“So how is your day going, Ana?” Dr. Lombardi asks me on our Monday meeting.

“Oh, I’m alright,” I assure her with a small grin. “My weekend was pretty amazing and today is pretty good too so I’m happy.”

“That’s really stunning to hear, Ana,” She grins at me, for some reason looking excited and proud at what I’d just told her. “How was Saturday? With Niles? I noticed that you took one of the two pills that I gave you.”

“It was… interesting, I suppose,” I tell her slowly as I try to decide how to describe how that day went. “We had a nice lunch and then I helped him with his math a little bit. But yeah, his friends came over- he didn’t know that they were coming and they kind of surprised him by dropping by- but just the surprise of it all kind of freaked me out and I took the pill to calm me down. I had a panic attack but it wasn’t really that bad and I was okay.”

“How do you feel about Niles seeing you like that?”

“He didn’t. I locked myself in the bathroom for a few minutes until I calmed down. I was still pretty embarrassed but I was okay, I guess. I think it’s worse when I go through panic attacks in front of family because they completely lose it. Niles, though, he got scared a little bit, I think, but I wasn’t as embarrassed because I don’t feel like Niles judges me as much as most people do and it’s just better, I guess.”

“Okay, that’s good,” She nods, writing down something on her notepad. “And what about yesterday? How was your party committee meeting?”

“Oh, that was fun too,” I say with a nod. “We pretty much just kept painting our sign. I think it’s going to turn out pretty well, even with Desiree’s glitter. She’s going to put it in the sky instead of on the letters, so I think that it’ll turn out pretty well. I talked to my dad yesterday too, so that was pretty nice.”

“Have you talked to Penn yet after you two had that argument?” She wonders.

I shake my head. “No, I haven’t called him yet. My dad told me that Penn wants to talk to me but I won’t do it. All he’s going to do is tell me that being friends with Niles is stupid just because he’s a guy. Like, he always is trying to get me to make friends but God forbid it be male. But it’s not my job to make sure that he likes my decisions.”

“I think that it’s important that you welcome comfortable communication,” Dr. Lombardi starts her therapist talk on me.

“I know that it’s important and I’m going to be openly communicating with my brother through my dad so that he can’t directly yell at me. Ironically enough, my dad knows about me being friends with Niles and he isn’t even as upset about it as Penn is. He’s so overprotective which I get, but sometimes it’s just too much.”

“I understand that. It might take some time to get on the same level. You probably want to be treated like an adult whereas your brother wants to always be there to protect you. Once you’re back home, maintaining a healthy relationship with your family will be easier but for now, I suggest that you call your brother and talk things through.”

“But he’s so stubborn,” I tell her. “He won’t hear any of it.”

“Well, it can’t hurt to try, right?”

I shrug with a long sigh. “Sure, I guess so.”

“Good,” She chirps. “Now, onto our next thing of business. I know that we’ve talked about this a lot before but I have to keep pressing the issue to keep you thinking about it.”

I purse my lips and sink down in my chair, knowing what’s about to happen and I really wish that she would stop bringing this up because I really hate even thinking about it.

“Do you feel comfortable with telling your story?” She asks me the question that I was expecting.

I shake my head. “No. And, like I always say, I never will be. It won’t make me feel better. Seriously, it’ll make me feel so much worse by remembering everything.”

“Why is that?”

“Because it makes it real.”

“But if you realize that it’s real, then you’ll recognize it and be able to move on,” She tells me. “Think of it as a haunted house, okay? Say, you live in this house with a ghost in it and you want to defeat the ghost. Now, if this ghost is invisible, all you’re going to do is start swinging your fists through the air. You have nothing tangible to defeat, right? But, if this ghost is more lifelike- human- then you know exactly where it is and what it is. You can start swinging and you can kill the ghost.”

“But not if the ghost kills me first,” I refute. “And bringing this ghost to life and making it visible and real, I know that it’d get to me before I get to it.”

