legs shake like they’re nothing but noodles. I start to fall forward but quickly catch myself by placing my hand on the granite countertop. Mariabella is speaking, but her words enter one ear and then leave the other. It’s almost as if my head is made up of nothing but air, and the words hang suspended there, impossible for me to fully catch.
She saw.
She saw something that no one has ever seen before. Something that I don’t want anyone to see. It’s twisted and fucked up, but it’s also mine. My demons and my pain. My internal suffering made flesh.
Slowly, distantly, sounds return to me. It feels as if I’m underwater, hearing muted conversations on the surface but unable to join in. Water rushes through my ears, the sound shattering my eardrums, as I finally orient myself to the here and now.
“What the fuck happened? Peony, I can’t… What happened? I just…huh?” Mariabella is saying, her words rushing together in her distress. She’s staring intently at my pale arm, at the physical manifestation of my emotional pain. Marring the porcelain skin are deep, jagged scars. Hundreds of them. Some are barely the width of a string, but others are large, as if someone has taken a knife and gorged out the skin. They extend from the inside of my wrist to my elbow, each one telling a different story.
“It’s fine.” I try to sound dismissive, even happy, but Mariabella’s fierce expressions stop me in place.
“It’s not fucking fine,” she rages, glaring at the offending scars. She swallows heavily. “Did you…did you do this to yourself?”
I want to lie—but what lie could I give her, anyway? She’s already seen how broken I truly am.
“Don’t worry,” I reassure her, removing my arm from her steel grip and pulling the green dress the rest of the way up. I give her my back so she can zip it up, and I’m shocked to feel her fingers trembling. “They’re from middle school.”
“Peony,” she gasps. And when I turn back towards her, tears run down her cheeks. “What happened?”
I can feel myself start to break as well, start to crumble into dust. She’s ripping open my meticulous packaging, pulling at the pretty ribbons securing me in one piece, and then watching as I come apart around her, revealing a box full of shattered glass. There’s nothing beautiful about something capable of cutting you open. The wrapping serves as an illusion designed to deceive and entice, but the inside? That’s where you see how ugly someone truly is.
And I’m the ugliest monster of them all.
A single tear travels down my cheek, followed immediately by a second one. And then, I’m sobbing, gasping for breath, ruining the makeup she painstakingly applied.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” I say as she stares at me in disbelief and pain. So much pain. It’s almost as if my grief has become a palpable entity that she can feel herself. “You don’t remember me from middle school.”
“Middle school?” Her nose crinkles as she stares at me, and then I see it. I see the moment when understanding dawns, and what little color remains on her face disappears completely. She staggers back a step as if she’s been struck, shaking her head from side to side slowly in disbelief. “No. It can’t be…”
“We never really talked,” I confess in a choked voice, those damn, wayward tears continuing to leave red, blotchy marks on my face.
Horror has her clutching the towel rack, as if her legs are seconds from giving out. “Karsyn…”
And I can see that she knows. She may not have ever talked to me, but she remembers the poor, broken girl teased and bullied mercilessly by the Devils. By her boyfriend. And I can see the pieces clicking together in her mind as she stares at my arms, now hidden by the dress sleeves.
She races towards the toilet, barely getting it open before she throws up. She’s crying in earnest now as her hands clench the bowl.
“I am so, so sorry,” she sobs, dry-heaving. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was that bad.”
I take a step towards her, and she flinches away.
“I don’t blame you or anyone other than them,” I whisper, grabbing a towel from the rack and scrubbing at my face. I’m going to have to go sans makeup for my date, but I can’t find it within me to care.
“But we were there,” she screams. “We saw what they were doing, and we just let it happen.”