I've Been Dying to Tell You Anything You Want to Hear 

Ava didn't wear her emotions on her face and she sure as hell didn't give them life through words.

She stopped doing that after her aunt's husband nearly broke her nose when she started acting out at school. She was five.

It was fucked up just how poetic his torture became. It was so sick it was perfect.

One of the worst things about him wasn't what he did to Ava; it was how he managed to keep doing it to Ava. It was how he put a leash on her and anytime she started feeling comfortable it became a noose he would string over a tree branch so he could watch her hang herself.

As repulsive as he was, I had to give him credit: he was smart.

He knew exactly what to do and what to say to keep Ava from talking. After a while it wasn't Ava's choice to keep her emotions as far from the surface as she could get them. If she didn't he would have killed her. I never doubted that.

Most people started small, leaving room to grow. He started by putting her in the emergency room and finished with her in the intensive care unit, incapable of walking for two weeks.

And no one did a goddamn thing, because he was good at controlling her and she was good at lying. It was almost beautiful the way their relationship worked like some sort of twisted circle of life bullshit.

As far as I knew, this cycle of torment started because Ava cried every day of Kindergarten and complained that she didn't want to go home after school with her aunt. Afraid of the attention she was gathering from our teacher, her aunt's husband told Ava she had to stop, or he'd have to punish her.

When she didn't listen, he started tying her up when they'd play their little game in the bedroom. If she couldn't act like a kid, he wasn't going to treat her like one.

I remember the first time she told me about it. Looking back, I realized that he got off on it, but at the time, it didn't make sense to me. Even the mutts taking up residence in my barn had more freedom than that man gave Ava. He was treating her like an animal—like the bitch he told her she was—when she hadn't done anything wrong.

He'd bind her wrists with duct tape, sometimes in front of her, sometimes behind her back, but he always left her feet free. It was too hard to get her pants off otherwise.

She wore bracelets as often as she could, to cover the pink tinge of her pale skin after days when she'd struggled hard. Although she already had an obsession for wearing jackets in the summer, the duct tape rings built the foundation for her attachments to her hairbands.

Sometimes when we'd play fight and I'd pin her wrists, she'd panic. Countless times our laughter turned to Ava gasping for air and forfeiting the fight to me, so she could try to stop the tears. Because of that, I didn't win any more fights after she turned six. It was worth the humiliation of being beaten by someone less than half my size if it let her feel like she was in control.

She was in control of a lot more than she ever knew. We all saw the symptoms, but we didn't do anything. She controlled everyone by making us think they were her quirks when they were lies.

On his birthday he tied her to his bedframe and that was harder to hide. She made up a lie about a jump rope that no one really believed, but didn't have enough suspicion to challenge.

All she'd say to me was that it hurt. And he hadn't made her wear the duct tape on her mouth, but she wished he had.

That was when her head started getting all fucked up. That was when he started breaking her.

The game started at the point his punishments met success.

But although it worked for a while—she forced herself to stop crying at school—there was something her aunt's husband hadn't planned for: the more time Ava spent tied up, the more she wanted to be in control of herself. Having that freedom taken away from her made Ava angry.

She started getting violent. If she couldn't have freedom after school, she was going to take every bit she could get where ever she could.

Being touched was her biggest fear, so when kids would try to grab her hand on the playground she'd ram her knuckles into their stomachs. When someone would accidentally run into her playing tag she'd shove them as hard as she could. Once her brother got too rough with her and she bit him hard enough to bring a river of blood flowing from his forearm, a boat of redcoats on a pale sea. It seemed she was using the force she'd kept pent up since he took the tape off her mouth to make her do things we didn't understand.

She'd refuse to do her class work and participate with all the other kids. She went so far as to slap a teacher for putting their hand on the back of her neck. Ava didn't take shit from people. Even when they were just trying to help her.

She was lucky she'd always been such a good kid. Had it been me, no one would have been surprised. That's the problem with symptoms: you only notice them when they're new to you.

