68 ~ Deformed Baby Birds-3

“Hey, Amanda,” she said to me, her voice was gentle but her usual friendliness was still lingering in her tone, ready to spring with greetings and kindness, as it always had, and she closed the door behind her, grasping her hands together behind her back as she smiled at me. It took me a moment of gawking at her, at the fact that she was here and looked as well as she did—a deep contrast from how I had last seen her in the back of an ambulance, strapped to a gurney with a gray blanket laying over her legs and red blood dripping from her lips—for me to realize that she had called me Amanda, and not Mandy. The name sounded out of place in my ears, as if two worlds that didn’t belong together had just collided in a greenish brown hospital room, and as she strode closer to me, slowly taking her hands away from behind her back and in front of her, I wasn’t sure if this was a good thing. I was Amanda here, clad in a pair of blue yoga pants and an oversized T-shirt with a cartoon Hulk on it with the caption I HATE MORNINGS! written underneath his green, clenched fists, and Mandy was the girl she was friends with. Mandy was the girl that she laughed with, shaped lip-glosses with, watched movies with, but that girl wasn’t here, and she was slipping away. “You look . . .” she said, her gaze traveling away from my eyes to my cheekbones, to the collarbones that protruded against my skin, and petite fingers that I held together in my lap, and then her grin shrank into a depressed smile, “. . . horrible.” I stared at her for a moment, smoothing the pad of my index finger against my thumbnail as I sat there on the edge of the bed, and then as she winked at me, her sad little smile slowly growing into a teasing grin, I smiled back at her, softly, and looked down at my hands. “Thanks,” I murmured, and then I wanted to shake myself, to roll my eyes inwardly at my Amanda-ish behavior, for letting my Mandy exterior and confidence vanish from me and replaced with the meek girl that no one remembered for anything other than a tragedy. She slid her bulky purse from her shoulder and dropped it onto the floor beside of the foot of the hospital bed, the fake, hot red alligator skin gleaming with white streaks of light, and I heard a series of muffled clunks inside. Then she plopped down beside me, the bed creaking slightly, and she kind of bounced on the mattress, frowning. “Wow, these are really high,” she remarked, peaking over her knees to look at the ground, where her sneakers dangled in thin air, and she clinked the heels together. I was about to say something about Oz or Dorothy when she turned to look at me and touched my collarbone, gently, and sighed. “I really just want to give you a muffin or something right now,” she mumbled, her voice quieting from her energetic babble to soft and deliberate. She dropped her hand from my shoulder and rested it on my knee, giving it a pat. “I convinced my mom to let me come here when I heard you were in the hospital. I told her that I was going to try and convert you to nourishment.” She grinned, but there was something sad in the twitch of her lips as she stared at me, her gaze falling away from mine after a few seconds. “We were wrong, Amanda.” “Kara—” I began to say but she interrupted me, lifting her hand from my knee for a brief moment, a small chill flashing against my skin underneath the fabric without the warmth of her hand, and she motioned for me to be quiet for a moment, and I noticed that her fingernails were bare, not a single chip of neon nail polish to adorn her pink nail beds. She shook her head, glancing away from me as her black curls bounced and swiveled as she angled her head from side to side, her smile slowly morphing into a frown, and there looked to an almost guilty glint to her eyes as she looked at her knees. “We shouldn’t have done what we did,” she mumbled, running a hand across her thigh, smoothing out the denim. “And we shouldn’t have made you do it too. We were so obsessed with these . . . goals that we started hurting ourselves, and we just thought that we weren’t doing anything that bad. We weren’t cutting ourselves or taking pills or drinking a lot. And we thought that it made it okay when it wasn’t.” She smiled at me, sadly, and I thought of the Braverly pamphlet hidden in my underwear drawer, my goal, or at least it was her goal and I tried to accomplish it for her, somehow believing that it would bring her back just for a moment to feel proud of her, of me. “I mean, you passed out and I got an ulcer. Who knows what will happen if Reese and Veronica keep it up? So I just wanted to say that I’m sorry that I was that friend and that we did something really, really bad to you.” Her eyes were brimming now and she was still smiling that sad, pitiful smile that made me reach forward and grasp her into my arms, wrapping my small arms around her small back, and I smoothed my hand over her black curls while she continued to whisper that she was sorry. “I don’t want you to end up like one of those sick girls who look like deformed baby birds. I want you to be healthy and I want to you stay.” I want you to stay. It wasn’t until I felt the warmth of Kara’s body embracing mine and the scent of her coconut shampoo strong in my nostrils as I held onto her, listening to her quietly as she spoke, that I was slipping away from her, from my parents, from Orion, from Veronica and Reese, from Mikayla, and that my mother was right when she was afraid that I would turn into Roxanne because I was turning into her and away from them. I was distancing myself away from everyone and surrounding myself in this world that I didn’t realize was so dangerous, covering my ears with my hands to stop the pleas to return to me from hitting my ears. I was losing myself, just like Roxanne had, stumbling away from everyone who loved me the most, and becoming someone else. I was turning away from the hands that reached out to grasp me, without ever realizing that I was putting them in the exact same place I stood a few months ago when I watched Roxanne leave, and that when they watched me leave, they never knew if I would come back. But now I was finally coming back.