Sleepless Torment

Sleeping all day had done terrible things to my internal clock, and at three in the morning, I was still awake. I kicked the sheets off from the bed, figuring that if I wasn’t going to sleep, I didn’t need that protective layer of heat that was causing me to sweat. Thoughts were swirling around my head, none of them quite substantial enough in the late hour of the night to actually take hold in my brain.
My knee was sore, and the band-aid was beginning to itch, but I didn’t dare touch it, knowing full well that the cut hadn’t scabbed yet. In order to possibly slow my thoughts down and distract me from the itchiness I rolled over and turned on the radio to my favorite station, not sure what to expect at three in the morning. Lucky for me, they weren’t playing some weird techno songs or running the same old commercials over and over again, but rather playing songs that had been popular just a couple of years ago.
When I turned the radio on, it was in the middle of playing the song that my entire grade had been obsessed with in about fourth grade. It was still a pretty good song, but after about a year most people began to realize how overplayed it was. I hummed along quietly, letting the lyrics take over my mind.
The first song ended, and the next one came on. No. No, no, no. I thought, as the first few chords began to play. Not this song. Please no. I begged silently to who knows what. This song was that song. This was the song from the night of The Incident. The cheery chords and joyful lyrics only brought terror and tears for me. Instantly I was fighting from the memories all rushing back. I was holding back tears, unsuccessfully, and trying to muffle screams into my pillow. A cold sweat broke out all over my body.
No. I wanted to reach over and turn the music off, but I couldn’t do it. Some masochistic part of myself liked the terror, liked the pain that this song brought along with it. The tears continued to stream as I remembered each wretched moment of The Incident. I could see everything happening in vivid detail, could smell the smells, hear the sounds, and even feel the touches. I shivered, waiting for it to end.
I wanted to scream out loud for once, but I knew that I couldn’t, my mom was only yards away in her bedroom, and I wouldn’t let her see how much pain this still caused me, no matter what. I hated this. I hated feeling so trapped. I knew that I couldn’t do this alone anymore, but I knew how much it hurt the people around me to see me in so much pain, and I would never put them through that again.
Trying to calm my thoughts, I took a deep breath, but as soon as it seemed like I would be able to gain control of my pain, it all rushed back, and in a sudden snap of memories, I was once again whisked away to that night.

