Light

By Amethyst Turner

Sometimes in the sky there's a light

Calling

Sometimes in the sky there just

Isn't

XXX

Jameson grunted as he shoved the coffee table out of the way, sinking to the carpet. He massaged his aching legs, stretching them to both sides and then in the front. He grabbed his foam cylinder from on top of the coffee table to roll his smarting calves and the knots forming in his back.

Above him, Ella bandaged Kayln's bleeding toes on the couch, Neil joking with them with his legs wrapped around Ella's torso. Brandon was plinking away on the guitar, every once in awhile braying out an incongruous lyric. Aaron slept soundly on the loveseat, arm thrown over his eyes.

And June? While his friends chatted without concern, Jameson listened hard. He could hear a toilet flushing. So there was dinner, gone.

June wasn't the only anorexic ballerina he knew. In fact, Ella talked openly about her weight goals and the calorie charts in her journal. Jameson thought he'd heard Kayln purging a few times, too, although she did claim it was just the odd case of food poisoning.

But with somehow with Ella and Kayln, Jameson didn't worry so much. Ella was smart, calculated. She seemed okay with the fact that what she was doing was considered wrong, but there was no changing her mind about it. And with Kayln, Jameson just felt like she was strong enough at mind to deal with the repercussions of whatever damage she inflicted on herself.

June was a different story, though. If there was one thing Jameson knew about June, it was that the girl had no idea where her limits were. She pushed and pushed and pushed until she was broken, bleeding, down with no way to get up again. The teachers loved that, of course. They rewarded her for it. What they didn't see was the way she couldn't move in the mornings from her muscle pains, the way she cried while she stretched, trying to force her body into obeying her, the way she didn't have time to relax with her friends, and when she did, all she could talk about was what she should be doing right now: stretching, research, practice. She spent their time off repinning the ribbons on her pointe shoes and tucking Jet Glue around the wooden block inside.

She came out of the bathroom looking paler than she had before, eyes red. She smiled and said hello to Kayln and Ella. Brandon played a chord of welcome, but she ignored him and sank to the ground beside Jameson.

"We should get back to the studio after you're done eating," she said, her breath minty and fresh, but beneath that was the sourness of stomach acid. "Okay?"

"We haven't even ordered the pizza yet, Junie."

"Then maybe we should go now."

"Can you just relax for one second?"

But she couldn't. She left him on the floor and went to lace up her shoes and practice against the kitchen island, face somber and grave as if she was performing in front of thousands.

XXX

All through dinner, Charlie's hands itched for her pen. She hadn't had the time to open her journal since lunch nearly six hours ago, and her soul felt like it might combust if she didn't let out the pressure building up in her.

The boys smacked their lips and clattered their silverware and yelled, making Charlotte's skin crawl. Every crash made her recoil further into herself, each shout bringing a dirtier look to her face. Dean babbled about something he did at recess while Chris tried to yell over him, leaning on his plate with his ribs hooked on it so that when he rocked back and forth in his chair, the plate rattled and pounded against the table. Ryan ate loudly beside her, taking long, infuriating gulps of water. Across from them, Liam was crying because their mother had yelled at him to eat his green beans. Charlie decided that if any one of them died right now, she would not grieve.

"Aw, don't look so sour over there," her father prodded, offering her a playful smile. "Of course we want to hear from you too, Sweetheart. How was your day?"

Charlotte could have cried right then, just from the openness in his face. His eyes said, tell me, but Charlie knew that if she dug into the gritty details of her life, he would shrink away just like everyone else.

How was her day? She needed to write, pump it all out of her system. She needed to draw a pen sketch of Andy Ragnarsson with devil horns and black pits for eyes and write out the way her heart had whirled to the point of pain. She needed to make her problems two-dimensional and shelfable.

"Fine," she grumbled.

"What did you do in Spanish today?" Her mother asked, as she always did. Mrs. Lewinski knew Senora Rodriguez from her job at the bank and liked to make it a common link between her and Charlie.

"Spanish," Charlotte muttered back.

Her mother's smile faded. "No need to be a smart alec about it," she said. "I was simply asking."

Charlie put her fork down and pushed back her chair. "May I be excused?" she asked.

"No, you need to sit here and eat, please," demanded her mother, tight lipped.

