Oleander had bruises adorning her neck, collarbones, and inner thighs. She loved the ache that filled her when she applied pressure with her fingertips to her darkened flesh. She enjoyed staring at them, she could sit enraptured by them for what felt like hours. She told herself that they were declarations of love that Trent had written her with his teeth, she also told herself that they were declarations of independence, she just was unsure of what she was now independent of. Oleander sat down in the floor length mirror that was on her opened closet door, she wanted to look at herself. She wanted to truly see herself, because she felt as though she had become someone else.
She had asked Trent to leave her alone in a room for an hour, she believed that he was in her living room watching something on television. She had been smoking in her room by herself and relaxing, with an ashtray in-between her feet. She extinguished her cigarette and held her hands up to her reflection and began to examine the two scars that decorated them, one on each palm. She remembered cutting the first one into herself and then cutting Trina, she remembered letting Rebecca cut her. She knew that Trina, Rebecca, and Valerie all had twin markings on their hands. That was her first declaration of independence she decided, when she drew her father’s straight razor across her palm and then her friends’ that was when she turned her back on the girl that she had been. Innocent Oleander who was afraid of a monster and too meek to talk to the boy she thought she wanted more than anything; but now here she was having cheated on that sweet boy twice with the monster who once dwelled beneath her bed.
Oleander leaned closer towards the mirror and examined her eyes, they were rimmed with a thin line of black kohl eyeliner and her long lashes were coated in a few swipes of mascara. She could not tell whether or not her pupils were dilated, she figured that they probably were. She pulled her hair back and glanced at her hair line, she became irrationally filled with the belief that a hand was going to sprout from the seam of her hairline, as if her body was a costume for some creepy creature. She shut her eyes tightly and took a deep breath in attempt to rid the frightening image from her mind.
She opened her eyes and then shielded them with a hand, she could not shake the thought even though she knew it did not make very much sense. She told herself that it was just her imagination going wild in a manner that was inspired by her thoughts of monsters and her own drastic changes. She tried to convince herself that was all it was but she was unable to shake the nagging feeling in the back of her head that she needed to do what Rebecca had said the day she had gone to check on her with her friends, she went to cover the mirror but then stopped herself.
“I have to break it.” She reminded herself in a whisper, as she made a fist and prepared herself to destroy her reflection.
YOU ARE READING
The Patron Saint of Monsters
Teen FictionA girl falls in love with the monster under her bed.