“Sure, that’s a possibility,” Dr. Lombardi nods. “And what you have to ask yourself now is if the risk is worth it. Sure, if you bring this ghost to life, it might be hard to defeat but you’ll have help. You have so many people around you that are prepared to help you take this ghost down. Me, Niles, Mia, Renée, your family back home. We are all here for you, Ana, and together, we will give it our best shot and get this ghost. Or, you can let it go and live in this house with this ghost hovering over your head all of the time like you have been. But it will always be there, Ana. It will always be haunting you. So ask yourself if it’s worth it or not, and I hope that you’ll find that the risk really is worth living without that ghost for the rest of your life.”

I think for a minute and then lean forward in my chair, still stuck in thought as I consider what she just told me because I’d never really thought about that. “But it’s really scary,” I tell her under my breath. “And I’m scared.”

“I know,” She nods. “But you’ve been through so much already. You’re a lot stronger than you think that you are. I think that you can handle it.”

“If I were to… you know, bring this ghost to life,” I start out hypothetically. “Would I have to tell the story to you? I mean, it’s not that I don’t just love our chats but I just think that it could be easier if I said it to like, Mia or Renée or somebody.”

“Whatever works best for you, Ana,” Dr. Lombardi assures me with a small smile and I think that she thinks that she’s making a breakthrough and maybe she is. I’m not sure yet.

“I…” I trail off, still trying to consider everything that she just said. “I don’t know.”

“That’s alright. You can think about it some more. We’ve been talking about this since the beginning so there’s no rush,” She tells me. “But I do hope that you really do think about it, okay? I sincerely believe that once you come to terms with what’s happened to you, you will be able to move on from this.”

“Do you think that I could ever live a normal life?” I ask her curiously.

She nods without even a hint of hesitation. “Yes, Ana, I really do.”

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“You can tell me all of your secrets. That’s what I’m here for,” She tells me.

“A while back, when Niles took me to the park, I told him that if I wasn’t so… I don’t know, traumatized… if I wasn’t so traumatized, then I would fall for him. He’s so incredible and for the first time in three years, I’m unafraid and that’s so incredible. I wish that I wasn’t so haunted, if we’re keeping this metaphor alive, because I think that if I didn’t have this ghost then I really would love him. Or maybe I’d only like him. To be honest, I have no idea what love is or how it works but I think that I could figure it out with him. And I know that he isn’t into that kind of thing, and that’s okay, but I was just thinking that if I really was normal and un-haunted then… I don’t know. Maybe we’d have a shot? That’s dumb. I shouldn’t have said anything. Forget it.”

“Ana…” Dr. Lombardi trails off with an apologetic look on her face.

“I know what you’re going to say,” I say quickly. “And you don’t have to say it.”

“Look,” She sighs. “I’m happy that you’re finding comfort in Niles. I truly am. But like I said before, I won’t feel comfortable with our arrangement if things start getting romantic. There are so many cases where a person in your situation can latch onto another person and it’s unhealthy and I don’t want to see that happen to you.”

“I know,” I mumble. “But… just forget it. It’s fine. Totally fine. I shouldn’t even be thinking about that anyway.”

“Once you get home, however, and you’ve made a full recovery, then a romantic relationship is definitely a possibility for you,” Dr. Lombardi tells me optimistically. “But right now, while you’re in the midst of your recovery, I just don’t think that it’s a good idea.”

“Right,” I sigh. “Well, anyway, back to the topic at hand, I’ll think about it. But no promises.”

“That’s good,” She smiles. “That’s all that I ask.”

“Well you can put a check mark on that subject. What’s next on the list?”

“Something new,” She tells me. “I want to talk about how you feel about your physical scars.”

“Oh,” I mutter, surprised at the change in subject. I haven’t really talked about those for a while, excluding me mentioning them to Niles a little while back but it wasn’t an actual conversation. “Well, what about them?”

“Just what I said- how do you feel about them?”

I shrug. “I’m not really sure, I guess. They’re there, a part of me.”

“Usually, when somebody is left with permanent scars after a traumatic incident, it can be hard to be okay with them,” She explains to me. “Do you feel like they are hard to look at?”

