Bones

Chapter One

My feet are numb, the cold tile of my bathroom feels slippery underneath them.
I stare into the mirror. My eyes are sunken in and darkness surrounds them. I watch myself lift my skinny wrist up to pull my hair back into a ponytail.
No tears slip out of my dead eyes, I am calmer than I thought I would be.
I pull the drawer beneath my sink open and take out all the bottles of pills I've collected over the past few days, along with the knife I stole from our kitchen ten minutes ago.
The knife is dragged along my vein, slowly and deliberately. Blood spouts from the top where it cut through.
I am still calm, even though the blood is on the floor and my shirt.
The biggest cup that I could find downstairs is sitting on the counter. I need as much water as I can get in order to get these pills down.
Handful after handful of pills escape from my hand, dropping down my throat.
I sit on the bathroom floor, blood getting onto my shorts, covering my arms.
My eyes are going in and out of focus, and I wonder if this is how it would feel if someone forgot to put their contacts in.
My body begins to slow and my vision is gone.
I sigh, knowing it might be the last time I ever exhale.
Then, everything goes a bit black.

    My eyes pop open, and I'm simply in my bedroom. I'm in my bed, but I jump out and look in the mirror.
The perfect, skinny body I had in my dream did not become real overnight. I'm still at 119 lbs, and absurdly high number.
For most people, that might have been a nightmare. But I haven't felt as calm as I did in that dream in years.
For now though, I have to sit through day after day of torture. I have to sit through day after day of high school.

