Picture this: a musty old house, chipped white cupboards, a sofa covered in fur, a dim bathroom with a bathtub from a horror-movie, and several cases of beer in the corner of the kitchen. Now close your eyes and breathe in. Can you smell the dogs floating in the air? The syrupy aroma of leftovers stewing in the trash? Are you hearing the neverending machine guns from the oversized TV and the muffled panting of a soggy mouth? What about the feeling of a carpet infused with hair between your toes, and the moist paws of an intrusive puppy padding all over your lap?

Now, imagine a girl, 14 years old. She has a shock of cropped red hair, with long bangs swept to the side. Her body is built like a kite—narrow neck, wide hips, legs ending in a point. She wears ill-fitting, gory clothes matched with ever-present long, blue gloves, and skinny jeans sitting far too low on her hips. Think of a high-pitched voice filtering through an inky mouth lined with spikes, spitting out f***s and s***s and b****es like a boy on a sidewalk. She has black eyeliner on her oily eyelids, stretching too wide and climbing too high and pointing too sharp, just like her mood swings. You might not see it at first, but if you peer down her throat, you’ll recognize a boiling mixture of depression, suicide, and some steel, as in cutlery. Be careful though, because her breath smells like sweat and her tongue exudes parfum de dégoût de soi (self-loathing).

It’s a murky night, and the streets of a tiny town are covered in mud and trash. Across a marble bridge and along a chipped road lies this very girl’s house. Two windows are bright on the top floor, with shapes moving inside them. It’s the girl, and her friend. There are guitars seeping out of an ancient speaker connected to an older iPod, with screeching voices breaking through the riffs every four beats.

“It’s so hard to fall asleep with the music playing.”

The music blares on. The girl just loves her music.

With your ear pressed against the frosty window, you can just barely hear a sigh as the girl’s friend tries to squeeze her eyes shut, curled up against the wall. She’s thinking about what would happen if the uneven, unstable, unmatched old place accidentally fell apart. The floors are so crooked and the angles are so unpredictable that it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing, at 3:00 in the morning.

Finally, her friend drifts away, only to wake up a few hours later when the music changes from Fall Out Boy to Panic! At The Disco. (The girl’s library cycles by artist.)

Her friend wanted to stay over two nights, because she’s stupid and blind and just can’t see what’s right in front of her. She’ll see how that works out in a year or two. Anyway, she planned to stay for two whole nights, which she thought would be fun, but now you can see the tension in her eyebrows and the small frown decorating her lips—she really wants to leave. She can taste the dogs downstairs as their breath billows out into the air, and the mold growing on the girl’s clothes and her books and her Little Pet Shop figurines, but she’s too scared to move and she doesn’t know the girl’s wifi password and she only has a tablet so she can’t just text her mom to come get her, so she clutches the blanket up to her neck and tries to fall back asleep, her lips pursed in despair.

All her friend can think about is how the girl won’t let her talk, and won’t let her tell her that no, you can’t just put a glass of cheese sauce in the microwave without unscrewing the cap, won’t let her choose what to believe and what to discard because this is the girl’s house, not her friend’s.

“ There’s cheese everywhere!”
“You should’ve unscrewed the lid.”

How do you not know that? she’s thinking, but she could never say that out loud. The girl would turn around, grab the scalding bottle, and fling burnt cheese sauce all over her friend, telling her that she should have told her before, that she shouldn’t be so negative, and—

Wait, now the girl isn’t a girl anymore. She’s something defying stereotypes and the gender binary. Of course, none of this makes any sense to her friend, but she’s curious about dressing as a boy, too, and because she doesn’t know anything about anything (overprotective parents), she asks the girl what to do. The girl holds up her hand in her friend’s face and tells her that she’s the one who’s questioning gender, and that if her friend wants to dress as a boy then she should do it her own way instead of copying her.

