[WATTYS 2016 WINNER!] [COSMOPOLITAN Featured!]
Trapped in her white trash hell, Layla Danner is failing at life.
Her friend Peyton? Everybody thinks he's perfect, a staggeringly rich, handsome, and well-mannered story book prince. But they don't kn...
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I thought about Jeanine Waites a lot in Chicago, the words she'd said to me at Earl's funeral.
"I did love him, you know, with all my heart. But there's a difference between giving up and knowing when you've had enough."
Jake never did call her.
I thought about a lot of things, laying on that mattress on the floor in that crappy little sublet reeking of mildew and cats.
Brandy, Buck, Earl. They'd all walked this path before, they'd all gotten stuck.
Jeanine and daddy, the ones who got away.
All the things I'd done these past months, the things Jake was still doing.
A month into our stay in Chicago, Corrine Willows died. She jumped off the roof of a parking garage near the Willis Tower on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.
We knew her from the club, a girl from Elkhorn, Nebraska who'd run from an abusive stepfather. Sweet and funny, she had a gimp second toe that had no feeling left in it following a childhood accident involving a corn seeder.
"C'mon Layla, put some muscle into it! Like really stab at it with that pen, I swear, I can't feel anything. Huh? Huh? Pretty cool, isn't it? It's my secret weapon for the Zombie Apocalypse."
Three years on her own, Corrine stripped, and when she needed to, slept with men for money. She was nineteen.
It broke me, showed me what we'd become, throwaway people with throwaway lives.
It takes a toll on you, not seeing the light of day for weeks on end, drinking too much, running on fumes. The emotional exhaustion of being surrounded by people who only wanted to use you, and letting them do it anyway. The bloodlust, the brutality of fight rings. Men.
I'd changed so much that I hardly recognized myself. Day by day, it grew increasingly difficult to look at myself in the mirror. So I got into the habit of keeping the lights off in the bathroom, and using the little mirror in my compact instead. Fragmented pieces of me was all I could stomach.
Oh, and Heaven. I hoped Heaven was a lie, that death was the end of it all, that daddy hadn't watched me turn into whatever it was that I'd become.
How quickly I'd fallen apart, how far I'd let things go.
He would've been so heartbroken.
I slept for three days straight following Corrine's death. When I finally opened my eyes, it was to a weak beam of yellow sunlight rippling through the smog stained windows of our bedroom. I'd turned to Jake and said "no more".
He'd said okay, don't worry, I can keep us going. I'd said, no, no, and begged him to quit too, for us to bury the monsters of the last six months and leave this place, find a home like we'd originally planned.
