After You

iii. loss is the lingering echo of an imaginary friend

It wasn’t a new experience, the distance. Clarke had dealt with distance before. It had lived in her blood and bones, wrapping around her insides like a fist and squeezing. At six years old, she had been breathless with the pressure. At seven, just as labored. At eight, accustomed. At nine, temporarily relieved.

But this, this was different.

This distance didn’t mark itself with miles or with a purely physical separation between two end points, two bodies. This distance was something intangible. Cloaking itself in close proximity, it existed only in the quiet and the awkward, the unspoken, the fragile, the strained. This distance marked itself with a separation between two hearts.

It planted itself inside Clarke, but it didn’t squeeze. Instead, it expanded. It rooted firmly between her ribs and began to grow like a weed.

It began the day following the scene in the school parking lot, the day Lexa’s father clashed with Clarke’s, and it grew in little breaths, little details, little moments over time. It grew in the way green eyes suddenly dropped and darted, began avoiding blue. In the way tiny steps closer slowly became tiny steps apart, became a turned head and a rigid back. In the way short sentences became single words, became nothing. It grew in the way Lexa’s quiet moments pressed together to create a persisting, impenetrable silence, that eventually left Clarke strained and spiraling and alone.

So full with this distance that she felt, always, on the verge of bursting.

The silence persisted for a year, and Clarke suffered it in secret. Lexa kept her distance even as they shared the same class, the same teacher, the same row of desks. At first, Clarke tried to understand. She tried to correct whatever she had done wrong. She tried to apologize for something, anything, everything. There was an invisible, intangible cord connecting the two of them, she knew, and she was desperate to take the strain off of it. Every time Lexa stepped away from her or averted her gaze, the cord tugged harder.

Lexa didn’t give an inch beyond the occasional glance in Clarke’s direction, the occasional caving of her shoulders like she was suffering the strain of the distance as well even if she would never admit it. She never acted to lessen it, though, and she never gave Clarke any explanation.

She simply withdrew, and Clarke watched it happen. Sinking back into herself after far too many failed attempts at relief, Clarke stopped trying. She let Lexa have her silence, have her distance, and she didn’t push. Eventually, she stopped trying to understand at all, and where confusion had previously been, anger took up residence.

It built in her chest, and it boiled and bubbled for days, weeks, months; like a kind of persisting heartburn. It wasn’t fair that she was being punished, and for what? She didn’t know. That was the worst of it. Much like when Lexa had been sent away, it was the wondering that bothered Clarke the most—wondering how they had gotten to this point and so quickly, wondering what she had done to cause it, wondering if they would ever go back to how they were before; wondering if the girl she thought was her best friend ever even cared about her at all.

Surely she didn’t or she wouldn’t have been able to toss Clarke aside so easily.

Clarke became so eaten up with her anger that she resented Lexa. She resented her for taking herself away from Clarke, for shutting Clarke out and down without even an explanation, for making Clarke feel this way. But mostly, she resented Lexa for not caring about her as much as Clarke cared about Lexa.

So, Clarke determined to stop caring about Lexa entirely. She failed, of course. She failed so completely that she, more often than not, found herself crying quietly in her bed at night—missing Lexa’s little smiles, missing the way she would say Clarke’s name, and always blaming herself. She tried not to. She tried to put the blame entirely on Lexa, but it never worked. Clarke felt guilty and angry and alone, too fried from the experience to try with anyone else. Fried, in general. It didn’t make her any less determined, however, to bury it all down and absolutely, positively not care about Lexa Woods.

She could do silence. If that was what Lexa wanted, Clarke could do silence just as hard, just as ugly, and Lexa would know what it felt like to be brushed off and pushed away and broken.

Of course, Clarke lasted only three days of pointlessly trying to give the cold shoulder to someone who had already iced over months ago, or so she thought. She lasted only three days, because on the fourth day, she saw something she wasn’t meant to see, and everything just shattered.

Fourth-grade physical education was mostly a lot of awkward squat thrusts, jumping jacks, and lanky kids wiggling their way up a scratchy old rope. Lexa was one of the lankiest, all long, awkward limbs and bendy beyond reason, and Clarke did her best to find it more annoying than endearing. She crossed her arms over her chest as she stood to the side of the blue mat at the base of the rope and stared up at the scrawny girl inch-worming her way to the top. She was one of the few who could make it all the way up to ring the little bell attached to the beam. When it dinged a moment later, Clarke huffed and rolled her eyes.