***

“Alright, Eva, I’ll be back in, like, forty five minutes. Josh will be here the whole time, so don’t worry about anything.” I gave my sister a small wave as she walked out of the house. She had promised my parents that she would pick Grandma Mary up from the airport on time. My mom insisted that she could stay home from her lunch with the girls, but in an attempt to prove her responsibility Taylor had practically shoved her out the door. Even though I was twelve years old, I was terrified of staying home alone, and this was before The Incident. Josh Wilkens, Taylor’s boyfriend of two years, had volunteered to stay with me, since there wasn’t room in the two person car that Taylor had been left with the pickup Grandma with.
“Bye, Taylor!” I turned back to the book that I had been reading. Josh was practically a brother to me, and he was totally comfortable in our house, and we were totally comfortable in it too.
After a few minutes of watching TV Josh turned to me, “So, kiddo, what do you want to do?” I shrugged, indifferent. “Well, what did we do last time?” He asked.
“I think we played cards,” I said.
“Oh, yeah! That’s right. Well, we could play another game,” Josh suggested.
I nodded, “Sure. Can we play Monopoly?”
“Definitely,” So I pulled the board game out of our hall closet, and we began to set up the pieces.
I always had hated putting the game together, it took too long, and I wasn’t even sure how it would turn out, with just two people playing and all. I made Josh be the banker, because I hated math, even minimal amounts of it.
I loved hanging out with Josh, he really was like that older brother that I never had. At first when Taylor started going out with him, I wasn’t sure if I liked it, I didn’t think that I would want to share my sister, but soon enough, our whole family was tied around his finger. I secretly hoped that the two of them would get married one day, even though my parents told us that that was ridiculous. Taylor was only sixteen after all. I don’t think that I was supposed to know this, but Josh was seventeen, almost eighteen, years old. I had heard them talking about it once, but I never told my parents, because I figured they had known, but looking back on it, I think that I must have figured wrong.
Josh was the kind of boy who could make anyone love him. My family and I definitely did, and I know that he was super athletic, so the coaches all loved him. He definitely got good grades, and he was the boy that everyone wanted, or so I had imagined at age twelve.
About fifteen minutes into the game, I became thirsty, so while Josh was taking his turn, I walked into the kitchen to pour myself a glass of water. I remember carefully counting out the little cubes of ice that I gently plopped into the water, making sure that there wasn’t too little or too much.
When I walked back towards the family room, I tripped, spilling ice water all over myself. My purple sweater with gold sequins took the majority of the spill, but water was everywhere. Josh whipped his head around.
“Eva!” He laughed, grinning at me with a horrifying smile.
***
No! Stop! I yanked myself back into the present day, in my own bedroom in the summer heat, before the worst parts of it flooded into my mind. I was not reliving anymore of that treacherous memory. My breaths came at an unsteady pace, and my heart was beating much faster than its usual rate. Tears started to pour from my wide eyes. I couldn’t believe how vividly I still remembered that night. It was never going to go away, was it?
I spent a good portion of the past three years trying to heal, trying to get better and forget, but it all must have been a waste, because just as I thought that I might actually be getting better, it all came back. This couldn’t happen to me again, it couldn’t. For so long I was in so much pain, The Incident took over my life, and I hated it. Everything about me was weak in my mind. I wasn’t strong enough to stop what happened on that night, I wasn’t strong enough to keep composed in front of my family and friends in the beginning, and now I wasn’t strong enough to get better. What was wrong with me?
I couldn’t do this anymore. There was no option but to give up. But to give up what? I had no idea what I was thinking about. I just knew that I couldn’t handle it all anymore. I guess it was time to give in. If I wasn’t getting better, then there was no point in lying to myself and say that I was. For such a long time I had refused to write in a journal or a diary, because after The Incident my therapist had me write a journal to deal with my emotions. Once I figured that things were getting better, I decided that I wouldn’t write in the notebook anymore, because if I could not do that, then surely it must be true, I must really be okay. So, with the admittance that maybe I wasn’t healed, I dug through the books next to my bed, and found the marbled notebook that I had stored all of my deepest feelings in.
I began to write. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t pretend that I’m okay any longer. But I have to. No matter what I do, I will not hurt the people who love me any more than I already have. I’m sure so many people blame themselves, when really it was my entire fault. Even the people who don’t blame themselves hurt so much more with every tear that they see me shed.
I am so afraid. Though I have no idea of what I’m afraid of. I guess there have been some obvious changes in me since The Incident, but I’ve always adapted pretty well to change of all kinds. Maybe I’m afraid that it could happen again. I don’t know. I’m just afraid, and that’s all there is to it. Every time that I try to shove my fears out of my mind, it seems as though they just come back even stronger. I can’t make the memories go away, I can’t make the waves of nausea that begin every time I think of The Incident stop. I just can’t do it.
Is this how I’m stuck feeling forever? Small, weak, and afraid? That night was the absolute worst night of my life. How many times am I going to be forced to relive it? I don’t think that I can even do anything to stop this. There isn’t an end in sight, and I can’t think of any means to an end at all. I used to think that it would just take time, and soon all of the vividness of my memories of that night would disappear.
Please don’t make me do this anymore, oh please, God, no.
And I snapped the notebook closed before laying back down, and falling asleep. My tears continued to fall throughout my few hours of rest.