The thing is, four months before, the girl’s friend had taken a leap: she went to the hairdresser with six-inch-long hair and chopped it off. But before the bangs went, she stopped and decided she loved the short cut with the long bangs. Then, a month later, the girl herself went to a different, better hairdresser and got the same cut, blaming her inspiration on some celebrity that her friend didn’t know about.

Oh, well. There isn’t much the girl’s friend can do.

“Why do you always wear those gloves?”

The question of the hour. After the girl rolls up her sleeves and takes off the gloves, the game changes. Her friend, who is innocent and oblivious and idiotic, sees scars and her eyes widen in, what is it, horror? Of course, she asks if it was a cat or an accident and the girl tells her, with no emotion in her voice,

“I used to cut myself.”

And her friend goes home after school that day and tells her mom about the white lines on the girl’s too-pale skin, and her mom knocks a grain of sense into her. She tells her daughter that the girl is a bad influence and that she should get away, that the girl isn’t someone she wants to have as a friend.

At the end of that school year, seventh grade, the girl’s friend sends the girl an email (a poorly-worded, childish one, but one nonetheless), telling the girl that she’s had it with her and her opinions and her white tattoos and her always telling her she’s better. It works, for a while, but because it was conveniently sent right at the end of school, they have the whole summer to heal.

With the sunny weather comes a sunny mood, right? As the trees started to blossom, their friendship found its way back together like two ends of a magnet. They typed frantically back and forth, catching up on everything they had done without each other. To an outsider, it might seem like a typical middle school friendship: two girls become best friends, they fight, then they get back together because they just can’t stand to be apart. But,

Actually, that’s exactly what it was.

“Hey.”
“Hi again.”

Eighth grade—they’re back together with a renewed vigor, but the girl’s friend is wary. The school is so small that they can’t get away from each other, and there is just one long table for the eighth graders, and the girl and her friend have always sat together at one end with their clique. And the girl’s friend isn’t about to sit somewhere else. So she just barely balances on the edge of the bench, watching as the girl eats and laughs and makes sure that her friend knows that she’s better and she can force her friend to sit with her, because they used to be inseparable and nothing can change that.

An uneasy, conversational discomfort settles in between them, but they keep on talking and keep and joking and keep on hugging like they’re perfectly intact. The her friend hangs on the girl’s every word, even though she knows it’s stupid and she knows there are far better people to listen to. She would have escaped a long time ago, except there just aren’t enough people in this damn school to melt into another crowd.

“What would you think about transferring?”

“What?”

If the girl’s friend was stuck in a tunnel, her mom’s suggestion would have been a faraway beacon at the end of it. A beacon of disbelief, guilt, and then a huge, unending tidal wave of relief. This could be the answer the girl’s friend had been looking for for nearly three years.

“We can open enroll. You can start high school at another school.”
“Yes.”

The girl’s friend told the girl right away, her voice high and excited. Of course, she didn’t tell the girl that she was so thrilled because she got to leave her. She just channeled all the possibilities into her voice, not expecting a blunt

“What the f***?”

As soon as the girl heard, her mouth set in a firm line and her eyes took on a glassy, betrayed quality. Her kite body slumped, sending her too-low skinny jeans even farther down her hips. Her friend had no idea what was going through her mind, but she could see the dejection and grief painting across her face, like the girl actually valued her all along.

The girl goes home crying that night, or at least that’s what her friend assumes. She didn’t think that, out of all the girl’s usual reactions, she would have chosen heartbreak. Seeing all that anguish in her eyes made her think from a different perspective. Maybe the girl isn’t that bad after all. Maybe she’s been misinterpreting everything. Maybe the girl was just going through rough times, and she didn’t know how else to deal with it. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

“Did you suddenly forget the past four years?”

Her mom’s incredulous voice shakes her from her second-guessing quicksand. Of course she didn’t.

Some days before the end of school, she stops talking to the girl. She eats lunch across from her, but she doesn’t look at her, and the girl gets the hint. The last day of school passes without a word. She never did say goodbye.

She’d like to think that she never spoke to her again. Sadly, that’s not the case, but she’s trying to forget.