Thirty years in the game told our Kindergarten teacher that something was wrong with Ava. Not only was it suspicious how attached Ava was to her dad, but her sudden, drastic change in behavior was a red flag in a sea of white picket fences. The woman was smart and she almost saved Ava's life. Almost.

Going on little more than a hunch and a few complaints from other students, our teacher called a conference with Ava's parents a week after she started becoming overwhelmingly aggressive. Both of them, wrapped up in their lives that were supposed to be lived together but spent almost entirely apart, had no clue why she was misbehaving.

They spent that night telling her how disappointed they were that she was being such a bad girl. And it would have stopped her, but her aunt's husband had to make sure Ava knew who was in charge. He did it in the biggest, most obnoxious way possible.

After they played together in his room he always made her take a bath—she refused to talk about those times, saying he treated her like a baby, then never letting slip another word—and the day after the conference, as she was getting out, he grabbed the back of her head and slammed her face into the edge of the tub.

He said it was because she was being bad.

She wasn't allowed to show the symptoms that were psychologically expected of her. She wasn't allowed to act out or panic over anything reminding her of her trauma. It was what made her so angry in high school when people passed around their sob stories as excuses for their behavior: she had never been allowed to do that. When she tried to play the pity card, she got her face busted up.

After it happened, I went to her house to drop off the get well card our class had colored and our teacher had entrusted me with. I was proud to be the messenger, because I knew she was going to love it and I knew it was going to make her happy. The stupid piece of construction paper was purple and yellow and it was going to make her feel better immediately.

Ava winced in pain as she forced a smile for it. But instead of thanking me for bringing it to her, she apologized. Sitting on her couch, listening to her parents whisper fight in the kitchen, she said "I'm sorry I was mean to you, Carter."

I asked her what she meant. She hadn't been mean to me at all.

"That's why he did it," she answered, like she was rehearsing a speech that had been planned for her. "I was mean to people."

When I asked her what had happened, she couldn't resist telling me. It was eating away at her insides like a parasite trying to take over her entire body.

As she spoke she seemed cold and detached, like she was watching the streams of blood running off her pale flesh and sliding down the porcelain tub all over again. There was so much bleeding it had scared her aunt's husband into taking her to the emergency room.

When my parents came to pick me up, I heard the story he had been given the ER nurses: Ava had gotten dirty while playing outside and slipped and fell getting out of the bath.

Supposedly she was a clumsy girl, but no one had any idea how much of a balancing act her life was. She deserved credit for the performances she put on. They never failed to amaze.

Like it was killing her to hide, she couldn't let me leave until at least I knew the truth. Hurriedly, she pulled me into her room, closed the door, pushed her hair back, and showed me the bruises his fingers had left on her scalp. Like I was her living suicide note, she told only me the truth. No one saw those but me and that must have dampened the pain of being entirely alone.

Still, he couldn't have chosen a worse punishment for her. Not only did she always have to hide the emotional trauma he subjected her to, after that she had a physical reminder where she couldn't hide it. He ruined the pretty face she always put on to make everyone believe her life was okay.

She hated him for it and she hated everyone for doing nothing but staring. All the kids gawked at her nose, swollen and purple, and the dark circles under both her eyes that never truly went away, just as five-year-olds were expected to do.

Countless times they asked her what happened and she repeated the story so often it became as casual as a hello: "I slipped."

He expected her to wear a mask in public and when she disobeyed, he made it nearly impossible to pass off the charade. It was like showing up at a ball either dressed in full costume or in absolutely nothing at all. The horrors were all hidden behind the glamor of the event and I wished she wouldn't attend. But she had to. If she didn't he was going to do something worse.

And wondering what was worse than having your faced shoved into the side of a porcelain bathtub was almost as much torture as actually having to feel the pain of the bone and cartilage begging to break, but only succeeding in bruising.

But somehow he found ways to outdo himself