Eva Endeavors

The next few days were long and difficult to get through. It was the middle of June, and a heat wave had just arrived. Our schools had only just let out for the summer few days ago, but already the summer season was in full swing. I loved the laziness of summer, loved the sickly sweet smell of my mom’s homemade lemonade, the feeling of damp cloth on my back as little beads of sweat formed a loose glue between my shirt and my skin. Year after year it was always the same thing, every summer, the same boredom, the same freedom, and the same experiences that somehow brought new memories with new years.
On the first Wednesday of summer, I woke up earlier than usual, drenched in sweat, a nightmare that was more like a flashback of The Incident scaring me into consciousness. My cotton shorts and tie-dyed t-shirt hung limply on my body, and strands of hair that had escaped my ponytail clung to my face. I stifled a scream and tried to catch my breath. One, two, three, four, I counted, trying to make my breaths come evenly. I couldn’t do this again, wouldn’t allow this disaster to become the center of my life once more. It had seemed as though I was getting better, beginning to heal, even my therapist had thought so, and for about five months I had only been going in for bimonthly check-ins. Apparently I was wrong. The nightmares, the breakdowns, it was all coming back, all of it.
Deftly, I rolled over, tangled in the bed sheet, and squinted at the clock on my bedside table, before giving up and rolling over completely in order to reach my glasses. It was 7:14 in the morning, much too early to be awake when I wasn’t forced to be. My breathing was still unstable, and my heart continued to race. I knew it would be a complete lost cause to fall asleep again, so I mustered my energy, and swung my legs over the side of the bed, sitting up and untangling my body from the bedding. I sat there, perched on the edge of the mattress, for a few moments, allowing my heartbeat to slow down a little, and with it my breathing steadied.
Deciding that there was no point in wasting the time I spent awake, no matter how early it was, I collected my towel and bathrobe and walked into the purple themed bathroom that Taylor and I had shared until she left for college. The temperature outside must have already been up to the mid to upper ninety’s, and it would only get worse as the day wore on. My family had the windows in our house closed, though, because we didn’t want the air conditioning to have to work harder than it already was, but still the rooms were hot and the air seemed almost too thick to breathe in.
When I stepped into the shower, I let the cool water pelt down onto my bare back for a while, before beginning to actually clean myself. It was unusual for me to keep the water in the shower below scalding, but it was much too hot out to even consider anything above chilly.
Once I was showered with my teeth brushed and contacts in, I wrapped my towel under my arms, and allowed my wet hair to lay down my back as I darted into my bedroom to get dressed. It was around 8:00 when I was dressed in Bermuda shorts and an old camp T-shirt with my hair wrapped in my towel.
“Eva?” My mom called from downstairs. She must have gone into the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee before getting ready for her day.
“Yeah, Mom?”
“Did you turn the air conditioning off?”
“No, of course not,” I said incredulously. I glanced back at the thermometer stuck to my bedroom window; it showed one hundred and eight degrees already.
“Hmm…”
“Why? Is it off?”
“Well, yes and no. The thermostat says that it’s on and programmed correctly, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Maybe the unit has finally seen the last of its days.” She suggested. No. No, no, no, I thought, this is not happening. My dad was getting back from Ohio in two days, and I knew that my mom would wait until he was home to call anyone to fix the AC. I groaned.
“Now, Eva. I know it’s hot out, but maybe it’ll be good for you. Marissa, Dana, and you can spend the day outside for once, the breeze will be better in the yard then in here, and the fresh air is healthy.”
“If we don’t die from the heat first,” I muttered under my breath before walking back upstairs to text Marissa and Dana and warn them about the AC. Marissa’s dad had died when she was only a year old, and her mom had to work long hours to support the two of them. Ms. Davenport, Marissa’s mom, was worried that if Marissa was home alone all summer she would get involved in bad things, so my mom had offered for Marissa to hang out at our house during the day, so it wasn’t like we could hang out there until the AC was fixed. Dana was the oldest child of six, and her house was chaos all the time with the four year old triplets screaming and the eleven year old twins’ attitudes growing by the minute. We loved the hectic environment of the Rani’s home, but it was too crazy to spend an extended amount of time there.
sorry, guys, but it looks like we’re going 2 b forced 2 spend the rest of the week in the heat I warned.
