Shelly pulled strands of her short hair, like she was trying to make it stretch. “I get in trouble.”
“I never see anybody raise their voice at you, Shells. Your mom treats you like a glass princess. You don’t even have to take care of Ella. I don’t get why you’d want to leave that to live with me.”
Shelly burst into tears. “You’re wrong. She’ll kill me for this. She loves my hair.”
Julia touched her shoulder and she collapsed, crumpling into her arms. Alarmed, wondering if this was a trick, Julia held her. But then Shelly was sobbing. The sound of her old friend’s pain was too much, so Julia hugged back, sticky with grime, keeping her bleeding hand at a distance, so as not to stain.
“It was too long before. This is better,” she crooned.
“I see myself doing these bitchy things,” Shelly said, her voice muffled by Julia’s shoulder. “I can’t stop. It’s like a… a monster inside me that I can’t control.”
Julia breathed Shelly in—that strange smell of someone who’s nothing like your family. They eat different foods and they use different detergents. She felt herself crying, too. She’d missed this. You turn twelve, and suddenly it’s not cool to hug. The best you can get is sitting extra close during carpool or sharing a blanket while playing Deathcraft.
“Why didn’t you do a tampon?” Julia asked. “You know the Markles and your sister are gonna tell everybody.”
Shelly looked ahead, at the neatly lined houses along the crescent. “I ran out. She was too boozy to drive. I was going to just put a bunch of toilet paper or something, but I forgot…” Her mouth screwed up and she looked at her knees. “That’s not even true. I saw it was bleeding and I didn’t care. Last night was so bad. It took so long for those braids. I woke up and couldn’t be home. I knew the blood would happen and you’d all see and I didn’t care.”
“Oh…” Julia didn’t know what to say to that. It didn’t make sense. Periods are mortifying. They’re giant, blood-soaked pads of shame. Julia spent at least ten minutes a day checking to see if her first had come, making sure there was no way, if it ever happened, that it would show. Nobody wants to get caught with a period. “Brooke Leonardis had it happen in school and nobody even talked about it. Sienna Muller saw it all over her lunch chair. You weren’t that bad. It’s deniable. I’ll deny it with you. We can just act like the people who say it are mental.”
“You don’t get it.”
“How do you mean?”
She was still looking at her knees, tufts of hair sticking up. “It’s like I see my life from far away. The real me’s stuck, and the rest of me, it’s just this body that walks and talks and screams at people. The real me’s dying.”
Julia felt her eyes go hot. She remembered how much she used to love Shelly. Right now, in this moment, she still loved her. “Please don’t talk like that.”
Shelly sniffled. “I think about a razor. I keep this Pain Box that has my proof. It’s got all the evidence. I’d leave a note on top.”
Julia blanched. Proof? What kind of proof? “Don’t talk about razors,” she said.
Shelly’s voice got low and steady as a wishful incantation. “It’d say: You made me do this. Now I’m dead just to get away from you. I hope you’re happy.”
Julia tried to be brave. To be firm, because maybe Shelly needed firm. “Stop it. You’re being a drama queen. You’ll make yourself sick.”
Shelly’s jaw opened like she was going to gag and her eyes got wide, and Julia could almost see a terrible nothing inside her, wasting and strangling, eating her up from the inside out. She dry-cried, no sound and no tears.
Julia took her friend in her arms. Squeezed as hard as she could.
“Stop. It hurts.”
Alarm. A jolt of a thousand volts. Julia loosened.
“No one wants to hear it,” Shelly said. “If I told them, they wouldn’t believe. You were my best friend and I couldn’t tell you anything. You still don’t want to know. How can Miss PTA be anything except perfect? I’m the one they don’t like. I’m the one who’s mean. Unstable. There’s nobody to back me up. Even my family, they don’t see it. Or if they do, they pretend not to. I just, I’m all broken and nobody else is broken. Nobody else is in this.”
The words jumped and bounced, and Julia kept trying to fit them together differently, so they’d tell a kinder story. But there wasn’t one. “What’s happening to you?” Julia asked.