Please, Keep Me

by Juliette Brookman

Image credit: Jason Abdilla on Unsplash

I sat up with a jolt of pain in my abdomen. My eyelids begged for relief, but my

stomach ached as if I had been kicked by a steel-toed shoe. 6 a.m. My alarm clock

glared at me. I had disturbed its time off, its peaceful dawn. I am not some newscaster who needs to roll out of bed and drive down dark, desolate streets toward the station. I do not need to be up this early, I don’t want to be up this early. Vacation does not require some strict wrangling of the teenage sleep schedule. Regardless, I was up.

Standing on wobbly feet, I felt the pain rush down my legs. I looked to my right. My best friend rolled over in her sleep, clutching her blankets. This beach rental kindly supplied us with a two-bedroom, but I wished I were alone. Cramps did not enjoy company. My eyes welled up and became as full as my pad. Not wanting to wake her up, I tip-toed across our room, nearing the threshold of the connected bathroom. The Jack and Jill sink gawked at me from its tiled corner. I refused to look in the mirror.

I prayed to someone. I opened the door and slid back into bed, light-headed and groggy. The pain surged. I needed help, this could not wait until the appropriate hours. I made my cautious escape to the kitchen, slowly opening and closing our bedroom door. The kitchen sink was far enough away from Lee that I could wash my hands, appendages that I desperately and ferociously cleaned, washing away my tragic episode.

I felt like a mouse, pawing around for sustenance in the dark of night, chewing on saltines and trying to open a bottle of ibuprofen. A few crackers down the hatch, I bit two pills until their bitter casings were small enough to swallow with water. I could not bear to choke.

The sliding glass doors usually offered a warm ambience, pouring light into the dining space. Everything was swallowed in darkness, the witching hour coming to a close. For once, I played along with the tricks of early-morning shadowy projections. With my back facing the glass doors, I had let my eyes flick up and down at the living room before me, trying to determine what these blurred figures were, if that furniture was ever there. I let myself question the mirage staged in my eyeline, as if the night knew they’d trap a sorry soul and meticulously placed each unrecognizable blob in hopes of evoking panic from my groggy mind. I wasn’t scared, merely curious.

I shuddered from the bitter pills. With tremors, I twisted the plastic sleeve of saltines closed and stood up, hating how it felt to become a waterfall. Lee will understand. Teenage periods are rough. She’ll understand. Maybe we’ll laugh about it in the morning. In the morning, I’ll be 16.

*

Falling asleep was futile. My stomach was laced with thin scraps and placebos. I fumbled for my phone, sitting screen-down on my bedside table. I stared mindlessly at videos, occasionally glancing over at Lee. Paranoid that she could hear the noise playing through my earbuds, I paused the video. Her body told me nothing, but I was certain I had woken her up. So, I sat and stared. Looked at the wooden bathroom door, slightly ajar, in need of sanitizing. I watched its corners warp and become speckled with dots.

7 a.m. Delirium knocked me out.

*

A clamor of voices pinched my eardrums. Sitting up, I noticed an empty bed beside me. My delusions at bay, I left the bedroom and was greeted by my mom’s happy birthday banner, each letter strung together and hanging, curved up like a smile. Everyone was waiting. My sister and her friend ate breakfast as I sipped a cool glass of water. Lee was excited; it was her friend’s big day. Celebration sat poorly on my stomach. To wade off any suspicions that I was sick, I stuck two halves of a bagel into the toaster, business as usual. Dizziness coated my nerves, and I had to sit and wait as my bagel browned. My mom asked if I was okay. I gave a timid nod and stood up to pluck my breakfast from its heated slots.

Lee got me a blanket. A sentence stretched across the soft fabric, a jumbling of letters that my foggy mind could not decipher. My sincerity was muddled by my exhausted tone, and she didn’t look pleased. Unless that’s another trick, this time in broad daylight, where I think smiles are frowns. She wanted me to say more, to be more grateful. I think. I’m pretty sure I read her right. Maybe I was hallucinating, imagining, casting my worst fears onto her unsure expressions. Maybe she was just worried. I’m concealing, but she’s my best friend, she knows what these symptoms look like. She’d understand.

*

Lee closed her eyes and inhaled. The ocean breeze sprayed a gust our way, and she relaxed her shoulders, sitting back on our shared towel in a bikini and fluttering sun hat. I couldn’t swim; tampons were off the table, so I buried my toes in the sand. She winced, perhaps from the harsh sand caught up in the warm winds. Or maybe I did something to cause that wince. I looked down at my outfit. Shorts and a t-shirt. I know this is not how she pictured it.

Maybe she wanted me to join her in the ocean to act as a shield against the wisps of stinging salt, despite my smaller stature. Maybe she wanted someone to wear a bikini with, a duo of girls made more intimidating to any wandering creeps. I couldn’t give that to her.

I wasn’t talking much either. My phone screen was too dim in this bright, early afternoon sun. I began to pile sand onto my legs, giving myself something to do other than sit and look. The water was pretty, but my hands needed a job. Lee glanced over at me. I bet I looked like a little kid, digging holes and tracing letters in the sand. She sat and watched.

Lee didn’t swim. I asked her why. She felt uncomfortable going in alone. I understood, feeling a pang of guilt ebb and flow. I couldn’t join her. It’s my fault that she wasn’t having fun. She sighed, looking past me, dreamily gazing at the girls our age splashing in the water. If I could give that to her, I would. My mom walked down the sandy hill and dipped her toes in. Lee got up and joined her. They talked for a while, Lee occasionally laughing. I worried that I was the subject.

