Page 72 of Warmer, Colder

It wasn’t boys, but it wasn’t just anyone else either.

It was her,alwaysher,onlyher.

Summoned from the past are the innocent brushing of hands, late-night whispers from beneath the covers, and bursting laughter that grabbed my attention like popped bubblegum. Part of me—the realest version of me, will always be stuck there—in the times before everything became so complicated. Before the world tried to force us and all of our too-big feelings into some narrow lane they’d designated for our friendship.

“It took me until I was in middle school to fully recognize that I liked girls—a girl. It was simultaneously one of the best and worst things that ever happened to me. Best because my world started to make more sense, like why I was never excited about the new boy in class, why I didn’t swoon over everyone with a heartthrob haircut, and why I never accepted their flirtation thatwas simply manhandling. It dawned on me that I ‘wasn’t like other girls’. Not in the sense that I was better, but in the way that I was distracted by lush lips coated in candy-flavored lip gloss. Luckily, I alsowasn’t like other girls my agein that I became very comfortable very quickly with my sexual orientation. Liking girls and other women, was never embarrassing to me. Even when kids made fun of me. Once I knew it, I gladly accepted the clear answer that the label of lesbian gave me.” I spread out the paper on the table, opening the folded triangles so I can write beneath them.

“It sounds like a hard thing, to be queer at such a young age, in a time like that.”

I snort. “Yeah, the early two-thousands were not the best years of my life. I mean it was technically a crime to be gay in a lot of places up until 2003. Shit, same-sex marriage isn’t even legal in all fifty states yet.” I abandon my project and pull my knees to my chest trying to stifle the ache that still blossoms there when I think about the years I spent trying to stop the hemorrhaging of my heart. The summer after everything happened was the worst of my life. The transfer to a new school was hard at that age, leaving everything I knew—looking back, it was a rare mercy from my mom that I should have been more grateful for. Starting over wasn’t the problem; the thing that had devastated me was losing her. My only friend. The girl I loved—as much as anyone can really understand the concept at the time. But maybe that’s what makes first loves hurt so soul-crushing. The fact that you don’t fully understand the magnitude of such an emotion. What people get wrong is that they don’t think a child can feel love, that they can’t understand it, and maybe that second part is accurate, but when you’re so young those feelings eclipse everything else, they swallow your world whole. Unfortunately for me, the eclipse never passed. The sun never shone quite the same again. Myobsessivelove for Becca cast a shadow over mefor the rest of my short life. “You know you were always one of us. Queer, I mean.” I know I shouldn’t go down this road, shouldn’t push us closer to the hidden path that leads to my secret, but I can’t help myself. I want to hear in her own words what she thinks happened. “Did anyone ever suspect it?”

“Umm . . .” Becca’s eyes dart away, guarding her past. At least she has some shame around the whole situation.At least she remembers.Sometimes—with the way she acted around her friends, her refusal to accept this part of her—I feared that I’d somehow imagined it, made it up, created some traumatic past that didn’t exist between us. But the memories eat at her now, and she turns that uncomfortable hunger on her nail beds. “Yeah, they did.” She takes a seat at the other end of the couch, her notebook forgotten, and mirrors my posture. “There were some girls who accused me of liking—” she coughs, like the rest of her sentence itches on the way up, “a friend in seventh grade.” Her brow furrows, features tightening as she searches for the right words. “But I denied it then and I denied it every time anyone insinuated it from that point on. It didn’t happen often. I did my best to dispel the rumors.”

Even though I already know this from her diaries, the snake of jealousy winds its way around my stomach and throat as a swell of nausea takes hold of me. I don’t want to hear this, but I have to. I need answers, I need clarity, I need something to act as a balm over the burns left behind by the implosion of our friendship.

“I did a lot of things, actually.” She laughs, but there’s no humor present, only bitterness. I wonder, do all the lies she’s told herself leave a foul taste in her mouth, too? “One of my biggest regrets is having sex before all my friends. I was so desperate to prove that I was like them, that I liked boys—and I did sometimes—that I was willing to offer up my body as the ultimate evidence.” Her teeth briefly sink into the knuckle she’sgot against her lips. “I thought that if I did it, it would stop the accusations completely. It did for a while, but they always cropped back up. The rumors always waited for me behind thinly veiled smiles of new friends and sneers of those who were eager to put me in my place. You know, I—” She shakes her head at the foolishness of her younger self. “I even told other guys that they could say that they’d slept with me.” She heaves a long sigh. “Just so it would look like I was actively pursuing them. It was a good distraction for a bit, but it fell apart quickly when my many short-term boyfriends would get frustrated with my inexperience or unwillingness to sleep with them. Then I became a tease. A challenge.A target.” Her arms wrap impossibly tighter around her slender frame, and she lays her head against her knees turning it away from me. “Sometimes when I lay awake at night, I wonder if those choices were the catalyst for everything that led to my death. Was that why Nate sought me out? Were those deceptions and games I played in a desperate attempt to hide the truth,to hide from it, what inevitably made me the perfect victim?” The words are a shaky mess, much like Becca’s shivering limbs. “Was it my fault that Nate found me to be easy prey?”

