointed out. “Especially if you get coffee. Which you will.”
She had to force herself away from him, to place one foot in front of the other and walk to the door. The scuffling of his boots told her that he was falling in step behind her, but she couldn’t turn around. She wouldn’t. The temptation was choking her. Was he still staring? Or had he, too, abandoned her hapless personality, and her wavering health along with it?
Curiosity made her stop in the doorway. She shouldn’t have moved, but somehow she couldn’t stop herself from pivoting. “What makes you think that?”
He was so close, her breath caught in her throat. He towered over her, a powerful – and painful – reminder of how much stronger he was. It was a tiny jolt, enough to send memories of blood-stained fists scuttling across her vision.
“Because,” he said, “that’s your salvation.”
“Trying to keep me alive again?”
He leaned closer. There was not enough not enough space, and when his sweatshirt strings touched her arm, she was positive that the white in her complexion had been eradicated by pink flush.
“Who else is willing to try?”
The tension, the nervousness, the strange blush, the jittery feeling in her stomach, crashed down into her toes with his words. Who else cared? Who else would save her?
There was nothing wrong with her. Nothing. She lost a few pounds. More than a few. A deduction here and there didn’t constitute a disorder, did it? Weight was not her problem because she would not let it consume her.
But if she didn’t have a problem, what, exactly, was he saving her from?
***
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