It’s not too hard to avoid Lianna after that. I hid in my room and pretended to be doing homework while Mom helped Carol move the rest of their things in. I turned down the offers of food, too worried Lianna might be joining for dinner. And though it seemed rude in retrospect, I was too in my head to care about it. I thought about what Lianna said the entire night. It was the one thing I couldn’t get out of my head. I could pretend I never talked to Mom or never gone to school when I had a bad day. For some reason, I couldn’t fully shut Lianna out.
She’s made it almost her agenda to push her way into every corner of my life. I can’t avoid her at school and now she’s in my house.
I slowly sit up in bed and stare down at my feet. Six o’clock my slock says after it’s done screaming at me to wake up. I silence my phone, taking it with me as I move towards my closet. I grab the first shirt I see and my one pair of jeans. My underwear and socks are something I also don’t think about before I grab them.
Everything is another shade of black or gray. The only thing in color is my hoody which is the standard one I wear almost everyday.
My eyes adjust to being awake as I walk out into the hallway. The guest bedroom, now Lianna and Carol’s room, is shut. I peek around, making sure I’m not walking into an ambush. Sure no one is around, I tiptoe to the end of the hall and to the bathroom.
It’s not until I’m safe behind the closed door do I let myself sink down onto my entire feet. I was starting to get a cramp. It would be worth it if it meant I didn’t run into Lianna.
I throw my things onto the messy counter. We should have cleaned up before anyone moved in, but I blame it on Mom for not warning me ahead of time.
I strip down to my underwear and, as I always do in the morning, turn the shower on to a blazing hot and sit down on the toilet.
Then, there’s the hard part.
I peel my underwear down.
The first sight of blood makes my stomach churn. It’s all in my head. I’ve done this before countless times. There’s no reason for me to be disgusted by something so natural.
But it’s like a punch to my gut every time I have to acknowledge what is happening.
Mom says it’s a gift of being a woman. Without it, there would be no life.
Mom is poetic in the least beautiful way.
It’s harder than it should be to pull the bad away. There’s a stone growing inside my stomach, pulling and twisting my insides. It’s moving up and down, trying to find a way out. The blood is disgusting to look at. There are small lumps inside it. I sometimes have nightmares about it coming to life. It’s a monster inside my dreams. And now that I’m examining it, I can see how it could morph into a beast. It could tear me from the inside out.
I peel the pad away. The sound of the sticky part ripping away from the fabric makes a sickening chill run down through my spine. I hold my breath and roll up the bad, tucking the corners in carefully.
I freeze.
My hand is shaking as I turn it over. Blood is smudged across the side of my hand. I close my eyes and count to ten.
On the count of ten, I toss the pad away.
When I open my eyes again, I’m staring at my hands, trying to calm my nerves. I’m a freak. There’s no other explanation. I can see why Liza didn’t want to be my friend anymore. I kept blowing things out of proportion.
I throw my underwear into the pile of clothes by the bathtub. I flush the toilet, keeping my right hand at a distance. The thought of just having blood on my hand makes me want to puke, but I keep telling myself it’s nothing. It won’t kill me.
No matter how much I reiterate it or try to see another perspective, I can’t ever get the sickening out of my head.
I turn the sink on. The water is scolding.
My hand finally stops shaking as I hold it under the faucet. My skin turns red and the water is so hot that it begins to feel cold. When I know my skin is beginning to scold, I remove it from the stream and turn the water off.
My stomach grumbles. I hold it, looking down at it as if it would tell me what is wrong.
You can’t be serious…
I sit back down on the toilet. My stomach churns a little and I try to think back to what I ate the day before.
Before I get too far down the list, the bathroom door bursts open.
“Ah!”
I grab the closest thing to me—the toilet roll.
Lianna stands in the doorway with her own pile of clothes and shampoo. She holds the door with her other hand, staring right at me.
“What the fuck! Get out!”
“It’s not like this isn’t the first time I’ve bust in on you pissing.”
“Get out,” I say. I cover myself as best as I can, but I can’t hide my embarrassment.
“Alright.” She goes to walk out but stops. “Just to let you know, I can see your nipple.”
I chuck the roll at her, but it hits the closed door.
Just when I thought I had my nerves under control, I’m shaking again. At least when I look down at myself, I don’t see any blood.
I take a deep breath.
Just get through the morning. Everything else after will be okay.