huh? They both replied, almost at the exact same moment.
the AC broke. its even hotter inside than outside :(
no big. just left the house. b there in 2. Dana replied first. The three of us all lived in the same neighborhood, though Marissa lived at the opposite end that Dana and I did.
whatevr. but no making fun of my frizzball hair. Marissa said, and I could almost hear her laughter.
kk. cya soon! Dana would probably be here before the message had even sent, but I hated not replying to people.
riss, we all get frizzball hair in this weather. rmbr last yr? it wasnt even this bad then. I said.
yeayeayea. suree. trying to find matching flip-flops, then i’ll head up.
just wear 2 different colors. none of us care.
fine. i’m leaving now.
good! don’t try to take that shortcut again! Last summer Marissa had tried to cut through some wooded areas in our neighborhood to get to my house faster, but ended up with nothing but scrapes and a bad case of poison ivy. Dana and I won’t ever let her forget it.
I unwrapped the towel from my head, my still damp hair falling around my face. I didn’t even bother putting shoes on when the doorbell rang, knowing that I would take them off once we were outside anyway. Dana stepped into the house, and made a gagging noise.
“Could this air be any thicker?”
“Ugh, I know, right? My hair is never going to finish drying in this humidity.” I complained, not really caring what I looked like, but there was enough moisture in the air surrounding me, I didn’t need any more of it, thank you very much.
Dana kicked her shoes into the mudroom, and the two of us walked outside and into the garden shed, in search of an outdoor blanket to sit on. In the middle of us trying to climb up the various objects in the shed to reach the top shelf Marissa walked in and began laughing, causing me to whip my head around. I accidentally fell into Dana, and as the two of us struggled to regain our balances on precarious perches, someone grabbed the edge of something on the top shelf as both of us fell onto the ground, an avalanche of various seasonal object cascading down upon us. Snow sleds, plastic sand toys, a portable lawn chair, and an assortment of other objects completely buried us, the blanket that we were trying to find drifting down to sit on top of the pile.
Marissa stood by the door laughing hysterically before beginning to save Dana and me from the dangerous pile of shed objects. It took the three of us about two hours to put everything that had fallen back into its rightful place.
It wasn’t until we had spread the blue picnic blanket out in the back yard underneath a big oak tree that I noticed the gash on my knee. My left calf had dried blood all over it, though the cut didn’t appear to be bleeding anymore.
“Um…guys?” My voice squeaked as I looked back and forth between my friends and my knee. How had I not noticed such a large cut before? I guess I must have thought it was sweat running down my leg, not blood, which was a logical thing to think.
“Eva!” Dana said, before springing into action. She was always the one that knew what to do, always the one who could think clearly in every situation. I couldn’t stand the sight of blood, my own especially, ever since I was a little kid, and I froze up at the sight of it. Marissa and Dana pulled me towards the door to my house, and sat me down at a chair in the kitchen. As Marissa was pulling a box of band-aids out of the medicine cabinet along with a tube of antibiotic ointment, Dana was putting soap and water on a paper towel to clean my knee.
“Eva Marie Rodgers! What happened?” My mom asked when she walked in from the kitchen, taking the paper towel from Dana’s hand and continuing to clean the cut.
Dana launched into the story, starting from when we were looking for the blanket, ending where I discovered the wound. My mom just shook her head at us, laughing quietly before putting about three times as much antibiotic ointment as was needed on my knee and covering it with a band-aid.
“Well, I guess you girls have always been kind of crazy. Let’s just not go anywhere beyond cut knees, deal?” My mom said.
“Definitely!” Marissa answered with a smile, before pulling me and Dana back outside.
The three of us spent the rest of the day laying on the blue blanket outside, and when the sun changed sides in the sky, and we were no longer in the shade, we had actually fallen asleep, exhausted from our shed endeavors and the heat. Dana and Marissa each had lobster red skin, whereas mine was just slightly darker than before. I guess it was one of the blessings that I had received when I was born, I had never burned in my life.
We also all woke up with the frizziest hair that I have ever seen. It was worse than any other summers before, and we all laughed at the odd directions of our hair. Ah, how I love the laziness of summer time.
After dinner with my mom Dana and Marissa each went home for the rest of the night, though I’m not sure what they did for the hours of the night, because I know that I certainly wasn’t able to sleep.

