Authors: Emma Hart
“You don’t need it. I promise. You’re more than that. Don’t let it all destroy the person I know,” he whispers and his lip quivers. “Let me help you, Abbi. Not because of my sister or anything else. Let me help you because I need to.”
“I can’t replace her.”
“I know. I don’t want you to replace her. I want you to be you. I don’t want another sister. I want you. That’s it. I don’t want us to be skirting around the topic of us anymore. I want you and all your shattered pieces, if you think you can handle all my broken bits.”
“I don’t know.”
“Try. Because I won’t stop trying.”
I have no doubt. He hasn’t stopped trying since our first dance together, and his eyes promise me what his words do. So no matter how much it scares me, no matter how much I want to hide, I give him what he deserves. What, in my heart, I truly want.
“I’ll try.”
Because amidst all the chaos and heartbreak holding us together, he is my light in the dark.
She feels so small in my arms.
Her body is quivering and her chest is still heaving. My top is soaked from her tears, but I don’t care. The only thing I care about is the words she just said. Two tiny words that mean so much.
Two tiny words that have the immense power to change everything.
I tangle my fingers in her hair, breathe in, and tighten my hold on her. I don’t want to say what I’m about to. I don’t even want to think about it, but I have to. I need her to understand that I know. I
know
the pain she carries even if I don’t get it.
I need her to understand I can hold onto her broken heart the way she needs me to.
“Tori and I were inseparable. We danced together almost every day whether we has class or not, and when I was eight, we had our dream. We promised each other that when we were old enough, we’d leave London, fly to New York, and go to Juilliard. I always thought she’d go first since she was four years older than me, but she insisted she’d wait for me. She said she’d work and save all her money to get us here, then even if it all fell apart for her, she’d stay and watch me take the college by storm.” I swallow, feeling the same sting I always do. “She was my best friend as well as my sister, and it drove my parents batty. They hated I was closer to her than my brother – my only brother. My father dreamt of weekend football matches watching his boys play so he could boast to his friends. My relationship with Tori destroyed it. I was never going to be the dirty, ruffed-up boy my father desired me to be on a football pitch. In my mother’s words, I was always going to be “the fairy on a stage.””
“Blake,” Abbi whispers, clenching my top tighter.
“We spent hours making our plans. Where we’d live, where we’d work, what we’d see. Tori said more than once we’d be like live-in tourists. I couldn’t wait. I wanted nothing more than to achieve my dream with my favorite person. But it would never happen.
“If I knew then what I knew now, I would have tried harder to make her talk to me. If I knew I’d lose her just four years later, I would have never left her side. And I definitely wouldn’t have listened to my parents denying the very existence of depression. To them it was taboo, not something to be discussed, and there was no way on Earth their perfect baby girl was suffering from it. There was no way she was being bullied at the top-notch private girls’ school they sent her to. In their eyes, Tori was doing nothing but attention seeking.
“I hid everything for her. The late night crying sessions were blown off as the time of the month, or a sad film or television show. Even a sad chapter in her favorite book. Every cut or mark on her body was passed off as an injury from dance, hockey, anything. She had an excuse for every single one, and I never questioned it. I was only twelve. I didn’t have any reason to believe she would lie to me. Even when she asked me not to tell Mum about it, I didn’t ask why. I wasn’t blind – where I was the black sheep of the family, Tori was the eldest and the golden girl. But they never cared enough to listen.”
“Blake-”
“I found her.” I pause for a moment, choking back the tears building in me as the memory plays in my mind. “I found her in her room, curled into a ball on her blood-stained bed. She’d sliced her arms to pieces, but that was nothing compared to the gash on her thigh. She knew what she was doing – the coroner’s report later showed she’d severed right through her main artery. Every time I think about her that’s what I see. I see her surrounded by her soft toys, each of them a reminder of the girl she used to be. I see her art coursework scattered across her bedroom floor and the knife she’d used to make the cuts. And the worst thing, the thing that haunts me the most is I see her holding her ballet shoes to her chest.
