Shorter Stories from The Avocado Grove - Part IV Why My Boyfriend Does Wheelies on His Motorbike at Midnight

Over the next few weeks, my bones turned as brittle and thin as the bark on the paper tree forest near my neighborhood where Cliff and I used to hang out and play hooky.  I didn't tell him about what happened, but I confided in Sherry.  She stared at me as if I used smoky eye shadow for cheek blush.  

"No way, Dillon would never," she said.  And most people would think like her, Dillon would never.

With no one to talk to, I started having conversations with Dillon.  It wasn't the real Dillon but his two-dimensional likeness.  I called him 2-D.  He materialized in the bathroom as I washed up.  His reflection stared back at me after I lifted my damp head from the sink.  My blood shot eyes met clear, pretty green ones, and I sprinted for the door.  When I finally figured out he wasn't following me, I flopped Raggedy-Ann style back down against the wall and rested my head on toothpick arms.  After a time, I worked up the nerve to talk.

"Isn't this worse than what I did?" He asked.

He meant the starving and the hiding out.  Did I shrink from living?  Was it safer to be dead?

 

"I can't seem to do do anything else."

I studied 2-D, his tall deflated form and hated the memory of the real Dillon and what I believed - the syrupy things he said, the way I reacted to those things, and what he did.

 

"Let me go," 2-D said.

"You fed me peanut butter cookies from your fingertips, you told me you have a cousin who wants to play volleyball on the men's team in a couple of years, the two of you were going to see me play."

"You know what we did."

I nodded but refused to meet his eyes and stared down at his flat tennis shoes and pretended he was better than the real Dillon, a sweeter version, maybe even one I forgive.  He still looked strangely thin and unreal as if my mind wanted to remind me of its trick.  I swallowed and asked the thing I didn't want to know, "Why did you break me?"

"Because I could."