Leah

“Leah?” I asked, pulling out pieces of the prickly grass covered in fresh dew from the early morning rain. I looked down to examine my hands and found them covered in green stains.

“What’s up?” She replied, while putting out a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket. I watched her as she picked out one and then lit it, the tip of it turning an angry red and then slowly burning out and forming ash. She took a drag forming a perfect ‘o’ with her lips, letting the smoke dance out of her mouth, as she tiled her head back and closed her eyes. All of a sudden she opened them, revealing her pale blue eyes. I loved Leah’s eyes, they reminded me of winter, and almost ironically her gaze too itself was always seemingly cold, to match alongside the season of her eyes. She was pale too; her skin so white it almost looked as if a layer of frost covered it. Her dark hair clashed against her eyes and skin, making her breathtakingly beautiful. Leah’s appearance was very unique however, not the typical pretty. I think Leah was the type of pretty that you would not really notice at first. If a stranger walked past her on a street, they wouldn’t see much in her. But if you were around her long enough, you would begin to see the small things that made her a masterpiece. Her lashes were long, and when she blinked they fell over her lids like curtains. Her thin lips were cracked from the smoking but a soft pink. Her sunken cheeks made her already thin face seem even thinner. Her delicate, long fingers seemed to graze across things with a gentle touch.

“You were going to ask me something?” Leah stated her head in a tilt looking at me, her long hair falling over her shoulders, interrupting my thoughts.

I blinked and jerked my head to the side sinking back into reality. Then I took a deep breath and said, “Why?” Her eyebrows clashed together in confusion, making deep lines across her forehead. My gaze shifted to her wrists, where red lines stood out against her skin. They were fresh, the old ones fading into light brown lines, hiding behind the new ones.

“Oh,” she whispered her chest sinking as she took in a sharp breath.

First there was an uneasy silence in which I tried to look at everything but Leah, while she looked at nothing else but me. Finally I rested my eyes upon her, in which she gave me a half hearted smile, lines forming at the corners of her tired eyes. She lay down upon the wet grass, not caring about the dew seeping through her thin shirt. She didn’t answer my question. She didn’t need to. I already knew.

I had known Leah for almost all my life; we were neighbors then classmates and then finally best friends. I remember how Leah used to be. She was happy; she was warm. But then something changed in her. I remember one time I was over at her house when we were kids, up in her room playing with her dolls, when we heard a shout from downstairs. I looked up at Leah who was biting her lip, and looking down at the ground.

“What was that?” I asked. She shrugged.

“C’mon, let’s go check it out,” I said, while tugging on her arm to get her to stand up. She seemed unwillingly, but my stubborn self continued to pull, until she finally let out a soft sigh and got up. We both tip toed downstairs, and hid behind a wall, while watching curiously. Leah’s parents were in the kitchen screaming at each other, I couldn’t understand most of what they were saying but I did catch the words “sleep”, “whore” and “lying bastard” in the frenzy of words her mother was spitting out at her father. Suddenly, her father punched her square in the face, and her mother collapsed to the ground, dark, red blood flooding from her nose. I looked over at Leah, who was staring at her mother. No blinking. No cringing. No flinching. No crying. She just stared at her mother with a blank expression on her face.

“Let’s go,” I barely managed to say, a large lump in my throat. I pulled her by her arm again, but this time I didn’t need to use much force. She easily glided along with me upstairs. We went back up and Leah sat down, picked up her doll, and began to brush its long blonde hair in silence, as if nothing happened. Leah was never the same again. Her parents eventually got a divorce, and she went back and forth between her mother and father, who were both, too busy with their own lives to pay much attention to hers. In middle school she began to take her education less seriously, ditching classes and failing almost everything. It wasn’t that she wasn’t smart or capable of doing the work, but she just stopped trying. In her first year of high school she began to date a drug dealer who was five years older than her named Rick that she met at a party one night, who she gave her everything to. He disappeared into thin air after he got what he wanted, and left her devastated and drowning. When she finally did resurface from the water, she came out cold towards the idea of love with anyone or anything. She soon began to stop eating for days upon days until she looked sick. Her ribs poked out from underneath her skin and her legs were so skinny it was hard to imagine how they bore the rest of her weight. She was so breakable. So fragile. She once hit rock bottom and attempted suicide. She was in the bathtub, her body hunched over, the soapy water red, and slits along her right wrist when her mother found her. After that she was sent to an institution especially made for what they called “the emotionally confused”. I’m pretty sure Leah wasn’t confused about her emotions however; she was actually very much in touch with them. Why else would she attempt to kill herself? Her sadness had engulfed every part of her being. It was always there, she was always aware of it, never confused about how bad it was or how it made her feel.

I looked over at Leah. She gave my shoulder a quick squeeze, shot me a soft smile, got up – brushing the grass off of her body, and then walked away. I watched as her outline began to grow smaller and smaller the further she distanced herself from me, until soon she became a part of the wet grass meeting the cold, gray sky.