Coach Barnes clapped his hands and then motioned for Clarke to move forward. She was up next on the rope, which Clarke hated. The halfway mark was as far as she had ever gotten and that had been a real stretch. She was not cut out for climbing; at least, not for climbing up skinny, scratchy, wiggly strings that made her feel like she was a breath away from falling every inch she managed to grunt her way up.

It was 9 AM, and Clarke was already having a crappy day.

Crappy evolved into sweaty and crappy by the time P.E. was over, and from sweaty and crappy to downright horrible by the time the girls’ locker room cleared out.

They filed in together, a bunch of sweaty girls in baggy shorts and t-shirts, and began changing their clothes and using paper towels to wipe off their faces and the backs of their necks. Showers didn’t start until sixth grade, so no one ever took very long, avoiding the large open shower stall and mostly only using the big common room that contained the storage lockers and benches. A few used the toilets, of which there were only three, all walled in with doors that locked. There was also a single private shower stall, just off from the toilets, and while it didn’t have a door that locked, it did have a privacy curtain. Some of the girls preferred to change in the stalls while most of the others changed out in the main room together.

Lexa was one of the few who used a stall every time, always one of the first ones into the locker room at the end of class. That day, though, she had been held back a moment by Coach Barnes and ended up being the last one in after the bell rang. Clarke watched the way Lexa quickly grabbed her clothes and shoes from where they were stacked at the end of a bench and hurried toward the stalls, all of which Clarke knew were already full, except for the private shower stall. She heard the curtain screech as it was pulled open and then closed again, and Clarke rolled her eyes at herself.

Why she was still tuned in to every little detail of Lexa Woods, she didn’t know, but no matter how she tried, she couldn’t make it stop. It was maddening.

Clarke did her best to clear her head and focus on herself. She changed her clothes, not bothering to rush like most of the other girls did, several of them having already finished dressing and headed out to the hall to wait for a teacher to walk them back to class. Making her way over to one of the sinks, Clarke wetted a paper towel and ran it over her face and forehead. She rubbed at the sticky, sweaty spots just past her hairline and then swiped the paper towel down the length of her neck. The cool, damp press felt good. When she crossed the small room to toss her paper towel into the large trashcan, she glanced toward the stalls and stopped dead in her tracks.

The curtain of the private shower stall puffed out suddenly like something hit it from inside. One of Lexa’s elbows maybe. It was a small stall with not a lot of room to move around. The motion, though, was enough to pull the curtain a bit on the rod so that it was slightly ajar, and Clarke got a quick shot of Lexa through the gap. She didn’t mean to see anything, had only just been glancing over out of habit, her eyes always sort of roaming around any space she found herself in. She had always been observant. But she did. She did see, and the lump that instantly formed in her throat told her that she would not be able to un-see it.

That one flash was all she needed to realize that Lexa already knew what it felt like to be broken by someone close to her, and Clarke hated herself for ever having had the thought.

Her feet were moving before Clarke had a chance to think about what she was doing. There was nothing but hazy red in her vision as she grabbed onto the shower curtain a second later and wrenched it back. The guttural yelp that followed the action did nothing to clear the haze, and Clarke felt dizzy as she got a fuller, brighter view of the large yellowish-green bruise at the base of Lexa’s back and disappearing under the band of her jeans just a split second before Lexa’s arms shot across her chest and she whirled around.

“Clawke!”

Her name on Lexa’s lips sounded more like Clarke than ever before, daily speech class having certainly done its job, but the ‘r’ was still soft enough that it carried the familiar melody of Lexa’s impediment. It had been months since Clarke last heard it slip over the girl’s lips, but in this moment, she couldn’t enjoy it. Lexa’s green eyes were wide and panicked, and Clarke’s chest suddenly hurt. It hurt like she had gone too long without breathing, and she felt her eyes begin to sting.

“Lexa,” she said, her voice shaky and slightly choked. “Your back.”

Time seemed to freeze for a moment as they stared at each other, Clarke breathless and Lexa beginning to tremble in place. After one hard moment of silence, Lexa’s expression contorted with frustration. “Get out,” she said in the harshest tone Clarke had ever heard from her, but Clarke stood her ground.

“Lexa, your back,” she said again, shaky but loud, and then suddenly there was a hand clamping over her mouth.

Lexa shushed her, an angry hiss as she stopped bothering to cover her flat, naked chest and used her remaining hand to jerk Clarke further into the shower stall with her. She poked her head out to peek into the locker room and then yanked the curtain closed so that she and Clarke were practically chest to chest in the small shadowy space of the stall. It was the closest they had been in months, and Clarke still felt like she couldn’t breathe.