Charlotte spent the rest of the meal with her eyes fixed on her lap, catching tears on the cuff of her sweatshirt before they could escape.

XXX

The day after the silly string, there was bug collecting.

Not just bugs, really, but that was all any of the children could actually catch. Brinley held her net under the water, watching the minnows with utmost focus, but when she came back up, the net held only a long-legged water strider bug, antennae waving wildly in the mesh.

Kris had caught three minnows, though, and a little chirping frog. They had held up the squirming creature for the class to see, green-rimmed eyes bulging. "This is a Carpenter frog," Kris had told them. "These little guys eat crayfish, so there must be some of those around, too."

Brinley had never seen a crayfish before, but Kris said they were like mini lobsters, almost. Brinley thought of the lobsters in the tank at the grocery store, seeming to bang on the glass with their bound claws.

At first, she hadn't been sure about this, the bugs and the mud and the soft gurgle of the brook around them. But now, knee deep in the sludge, face splattered and arms crusted with dirt, she felt right somehow. She didn't need anyone's attention when nature balanced itself so perfectly in her hands.

XXX

With the tape off, her toes looked too pale, too round, too bulbous. Something about them seemed genuinely alien, amusing in their disbelonging. Amethyst giggled whenever Charlie moved her fingers on the bottom of her foot.

It felt strange to have someone touch her toes. She did think anyone had ever touched her there before, not even during showers when her father had touched her everywhere else. Maybe it was the last private place she could have, somewhere just for her and Charlotte.

The paintbrush lapped at her toes like an eager dog, leaving behind bright pink streaks. The cold paint touched her skin sometimes, startling her.

Charlotte was talking again, something about her friends. Her voice washed over Amethyst like waves of heat on a summer day, calming and warming her. "They don't really listen to me," she said. "Not that I talk to them anymore. I've learned. But you listen, don't you?"

Amethyst nodded. "I like listening to you," she admitted.

"Do you really?" Charlie grinned, showing the gap between her front teeth. "Well, can I tell you something that happened today? It's not a good thing, but no one else wants to hear it, and when I tried to write about it, it just came out all wrong."

"Okay," Aimee said.

Charlie finished with a dot of nail polish on Amethyst's pinkie toe and then moved on to the left foot. "Here's what happened," she said, not taking her eyes off Amethyst's toes. She held Aimee's heel in her left hand, fingers putting pressure around her ankle. "Well, I don't really know where to start it. I guess when we snuck out? Well, yeah, so we snuck out of fourth period today -- don't do that, alright? When you get in school? Sneaking out is bad."

Amethyst nodded. "Okay."

"But, we did it because we're not very good kids. So, we went to the woods behind the school to just smoke and whatever until lunch. You shouldn't do that either, you know. Smoking hurts your lungs."

"Okay."

Charlotte dipped the brushed back into the bottle, soaking it in neon paint. "But we were smoking and talking and whatever, and then this kid, his name's Andy, I never liked him. I always thought he liked himself a little too much. And he offered me a beer, but I said no, cause I don't drink. Why would I drink? I'm fourteen." Charlie shook her head to herself. "Some of my friends do, can you believe that?"

"No."

"Well, he offers me the beer and I just say no, right? But then he starts, like, harassing me. He keeps saying, 'oh, come on Sugar, you know you want some' and stuff like that and he keeps leaning closer to me and he's not even holding the can anymore. He's got his hands, like, here." Charlie trapped the brush in her teeth and laid her hands over the tops of her thighs. "Then here." She slid them down, fingers almost touching the place where the seam running down her jeans was stitched. She took the brush back in her hand and said, "And I could feel his fingers on the button of my pants."

Amethyst frowned at her, unsure what this story meant. "Okay," she said.

"And I started saying, real loud so everyone could hear, 'No, Andy, no. I said no, don't touch me!' and he kept doing it, even started on my zipper and I was practically crying, Aimee -- I was crying, and no one said anything. He could have -- he could have --"

Charlotte buried her face in her hands, neon pink spilling onto the bedspread. Amethyst didn't think about that. She climbed into Charlie's lap and squeezed her, trying to send the love she felt in her heart through their skin. 

XXX

The road outside my house is paved with good intentions
Hired a construction crew, 'cause it's hell on the engine 
You are the dreamer and we are the dream.
I could write it better than you ever felt it.

-Hum Hallelujah by Fall Out Boy