Page 46 of What Rough Beast

Which could be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me that wasn’t about my body, but Ava just used the word unnatural to refer to Restoration Acres, and now’s not the time for her to smarten up, or for me to let my guard down.

“Widow does what she has to,” I say evenly, once again talking about myself as well as someone else.

“I don’t mean Widow,” Ava says, shaking her head. The movement is unbalanced, off-kilter, her eyes glazed over again.

“Dude, are you okay?” I ask, a question I’m not sure I’ve ever put to anyone in my life, except Quentin.

“No, I had a really bad weekend, and I upped the dosage on my depression medication this morning,” Ava says flatly. “It makes you foggy.”

“Maybe don’t just do that without talking to a doctor,” I say. I might be a person who pulls glass out of their grandfather’s gums, then gives him a vodka chaser and says it’s fine, but even I know you don’t fuck with pills. My brother had hard days that stretched into long weeks after his accident, and I should have spotted that glaze on Ava’s eyes before, the thousand-yard stare that starts to develop when nothing matters anymore.

I hear voices around the corner and come to my feet before she responds. Two freshmen pass by, duck into the library. I’m already walking away from Ava, but I spin on my heel, still moving backward.

“Hey, you’re not going to kill yourself, right?” I ask.

“What?” Ava asks, her face bunching in confusion, not so much because of the question but because I’m the one asking it.

“I don’t like you or anything,” I tell her. “Just don’t do that, okay?”

“Okay?” Ava says, eyebrows still drawn together.

“Okay, good,” I say awkwardly, turning back around.

It’s true; I don’t like Ava Germaine.

But I’m starting to feel sorry for her.

Because I know what’s coming.

Twenty-Eight

Ava

Cages over graves are not normal. Losing your fingerprints is not normal. An egg calibrating your heart rate is not normal. A deer returning your lost ring is not normal. Puking up white shit that moves is not normal. Problem is, all of these things are associated with Restoration Acres, and it’s the only thing in my life that I care about right now.

And that—I realize—is not normal.

I didn’t go to work after school, instead calling Widow and telling her that I wasn’t feeling good. Which is totally and completely true. My back feels fine, but the pain in my left shoulder has resurfaced, usually as an ache, sometimes as a stabbing pain, the last typically being the prelude to white vomit. I sit back on my heels now, flushing away the most recent occurrence, and go back to my room, where I collapse on my bed.

Bethington has not been kind to me, and Ethan’s party was only the culmination of that. I don’t fit in here; my big ideas and even bigger mouth made that clear from the beginning. The fact that I managed to make a friend in Becca felt like a life preserver being thrown to a drowning person. Her hooking up with Murphy was when it started leaking air, and I began to sink, going completely under when I woke up half naked in a field. My lifelong contention with depression became less violent, my struggles against it diminishing as I gave in to the weighted blanket of comforting numbness. Mom and Dad do their best, but the truth is that they think it’s just sadness. A feeling, not a condition. Something I can snap out of if I just try hard enough.

The world doesn’t talk about the hard shit, period, unless it’s Mental Health Awareness Month and there’s suddenly a lot of billboards asking how you’re doing and a reminder to call 988 if the answer isn’t so hot. But Widow talks about the hard shit, stares it down every day. Part of what I love about working at Restoration Acres is that the truth is constantly on display, no matter how ugly. We have small victories, but they are tiny islands in a sea of intense losses. The world crushes the weak and the lame, and Widow looks this reality in the face, unblinking.

Maybe this is why people don’t like her, when you get right down to it. It’s not that she gets along with animals better than humans, or that her family name isn’t associated with behaving normally. It’s because she talks about the uncomfortable things, points right at them, reminds everyone that the world doesn’t owe us anything, and that it can take everything we have at any moment. People don’t like that, and they don’t like me, either. I guess we’re both the fly in their picture-perfect caramel macchiatos, resting right in the center of the milky, decorative heart.

There’s a knock on my door. “Ava?”

I don’t say anything, can’t bring myself to care enough to answer. Mom opens the door, sticking her head in.

“Hey, you feeling okay?”

I open my mouth to tell her that I’m not okay, that I doubled up my depression meds this morning out of desperation and my brain has stopped working. I did that because I can’t feel anything, and if I can’t think and I can’t feel, then I don’t know what or who I am anymore. Girls like Hailey might put a lot of importance on being pretty or popular; all I’ve ever had was my thoughts and my feelings. But before last month nobody wanted to hear what I thought, and now it’s very clear that nobody cares how I feel.

“Honey?” Mom asks, and I realize that she’s still waiting for me to tell her that I’m fine.

But I can’t. And it’s not because I was raised to never tell a lie or because I’m not able to articulate anything anymore. It’s because there’s something that has been opened inside me, a pit deeper than the one at Restoration Acres, and much more terrifying. Because it’s empty, and I can feel the best parts of myself falling into it.

“Mom?” I say, and it comes out like a question. It’s the voice of a five-year-old asking her not to leave my bedroom yet, because when she’s gone is when things get scary, and the dark is the worst thing that can happen.