“She knew what would happen. It was never a cry for help, not for Tori. It was always the real deal. And the worst thing about it all is she never should have been alone that afternoon. Jase had a football game, a final of a local competition, and Dad insisted we all went. Tori got to stay behind because she was studying for her exams, but I was forced into going. And I did. I went, and that’s what I found when I came home. My last memory of my big sister was always supposed to be of us dancing together at Juilliard, but instead it’s of her dead body.”
Abbi’s arms slide around me, and she pulls me closer to her. Her fingers splay across my back, like she’s trying to wrap every part of me up.
“And no one dares to speak about her. Just me. I’m the only one who remembers she even existed. And it fucking kills me.” I close my eyes as the tears I’ve fought this whole time spill out and down my cheeks. They roll down silently, nothing like the tears that fell the day I found Tori. I can hear it in my head; my shouts for help, my inconsolable sobbing, the scrambles of my parents, my mother’s cries, Kiera’s shushing and shuffling of the other kids. Yet over it all I hear one long scream filled with more pain than I ever thought one person could feel. My scream. The one that belonged to the bond I’d had with Tori, the bond that had shattered the second my eyes fell on her broken, still body.
Abbi’s arms tighten around me. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. You didn’t make that choice, did you? She did. No one can apologize for her mistakes.”
“No, I didn’t, but I almost did.” Her whispers are muffled, and I’m certain I wouldn’t have heard her if it wasn’t my shoulder she was snuggled into.
“What?”
She takes a deep breath and pulls back. Her fingers slip under her sleeves, and she rolls them up to her elbows, doing the same with her sweatpants to her knees. Finally, she pulls her top up, exposing her stomach, and drops her head.
I comb my eyes over her bare skin. Almost every inch is covered with white lines, long and short, deep and shallow, and I can’t stop myself from reaching for her. My fingers run over her arms, her legs, her stomach, feeling every bump across her skin.
“Almost,” she whispers, stilling my hands against her stomach. “I get why Tori did it. I understand. Sometimes it gets too much. Sometimes,” she breathes in heavily. “Sometimes just once isn’t enough. It’s addictive. The release you get, however short, it’s like a drug. Once you’ve done it once, you keep doing it, over and over. Tori knew what she was doing, and I did too. I didn’t want to hurt anymore, I didn’t want to keep getting hurt, but it was too late for me to get out that way, so I took the easy way. The coward’s way. I just wanted a life where I’d be happy, where I wouldn’t be controlled by him. I didn’t want a life where I wondered when the next argument or fight would be, and I was in too deep to get out. I was too broken and too weak to even fight with him anymore. I didn’t want that for myself.
“If Maddie hadn’t of found me, I wouldn’t be here now. I tried what Tori did – hit the main arteries and just bleed. Unlike Tori, I misjudged it. When I woke up, they told me I was half an inch away from it. If I’d hit it I wouldn’t have been around for Maddie to save. It would have been too late for me.”
Him. Argument. Fight.
“Who is “him?”” My arms are tense. The thought that someone, anyone, could have hurt her so badly she wanted to take her own life sparks a fury in me I didn’t know I had.
She curls her fingers around mine. “
He
doesn’t matter. He can’t hurt me anymore. Only I can do that now.”
“You can, but you won’t.” I tug her clothes down, covering the marks, and look her in the eyes. “If it hurts I want to know.”
“It’s not a pain you can take away.”
“No, but it’s a pain I can ride out with you. I can be there and hold you whenever you need it. You don’t have to do this alone anymore, Abbi.”
“I’ve never been alone,” she whispers. “When I left the hospital I didn’t come home. They sent me to a mental institution. I came home six weeks ago.”
Shit.
I tug her into my body, needing to do nothing but just hold her.
“They sent me there so I couldn’t try again. So I couldn’t get that half an inch over.”
“Would you have? If you’d come straight home?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” She shrugs, laying her head against me. “Last year feels like a lifetime away, but even then I remember thinking I didn’t get it right for a reason. If I was truly meant to go, if it was meant to work, I would have hit the artery dead on, or Maddie wouldn’t have found me. That half an inch saved my life.”
