Mutual Friends | Lando Norris

Chapter 17 - Mirror Mirror

Liv's Pov

I rub my tired eyes as I stare at the reflection in the mirror, trying to remember where I know this stranger from.

My eyes burn red from the makeup, the black liquid smears and smudges further like I didn't just spend an hour in the shower letting the cold water run over my face and body. I keep rubbing till some of the makeup transfers onto my hand.

I didn't mean for that to happen. I'm upset because no matter how much I keep rubbing, the stuff won't come off my hand. The more I try, the less it's working. It's difficult to ignore the tears building up under the ruined lashes. It's just mascara I tell myself.

I sit down on the cold bathroom floor and stare at my hands. Even they look foreign to me, pruned from the water, red from the irritation but also just completely different to how I know my hands to be. Everything looks smaller when you're sitting on a bathroom floor.

I wish I was somebody else. I wish I wasn't so sensitive about everything all the time. I wish I stayed in California. I wish I wasn't here. Sometimes I wonder if anyone would notice if tomorrow I wasn't here. I rub my hands again.

I want to say these thoughts are new but they're not. They've always been there in the back of my mind, on most days I can fend them off but today, today there's too many of them happening all at the same time.

I've always been a people pleaser and this is something I truly despise about myself. I've wanted to stop for the longest time but it's worse than an addiction when you feel like your worth is dependent on how someone else views you. I think a part of me is afraid of seeing what it looks like when I have nothing to offer someone. People never stay when you have nothing to offer them.

What they don't tell you though is how much it hurts when you do have something to offer and the people still don't stay.

This is what it looks like to take the mask off. It's sitting in your shower, fully clothed not knowing how you got there. A soggy donut clogging up the drain. It is all consuming, drowning and unforgiving. It will hit you all at once and then you'll have no one but yourself to face as you hide your tears behind the shower water trying to numb your feelings back into the quiet little box you tuck behind the walls built around your heart.

I feel like I know this stranger. She seems familiar, like we met once at that party that had too many drunk teenagers, or maybe she's someone I used to ride the morning bus to school with. She's someone that could be anybody if she wasn't the person unpacking the sadness of my life into the cabinets of my bathroom. At this point she's just a friend of a friend. A mutual friend.

I just want to forget, I say to myself.

It's the gold ring on my pinky that feels the most certain. The only thing I'm sure about in this moment as my brain fogs up with suppressed memories and emotions. This is when it becomes unbearable.

In a panic I reach for the phone that's next to the sink and call the only person I know will answer my call at this hour of the night. Zoey.

**Ring Ring**

My brain takes me down memory lane, back to something I don't remember ever happening because it feels like I'm experiencing it as if it's happening in the now.

We're in my aunt's west coast living room and I'm 16, I can tell because of the hair. I went through my shaved head phase when I was 16. I'm laying on the couch, head in her lap as she rubs my back. They must've thought I was asleep when they started speaking.

**Ring Ring**

"The shrink says she's got something called major depressive disorder and ptsd." My dad was the first to speak. His voice sounded cold and distant. It's funny because I remember him looking and sounding differently back then.