#runwhileyoucan

“The Girls”. I can just see the headline plastered on shiny streetside magazines, cloying for a cash grab. Perfect girlish cheeks gleaming in the innocence of youth… gone too soon. But something in those fragmented vignettes of pearly white smiles and homecoming queen hospitality told me I was…less than. Sophie, blond hair curled in hairspray-caked ringlets. Breanna in all her bronzed skin glory, trail of glass bottle florals so sickly-sweet, it rang of decay and molted flesh. Gabbie, attention-greedy glare hidden behind lacquered lashes and the latest fashion trend. And Riley. Riley Carter, the picture-perfect, all-American teenager. That glossy, presidential smile and cheerleader charm fooled all of you. She was a queen bee, alright, but she stung. Vicious and cruel, prowling for her next shiny new toy to break and discard. Riley- she was everything I wasn’t. But somehow, she looked at me differently. A look that ran through my insides and dug up the darkness. Like she could really see me, the lonely girl by the lake, drowning in my sketchbook. While other seniors my age spent weekends at the mall, or in a drunken haze wasting themselves away at sweaty beach parties, I sat like the ideal academic in my room, securing myself a scholarship for medical school at Columbia. I was the perfect daughter: dutiful, god-fearing… did what I was told. If only they knew. 

Hope’s Haven Bible Camp, 1991. That splintered wooden sign advertised a sweet July escape, blistered skin days and balmy moonlit nights spent with blood oath friendships under the canopy of whispering pines. But those painted letters faded with the weight of a lie. The four welcomed me that first day on the camp bus, smiles as fake as their hard candy nails. A textbook loser like me hadn’t received attention like that and as much as I didn’t want to admit it, I craved validation so badly. After that drive over, I was a conjoined arm in their little clique, ear-witness to star-veiled crush confessions and every piece of midnight cabin gossip. Their effortless magnetism took me hostage with each inside joke, each whispered giggle as we snuck out to the beach for forbidden trysts with beer-breathed boys. Two weeks passed me by in a cicada-sung dream. I was even invited to their not-so-secret, exclusive bonfire parties; such that I bore witness to a fortnight of the perfect teenage reverie: pulling all-nighters in a canopy of smoke and the type of desired status you only heard through word of mouth.

But in the haze of that flickering flame the darkest parts of myself came to fruition. Because under the milky moonlight, like a dream so ethereal, so heady… there she was. Soft, luminous skin and a laugh that made angels weep. A playful grin so inviting… forgive me, I’m getting ahead of myself. Riley was a sin by design. Sometimes, her laughter suffocated the ache in my heart so painfully, I could see my sacrilege carved into my skin in the shape of her. I know she felt it too. Words unspoken, a tenderness saved for each other and a string between us pierced through our hearts that we’d been told to sever since childhood. Riley was everything, but she was untouchable, and wanting was the first step toward falling. She moved like she belonged there, with the stars and the endless sky. But I didn’t belong. Not with her, not with any of them.