“I mean, I don’t look at them unless I absolutely have to. Like, I avoid mirrors and stuff when I’m getting dressed,” I explain to her. “But that’s just a habit now. I haven’t really thought about them in a pretty long time. I know that if anybody else saw them, I’d panic. Niles saw the beginning of one on my waist once and I almost lost it. I feel like my scars tell my story, you know? And I don’t like anybody else knowing my story like that.”

“Sure, that makes sense,” Dr. Lombardi nods as she’s writing something down on her notepad. “I suggest that if you feel like you would want to feel more comfortable with your body that you just stand in front of a mirror or something for a while and just look at them and get used to looking at them. It might not seem like a big deal now but in the future, if you have an inner hatred for how your body looks, it will start to wear down on you.”

“Okay, I’ll try that,” I tell her with a small nod. “But like I said, it’s not really something that I think about a lot.”

“So if I asked you to right now, how would you describe your scars?” She asks me curiously.

“Um, well, they’re pretty pale now so they don’t look really terrible. I have the big one on my side right here,” I say, running my finger down the front of my scrubs to show her where the long scar is that starts at my hip bone and runs down my thigh. And then there’s the one up here that goes across the left part of my chest.”

“Okay, well we can leave it at that for now since you don’t seem to have any troubles with that,” She says. “After you try that mirror exorcise, let me know because I’d like to talk about this some more after you try that.”

“Will do,” I nod.

For the rest of the time, Dr. Lombardi talks to me about my next physical, which is coming up next week, which is a pretty boring conversation and when that’s done, she dismisses me for the day so I leave her office and go back to my room and shut the door. On the back of the door, there’s a full length mirror but it’s apparently unbreakable (I assume because it’d be pretty ridiculous for them to put breakable mirrors in our rooms when they’re so worried that we’ll off ourselves) and I wonder if I should go through with Dr. Lombardi’s suggestion. Deciding that I don’t have anything better to do, I slip my baby blue scrub top over my head and toss it onto my small bed before standing in front of the mirror in just my blue pants and a white sports bra.

The scars send me back to the hospital, because that’s when I remember seeing them first. Waking up in the hospital, I looked down and I was in a hospital gown but I was able to see the angry dark red line across the left side of my chest that had been stitched up already. Taking a shower after that, I remember seeing all of the angry red lines and swollen bruises that covered my entire body, making it painful for me to breathe or even move at all. It had looked like I was torn to pieces, only being held together by the black stiches sewing my body together.

Obviously, all of the bruises have healed but those really deep cuts and a few surgery wounds still remain. There’s one that I can see in the mirror that slithers up my side, under my right arm, which is where I had a surgery to fix something that my broken rib had ruptured. There’s another scar that begins at my belly button and runs diagonally up towards my right boob but it’s not very long, just a few inches.

I remember how I got all of these scars- the memory of that night is clear as day just like it always is- but when I first woke up in that hospital room, I had no recollection of anything and I didn’t remember how any of it happened, I just saw all of the bruises and my mangled body. I don’t know why I don’t go back to those flashbacks of that night when I think of my scars but instead, I think of waking up in the hospital and hearing my family cry for the first time.

Peter looked like he was going to throw up and I couldn’t figure out why- this was before I had a chance to see what they had done to me- and I was so confused. He looked sick to his stomach just from seeing my face and my arms. Penn was in tears and I think that, before I woke up, he actually did throw up because when he gingerly hugged me, he smelled of vomit. Penn’s girlfriend at the time, Elizabeth, she wouldn’t even come into the room because I looked so bad. She waited in the waiting room with my mom.

“Was I in a car crash?” I had asked Penn as he sat beside my chair with tears staining his face. When I woke up, my father was gone getting dinner and Peter was asleep beside Penn but my mother was still in the waiting room, unable to look at my mangled skin without fainting, which I hear that she did while I was unconscious.

“Ana,” Penn breathes.

“What? I don’t remember driving anywhere,” I mutter and I try to talk slower to enunciate my words but I still can’t even understand my own words because my mouth is so incredibly swollen that it’s hard to talk clearly. “Penn, what happened?”

“You weren’t in a car crash,” He shakes his head at me. “Ana, you were walking home and… you were attacked.”

