Ophelia Study No. 1

Chapter Seven

The whole front door thing was an eye opener. It was the first real hint I took that something wasn't right, that Emily wasn't being herself. The girl who was once afraid to let me touch her had allowed me to leave past three in the morning through the main door of her parents' house.

She started smoking regularly, getting cigarettes from god knows where. Usually she'd just borrow some of mine, 'borrowing' meaning smoking and never replacing it, but she started to produce her own Marlboro Greens as opposed to my Reds.

She asked me to hold them for her sometimes, confiding that her parents had started to get suspicious. That's when she admitted to her grades falling with a shrug. I only reinforced her behavior, having agreed, "Hey, shit happens."

Her parents began to searching her room, for what, I don't know. Had they started the ransacking spontaneously, then they most likely would've found one of her packs of smokes. But because they warned her in advance, the worst thing they found was a journal entry showing mild dissatisfaction with her English teacher.

She told me all this with a smile on her face. "They told me they're looking again next Wednesday. I doubt they actually know how room searches are supposed to work."

"If they can't figure out Facebook, they probably can't work out basic discipline," I'd smirked.

She was smoking, taking breath after breath of tobacco. When she kissed me, it felt like I was chewing a cigarette. Yet I couldn't get enough of it.

I found myself liking the new Emily a lot more than I did the old. It was probably due to the fact that she became more like me, for better or for worse. Over the next few months, it was definitely confirmed that she had changed for the worst.

She fell deeper into her depression, which would make her smoke more, which would make her feel bad about herself and drag her right back to square one. I got a lot of teary 2:00 a.m. phone calls, and I would usually just set the phone off to the side and ad lib reassurance without really listening. I wish I would've handled it better, but I didn't. I feel like if I had, a lot of things would be different now.

But I didn't. I ignored her when I needed her most, and why? Because I was tired of her. I stopped showing any effort in the relationship, stopped sneaking over to her house, quit trying to touch her, ceased in actually showing any empathy or affection for her at all. She could probably tell that I stopped caring, but it didn't stop her from dating me. I think it's because she had no one else to turn to, nowhere else to go.

It was on a February night that she lost her virginity to me.

She had been the one to initiate it. It was seemingly out of the blue, but now that I think deeper into it, she was probably trying to get me to fall for her again. Her naïve mind equated love with fucking.

So she dragged me into her car, her hair smelling of stale cigarettes and lips chapped and dry. We parked in a vacant lot, and she had neglected to turn off the radio as she started kissing me.

It was one forty two p.m. on a Wednesday night. We were out past curfew, and we surely would've been in a heap of trouble had we been caught. She didn't seem to care; in fact, she was the most content I'd seen her in weeks.

She was all skin and bones, obviously having lost weight since she started smoking. Throughout it, she had this glazed over look in her eye, a sort of emptiness that was unfathomable. It was a clue, and it was one that I refused to investigate.

After, we had laid in her car, wrapped up in each other to combat the cold. She combed her fingers through my hair absently, and she asked me if I really loved her. This time, I answered. I replied with a dull no.

I had finally told her the truth, and perhaps at a bad time, but nonetheless, now she knew for sure, knew that I didn't care if she woke up the next morning, that it didn't matter if she got home that night.

She started crying, her tiny body shaking beneath me. I buried her head into my chest, unsure of what else to do. I didn't do much else to comfort her. It's hard to break a girl's heart and then be her shoulder to cry on. She probably didn't even want to be around me, which she proved by pushing away whenever I tried to move her closer.

She had sobbed, "I thought you cared about me."

What comes next is debatable what I regret the most in my short time with her. I had leaned into her ear, whispering, "You haven't thought that for a while now."

She walked home, and I let her, in the blistering cold. I didn't give her as much as a gesture in the right direction. The fact that she was willing to leave her car there, with me in it, not even worry about getting it back, proves how desperate she was to get away from me.

To think she'd come back a week later.