Drained Dry

I scratched incessantly at my legs while waiting for my mom’s response. We sat at the end of my bed, wrinkling the pink cheetah print throw blanket. I usually didn’t allow anyone to sit on my mattress. I hated the way it messed up my perfectly arranged pillows and caused the bed to dip with their weight, but there was nowhere else to sit but the floor. We weren’t chatting in the car like we usually did, because now I had a license that said I could drive myself. We weren’t sitting on the couch in the living room, because I wasn’t chancing my dad overhearing. I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone this, but I told my mom everything, even the things that I wasn’t supposed to. I told her what my best friend, Isa, had confessed to me not even an hour before. 

 We had been walking through Bud Hadfield Park. The Texas air was filled with humidity and mosquitoes. I kept swatting at my legs and arms. The sunlight trickled through the leaves of the trees high over our heads. I remember thinking it was too bright, too bright out to be thinking of such darkness. 

“Think of the worst thing imaginable. That’s what I’m about to tell you.” Isa said. “What are you thinking?” 

I just shook my head. I couldn’t say words like that out into the world for the mosquitos to latch onto. I held them inside, not wanting to be right, but also not wanting to be wrong. Because if I was wrong . . . what could be worse than that. 

“Please just tell me. Don’t make me guess.”

The conversation that we had started weeks before at the tenth-grade lunch table had accumulated to this moment. She had offhandedly revealed that she, like me, had once gone to therapy, but when I asked follow-up questions she had shut down. She did that a lot when I raised questions that she didn’t like. But now, now it seemed that I would be finally getting some answers. Answers that I wasn’t sure I was ready to have. 

“Do you remember that time you asked me what happened to my arm? How did I get those bruises on it? I told you that I accidently closed it in my binder.”

Maybe I remember that. Maybe I remember thinking about how improbable that excuse was. Maybe I remember knowing that if I pushed her for the truth, I wouldn’t get it. She never gave me the truth that mattered. But I knew this mattered. It was the way that she refused to look at me, instead focusing on the gravel under our feet. 

“Sure.” But I wasn’t sure. But maybe if I could be sure about this one thing, I could be sure about the rest of the things that were about to spill from my best friend’s mouth. 

“I lied. My . . . My dad gave me those bruises.”

The rest of it seemed to fall out of her. She was the first tropical storm of the year. She swept through Cypress, Texas, in the spring before hurricane season even truly began. She was ripping up the ground from under me, flooding it with her words and leaving me to flail in the current. 

“It only happened twice.” She said it casually like this was no big deal, but it was. “The first time he was angry with me after a tennis tournament. I played badly. And he hit me while sitting next to me in the car.”

We had met in middle school through tennis. We had become best friends through the 15+ hours of practice every week, but also because of our mutual love for fantasy novels. We geeked out over authors like Holly Black and Sarah J. Maas. When we weren’t on the tennis courts, we could be found at the library, checking out six books at a time. Sometimes we had competitions to see who had the most novels weighing down their backpack. Our school and off-campus PE schedule was tough, but we struggled through it together. Or so I thought. 

I had never really understood her relationship with the sport. I loved tennis because of that feeling I got when I won a point off an amazing forehand or when I learned something new and began to excel at it. I loved it because of all the people like her, the ones I joked with on water breaks and in the locker room. 

Isa loved tennis more than anyone I knew, but for entirely different reasons. She pushed herself hard, harder than the 15 hours a week. There were periods where she practiced for hours every day, even leaving me behind at school to be homeschooled in eighth and ninth grade to do so. She constantly talked about her dreams of becoming a professional tennis player, dreams that I outwardly supported. Yet inwardly I doubted her. For all her love there was so much hate. There were weeks when she questioned if she wanted to keep doing it, quitting only to start again. It made her cry. It made her so mad. It made her think she wasn’t good enough. That she would never be good enough. She was already beating herself up over her performance, but I now wondered if that had started before or after her dad came at her with his fists. 

“He apologized afterwards. He said it would never happen again. But he did it again. This time in a hotel room while we were away at a tournament. And afterwards he cried, and he begged me to forgive him.”

There was this pressure building up in my throat when I thought about her going through this alone. I had somehow swallowed up some mosquitos and they were buzzing around, making my eyes water, and getting my words tangled in their wings. 

We arrived at a fork in the path, silently agreeing to take the path on the left. The trail on the right had turned to mud that we wouldn’t have been able to walk through. But even on this path, the gravel that crunched under our feet soon turned to lakes of impassable sludge. Our sneakers stuck in the grime and the mosquitos took it upon themselves to descend upon me once more. My friend seemed to be unaffected by the blood suckers. We were forced to turn back to our original trail. The reprieve in the conversation broke. 

“Coach Leslie saw the bruises. I told her what happened because I thought I could trust her. But she called Child Protective Services even though it only happened twice.”