I wish I can trust myself, but I’ve been lying to myself for so long that it’s past the point of being funny.
***
The shower is steaming hot. The water burns my skin and makes it hard to breathe with all the steam filling the bathroom. I close my eyes and imagine this is what my life is all about. In my dreams, I live here in this land of floating warm clouds. There is no growing up, no evil lurking, and no responsibilities. The saddest part of it all is that I don’t even want to have friends there. I want to be alone. The only person in this wonderful world.
I can certainly say the worst thing for me is to be alone with my thoughts. But I knew that a long time ago.
I press my hand against the shower wall and let the hot water stream down my face.
Lianna. She’s the one person I can’t seem to get out of my head. It sounds insane. Like a corny line from a bad movie. And though I’m the only one who knows the truth, I’m even embarrassed to be admitting it to myself.
The whole situation dealing with Zoey and Jack pops up as well. I mean, how could it not when Lianna was the one to let me in on the…
Prostitution. There’s no other way around it.
It leaves a bad taste in my mouth without even having to say it.
As if conjured, his face reappears. I can feel his hands running over my body, the stench of his breath, and the disgust rolling through my body.
I snap my eyes open.
My hand claws into the show wall. It doesn’t make anything better and it doesn’t make the images fade.
Like other things in my life, I have no control of my mind. It does whatever it wants. Causing me stress or pain, it doesn’t care in the long run. As long as it tortures me into submission.
My hands are robotic as I scrub the soap into my hair. I stare at the tiled wall, tipping my head back into the hot water.
I turn the water off. The thick strands of my hair fall across my cheek. I shake the water out as I step from the bathtub. My movements are a blur as I towel my body dry and dress in the black clothes I’d picked out.
My back straightens as I stare at myself in the mirror. She’s tired, so painstakingly ugly, and so sad. There are many things Liza has wrong about me. I’m not being nice to Lianna. I’m not being sad on purpose and I’m trying more than I should to make things right again.
But there are things about me she’s right about. She doesn’t say them. She can say more with her eyes than she can with her mouth.
I’m a bore. I’m not fun. Her friends would rather leave me behind and Liza would too. I don’t go to parties and I can barely muster a smile most days. These are things I could change. The energy to do it all is what stop me from even trying. If I could do it normally--like everyone else in this fucking world seems to be able to do--then wouldn’t she realize I would have done it already?
I leave the bathroom with my dirty clothes, soon forgetting I have one problem living in my house. For now, Liza has become the sole thing on my mind.
In my bedroom, I finish getting dressed, pulling on my sneakers and backing my bag with my notebooks for the day. I put my earbuds in and scroll down to the longest playlist on my phone: classic piano. The delicate sound of fingers on keys fills my head. It’s an attempt to drown out any other plaguing thoughts.
I sling my backpack over my shoulder and finally leave my bedroom.
It’s the wrong choice I realize only after I’m standing in the hallway, gaping at the slightly ajar door of the bathroom.
Lianna stands just outside the door, dripping wet with her hair up in a towel. Her body swaddled in a too tiny towel—which stops just above the middle of her thighs—and she's on her phone. Her arm is stuffed beneath her breasts. It pushes them up to the point they look like they might pop out from the top of the white cotton. Her hand delicately holds the phone in front of her.
She looks up from it. She raises a brow, smiling.
I’m a deer in headlights looking at her. The music in my ears makes it feel as if this is simply a mirage. A deprived image. It’s hard to breathe and I clutch tighter to the strap of my bag.
A droplet of water slides down the base of her neck, down the curve of her collarbone, and disappears down her chest.
She struts down to the door of the second bedroom—her bedroom now—and slips inside.
My heart is racing and the strange feeling in my gut is growing, not going down as it should. I gulp, knowing the signs. I close my eyes, praying the tears won’t come back. What might have been seen as innocence to an outsider never feels the same to me. It all feels like the cut of a blade. Every time it happens I’m left bleeding, painstakingly aware of everything around me as I bleed to death.
I’m pathetic. Dramatic.
I shake my head, feigning ignorance to the thing right in front of me.
The pain is drowned out by disgust and annoyance. It’s all directed toward Lianna. Though I know I have to deal with some certain changes, I didn’t think she would be this irritating to death with.
I don’t know how I’m going to deal with her anymore than I was when she wasn’t living with me. It seems like she’s making it her mission to entrap me in her web. And with these feelings growing, I don’t know what else I can do to rid her from my life.
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