To All Those Brave and Lovely

Prom

Once, when she was twelve, she got mad and dumped all her dad's alcohol down the sink. 

Nora kept telling herself that this is what people do, when they're trying to help someone, that sometimes you have to make the choices that they aren't strong enough to make themselves.  She wasn't thinking about how he would come home and scream, and how his hand would flash out at her and she would flinch away.  She wasn't thinking that he would throw all the bottles to the ground with one sweep of his arm, and how loud the crash would be when they hit the floor.  She had thought that when he saw what she had done, some part of his mind would snap open to the truth and realize what he had done to the two of them, and he would suddenly become the father she's always wanted, and he would promise never to leave her again.  (Not that he ever left for real, he was just down the road at the bar if she needed to find him, but the house still felt so lonely even when he was in it.)

What actually happened is that he yelled, and then he got real quiet, looking around at the mess he made.  Then he left, leaving her to sweep up the glass (she tried to use her hands, it sliced her palms open, she put herself back together with neon colored band aids) and walked the whole two miles down to the liquor store in the rain.  The money came out of her allowance, which was actually just the money she used to buy lunch, so for the next to weeks Eva shared her peanut butter sandwiches with her and everyone pretended that nothing was wrong.

Nora remembered that night mostly because of the hand reaching out to her and the glass cutting into her skin, but she also remembered that when she rummaged through the medicine cabinet, she found one last bottle of something tucked way in the back, like her dad was afraid he might run out.  And she wanted to know, suddenly, what had kept him trapped like he was, what was so lovely about those bottles that he kept falling down into them.  It took her three tries to open it, because the band aids made her hands clumsy.

It burned on the way down, and was warm in her stomach, and the taste in her mouth reminded her of the time when she and Eva drank the old cream soda that had been sitting out in the sun all day, choking it down even though it was warm and the bubbles had all gone flat.  She didn't like it at all, didn't like the wooziness in her head and the way her stomach turned in on itself the next morning, didn't get how her father kept managing to choose this over her.

She didn't get it then, but she does now.

There's all kinds of ways to hide yourself in something, bury yourself in so many different things that you never have the chance to pause and take a moment to look around you.  Like, if you keep yourself moving, you never have to look behind you and see the wreckage that made you start running in the first place.

MJ calls this sublimation.

Nora calls it coping.

"I just don't think this is a good idea."  Peter stood across from her on the mat, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.  He had originally came to talk to Tony, but he ended up hanging out with Nora instead, just like he always does.  She had been down in the basement, with the music so loud that she didn't hear him even when he screamed at her.  Nora had been on the treadmill when he interrupted her, and almost fell off when she felt his hand on her arm.

(It's part of her routine now, to go down and run until she can't feel her legs and she's so out of breath it feels like her lungs are going to explode, then drag herself up the stairs and into bed, hoping that if she gets tired enough, if she works hard enough, she might be able to sleep through the night this time.)

"Why wouldn't it be a good idea?"  She's too excited, too hyper, and a little too uninterested in what Peter's trying to tell her.  "I'm tired to practicing on dummies.  I want to fight someone for real, and Natasha isn't here."  Nora jumps forward and shoves him, so sudden that he isn't expecting it and stumbles backwards.  "What's the matter?  You afraid?"