“I fell at home,” Lexa said, lowering her voice to a whisper once they were closed in, but Clarke immediately shook her head.

“No you didn’t.” The words were mumbled against Lexa’s sweaty hand, and Lexa narrowed her eyes at Clarke before letting go.

Her words were careful, slow, measured; punctuated. “Yes I did, Clawke.”

“No you didn’t, Lexa.” Clarke huffed, tears slipping free before she could stop them. She wiped them quickly away. “Your dad did it.”

Lexa shushed her again. “Don’t talk about my dad.”

“You gotta tell someone,” Clarke said, still shaking her head. She reached up before she could stop herself and wrapped her hands around Lexa’s shoulders, surprised and temporarily relieved to find that Lexa didn’t wince or pull away. In fact, she leaned a bit into Clarke’s hold. It only made Clarke’s eyes water harder. Lexa’s skin was cold to the touch from being exposed to the air, and Clarke couldn’t help but rub her thumbs back and forth, try to create a bit of friction. “You can tell the teacher. I’ll tell my mom. We’ll tell her together.”

“No, Clawke.”

“Lexa, please.”

“I’m fine.”

“I know you hate me now,” Clarke said, voice cracking, “but I still care about you, and I don’t wan—”

Clarke’s words stuck hard in her throat when Lexa pressed in and wrapped her arms around her. Her bare chest pressed to Clarke’s t-shirt as she squeezed Clarke tightly in the small shower stall. A stuttered sort of sob wrenched its way out of Clarke’s throat as she stood shocked and frozen for only a moment before circling her arms around Lexa’s thin body and holding on for dear life.

“I don’t hate you, Clawke,” Lexa whispered, and another, quieter sob escaped Clarke.

She didn’t believe her, but she wanted to. She desperately wanted to.

“He hurt you,” she said, her voice cracking again. Fresh tears slipped down her cheeks, hot and fast, as she squeezed Lexa, avoiding her lower back. It was somehow both the best and worst feeling in the world, Clarke thought—the best feeling to be close to Lexa again and the worst to have had it come about this way. “He’s hurting you. We have to tell somebody.”

“It’s okay, Clawke,” Lexa whispered, awkwardly patting Clarke’s back in a way that made Clarke’s chest feel both shrunken and vast. “I’m okay.” She sighed when Clarke finally released the tension in her body and they sank more fully into each other. “We don’t need to tell anyone.”

Clarke held those words firm and aching between her ribs, slippery and rolling in her belly; quiet but echoing between her ears.

We don’t need to tell anyone.

She held them as Lexa pulled back and let go, pulled on her shirt, and pulled back the curtain.

We don’t need to tell anyone.

She held them as their teacher came looking for them, told them to hurry it along.

We don’t need to tell anyone.

She held them just behind her teeth, an angry wave pushing against a fragile dam, through every minute of the remaining school day. Through every glance toward Lexa’s desk. Through every sad, uncomfortable bit of eye contact.

We don’t need to tell anyone.

She held them close through the vibrating rumble of her father’s car down the road. Through the click of the front door closing behind them. Through the scraping of forks over dinner plates.

We don’t need to tell anyone.

She held them through a warm bath and a loving “goodnight”, but when the lights went out and her bedroom door closed, Clarke felt all her strength begin to crumble.

Tears pricked in her eyes as she squeezed Leggy Sue against her chest and tried to swallow down the wash of worry and guilt sloshing around in her throat. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw a flash of Lexa’s face, a flash of Titus’s. Bruises and trembling hands and panicked green eyes. A kind of nightmare she only knew bits and pieces of, leaving her brain to fill in the gaps with all the skill of its vast imagination.

Her stomach lurched in protest to the words still pressed inside, heavy in her chest, knocking behind her teeth, and Clarke couldn’t take it. Bare feet hitting the floor with a nearly silent thud, Clarke kept her stuffed octopus tucked against her chest as she padded across her bedroom, pulled the door open, and made her way down the hall to her parents’ bedroom.

Silently slipping around to her mother’s side of the bed, Clarke shook Abby’s shoulder in the dark. As soon as Abby stirred, Clarke felt herself break. The tears burning in her eyes bubbled over and spilled free, and Clarke let out a quiet, choked cry.

Abby shot up like a rocket at the sound, jerking back the cover to get her legs free, and dropped to the floor. “Clarke,” she said, kneeling in front of her so that Clarke towered over her just a bit. She reached up and tapped the base of the lamp on her bedside table so that a dim light flickered to life just behind Clarke. “What is it, honey? What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

Clarke shook her head but cried even harder when she tried to speak. Her heart felt like it was going to cave in on itself any second.

