Ashley ✓

Thirty-Three | Real

SOTC: High By The Beach by Lana Del Rey
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"NO BECAUSE WHAT?" Sienna exclaimed, her head going down so far that her black braids nearly got into her ice cream. "She literally just levitated out of the fucking sand— AND I FUCKING JUMPED OUT OF MY BONES BRO!"

I just continued giggling with my open palm over my mouth and my vanilla ice cream.

"My BONES!" Sienna screamed again.

The next day under clear skies, Sienna had invited me to the beach with her to witness what was apparently one of the best days in this part of central L.A. that apparently had no name stuck to the occasion. According to Sienna, it was one of the best days because food trucks from every cuisine had been lined up across the ocean section of the beach. Apparently, a lot of people had thought so, too, because a sea of people now made the lines everywhere. Especially the never-ending line for what I firmly believed was definitely some of the best Thai food I ever tasted after Sienna and I agreed to have that be our main course.

It's when we were then waiting in line for ice cream that we witnessed the bone-jumping fright, which had been when a woman who had appeared to be stomach-up under a concealing towel suddenly levitate into a standing position. Sienna had screamed, and I gasped when I found the culprit behind what appeared to be the magic trick: the twelve inch hole of sand her feet where placed in. The effects of the reactions hadn't even ceased when Sienna struggled to construct a coherent request for what ice cream she wanted at the front of the line. Not even when we were now leaving.

"Okay— okay so wait, where do you want to sit again?" Sienna eventually strung together.

Finally, my tongue slid across the scoop of Superman ice cream until I said, "You just want to do the shore?"

"Yeah."

Sienna and I kept walking until we sat on the golden sand, extending our legs to the point where the foaming waters were just inches from contacting our exposed toes.

"You know, I used to go to this with my dad," she said after a quiet moment between us.

I looked up at her from my ice cream, confusion spreading throughout me. Sienna had never mentioned her dad to me in any sort of conversation.

Sienna continued. "From the time I was six to when I was, like, twelve of so, we came to this together and then played tag over there. Back when it was different cause 'over there' is now filled with shit." She put a hand over her eyes and pointed to the right of her with her free one, where I found an area filled with clumps of seaweed and seagulls.

"Oh."

"Yeah. We stopped doing that when I was thirteen after he left Mom— Belle— and I." Her eyes shifted at the image of the ocean blue and people in front of us and added, "Kinda depressed me for a while."

"I'm sorry." My voice came out almost pained, and a heavy feeling took root within me.

"And then Fedor came."

I was mid-way through licking my cone when I raised my brows.

"It was when we were both in seventh grade. He came from the Czech Republic and it was so fucking awkward because he didn't speak a word of English and obviously I didn't speak a word of the languages he did. But then I took him to this place and then we understood each other. Mostly because a Starbucks employee told us what Google Translate was."

I snorted.

"Yeah, that shit helped a lot," Sienna giggled. Her tongue glided across her scoop of banana ice cream and then her brown eyes locked with mine. There was a hesitancy in her voice as she then asked, "Um... can I ask you a personal question? One about Beverly Hills?"

"Yeah sure," was a response immediately throwing through my mouth, the action paired with a shrug.

"What we're you like back then?"

It felt as if something in me snapped like a rubber band, and every iota of sound and frequency around the globe cut out.

"Um... what do you mean?" I eventually got out.

"Like what you were like before you came over here. I don't know, it just seems like after... what I assumed you went through, you would've been a different person." Sienna's eyes drifted away from mine. "Sorry, I don't know if that made any fucking sense. Also, you don't gotta answer the question."

I crossed my legs, my eyes shifting from one end of the occupied beach to the other before asking, "What do you assume happened to me?"

"Well, I said assumed because my mom and the social worker lady didn't tell me very much about how you got into the system. The social worker specifically said your parents were, like... removed from you by intended force," she said. "The wording was weird."

"That's an strange way of saying murdered."

Sienna blinked. "I'm sorry, what?"

"Technically only my dad was murdered because my mom cut him up before I got home. Oh, and his girlfriend at the time, too," I muttered, fixating on my ice cream. "And then, of course, she tried to unalive me but a cop shot her dead through the window. But according to Google, her death wasn't murder because there was justifica—"

"Are you fucking with me?" I found Sienna's eyes skydiving off the verge of dislocation, and her lips parting to the point where her jaw was about to fall down an abyss.

"Uh, no," I muttered.

"Holy fucking shit, you actually lived through that?" Her words had filtered through a hoarse gasp, and two of her fingers contacted each side of her nose's bridge. "Oh my fucking god, I'm sorry. Back then, I thought you were a weird bitch for being quiet and I literally said that to Fedor the first day you came here. Just holy shit, I am so sorry."

"It's fine that you thought what you thought and said what you said," I said.

"It's not."

"No really. It's okay because..." The next words from my mouth hadn't felt real. "If I was in your position, I would've thought and said the same thing. That and I was a weird bitch. I didn't have the identity that I had anymore and it was... weird."

There was another pause.

Sienna spoke again. "It'll take me a while to fully register that but.." She stopped for a moment. "Thank you."

"For what?"

"For being this real with me. You must feel horrible after saying all that, but you confessed that to me, anyway. You trusted me with it so... thank you."

On the contrary, I didn't feel horrible.

It was as if a force lifted off me when the words slipped from my lips, one I never possessed a clue about. A force that freed me from a vice when it vanished from the shoulders of my conscious. It was also then that I realized why my last words hadn't felt real.

It was because they might've just been the realest words I ever said.