Finally, I look down and see the gruesome bloody line across my chest. “By what? A bear?”

“No, by like… people,” He tells me softly, wiping fresh tears from his eyes.

“Penn,” I try to get my older brother to focus on what I’m saying because he seems to be such a mess right now and I’m not sure why. “Penn, I’m okay. You don’t have to worry about me, okay? See? I’m alive, aren’t I?”

“Yeah… barely,” He sighs, more to himself than to me, but I hear him just fine and when he sees my horrified expression, he looks appalled that I even heard that. “No, I’m sorry, Ana. You’re right. You’re alive.”

“I feel fine,” I tell him, trailing off to try and sit up just to prove to him that I’m fine, but there’s something keeping me still.

“You feel numb,” He explains to me. “They have you on every type of medicine in the book so that you can’t feel any of it.”

“What? What do you mean? It can’t be that bad. How bad is it?” I ask him, only able to move my head enough to see that red stitched up wound on my chest hiding below the hospital scrubs but that’s it.

“I don’t know,” He mumbles and I’m so taken aback because I’ve never seen my brother cry like this. I’ve never seen him cry at all, actually. He looks so scared, like the world was taken right out from under him entirely. He’s eighteen, three years older than me, and he’s always so tough and scary-looking so I know that if I’m what he’s crying about then it must be pretty terrible, and I become extremely scared. “Pretty bad, I think.”

“Please stop crying,” I plead with him, starting to cry myself because I’m so scared now. “You’re scaring me, Penn.”

“It’s my fault,” He mutters. “I shouldn’t have let you out of the house. It’s my fault.”

“Go get Dad, Penn,” Peter surprises us both by rising from his chair where he was sleeping just moments ago. “And get some tissues while you’re at it.”

Penn wants to object but he doesn’t, he just stands and leaves the room, leaving me alone with Peter.

“Tell me what’s going on. Why is Penn crying?” I ask him.

“It looks like you’ve gotten into a bit of a pickle, baby sister,” Peter tells me with a long, sad sigh as he moves to stand beside me. “You were in the park and you were attacked. They said it was five guys and they really did a number on you.”

“Why don’t I remember anything?” I wondered, trying to keep myself as calm as possible but it’s not working and I can feel more tears begin to bubble in my aching eyes.

“It might be the concussion or the medicine or the coma that you just woke up out of,” He suggests and when he looks at my horrified expression, he continues. “I know that I’m not making anything better for you right now but the rest of the family and probably the doctors too are going to sugar coat things for you but you deserve to be given things straight. Rip it off like a Band-Aid, right, kiddo?”

I run my fingers over that scar on my chest, right below my collar bone, once again as I remember how Peter had told me about all of the things that I had apparently been through. All of the surgeries, a few broken bones being cast. It was brutal but he told me how it was, which probably wasn’t what I needed right then, looking back at it, but it sure did help a bit but it scared me more than anything.

Seeing all of my scars like this isn’t as traumatizing as I’d probably expect, but remembering how I woke up like that and seeing Penn so traumatized, it does bring a few tears to my eyes. These scars, though, they aren’t representative of that one night that everything changed or even that afternoon that I woke up from a medically induced coma completely confused. They are part of my story. They tell my story better than I ever could. Every cut, every slice, it tells my story. Even the ones that I’ve added to my wrists, they add to my story. My skin does not hold one memory, it is fluid. It changes.

In a way, that is beautiful. And in a way, so am I.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Song: Ghosts by Mayday Parade
Picture: Fan cover by jupitah

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT

Title: Hate Runs Deep
Author: Twistedrea 
Genre: Teen Fiction
Summary: My name is Eve Slade.I'm the youngest child of Daniel and Catherine Slade.I'm also the accidental child that no one wants. My mother wanted me to be the perfect daughter so that I don't ruin my brothers good names. My dad doesn't care and lets her take the reigns of my disciplining.

My brothers? Declan,Shane and Kyle, they are the best things my mother has ever created and raised. The best part? They know it and love to rub it in my face,especially Kyle. Everybody hates me. Well maybe I should give them all something to hate...