“Honey, breathe,” Abby said, pressing the back of her hand to Clarke’s forehead just as Jake began to stir.

“Abby?” He sounded groggy, not fully awake, but Abby only shushed him, so he rolled back over and went back to sleep.

Abby kept her attention on Clarke, and Clarke tried her best to do as directed. She breathed in sharply through her now running nose, a wet, painful breath that stabbed in her throat and lungs, and then blew out through her mouth.

“That’s good, Clarke.” Abby pressed her hand over Clarke’s chest and rubbed small, gentle circles there. “That’s good, baby. Take another.”

Taking another deep breath, this one less painful but still not pleasant, Clarke sagged into her mother’s hold a bit and hiccupped. “Momma,” she managed to choke out, and Abby pulled her closer.

“It’s okay,” she murmured, wrapping one arm around Clarke’s back and using her other hand to continue the soothing circles over Clarke’s chest. “You’re all right, Clarke. Keep breathing.”

When Clarke finally calmed enough, her breathing deeper and steadier, she turned and buried her face against her mother’s neck. Leggy Sue squashed between their chests.

“You want to tell me what’s wrong now?”

“I’m not supposed to tell,” Clarke said, hiccupping through the words. “I’m not supposed to.”

Abby gave her a gentle squeeze and ran her hand over Clarke’s messy hair. “Honey, if whatever it is, is making you this upset, you need to tell me, okay?”

“She’s gonna hate me even more now.”

“Who?” Abby patted Clarke’s back as if urging her to keep talking. “Who is, Clarke?”

“Lexa.”

“Lexa?” Abby’s brow furrowed. “Honey, why would Lexa hate you?”

Pulling out of Abby’s arms, Clarke stuffed Leggy Sue up under her chin and huffed. “Because I’m not supposed to tell anyone.”

Clarke’s belly lurched again as she watched her mother’s expression suddenly change from confused to knowing.

“Clarke, I need you to tell me if Lexa is being hurt at home again. Okay?”

Clarke rocked on her heels, digging her chin down into Leggy Sue’s bulbous head, and then huffed out another heavy breath.

“Clarke.”

She couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud, so after a moment, Clarke just nodded. It was the slightest movement, but it was all it took to cause an earthquake, shaking up both she and Lexa’s lives.

Again.

Finally coming clean to her parents about all that had been happening over the past year was a terrifying kind of relief. Talking about it, pushing all that worry and hurt and anxiety up to the surface and out, made Clarke feel too much. Too much for her to measure or put a name to. Too much for her to process at once.

They took her to see a therapist, a friend of Abby’s from college whom Clarke was somewhat familiar with. It wasn’t exactly uncomfortable, sitting in a big chair in a big office with her legs kicking back and forth over the carpet and her words riddled with ums and punctuated with shoulder shrugs, but it wasn’t exactly comfortable either. It just was, and for a while, Clarke resisted. She was quiet and withdrawn, unsure of what to say or how to say it, unsure of why she felt the way she did or what exactly it was that she was even feeling in the first place.

All she really had was the lingering squeeze of Lexa’s arms around her, Lexa’s chest pressed to hers. The lingering echo of Lexa’s words in her ears.

We don’t need to tell anyone.

The lingering stir of guilt in her gut from telling someone anyway.

The lingering hollow spot beneath her ribs, a new and gaping hole punched through her the day Lexa didn’t show up for school. It was a heavy kind of hole, heavy with the weight of what Clarke already knew. Because this time, she hadn’t been confused by Lexa’s absence, and she wasn’t left wondering where she had gone. She didn’t sit at her desk waiting for Lexa to come back, because she knew Lexa wouldn’t.

She knew Lexa was gone, gone because of her, and Clarke didn’t quite know how to deal with that.

She learned, though. In bits and pieces, she began to open up, more and more as todays became yesterdays and yesterdays became last-months; last-months eventually turned into last-years. The moments came and went so quickly, and Clarke’s sadness and confusion slowly faded to a dull ache and understanding rather than a commanding throb. She made new friends and spent more time with those she had known since kindergarten, and it helped to have people to laugh with. It helped to laugh at all, but Clarke made sure to keep them at a comfortable distance, never letting anyone too close. Part of her was afraid to let people in, afraid someone would try to fill the space in her heart that Clarke kept reserved for only Lexa.

