She shakes her head again. It’s like the few sentences she just said are all she can manage. She looks like every ounce of fight is draining slowly from her body. Today, she looks an awful lot like giving up.
Her hands rub her face, her thumbs swiping under eyes. I want to say something – anything – but I can’t find the words. Hell, I don’t even think I have the bloody words. She drops to sit on her ankles, resting her forehead against her knees, and links her fingers. Her arms stretch out in front of her making her sleeves rise up, exposing her bare skin.
My heart stops.
If we’d been anywhere else I wouldn’t have noticed. If it had been any other day, I wouldn’t have even looked.
The harsh studio lights bear down on her, highlighting the thin white lines that crisscross on her wrists. The lines that speak louder than words, cry harsher than any sob and hold more pain than any other injury.
But I can’t look away. I can’t tear my gaze from them, even as I’m transported back to my sister’s room.
I see the very same lines on Tori’s arms, some white, some pink, some still red. The bumps, the bruises, the accidental cuts – the second I saw her arms it all made sense to me. But it was still too late. I was still too late.
I shake the memory away. Abbi’s looking at me, her eyes wide. She realizes my gaze is falling to her wrists and stands quicker than I’ve ever seen her move, yanking her sleeves over her hands. Her feet pound against the floor as she runs towards her bag.
No. Not this time.
I race to her and stop in front of her. She crashes into me, and I grab her shoulders to stop her from going anywhere. Tears spill from her eyes and she fights me, turning her shoulders and wriggling as she tries to get away from me. Her head shakes, and mine does too, both of us stuck in limbo until one of us gives in.
But I won’t give in.
I won’t let her go.
It’s not a want anymore. It’s not an interest, a concern for her. It’s a need. I need to know what would cause her to do that to herself.
I need to know what it is that’s so bad it would make her take something to her beautiful skin and break it that way.
“Let me go,” she begs. “Please, Blake.”
I shake my head. “No. Not until you talk to me.”
She tries harder to throw me off her. “There’s nothing to talk about!”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter anymore. None of them matter a single damn bit!”
“It matters to me.”
She stops moving. Her eyes crash into mine as she snaps her head up, and her lips purse. “Well it shouldn’t. It doesn’t matter to me anymore.”
“Then why are you hiding them?”
“Because I hate them!” She finally knocks my hands off and turns, walking a few paces before stopping. “I hate them and everything they are. Everything they mean. Everything they remind me of. I hate them.”
Her voice is thick with tears both falling and unshed and her shoulders rise and fall with each heavy breath she takes. Standing in the middle of this huge studio, she looks tiny. And with her shoulders falling forward, her head hanging and her arms tucked around her, she looks completely and utterly broken.
She looks exactly how my heart feels.
Silence lingers between us. No words are spoken, and I’m waiting for her to say something. Anything. Even if she just tells me to piss off, that’ll do, even if it’s not what I want.
“They remind me of how things were,” she whispers, her voice barely there yet seeming to echo off the walls. “They’re everything my life was. Everything I don’t want it to be again. They’re hideous. They’re the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen, and I can’t believe I ever thought what caused them was beautiful. They taint my skin in the worst way, and I’m ashamed of them. If I knew I’d be stuck with them for the rest of my life I would never have done it or I would have cut even deeper.” Her voice trails off at the end.
My stomach rolls. “Don’t say that. Ever.”
“It’s true.”
I walk to her, coming up behind her again. I press my chest against her shuddering back, pull her into me, and rest my cheek against the side of her head. My hands take her arm and I ease the material of her leotard up to her elbows. She breathes in sharply and squeezes her eyes shut when I touch the pad of my thumb to her wrist.
The scars stretch up the inside of her arm, crossing each other and disappearing under her sleeve. I can barely believe what I’m looking at – each one of them is perfectly healed, some of them barely visible to my eyes. I know we see different things when we look at her arms.
“How many?” I whisper, my voice thick. “How many are there?”
“I don’t know. Hundreds, maybe. Everywhere. They’re everywhere.”
And I wonder how I missed it. Her body is always covered. Where the other girls wear no tights and short sleeved leotards, Abbi is always wrapped under opaque tights or leggings and long sleeves. Even out of class, she’s always hidden.
I brush my thumb up her arm, running it over the light bumps. “Why? Why did you do it?”
“Because it made the pain stop,” she breathes, raising her other arm and brushing her thumb along her skin after mine. “No matter how much it hurt, it always made it stop.”
“I don’t understand.”
She laughs sadly, tears still streaming down her cheeks. “You don’t have to understand. It’s better if you don’t.” She curls her fingers around her sleeve and pulls it down, covering her arm back up. My hands drop from her arm and she steps away.
“What if I want to understand?”
Tired eyes look back at me. “Then you’re stuck wanting, because I’ll never tell. Not you.”
I frown. “Why?”
“Because…” she says in the softest tone I’ve ever heard her use. “You’re much too perfect to be tarred by the mess that is my imperfect life. You’re much too perfect to know anything about the things that haunt me. I would never forgive myself if I destroyed you the way I’m so destroyed.”
“You’re not destroyed, and I’m far from perfect.” I take her chin in my hand, making her look at me, and rub my thumb across her cheek. It wipes away a tear only for another to replace it. And another. And another. “I’m nowhere near close to perfect, and even if I was, it wouldn’t make me want to know everything about you any less than I do right now. It wouldn’t stop me wanting to look into your eyes and put that spark I’m pretty fond of back in there. You might think you’re imperfect, and you might be right, but there’s nothing more perfect than imperfection. If I cared about true perfection I’d be stuck chasing something that doesn’t exist for the next forever.”