Long Live the Car Crash Hearts

There was something about watching Ava do ordinary things that made life seem kind of extraordinary. You never appreciated boring until you watched someone that lived for the mundane moments of life, because hers was so screwed up. It was kind of like glancing at the clock every couple of minutes while sitting in a classroom. You knew there would be very little change, but you still did it, because sometimes you could catch the hour hand shift ever so slightly and suddenly you would feel like you'd just seen the impossible happen. You'd just literally seen time move.

That's why I loved watching Ava do stupid, boring things: it was kind of like seeing magic. She spent hours and hours trying to make anyone that happened to glance her way think she was doing nothing strange, because she longed for everything to be ordinary. People always said they wished something different would happen to them and she'd laugh. If only they knew how lucky they were to be normal.

But even if Ava had had a boring life, she still would have been fascinating. Her personality was something like walking outside at midnight during a full moon. She was dark and mysterious, but also bright and beautiful. At the center of her being was an intense desire to make people happy. She wanted to see them smile and laugh at all the funny little things life offered. But that part of her was surrounded in a night that was as endless as it was dark. Maybe there wasn't a tragic tale behind every shadow, but even the good things were cloaked in her dark humor and quick, merciless wit.

Those thoughts were plaguing my mind when I took her out that day in August. That horribly normal Sunday when we went to meet our friends for some boring, afternoon fun at the lake. It was a sorry attempt to hang on to the last bits of summer, the last weekend of August, but we clung to it like it was a rope around our necks.

Junior year had started. The water was beginning to cool off. The days were getting shorter and the nights getting colder. Yet nothing much seemed to change. I was invited to have the kind of fun that was only fun because it wasn't mediated by any authority, so I drug Ava along. It was normal and noticeably unremarkable but we did it because although adults weren't telling us no, they weren't exactly screaming yes either. We did it because we wanted to and we didn't need excuses. We didn't need the promise of an unforgettable adventure or the excitement of a once in a lifetime experience. We just needed a few hours at a stupid lake, swimming in cooling water, drinking cheap beer, and pretending we were having a great time that one day we'd look back and maybe vaguely remember.

And I was thrilled to see Ava do normal things in her weird way. It distracted me so much that I hardly thought about where we were going until she said, only half as annoyed as she sounded "Jesus. Go back, I think you missed one," as we passed over bumps in the dirt road we were flying down.

I'd been watching her paint her toenails black instead of watching the road and she was right. Nearly every hole dug up in the poor excuse for a road had welcomed my tires. I resumed my glance at the red rocks, trying to casually pull the truck away from the ditch slowly so she wouldn't know I hadn't intentionally drifted that far to the side, and only sneaking a look at her once. She was wiping off some stray polish from the side of her toe, then wiping the rogue polish on her pants, then wiping her entire hand across the blue threads she'd painted black accidentally, trying to fade the new stain.

"Look what you've done," she said to me, taking her fingers from her mouth and using their new dampness to try to clean up her under thought and over accomplished plan. "You made a mess."

I quickly reminded her that I wasn't the one who decided to paint my toenails on a dirt road.

"Whatever," she grinned. "You made me make a mess."

As she screwed the lid back on the polish and threw the bottle in the backseat I asked her why she was even bothering. It wasn't like she was going to swim. There was no way she was stripping off her pants in front of people, bathing suit or no, because of the same reason she threatened to quit Cross Country when she discovered just how short the shorts of the new uniform were. She was hiding something. Something that would cause a lot of trouble if anyone else ever saw.

She shrugged her broad shoulders at the question like she always did. "Because I hate my toenails.

Before I could say anything else, she leaned over and turned the radio up, signaling the end of the conversation. She sang along as usual, quiet enough I had to strain to hear her, but loud enough her voice was unmistakable.

"Come on, son. You haven't got a chance now. She's a dove. She's a fuckin' nightmare."

Out of the corner of her eye, she must have seen me grin. Her voice was inarguably my favorite sound and the only thing I liked better than when she sang was when she swore. Something about hearing that sweet little mouth say such dirty words made me happy.

She didn't swear in front of her dad or her brother. She didn't swear much at school, especially not when teachers were around. Certain groups she hung out with didn't curse so she didn't either when she was around them. But I liked it when she would say anything. I liked it when she said bad words with her voice, soft and sweet.

I liked when she fucking rattled my cage.

When the line came up again, she sang it loudly, watching my face and socking me in the arm when I couldn't help but smile. "What?" she asked, knowing fully well what I was smiling about. I told her constantly how much I liked when she said dirty words, but that was part of Ava's midnight like personality. She liked pushing the boundaries for fun. "You like that, punk?"