    High school years are the years that every student dreads. They've heard about it from older siblings or cousins, relaying stories of bullying and sexual assault, how that girl they went to school with committed suicide.
Of course, there's no escaping the fact that all of these stories we had hoped were weak attempts to scare us, were actually a reality.
When I was ten and I saw high school in movies, I dreamed of the day I would be able to go to a big party and break curfew.
The day when that guy who had never even noticed me in the past finally left the popular, skinny, blonde girl for me.
Now imagine my surprise when I realized I was gay.
There's nothing fun or magical about high school, in facts it's worse than the stories say it is.
The girls are mean and corner you in the bathroom, avoid you otherwise because they don't want your homosexuality to spread over to them. The guys come up to you and ask you how many girls you've had sex with and how it works and, oh, won't you have a threesome with them?
Girls are getting pregnant left and right, while the guys proclaim their undying love for them. Every once in awhile, you see one of those few couples, where you can tell they're more than teenage lovers. They're truly in love with each other, and are destined for marriage.
Then there's me.
I'm the one who sits in the corner of the room, all by myself. I'm the one with the father who's always out at a bar with that girl who's younger than their mother.
The one whose mother would rather show how much they detest their daughter than admit that they aren't worthy of being a parent.
    The one whose best friend left. The one who stopped eating. The one who takes glass and razors and anything else they can find to their skin. The one who is physically sick at the sight of blood, but when it's intentional, they want the blood to be gushing and stare at it in awe.
"Rachel? Rachel!"
My attention snaps up to my teacher, staring at me and requesting the answer to a math problem written on the whiteboard.
This is high school, I think.
The day is silent, as it often is at three o'clock in the afternoon, with the children still in school and the adults working.
A gust of wind rolls through, strong and heavy, knocking leaves off the trees— leaves of all different colors— and littering the streets below with them. Outside, the weather seems more like late November than late September.
In ten minutes, the silence will be disrupted and the school bell will ring. Students from five to seventeen will rush out the doors, either to the open arms of their mother or the open doors of their gently-used-car.
I will rush out to no one that matters as much as my own thoughts do. They are the only thing I ever hear, or pay any attention to
My teachers say I need ADD medicine, but my parents don't want to admit that their perfect daughter, the youngest, most innocent child, has a problem. So, I generally sit in the back of the classroom, pretending to write notes while doodling, then copy the notes from Alex later on.
As the boredom eats away at me, I sigh, drawing the attention of my math teacher.
"Rachel? Care to explain what is bothering you?" Before the words even leave her mouth, roses are blooming under my skin. I shake my head and she turns, annoyed, back to the board.
I look out the window, looking at a grimy street surrounded by grimy concrete buildings. Cool autumn air crawls through the cracks around the windows, pushing through my extra-thick sweater and freezing my skin. It shouldn't be this cold already.
The last ten minutes of class creep by, and everyone rushes out of the door when the bell finally rings.
I push my chair back and smile at my teacher, an awkward smile that she doesn't return. It falls from my face as I walk out of my classroom and begin the search for my best friend in the sea of students. It isn't until I'm dragged by the tide out the front doors of the building that I see her face, sprinkled with freckles and complete with a smile, rushing towards me through the people.
Alex loops her arm through mine and we begin our walk to my car. "So, for tonight, I'm thinking we order a couple of pizzas to accompany us."
Alex and I have a horror movie marathon every month, a tradition that was started when we met years ago. I think we're still interested in it because of the faux fear; the chill that crawls into your heart for a second, taking your mind away from all the really scary things waiting for you off-screen.
I shake my head and pull my arm away. "Alex, can we just have salads? I feel like I've just eaten so much...so much...fake crap this week."
But it wasn't like that, not really.
The truth is, I can't stand the thought of that gross, greasy pizza contaminating my body.
"Okay, that's a good call. I need to lose some weight anyways. Maybe look a little more like you, Rachel." Alex looks down at my legs, then her own.
I fake a laugh. "Please, Alex. You're so skinny. What's the movie lineup for tonight?"
As Alex babbles on about old movies her mother suggested, I think about her comment.
Alex thinks she's fat, or plump, as her mother says. I can't see it though. Her legs and arms and stomach are all so perfect. She swims and runs, so she has a lot of muscle.
It looks good on her.
"Sound good?" Alex finishes.
My face is stretched tight into an unwanted smile.
"Sounds great."
As soon as I was six years old, Alex was my best friend. We sat next to each other in Mrs. Long's first grade class. As we got older, she still was. Two little girls, bubblegum, bikes, and skinned knees.
Except that's not entirely true. There were three of us, not two. Alex and Rachel.
And Lillian.
Lillian was the one of us with a reputation to uphold. Always sneaking alcohol from her parents or leaving her house in the middle of the night with some boy to smoke in the park a few blocks down from her house.
Her reputation was molded around her happiness, or her lack thereof.
When she got upset, she would drink until her head was in the clouds and she couldn't remember something as simple as her name.
I think the past few years have been the hardest on her.
At eleven years old, her parents got divorced. It was mutual I think, but it still tore Lillian apart.
At twelve, she stopped eating.
Thirteen, she started eating again, but she also started slicing her skin open and puking up her insides.
Fourteen, she was dead. Intentional overdose.
Up until her final days, I was always jealous of her body. She was the smallest of us. Tiny legs that wrapped easily around her boyfriend's waist, hip bones that protruded through whatever pair of skinny jeans she was wearing, and overall that appearance of absolute perfection.
She was pale, but she was still so gorgeous.
She had the appearance of a doll, a porcelain doll that would shatter if wind touched its cold surface.
Lillian was fragile and dainty looking, something I have always strived to achieve.
After she was gone, there was an empty space in the group. Lillian was our leader. She was the one who broke Alex and me out of ourselves and into a world of partying and hooking up with guys.
At least, Alex hooked up with guys.
As hard as Lillian tried to find someone for me, she just couldn't. I never had the courage to tell her it was because I wasn't attracted to guys.
Look, I'm not stupid, I've heard the horror stories.
You come out to your friends, and all of a sudden, they assume you're interested in them. No more sleepovers, no more pool parties. Awkwardness arises every time you point out that attractive girl you just passed on the street.
And Lillian never stopped trying to convince me.
Shot after shot at endless parties, because maybe if I just got drunk enough, I would find interest in the "hunk" standing behind Lillian. Because "so help me, Rachel, do you know how hard it was to get him to agree to hook up with you? To help you like this?"
Lillian could be a total bitch when she got drunk. But it wasn't like that all the time, she was usually so sweet.
Now, our friend group is a lot less interesting. No more hooking up at parties or being yanked out of our rooms at eleven thirty on a Tuesday night.
Of course, Alex and I will still occasionally go out. She finds her way onto some guys lap while I stand alone in the kitchen, drinking as much as I can.
Alex and I kept her memory alive though. The horror movies were Lillian's idea, thinking we didn't have enough excitement in our lives.
A few months before Lillian died, I had picked up on some of her habits. I never told anyone, and I rarely acknowledge it.
I just listen to it.