*

Lee and I came back home as dry as we left. I asked if we could watch something in one of the spare bedrooms since the TV in our room was busted. She agreed, sitting on

Image credit: Johannes W on Unsplash

the bed while I sat on the floor, positioned close to an outlet for my heating pad. My hands needed work, so I brought a coloring book and colored pencils into the room. I was shading a mandala, feeling her eyes on the back of my skull. I couldn’t read her mind, but I knew she’d rather be swimming. There was silence between us, only interrupted by a laugh track. An unspoken tension arose. I felt my lungs losing air.

“I’m bored,” Lee announced, hopping off the bed and walking out of the room. I heard her open the sliding doors that led onto the balcony and shut them behind her. I wanted to scramble out of the room and apologize. I should have, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to stain my drawing with tears, so I held it in. She had closed me off, frustrated that I wasn’t amusing. She’d rather be in the company of seagulls. There was no invitation on the shut door, no permission slip, no gesture towards friendship. I was locked in.

*

Middle school felt safe because Lee was there. Our shared friend group accompanied us to school dances, where we felt embarrassed to even slightly move our limbs, and instead took advantage of the free food and drinks. They were always held in the gymnasium, a place that reignited social judgments within me as an unathletic kid, but with Lee there, it felt as if I could reclaim the room, mold it into a dance floor, and extinguish the memories of towering volleyball nets.

I was at ease with her. At 16, I fought for her as if she were the opportunity of a lifetime. A stab in the back did not capture this feeling; it was a volleyball to the face, urging me to see what had always been there. And she would laugh as the circular bruise stretched from forehead to chin, giggling at its resemblance to an unbelievable sunburn. She would leave, and I’d be alone.

I felt my face, expecting it to sting and burn. It was only damp. Was I always going to be someone with temporary connections? And was that lack of permanence my fault? The guilt and shame coated every cell in my hunched physique, and I was disgusting. My body was proof that I should be left writhing in pain. So Lee, go ahead, kick a soccer ball at my knees, throw a football at my head, anything to keep you entertained.

*

She was standing in the doorway.

Not Lee, as she was still outside pouting. It was my mom who noticed that something was off. Lee’s and my separation set off alarm bells. Friends on vacation stick together. Friends don’t wallow, friends don’t leave. Brows furrowed; she met my bleary pupils.

“Don’t you want to join her?” she asked, one hand resting on the doorframe. The same hand that drove Lee here, that cooked her meals, that carried her towel, all for her to say she was tired of me. I hadn’t done enough to keep her.

I mumbled something about the back porch lacking outlets for my heating pad, which I had yet to even verify. If there was a solution, I didn’t want it. My mom left and came back with an extension cord, motioning me to follow her. I played along, grabbing my coloring book and coloring pencils. She plugged the cord into a kitchen outlet and snaked it through the slightly open sliding doors. I sat in the deck chair next to Lee, my mom placing the heating pad in my lap and securing its cord into the surge protector.

I didn’t say hi to Lee. A pleasant greeting felt unnatural, so we sat in silence. I spent so much time sitting and looking, a caveman pastime awarded to girls with twisting stomachs. Didn’t she understand? I didn’t ask.

I stared out at the large houses occupying the block in front of us, marveling at how their swimming pools sparkled under the harsh beams. Some kids younger than us were playing in their pool. I watched them, slightly out of annoyance, but more so out of envy. They were such an effortless unit of genes, a pool of chlorine meeting a pool of DNA and nerves and skin. The close bond that fun brings. How I ached for it. How I killed it.

“They’re pretty loud,” Lee said suddenly, as if tracking my eyes and thoughts. “I wonder if it’s a rental.”

Surprised by her deviation from our unspoken agreement to dwell in discomfort, all I could respond with was a slight nod. I didn’t even know what I was agreeing to, but it didn’t seem to concern her.

We continued to talk about nothing of substance or value, just small, directionless topics, as if we were strangers left alone by the friends who set us up. I’d known her since I was first bleeding and terrified of the spheres I somehow had to swallow. It had been four years.

We never discussed her jarring decision to get up and leave. I couldn’t talk about her comment, how it made me feel like a frail atom, bouncing off the walls and irritating her. She didn’t ask me to leave. I couldn’t ask why she was bored, if it was all my fault, if there was anything I could’ve done to fix this. I had swallowed my words like the gulp of a pill, strained and uncomfortable. For this to last, I had to resist. So, I sat, listening to how her voice and the waves crashed in an inharmonious rhythm, occasionally tuning into the family and their antics.

Her mom picked her up early. The bedroom felt full despite her absence, my mind filling the gaps and crevices with doom and gloom. I knew she went home and complained. Talked about how much of a letdown it was. And I worried and panicked as I had hours before about what this all meant. Confrontation wasn’t on the table; only pills and snotty tissues and pads, maybe a colored pencil or two. Words failed me, and I bit my tongue in bitter defeat.

*

I waited for the volleyball to strike, bouncing off the top of the net and hitting me: defenseless, unsuspecting, naive, bleeding in my underwear and out of my nose.

I still sit and wait.

Image credit: Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash

***

Juliette Brookman

Juliette (she/they) is a junior Creative Writing major at the University of Mary Washington. She loves writing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and tends to delve into themes such as inequality, anxiety, fears, love, and family. They have had poems published in their university’s literary & art magazine, The Aubade, and in Shenandoah University’s online literary journal, The Avalon. She is a friend to all critters, loves to collect trinkets, and has an extensive to-read list!