Sleep Magazine (Completed)

The Fight: 1

"Thanks for coming to get us. I called Celia and she didn't answer."

"She's probably asleep," Grace replied. She twisted in her seat to lay eyes on Ava and Melanie who sat like statues in the backseat of Stephen's car, coated in dirt and blood and avoiding her eyes.

After a brief protest from Ava, Stephen—having obeyed Grace's command with no argument—pulled the car onto Melanie's driveway. 

The girls looked at each other in silence, commiserating with lively eyes that contrasted their otherwise exhausted faces, their shifting pupils perceiving every flash of emotion in each other's irises, the ineffectual reality of their circumstance growing with every bump over the uneven gravel until they arrived at the end of the path, where Melanie quietly shuffled out of the car and shut the door gently behind her, keeping her head down as Ava, Grace and Stephen watched her ascend the rotting wooden steps to her kitchen door. 

Ava held back tears as the car headed back down the long drive and pulled onto the main road, Grace and Stephen whispering amongst themselves at the front.

"She is not okay. She is sixteen next week and she uses natural birth control."

Ava bit down on the tip of her tongue for only a second before anger and embarrassment made her jaw fly open. "We all do!" she yelled at the back of Grace's headrest. "We're not dumb—it's not that hard to keep track of!"

"Shut up." Grace said it so dismissively that heat shot up the sides of Ava's neck.

"I mostly have sex with girls anyway," she spat out.

"What?" Grace jarred and shifted in her seat to look at Ava with a scrunched up face that Ava instantly thought looked ugly, an abrupt assault on the conversance with Melanie's soft, vulnerable eyes still floating behind her own; golden-green valleys of promise and comfort now viciously replaced by an image so odious that the thudding in Ava's ears muffled the sound of Grace's next question. 

"Are you a lesbian?"

Ava scoffed and turned her head to the side to look out the window. Her white-hot vision burned into the imposing silhouettes of dark trees along the roadside, the skin on her arms prickling as she bore through the sharp needled branches in her imagination, tired legs striding deeper into the shadowy holes between dense masses of limbs but never breaking past them, desperate for some expanse of untouched space but unable to fathom it. 

"No I don't think so," she snarked.

Stephen rolled through the stop sign at the intersection, eager to get home.

Grace burned her eyes into her sister and matched her snide tone. "You don't think so?"

Ava didn't move a muscle, her chest tightening painfully.

"Well, are you attracted to girls?"

She snapped her eyes up to meet Grace's stare. "No," she said coldly.

"Then why are you fucking them?" Grace exclaimed. Her fingers were tense and white on the back of the headrest.

Ava forced out a mean smile and crossed her arms. "Why do you have to be attracted to someone to fuck them?"

Grace rolled her lips between her teeth and looked over at Stephen, expecting him to help her through the conversation, then sat back against her seat defeatedly when he ignored her.

"What the fuck is going on?!" she yelled at the windshield.

Stephen let out the breath he had been holding as he pulled up to the house.

"Don't start yelling at her now," he started, glancing between Grace and the rearview mirror. "It's late, she's okay, what's-his-name is going to be okay; they got him to the hospital." He leaned closer to Grace, keeping his voice low. "No one got pulled over." He attempted to prompt a smile from her with his own, but Grace held her mood, hostile and unwavering, frozen on her face. Stephen dropped his smile and sighed. "Just let her go to bed."

"Thanks, dad," Ava chimed in from behind them. Grace immediately spun around in her seat once again to berate her little sister.

"Don't call Stephen dad—oh I'm ready to smack you." She clenched her fist in her lap.

"He might as well be." Ava didn't let up on her tone. "He's basically the only man I've even talked to since summer." 

For just a moment she imagined Dave, smug and brooding in the seat next to her, his big eyes fixed on her chest, watching her breathe. She felt like she was suffocating.

Grace's expression dropped. "Doesn't Matty call you?" The name sounded to Ava like hot water poured over her head.

"Yes Matt calls me; doesn't mean I talk to him."

"You should talk to him, Ava, he's—"

Ava's mouth hung open and she uncrossed her arms to throw her hands down at her sides. "You're not telling me you talk to him now!"

Grace let her eyes flutter closed before she spoke. "Of course I talk to him, we—"

"You're crazier than I fucking thought! You hated him ten seconds ago!"

"I never hated Matty, what are you talking about?"

"You didn't talk to him for a year!" Grace's eyes opened just in time to see Ava scream, then closed again.

"That was a long time ago."

"It wasn't even two years ago!"

Stephen pulled the key out of the ignition and sank down into the driver's seat. He lowered his head to watch his fingers trace around the edge of the steering wheel.

"Things change, Ava. You can't be bitter forever—"

Ava scoffed and reached for the door handle as Grace continued. "And you shouldn't be especially, you're too young to start resenting people."

Ava froze, one foot out the car door, and turned to flash her sister a challenging look. "I can't choose whom I talk to or else I'm resenting people?"

Grace only sighed, feeling exhausted. "Whatever, let's go inside. I'm all done for tonight." She winced when the car door slammed shut.