Intro

“How do I forget?” I screamed, tears glistening on my eyelashes. “How do I make it all go away?” I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to hold everything in. It was only when I was alone that I could afford to unlock the mental doors that I keep shut snugly most times. My parents were both out, and I knew that I only had a little bit longer until my mom would come home and drive me to ballet, but I was too mentally exhausted to keep myself composed any longer. I tried to breathe, like the therapist taught me right after it all happened, but my lungs and my brain were not in sync. I may have been barely twelve years old back then, but I still remembered everything in vivid detail, three years later. It was times like these when I wished that my sister was still living at home with us, not across the country taking summer courses at some college in California. Taylor was the first person who I told about what had happened, about what I now refer to as The Incident, even though it really wasn’t much of an incident at all.
I could still see myself in my little twelve year old body, shaking as I knocked on my sixteen year old sister’s open bedroom door. She looked up from notebooks that she had strewn across the bed, and immediately saw the tears building in my eyes. “Come here, Eva. What’s wrong?” Taylor asked me, pulling me into her lap and wrapping her arms around me. I began to tell her my story, having to pause multiple times as the sobs shook my entire body. By the time I had finished Taylor was crying too, stroking my blonde hair and telling me that it would be alright. When the two of us finally calmed down after two or three hours, Taylor held my hand and led me downstairs to where our parents were watching the news on TV. She sat and held my hand as I re-told the story to my parents, until the four of us were all crying together.
The sound of the garage door coming up pulled me back into the present, and I got up from where I was sitting on my bed, wiped the tears from my eyes, and began to yank off my frayed sweatpants in order to put my tights, leotard, and shorts on. I grabbed my dance bag, slinging it over my shoulder, and slipped my feet into my purple clogs before pulling my hair back into a neat ballerina bun.
“Eva! Are you almost ready?” My mom called up the stairs. On a normal Saturday both of my parents would bring me to ballet, and the rest of the day would be a family day, but not today. My dad was in Ohio on his annual business trip, and my mom was babysitting her best friend’s three year old twins while they were away at a funeral.
“I’ll be down in a second, Mom!” I looked into the mirror one more time, making sure that I wasn’t showing any more evidence of the agony I had been in just moments before. My family loves me, and is there for me through everything, as I already knew, but I just couldn’t bear to cause them any more pain by allowing them to see mine.
“Okay, sweetheart. The O’Harris twins are still in the car, so just come right out when you’re done.” I lingered for an extra moment outside, breathing in the fresh Spring air, before sliding into the car.

---

Ballet was one of the only places that I was ever happy anymore. I could just let the music carry me, and flow gracefully with the rhythm. Ballet never bored me, no matter how many hours in a week that I spent practicing the same dance. I was never too tired for ballet, and the friends that I had made at the studio were some of my favorite people in the world. Everything came out in my dancing. My pirouettes and plies show the turmoil and destruction of my past, exemplifies my happiest moments, mirrors everything in my life.
The other girls in my classes were my best friends, the people who I hung out with on the weekends, the people who I giggled with at three in the morning during sleepovers. Even our teacher, Ms. Claire, was easy to talk to. Classes were a blast, and we were our own mini-family. Everyone at the studio knows about what happened with The Incident, but there are very few people who understood how deeply I had been affected. I tried to be strong in front of everybody, I saw how much it had hurt them when I told them how badly I had been hurt, and I wouldn’t let them see me in that much despair ever again.
I walked into ballet a few minutes late, and the other girls had already begun to warm-up, so I hurried to fill the gap between Rachel and Dana. We were about two weeks from our recital, and I was doing a solo dance that I was so excited about. Ms. Claire had allowed me to do most of the choreography myself, and this was my favorite one ever. It was slightly above my skill level when I first started creating it and rehearsing, but I mastered it fairly quickly. Everybody was impressed by the dance, and though I had been extremely shy since The Incident, ballet was the one place that I was not afraid to stand out.
After class Marissa and Dana, my two best friends in the entire world, walked up to me, water bottles in hand. “Eva!” Dana squealed, “Guess what!”
“What?” I asked, slightly out of breath from our faster paced dances.
“Chris finally asked me out!”
“No way! That’s awesome, Dana!” I tried to sound excited for my friend, but I was worried that Chris would hurt her in the end. They always did.
“Yes!” Dana was smiling ear to ear.
“I told Dana that we would help her get ready before he picks her up on Friday night, right Eva?” Marissa said. I nodded.
“Of course.” And I knew that Marissa and I would sit in Dana’s house the entire time that she was out, and then the three of us would have a sleepover, and Marissa and I would hear all of the details. This is what I loved about the three of us, though, our predictability. I didn’t like things to come as surprises to me, even before The Incident. And I was always super protective of my friends, just more so after what I’d been through. Right?