I crawl across the couch without a second thought, knowing nothing but the need to hold her against me. “Nothing you could have done would justify what he did to you.” I grip her chin firmly, ensuring she hears me when I say these next five words. “It. Was. Not. Your. Fault.”

For several moments, she just shakes her head back and forth over and over. Her lips tucked tight against her teeth, refuting me in a silent damnation of herself. But then it all becomes too much, everything she’s been holding in comes pouring out.

“Yes it is. It’s all my fault.” Her face is sopping wet, her eyes shut against the world as if she can’t possibly take in anything more. Her mouth falls open, downturned and devastated on awail that sends a chill to my bone. And for the first time, it truly pains me to see her crying. I’m finally seeing the depth of the well of sorrow she’s been trying to get out of. She’s been begging me to see it and I’d snuffed at the deceptively shallow surface.

“No, Becca,” I insist forcefully.

“It’s my fault that I allowed him to force himself on me. If I hadn’t been drinking. If I hadn’t isolated myself in that room. Iletthem do it to me over and over and over again.Iwas easily kept under their thumb.Ihelped him bury you in my yard for fuck’s sake. I dug that hole for hours. I helped him fill it with dirt.Ikept my mouth shut.” Becca’s voice pitches higher and higher with each condemnation of herself. “It’s my fault. It’s my fault. It’s my fault.” Her nails dig into the back of her scalp, chestnut hair gathered between her knuckles.

“Stop, Becca.”

She sinks them in further.

“Becca,” I warn.

Her fingers shake with the pressure she’s applying. “It’s my fault.” The words are a sickening chant.

“Stop it,” I grit through my clenched teeth as my hands snap out, latch around her wrists, and halt the abuse. “Don’t you fucking dare say that shit again.” With the exhale of the command, I inhale fear that I may push her too far, touching her like this. But I can’t sit here and do nothing. Everything halts. Her sobbing, her devastation, her words. Something about the contact brings our world to a standstill. Our eye contact is soul-deep, like we’re seeing each other for the first time.

With each wrist caged within my fingers, her frailty that I’d overlooked becomes undeniable. While holding these fragile bones that are actually the only parts left of us anywhere but here, I realize how gone both of us really are. The missing beat of our pulses that should be hammering against one another, reminds me that we’re all we have now. There’s no one else tofeel our despair, our anger, or our love. There’s no one else to make us scream, or cry, or laugh, or moan. There’s no one left but her and I.

And I will not let her drown in her grief.

“Listen. To. Me.” I bring her balled-up fists against my lips, placing a kiss on each. “You are a survivor.”

She shakes her head vehemently, silent tears falling.

“You didn’t deserve what happened to you. No one does.” I pry her fingers open and kiss her palm, stroking it with my thumb gently as I continue. “You can’t blame yourself for what happened to you. I won’t let you.”

The first rays of defiance break through the cloud of melancholy.

“You are a survivor, Becca. I won’t allow him to take what’s left of you.”

“He’s already taken everything,” she sobs. “I let him take everything. I didn’t die on December 10th. I began dying the moment I started seeing his face in the place my hopes used to be. When I closed my eyes all I could see were hungry eyes feasting on my skin. When I covered my ears, all I could hear was the ragged breathing of a man chasing a pleasure that didn’t belong to him to the haunting beat of flesh on flesh. There was nothing but him, nothing but what they did. I ceased to exist.” Becca’s hands press against her forehead. “I didn’t have a choice but to find a way out. There was nothing else to do. Nowhere else to go. I just needed out of my body.” Ragged breathing tears up her words that have become more of the growl of a cornered animal. “I needed out. I needed a new place to call home.”

A sob wracks her chest, and I watch as the shell of everything that she’s ever been to me caves in. Inside she’s hollowed out, her insides scraped clean by those that would devour her.

As if summoned, another leech, our eager entity, looms over us. Its dark form welling, eating up her sorrow. The sight turnsmy stomach, but I don’t have the heart to alarm her. I force it out of my mind, focusing on the only thing that matters right now.

All this time I’d preserved her in my heart as one thing, not seeing the wear and tear that a lifetime took on her. Becca’s life was set on fire, and she stayed in that burning house in silent resignation, curtains drawn, detectors disarmed, just her and the toxic fumes and scorching flames. Nobody noticed until the remnants of her too-short life stood in a heap of ash.

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