closeness

"He hit me," I said. I didn't mean to say it. The words just slipped out of my mouth and as soon as they were there, I felt as if they almost became me.

"What?" Sarah stared at the purple bruises on my forehead. Her blond hair hung down in a permanent preppy flip of a pony tail onto her shoulders. Her eyes were like saucers and I could make out each individual eye lash drowned in mascara. 

"He hit me." I repeated. My eyes were solid white which must have seemed strange to her. If Derek was going to hit someone wouldn't he hit them in the eye? Did this look too much like I had fallen down the stairs to band practice? I raised my hand to my eye instinctively. "At least he didn't get my eye."

"What happened??" Sarah instantly pulled up a chair. I hadn't seen her since last years family picnic and she had hardly spoken to me. Instead she was busy talking to aunt Lucy about her grades at B.U. which were of course exclusively A's. I wondered what she would have done if she hadn't gotten the job teaching English at a private school. Her innocent blue eyes would have rolled right into the back of her head.

"We got into a fight," I said. "We were arguing about this guy I know, Jimmy. I guess he doesn't like Jimmy much."

She pushed the few stray strands of her perfect pony tail back into place.  "And he just punched you?"

I shook my head as if I were ashamed. The more I talked about it, the more real it became. Who knew if Derek hit me or not? I hadn't seen my mother in over a year and Sarah was the only sister I had and I rarely talked to her. I remembered the conversations we had over the phone when I had overdosed on Adderal in the 10th grade. She had patiently talked to me about my troubles with Mom and how she knew it would be all okay once I was older. I never knew what that meant for Sarah, but we never talked much about it afterward. I wrote her long letters about school and my first boyfriend, a gamer named Matt. When she never wrote back, I imagined her with her never ending circle of friends, making frozen waffles and watching Melrose Place.

"You know that's really bad, right?" She reached out to touch the bruise but I stepped back.  A few years ago when I broke my arm skiing she had sent me a card with fifty dollars in it telling me to go out and have a good time and fuck having an arm. I laughed and went to see the movie Fargo. It seemed like the kind of film that she would appreciate with her friends once it came out on DVD. 

"I know." I nodded enthusiastically. "It's just that he loves me so much."

"But don't you know that lots of people love you so much?" Her eyes were so wide I could feel the lids splitting in half as they tried to meet her eye brows. They would never cross paths. Each one in their own way would be too exaggerated to ever meet the other.

"Thanks," I smiled. And for a minute I forgot that Derek was a made up name in a made up story.