Une Fleure Fanée

Week 15 Part 1 (Sunday)

***brady***

     The bus comes to a jerking halt. The moms, who are still awake, and somehow drinking wine on the bus, stumble to the front to start getting the luggage from the under compartment. Lilly's been asleep for the past two hours.

     Her skin is ice cold, her heart is barely beating, but she's not dead. Just anorexic. If it weren't for her chest rising and falling, I'd think she was dead. It's not worth it to wake her up. I'll just carry her to the car. I can feel the scars through the makeup on her wrists. Poor girl.

     I grab her and my dance bag and I lift her bridal style. She's so light. 50 pounds, maybe? She was a whole lot more in the beginning. I could throw her in the air. Pressley groggily joins my side. I guess they carpooled together.

     Pressley leads me to the car where she and Lilly carpooled in to get there. She's still fast asleep. I gently lay her in the backseat of the car and Pressley gets in on the other side. We buckle her in.

     "Goodnight Pressley. Goodnight Lilly," I whisper.

     "Night, Brady. Congratulations on the duet," Pressley whispers back.

     I don't want to think about this week. I smile and nod to show that I acknowledged her statement before gently closing the door.

     "Thanks for getting Lils in the car, Brady," Stacey tells me as she's walking to the car.

     "No problem. She needs sleep," I respond, walking to my car.

      How many more weeks until somebody notices? I'm telling my Mom in a week and a half as promised, but I hope somebody recognizes her struggle, her pain, earlier. She needs help. Desperately.

~~~~~

***lilly***

     I wake up in my bed. Nobody woke me up on the bus. That was probably the best. I'm still so tired. This is too early. I set an alarm for eight o'clock and very happily fall back asleep into demonic torture.

     I hear my alarm again, and this time, the sun is shining. I sit up and not only do I have a horrendous migraine, everything is in a very blurry haze. Blinking my eyes doesn't help. Immediately, my mind goes to three things. The team jackets are the first.

      One one of us, either Brady or I, will get a team jacket. I want mine back, but it feels wrong to count Brady out of the running. You were so pathetic yesterday, Lilliana. You're not getting a team jacket.

     As I walk to the bathroom for my medicine, or more stumble out of pain, I think about the second thing on my mind. My calorie limit. Normally, today would be 150 calories. But today, I'm not eating. Again. Third day. I drink water from the sink to keep my stomach engaged.

     The third thing I'm thinking about is suicide. We do have a balcony that I could jump off of. Four weeks ago, when our bus in the UK was on the wrong side of the road, I thought I was gonna die, and some voice told me not to want to die. What was that? Don't listen to her, Lilliana. She's garbage.

     I count all of my pills. Twenty in total throughout the three pill bottles. If I took all of these, I could die. I stare at them for a good ten minutes. I pick one up and... put it right back down. I can't risk my slim chance at getting a team jacket.

     I begrudgingly decide I should say hi to Mom before going back to sleep to get rid of this migraine. I stagger into the main room, pretending like I hadn't almost attempted suicide, and she smiles at me.