Forcing a frown that didn't spread anywhere past my lips, I shook my head, but didn't say anything. After a moment, she tapped me on the shoulder and I glanced over just to see her middle finger standing tall and proud to greet me. With a laugh, I grabbed her hand in mine and pushed it down.

"Hey, watch the road," she snickered, pulling away. Purposely, I jerked the steering wheel away from the ditch that wasn't even remotely close and watched as she fell into the passenger's door and giggled with delight.

With as much sincerity as I could summon, I told her to behave or I'd have to take her home.

"If you took me home, who would entertain you?" she asked, and I smiled again.

Only this time I was smiling because she was right.

When we got to the lake and met up with all our other friends, everything was perfectly normal. The guys jumped off the end of the dock while the girls sat on the wood planks and watched through their sunglasses. Although we'd all agreed it would be a casual, careless day, they'd still spent time on their hair and makeup, just as Ava had been doing. And I noticed that the other guys had put on nicer t-shirts without holes. It was a strange, superficial game we all played, but no one was exempt. You did things to impress other during the most unimpressive moments and no one ever questioned why. It was just something that happened without provocation or explanation.

So there we were, six teenagers doing nothing productive yet something that qualified as doing more than nothing. And there was Ava, making everyone laugh and keeping us all on our toes, waiting for the next installment of her wit. She was the dark heart of the party and I loved every second of it for her.

It was all just fun and harmless games until someone suggested that (he) wanted to go skinny dipping and someone else said no because (she) was not about to let her dad the cop catch us and take us in for public indecency. Then there was an argument surrounding the fact that those in the water (us) were already in our underwear and that we'd come to the lake to swim, not sit around and try to look pretty like (them).

Then another argument started about how it wasn't fair that some of the group (us) were being rewarded with the visions we had fantasies about, like boobs and asses possessed by (them), because they were not a commodity heavily flaunted like dicks. Then yet another argument stemmed from there and centered around the idea that we were all juniors in high school and what was the point of hanging out on a Sunday if nothing crazy happened while we were all still young and beautiful.

And what happened to get from that point to the point where the girls were stripping off their shirts and shorts and jumping into the water in their panties while those of us in the water were stripping off our underwear and throwing them on the dock was lost in the commotion of all the splashing. But when the uproar quieted, like a wave finally breaking on the shore and receding back into its somber peacefulness, one thing was unmistakable: Ava hadn't joined.

Someone prodded her to join, but she hesitated. As she gathered her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, the dark tint of her jeans standing out in dark contrast about the pale thinness of her arms, I could see the panic in her gray eyes. There was no way she could take off her clothes and join us because they would see what forced her to stay away from wearing shorts, even in the summer. And there was no way she could leave her pants on or else her dad would find out she'd come to the lake. The same lake all the teens went to when they wanted to drink beer, smoke pot, do drugs, and have sex. Even though he trusted her, Ava didn't want him to. She didn't want him to worry about her.

She was a caged animal and frantically her eyes swept from person to person as our friends started berating her for being boring. It was like watching one of those shitty afterschool specials where the "cool" kids were trying to get the hero of the story to try drugs by using the ever popular peer pressure. But she held fast to their lessons and continually shook her head. Strands of her blonde waves started pulling free from her ponytail and falling around her face.

The words were coming over her like a tidal wave. Cmonjustdoitwhydontyouwannahavefundontbesoboring. They were jumbled together like all the drops of water were slung together and falling into one big ass hole to make a lake. Slowly but surely, the currents were sweeping her under and she was starting to drown.

She stammered and stuttered, trying to buy time to think up an excuse worthy of being accepted. It was a sad sight, watching her trying so hard not to panic in front of people that didn't need a freaked out sixteen year old girl on their hands. But they kept pushing her so hard and I could tell she was fighting every muscle in her body so she wouldn't just slap her hands over her ears and start screaming just to drown out their voices.

Finally, she caught wind of a good explanation and chased it so quickly, I thought I could almost see dust rising from the ground behind the dock. "Look, the last time I stripped down for an audience, I ended up being banished from the internet and getting letters from Playboy."

Someone's mouth dropped because (he) thought she was serious and she laughed. "Okay I didn't get letters from Playboy. It was Penthouse," she said. Then Ava laughed again when someone else's mouth dropped because (she) thought for sure Ava was being serious this time around.

"I'm kidding," Ava finally said. "But seriously. I'm not taking my clothes off so someone else can take another stupid picture and start that mess over. My dad is just now letting me go out with people without screening them first."