Solace came in activities suggested to her by her therapist, in pictures she could draw and letters she could write, in little-league sports like softball. She found release in the crack of a ball against a bat and the slide of dirt beneath her cleats, in the slap of high-fives and the cheers of teammates. It was exhausting and exhilarating.

She found focus and stability in working with her hands, little projects she could do with her parents, and when her dad asked her about building a tree house in the old oak in their back yard, Clarke found thrill again. It was hard work, but it was steady. It was consistent. It yielded real results, and Clarke was able to exchange the weight of destruction for the freedom of creativity and creation.

Still, as she drew and wrote and played, as she carefully pounded nails into boards with the miniature hammer her father got her, as she measured and built and helped, she often thought of Lexa. She wondered if Lexa had found some kind of family, some kind of help, some kind of hope. She wondered if Lexa still thought of her, wondered if Lexa ever missed her at all.

There was a kind of guilt in getting better, lingering even after the relief took up residence in her bones; a kind of guilt that sometimes wrapped around Clarke’s heart like an angry fist and squeezed. She felt guilty for telling, for hurting, for healing. It wasn’t something she could explain, but it was there, gnawing at her insides when things got too quiet or too still.

Clarke didn’t have a clue where Lexa was in the world, but sometimes, she thought she saw her when out and about. A flash of bushy hair down the cereal aisle at the grocery store. Long, lanky limbs and an oversized t-shirt pressed between the squeaky chains of one of the old swings at the town park. A tiny, lopsided smile and green eyes amidst a blur of faces at the county fair. She thought she saw her in those little glimpses, and Clarke was never sure, never certain, but she held them firmly in mind all the same.

It took nearly another year to finish the large tree house, pressed between and held up by sturdy branches, but once it was complete, it became Clarke’s sanctuary. She hoisted up a twin-sized mattress and blankets, little tables and battery-powered lamps. She filled the built-in shelves with odds and ends—books and old toys and figurines. The walls were plastered with pictures she drew herself of people and places, black-and-white trees with rainbow apples and wild fields of wild flowers all sizes and colors and shapes. Shaky sketches of faces she knew and loved, amateur but distinguishable, and the more she drew, the better they became, the more real they appeared. One face, in particular, found its way onto page after page.

Clarke kept an old round tin hidden in the corner behind her tree-house mattress. It was filled with old letters and new ones, pages of script ranging from silly to serious, and all addressed to the one person she couldn’t share them with—Lexa. In her absence, Lexa became a silent presence in Clarke’s life, an invisible connection. A kind of imaginary friend Clarke couldn’t touch but could take comfort in.

Sometimes, at night, Clarke would sneak out of the house and into the backyard. She went to the tree house when she felt empty, when that hole she had been living with for two years couldn’t be temporarily plastered over or hidden away, when she couldn’t shake the thoughts or the worry, the wondering; when she most missed Lexa.

She would wrap herself in her blanket that now smelled like oak and read through the letters she had written Lexa since the last time she saw her. Sometimes, they were apologies, and sometimes, they were only little, strange phrases—random ways of telling Lexa that she missed her, that she still thought about her every day. Most of the time, though, they were questions. Random questions with no real purpose, just Clarke’s way of communicating with someone she thought she might never actually talk to again, someone she had spent more time away from than near but with whom she somehow felt more connected than almost anyone else in her life.

Lexa, do you think the sun goes into the ocean when it goes down?

Why is fork such a weird word?

Do you think bark is like skin for trees and if you pinch it, it hurts? If you peel a piece of bark off a tree, do they feel it the same way we do when we peel a scab or something? I feel bad about picking bark off the trees on the playground now.

Do you like softball, Lexa? I’m not very fast but I can hit hard. Sometimes I picture bad people when I swing. You should try. It feels good.

Lexa, do you think echoes ever really stop or do you think they just get too quiet for us to hear them?

Do you like birthday cake? You’re almost twelve now. I hope you get a birthday cake.

Do you think there are cities at the bottom of the ocean, Lexa? I wonder if they have waterproof traffic lights and seaweed blankets.

We talked about stars in science today and a girl in my class said God made the stars. Do you think God is real?

Why do gnomes wear pointy hats?

Lexa, do you think you can miss someone so much that it really hurts? I do. That’s how I miss you sometimes.

And when she was most down, most sad, most missing a friendship that never got to flourish, Clarke would imagine Lexa writing her back. Always in one or two words, nothing more than a fleeting acknowledgment, but somehow still meaningful. Somehow still satisfying. Somehow exactly what she needed.