Monster

To anyone walking past us, her “Do you want to come over later?” would have sounded perfectly acceptable, a perfectly reasonable request for one best friend to ask the other. Taking a few steps to where I was standing, into my position, the hatred that clouded her eyes would be impossibly clear to see. She practically spat the words at me as if each letter of each word was laced in acid. She angled her head at me that made her flawlessly contoured face look almost demonic, shielding half of it with her hair and looking at me through one eye. Her red claws resembled stick-on nails, and they menacingly tapped on the lockers beside us. Then, after flashing that smile that she whitened just about every week so you wouldn’t notice her forked tongue trying to peek through, I forced a smile of my own.

“I’d love to”.

I practically gagged on the words as they forced their way from my throat.

The hallway began to stretch out in front of me as we made our way to the doors. Realizing I’d have to journey the whole distance with her by my side, I shivered, most likely because she was breathing down my neck with her chilling breath. I turned to catch a glance at her usually emotionless face. I was shocked to see some tension, her jaw clenched, her eyebrows raised and eyes wide, and her plastic smile looked almost foreign to her face, stretching from cheek to cheek. She looked oddly uncomfortable. She looked like she was in absolute agony, trying to keep a straight face, and I was in pain just looking at her.

My escape was two feet in front of me. All I had to do was push open the glass door and flee from the ambush that I knew was coming and was all too familiar. But her hand made it to the handle first and she made me follow her outside.

As soon as I crossed the threshold that separated the school from outside, the sun blinded me. In the moments it took me to adjust my eyes to the lighting, the door closed, and then like a volcano, she erupted. As if she were the human embodiment of Mount Vesuvius and I was Pompeii, I was as good as dead. Words spewed from her mouth, each a perfectly strategized stab at me, each just a little more violently thrown at me than the previous one. Accusations were tossed about, and I stood there, blocking out the sound that was exploding from her. All I could do was wait for the incredulous cascade of white noise to stop coming from her mouth.

Some people can turn a beautiful day into an ugly one, yet she was especially gifted.

“Are you done?” I heard myself say. It took me a second to recognize my voice. I hadn’t even thought the words before they came out.

She looked shocked that I had cut her off and practically whimpered, “What?”.

My words sliced the air this time as I increased their force, “I said, Are you done”.

It was no longer a question. She opened her mouth to respond, but I cut her off again, holding up my hand. I closed my eyes, took an extended inhale to compose myself, and made sure she would be quiet so there would be no need for me to repeat myself.

“Do not talk to me ever again,” I said evenly. This voice was not my own. It was my own, but the power that accompanied it was new. The sound each word made sounded foreign to my ears as if I had begun to speak a new language. The expression on her face resembled the feeling I had, but her’s was covered in hurt. Then she broke. What I had said registered in her mind, her monstrous facade crumbled away, tears poured from her eyes, and she covered her face in resignation. I’d seen it all before, heard the apologies and sob stories that accompanied them. Then I’d say that it was okay, when in reality it wasn’t. She’d wipe her face with the back of her hand, ask me if her mascara had run, smile, hug me with an affectionate tap on the back as if I were the one that needed consoling, and be on her way.

There were moments in between each time her weak frame shook as a sob escaped her body, that I remembered every vulnerable moment I had seen her in. There weren’t many and I had always envied her strength, when I tended to be the one that was in need of support most. I remembered playdates at random playgrounds where running around for hours was anything but exhausting. I remembered laughing.

But sometimes buildings aren’t meant to stand forever. Sometimes walls cave in, paint peels, beams collapse, and the roof crumbles in on it all. Sometimes the carpet must be torn up, the roof leaks, and there is too much water damage to save the house. And a once beautiful house can turn into a dilapidated one, and no one wishes to live in a house where the floorboards creak and the ceiling is filled with holes.

I didn’t say another thing to her. Didn’t say sorry. Didn’t tell her that she no longer deserved the title of “best friend”. All it took was seven words to let go of seven years of friendship and the two seconds it took to say them. Maybe my heart knew it was giving up before I did.

I turned away from her anyway, leaving her there to weep alone.