It was only half a lie. Her dad didn't necessarily "screen" her friends, but he was more vocal about her choices in comrades, cautioning her away from the pot smokers and the vast majority of the football team as well as some of the band students he'd seen making out under the bleachers. Having a coach for a dad didn't always work out for Ava, because it seemed he knew the kids almost as well as she did. So when she went out, she tried not to name names. Especially not after the picture scandal that had barely happened a year before that boring Sunday in August.

With this revelation someone suggested she just jump in with her clothes on, if she was suddenly so self-conscious about wearing just her underwear around people. "Hey, I had on shorts, that night," she said, which was again partially true. "And besides, I can't wear my clothes in the water, because then my dad will know I've been at Lake Party," she said, rolling her eyes as she said the stupid name we'd drunkenly Christened the lake with.

Someone suggested she say she fell in a puddle. Someone else said she just tell him she'd help wash a friend's car. But she shook her head. "I'm not gonna blatantly lie to my dad."

Someone noted she already was by coming to the lake.

"No," Ava insisted. "That's not lying. That's omitting details." That was the funny thing about liars: you never knew when they were lying, because they always had reasons to justify it.

But I couldn't think about that. As Ava continued shooting down suggestions, talking to her hand instead of the crowd of unbelieving peers, a new idea was forming in my head. Because as thrilled as I was to see Ava standing her ground and defending herself, I hated seeing her ostracized by her friends. She spent all of her life on the outside, just being the whitespace. When we had small get-togethers, it was her time to shine. To be someone totally normal and because of what she was hiding, she couldn't.

I wanted so badly for her to be normal. And I said the words, I was praying they were true. I told her there was a pair of gym shorts in the duffle bag in the backseat of my truck. She was more than welcome to wear them, especially if it meant she would be accepted as just a normal kid doing normal things with her normal friends.

Little else was as powerful as when Ava would look at you with nothing but gratitude in her gray eyes and a shy, grateful smile on her pretty pink lips. It felt like you had just saved the world from some horrible tragedy and in a way you had, because you'd saved Ava from her self-hatred for just a moment. And that was enough to make any measure you had to take worth it.

So she borrowed the shorts and returned wearing a different shirt than the one she'd arrived in which shocked us all, because at the time no one knew she wore multiple pairs of clothes layered on top of each other to create the illusion of weight she'd lost returning.

When she returned from her private change in my backseat and joined us in the water, she made a joke about how I had a freakishly narrow waist for my height that served two purposes: 1. Everyone would forget about the strange conversation where she refused to follow along with everyone else for ridiculously frantic reasons and 2. So she could keep up the illusion that we didn't have sex as a pastime and she didn't already know how wide my waist was or how far apart it was from where her left thigh met my right hipbone to where her right thigh met my left hipbone. But I could see past all that.

I could see the way every conversation made her uncomfortable, even though she slipped easily back into her role as the appeaser of everyone. I watched the way she refused to go underwater, even when we played stupid diving games, because she was afraid the makeup on her jawline would come off and everyone would see one of the many things she refused to show the world. And I saw the way, she tried not to kick her legs too much when we decided to race out to "make out island" and back to shore. She swam in fear that the too big gym shorts would raise up over the backside of her thighs and show more than just her ass, but the things she was trying so hard to hide.

I watched the way the fun drained out of her gray eyes and the work of trying to stay in the same personality as the girl she'd presented earlier started to weigh down the edges of her mouth. No one else saw the way the dark heart of the party became the whitespace yet again. But I did.

Everyone was having too much fun doing weird, boring, stupid things. But she wasn't. She was under a lot of pressure to keep up the act that those few moments when she sat alone on the dock, the center of unwanted and unkind attention had completely ruined her day, her week, and her month. Nothing was worse than having the fun she so desperately craved ripped away from her and then given back in tattered shards with sharp edge and dull colors. That easy, carefree Ava that had sat on the dock with her legs stretched out and her eyes hidden behind the sunglass that were held up by her smile was gone and she didn't return. No one even knew she was missing.

One by one our friends left the lake. The first went to meet her family for dinner. Then two more left to meet their families for church. Then the last one left to go have a few beers with his other friends, and although he invited us to tag along, both Ava and I turned him down. She did it because she was tired of keeping up appearances. I did it because I didn't want to hang out with people if Ava wasn't there.

When they were all gone, I pulled her out of the water, and the last remnants of her forced grin faded. "Can you put some clothes on?" she asked. "I've seen enough junk to last me a life time today."