She kept focusing on that number like it hadn’t been enough, like she had no backing to complain. But I knew that it was two too many. I had been raised by parents who had never laid a hand upon me, who never yelled unnecessarily. My parents were the ones to console me after performing badly, telling me that there was always next time. I went to my parents for everything, my mom especially. I imagined not being able to tell my mom when I was hurting, when someone was hurting me. Those mosquitos were still at the back of my throat, and they were refusing to leave no matter how hard I swallowed.

Suck it up, I told myself. This is not your story to cry about.

“CPS got involved. Leslie wouldn’t let me go home with my parents. And that’s why I lived with John and Leslie that summer. CPS made me go to therapy. They made my dad go to anger management. And afterwards I went to live with my parents again.”

She quieted as a group of people came within hearing distance. They were laughing and smiling. It wasn’t fair that they got to joke around while the world as I knew it imploded around me. For three years my friend had kept this from me. She bottled it up so tightly inside that when she spoke it seemed as if had happened to another person rather than herself. 

“Did therapy help?” I asked and hoped that she couldn’t hear the waver in my voice. 

She shook her head. “I didn’t want to talk to them about it. It only happened twice. He would’ve stopped. He only wanted what was best for me. He hasn’t done it again.”

A mosquito came too close to my eyes, blurring my vision. I had never liked her dad. There had always been something about him that set off the alarm bells in every woman’s mind. Maybe it was his eyes; he held your gaze just a few seconds too long. Or his smile, never quite feeling sincere with those shark teeth of his. Or the way he talked, like he knew more about everything than you did. I despised how I’d never seen him wearing any shoes other than flipflops. I had never liked her dad. Now I hated him. I hated him because she didn’t seem able to, even when she told me that she knew he had cheated on her mom.

And CPS made her go back home to that monster. She lived with the man she was too afraid to hate. A man that didn’t truly love anyone but himself, a cheater, and an abuser. A man she still flinched away from years later. 

“I was a coward. I never should’ve told anyone.” 

No. No. You are so brave. Don’t say that.

The humid Texas air seemed to capture my words and kept them from her ears. Brave was a word that she swatted away like a hungry mosquito. 

For the first time Isa looked me in the eye. Hers were always so dark, nearly black. They burned against the white of her eyes. 

She had said, think of the worst thing imaginable. 

This was the worst thing to her. A father that you couldn’t trust. A man who expressed his anger through his fists. A person who was so disappointed in her performance that he took it out on her. A mother who couldn’t protect her. A little sister that she was terrified for. The perfect nuclear family.

She looked at me with her serious dark eyes. I swiped at the mosquitos landing on my arms and legs, my face and back. I was itching all over, scratching at my throat so I didn’t think about the emotion lodged there.   

“You can’t tell anyone this. You need to promise me.”

Her words descended upon me. I became a crushed mosquito, just a smudge of blood against her palm. 

“I promise.”

When we walked out of the woods, the sun was still high overhead. My tennis shoes were caked in mud, but hers were clean. The oppressive humidity draped us in our own sweat even as I turned the car’s AC on high.

I dropped her off at her house. It had never been harder to drive away. Back at home, my skin sticky with dried sweat, I sat on my bed with my mom. 

My mom who said, “I was wondering when she would finally tell you.”

I stopped itching the mosquito bites that were covering my legs to look at my mom. She held so much sympathy in her blue eyes, not just for my friend, but for me too, her daughter that was now so weighed down by this secret that it was leaking out of my eyes. “You knew?”

She nodded. Leslie, my tennis coach in middle school, had told her and all the parents. All those adults were just talking about my best friend behind her back; they had no right. Isa had kept this secret inside for so long and it had never really been a secret at all. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

“It wasn’t my story to tell.”

“What do I do now? What do I say to her? I hate this. I hate that she is still living with that monster.” I started to choke, leaking tears. My mom pulled me in for hug, hushing me, consoling me. 

“I’m here.” My mom soothed. “I’m here for you and her if she ever needs someone. Tell her that I’m here if she wants someone to talk to.”

“Okay.” I said, snot dripping from my nose. “I will.”

But I didn’t. I knew I never would. I couldn’t ever reveal that I broke her promise. She’d never trust me again. She’d never confide in me again. She’d already lost a father; I didn’t want her to lose me too. I wouldn’t ever tell her this. 

I had just enough room, space nestled close to my heart, to hold this inside too. 

*All names have been changed.

About the Author

Sydney Howse is a senior English major with a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in History. She loves the fantasy genre (especially anything with dragons in it), but can also be found writing and reading some other stuff. She also enjoys art such as drawing, painting, crocheting and felt animal making (please ask). She grew up in Houston, Texas, but does not consider herself a Texan by any means. Back in Texas, she has two dogs and a turtle and is always willing to show pictures to anyone who asks.