"I don't know if I should be thankful that I don't remember or if I should be scared, y'know? It's like, I don't want to remember what happened that night but I hate not knowing what happened to my body."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"No, it's fine. It's not your fault. I'm sorry you have to deal with me."
Groaning, Lisa is relieved as she drops her heavy backpack onto Sabrina's bed. She hands Sabrina the folder she received from the office filled with school work she missed this week, and one-by-one, she hands over the binders, separating hers from the ones that belong to her best friend.
"I'm not dealing with you. I'm being your friend, a good one at that."
Sabrina flicks her purple fidget spinner, as pathetic as they've been made out to be, and listens as it whooshes, her toes curling in her thick grey socks. She was always like this when she needed a fix, but the Connor situation only added extra stress.
"You know those things are, like, cancer, right?"
She spins it again, her gaze transfixed on the way it whirls, "You know boys are, like, cancer, right? All they want is sex and they'll manipulate you until they get it, and once they get it, you're nothing to them. It's nothing. Nothing is nothing but then nothing becomes everything everyone is talking about and then-"
The fidget spinner falls to her bed as Lisa knocks it from her shaking fingers. She's crying before she anticipates it but Lisa is there to catch her, wrapping her warm arms around her shoulders.
"Shh," Lisa whispers, her lips brushing the shell of Sabrina's ear as she pulls her quivering body against her own, "It's okay, shh."
The sobbing doesn't begin until their backpacks, textbooks, and binders clatter to the floor noisily. Their bodies flatten out, pressed so close that it's unclear where Lisa's body ends and Sabrina's begins, and Sabrina buries her face in Lisa's chest.
In the form of hot, fat tears, she lets it all out; the trauma, the loss, the sadness, the fear, the addiction. It stain's Lisa's winter sweater (although it's still fall) in her messy bed, under the roof of her house on the corner of her street, within the quaint town that they live in where nothing remains a secret.
YOU ARE READING
The Taste of Yellow Paint Chips
Teen Fiction"No!" She wags her finger in Connor's face, her body tense with an immense amount of anger, "Don't 'Sabrina' me, asshole. This is all your fault! You just had to throw that goddamn party!" In which a friendship between four friends falls apart...