I laughed, knowing she was doing her best not to slip into a somber, boring attitude. She was trying her best to be funny, because she knew I'd invited her to what was supposed to be a fun day where we had fun times with some fun people. She didn't want to ruin my day even though hers had been ruined and then torn apart and ruined again.

We went to my truck to change into our dry clothes and although I hoped she would, she didn't slip her hand in mine. Instead, she let me go to my side alone while she hid behind the passenger's door on her side and stripped out of her borrowed clothes.

As I was fastening my belt, I gave into temptation and casually looked her way. That's when I saw them, those awful things she was trying to hide. The things I was usually only allowed to feel on those nights we fooled around. But they were different. I counted the memory of them in my mind, feeling each phantom long, thin scar tingle under my fingertips.

Then I asked her if some of them were new, because they didn't fit into the diagram of her thighs that my mind had crafted.

"Hm? No," she said, trying to slip into her jeans as quickly as she could.

But it was too late. I leaned across the seat and pointed at the two new ones on each thigh, still pink and scabbed, just under her ass. They hadn't been there before. They hadn't even been there very long, according to their color.

"They're not new," she insisted, finally managing to make her trembling fingers pull her pants up and over them. She was too nervous to even scold me for sneaking a glance, because she knew I was right. She knew the cuts were new.

I was split into three conflicting emotions and I wasn't sure which was going to take over. It was a toss-up between 1. Anger, 2. Disappointment, and 3. Concern, and none of them were strong choices, but finally, in the billion seconds it seemed to take for my mind to decide, number three won out and I was asking her things before my mouth could process the words. What happened? She said she'd stopped. She'd promised she'd stopped.

"Nothing happened, Carter. I swear, they aren't new. They just look like that because I'm cold."

I almost asked her why the others didn't look so fresh. Why they looked like the same old scars she hadn't touched for months, but I didn't. If something was going on to make her do that again, I didn't want to push her.

And it was like she knew I was worried when we climbed in my truck and I started the engine. Maybe it was written all over my face or maybe it was because I forgot to even do my belt. Either way, she knew I was concerned, so she did her best to ease my anxiety.

"Carter," she said, putting her hand on my arm. When I didn't look at her, she kept talking. "I'm okay, Carter. Alright? I'm okay. Promise."

But I couldn't help noticing how she'd just said she was fine, not that she hadn't done it.

The words echoed in my head the entire way back to town and didn't get quieter until I took her out to eat. She said she wasn't hungry, but I insisted she needed food. We'd spent an entire day at the lake swimming and she was sixteen. Even if we hadn't spent the entire day doing physical exercise, she was a teenager. She had to be hungry.

And it was nice. We had a casual conversation while sharing a plate of fries drenched in enough calories she must have been terrified of them. But if she was, she never showed it. She didn't show any signs she could be the kind of girl to have two fresh, pink cuts to match the scars taking up residence on the back of her thighs where she kept them hidden from the world. I almost believed that maybe she hadn't been lying. Maybe she really was okay.

But that was the funny thing about liars: you never knew when they were lying, because they always had reasons to justify it.

So it took me by surprise when she stared out the window for a moment and seemed to fall in a trance as she looked at the building across the street. I watched the way her gray eyes ran down ever brick from the sidewalk up to the top. And I watched the way a dream smile crept into her pretty pink lips.

"You ever thought about jumping?" she asked.

I asked her what she was talking about and why she had even brought it up.

"Y'know those pictures of people that jump out of, like, burning buildings and stuff? You know how peaceful they look, kinda like they're just flying or something. Like, they're falling, but it's like they think at any moment it'll be over. Like, they either hit the ground or they don't. I dunno. It just looks so peaceful, I guess. Like, such a horrible thing can make these pictures people think are so beautiful and whatever. They make it look like some sort of beautiful dream. And I think it's awful, but I kinda wonder what it's like to jump. Just that feeling, I guess. I guess that's what I mean."

I told her no, I never thought about jumping, and no, there was nothing beautiful or peaceful about that.

She scowled at me. "I'm not going to," she said quietly. "And I didn't mean it like that. I just meant I wonder what it's like."

She could tell I was bothered, but she didn't know why. She didn't get it.

What bothered me the most wasn't that even though she tried to make her voice sound distant as she turned her gaze out the window again, I could tell she'd never been more present in a conversation. It wasn't that she twisted a lock of blonde hair around her long, pale finger as she spoke. It wasn't even that the corners of her mouth almost turned up in a casual smile as the words left her lips.

What bothered me the most was that she had thought about it.

Ava had thought about jumping.