Gnashing Bone

The snapping of the pills in her pill cutter should’ve made her remember the cracking sound when she fractured her leg in four places. The white tablet she fingered in her palm should’ve made her remember the sight of her pale bone protruding from just right below her knee. But she smiled instead, the music leaking from her phone to drown out her laughter. Laughter at the thought that her parents believed she’d actually take these pills. These pills, her kryptonite, zapped the madness from her brain, making her normal and boring like everyone else. Never.

She slid each pill into its rightful place in her day-of-the-week container to show her parents that she was trying to be responsible, to get her life back on track. But the evening routine was dreaded by everyone. Her parents would trudge into the bathroom, feeling embarrassed and reluctant at the role they had to play, at the fact that their daughter so willingly kept diving off the deep end. Kept falling and crashing because she loved being sick. Like a good girl she’d place the pills on her tongue, the chalky ones starting to bleed blue residue, and she’d pretend to swallow. They’d look inside her mouth, ask her to roll her tongue, just like the psychiatrist showed them and she’d manage a slack jawed smile as her white teeth, the gatekeepers of her sanity, flashed pearly white. But the second they’d blink she’d already slipped the white, blue, and pink pills into her jean pocket. There would be no pills to be found, just gnashing bone. Bones that clashed when she laughed. Her parents would nod in approval, ashamed of the position they had to take, the position they had to tilt their daughter’s head to make sure she was medicated. Every single night she followed their instructions without complaint. She was compliant. She pretended to pick lithium leftovers from between her teeth.

She seemed so obedient and pleasant, like the perfect patient, the patient daughter, but somehow her eyes still gleamed dangerously. Her pupils still dilated like two black holes sucking in everything around her. Her mouth, even when closed, still managed to consume the world. She hungrily swallowed the light and the noise, the beauty and the brightness, keeping her at the right degree of crazy because she’d never give up on her ecstatic madness. Even though she’d struggle to walk on her wounded leg from now on, the injury the direct result of her unmedicated reckless lust for life while manic, her crazy brain rewrote the story. How stunning she was when she glided across the crystal ice. How intoxicating as her body curled and carved the frost-bitten air. How she giggled music and steam as she attempted to twirl, instead lodging the blade of her skate into the ice and falling, crushing her left leg.

That evening after her parents left her alone in the bathroom, after she’d quickly flushed her pills as soon as the door was shut, she did remember the fall, the torn pants, the blood from her exposed wound, but the greatest tragedy of all was that now her parents knew she had gone off her meds and now they were her wardens. That is until she could smile her way back to perceived sanity, gain their misplaced trust, and go back to college. She knew it would be so easy to pretend to be what they wanted. She had never been their favorite child. She had never been their angel. But she knew what they yearned for. She knew that she could pantomime the sane daughter that they prayed for. She could wink and grin and lie better than her sisters, her sane and safe sisters, and convince her parents that yes, she was better now. And they could let her go.