I bend my head forward, letting my lips press against the top of her head. “I’m really, really glad you missed.”
Abbi curves her arms around me, tucking her legs under her. She turns her face into my chest. “Me too.”
~
Pain shoots through my neck as I try to move, and cramp takes my calf hostage.
“Bastard,” I mutter, rubbing both my neck and my leg at the same time. This is why no one should sleep on a sofa – especially not if it’s only two seats and you’re over six foot tall. It’s like trying to get a blow-up bed back to the size it was when it first came out the box.
A royal pain in the arse.
I roll over on Abbi’s sofa, rubbing my eyes. When I open them, I find her sitting cross-legged on the floor with a book open in her lap. Her hair is flowing over her shoulders, and for the first time since I met her, she’s wearing something other than long sleeves. Her tank top and yoga pants show her scars clearly even in the low morning light.
I ease myself up onto my elbow. “Good reading?”
Abbi pushes her hair back from her face as she tilts her face up to me. “Depends on your definition of “good” at six in the morning.”
“Okay.” I rub a hand down my face. “There is nothing that could even be considered good at six a.m.”
She smiles slightly. “It’s my diary. From St. Morris’s… The mental institution.”
“Ah.” I push myself to a sitting position. “I can’t imagine that’s light morning reading.”
A small laugh leaves her. “Not exactly.” She closes the book and runs her finger across the cover. “I haven’t looked at it since I left. I shoved it in a drawer when I got home and left it there. I didn’t want to look at it. I thought it was the most stupid and pointless thing ever – writing in a diary wasn’t going to help me get better. Dr. Hausen – my psychiatrist – made me do it. She said even if I just wrote one line a day about how I was feeling, it would help me.”
“Did it help?”
“No.” She laughs sadly. “I felt like an idiot every single night because it didn’t help me in the slightest, but it wasn’t supposed to help me. Not then. I didn’t realize it until I started reading this morning.”
“Call me stupid, but I’m really not following.”
Abbi brings her eyes to mine. “It was never to help me get better. Dr. Hausen made me write in it in the hopes I’d look back on it one day and realize how far I’d come.”
“Have you?”
“Look for yourself.” She tosses me the book and it lands in my lap.
I pick up the red, hard-backed book and glance at her. “Are you sure? I looked in my sister’s diary once, and she chased me with my brother’s baseball bat when she caught me.”
Abbi’s lips twitch into a smile. “I’m sure. You’ve already seen me at my worst and there’s nothing in that book I won’t eventually tell you.”
“Well, okay.” I open it to the first page and start to read, flicking through the pages.
April 6
th
I don’t know why I have to write in this. It won’t help. I can’t use words to describe “how I feel” every day. I don’t even feel anything. I’m just numb. Numb to everything.
April 12
th
The last pages here are blank. Why? Because I still feel nothing. How can you write when you have no feelings?
April 18th
Mom and Dad keep coming. Maddie keeps coming. Pearce hasn’t come. I don’t know why it bothers me. Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know.
I just want everyone to leave me alone. I wish Maddie had never found me.
April 22nd
Maddie is going. To California. Our crazy dream from our childhood. She’s doing it, and I’m stuck in here. I feel. Finally. I feel angry. Angry because I should be going with her. At least Dr. Hausen will be glad to hear I can finally feel something.
April 30
th
Group therapy. It’s crap. None of them know what I go through, what I remember. None of them are like me. They’re all crazy – screaming crazy. I’m not. I’m just quiet, happy to be left alone. I wish they would leave me alone.
“You didn’t exactly get on board with the everyday thing, huh?” I smirk.
“Um… No. I got better towards the end, but at first I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t interested in much of anything, to be honest. I was too wrapped up in a world of pain and haunted by memories. They were still too fresh… Too real to think about anything else.” She waves at the book. “Read as much as you want.”
I don’t miss the way her voice dips, lowering until it’s almost a whisper, or the way she picks at the skin around her nails. I look at the open diary in my hands and shut it, dropping it on the floor next to me.
“I don’t need to read it.”