The Way We Bared Our Souls Read Free Page A

whack. . . .
    TranquiLo. You’re at school now, in public.
I dug around in my backpack for my lunch, only to realize I’d forgotten to pack one.
    “Oh my god,” Alex said, her blue eyes fixed on me in shock. I stopped in my tracks. For a second I thought she knew my secret, like she had gotten hold of my medical chart. Then she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Lo, did you go to the gyno this morning? Did your mom take you to get a prescription for birth control?”
    I laughed, relieved. Alex knew perfectly well that birth control was the furthest thing from my mind, especially since I was a virgin and didn’t have a boyfriend, despite what my DayGlo underwear might suggest.
    “Yeah, right. Just a routine checkup,” I said, feeling a little guilty about lying but deciding that the alternative—making my friends worry—was worse. “So tell me about Brett,” I said, changing the subject. “Dish, Alex. I hate that I missed Weekends on Wednesdays last night.” I might have changed the subject a bit too effectively, because for the next four minutes, Alex didn’t stop talking about the star soccer player’s “pillowy” lips and “rock-hard abs.” I took this to indicate that she’d been reading too many of her mother’s romance novels. (By which I mean the novels that her mom
writes
, not ones she keeps on the shelf. Slightly overweight and incredibly awkward, Mrs. Karen Reynolds is known everywhere besides her church and the dentist’s office as Cate Mayweather, best-selling romance author.)
    Before I could interrupt Alex’s monologue, Ellen Davis arrived on the Agua scene like a bucking bronco.
    “Who’s seen my backpack?” she practically shrieked, stopping short our conversation, such as it was. I looked around for the bag in question, but someone was sitting on or near every backpack in the vicinity in a proprietary way.
    I hadn’t hung out much with Ellen recently. We didn’t have any classes together that semester, and I’d been distracted by my symptoms since the start of school. Ellen used to be attached at the hip to me, Juanita, and Alex, but she’d started going off the deep end last spring. Though we hadn’t said it to her explicitly, we were all really worried about her. Her pill problem was the worst-kept secret in our crowd. So far her mom, a wealthy state delegate, and the nosy guidance counselors at school didn’t appear to have gotten wind of her addiction, but Ellen routinely came to class either high on something or in a stupor that no amount of caffeine from the cafeteria vending machines could shake.
    And last spring Ellen had discovered heavy-duty pain-killers. Serious stuff, like Oxy and Percocet. So I was definitely worried about the road Ellen was on. But—and I hated to say it, because lord knows I’d had my own mood swings lately—she’d also been acting like a real bitch. After she wrecked her brand-new car last April driving to school on a handful of Xanax washed down with lite beer, we all rallied around her. Even though Mrs. Davis told us it was “only a fender bender” (false) and that they “had enough flowers already, mostly from the capitol building” (brag), we visited Ellen in the hospital anyway. But she was a nightmare patient, cursing us out right and left. She wouldn’t even accept Juanita’s get-well flower bouquet, saying that the smell of roses “made her want to vom.” It got so bad one day that we decided we wouldn’t come back to visit; we clearly weren’t helping her and were maybe only making things worse. Ellen had been drifting further and further from us ever since.
    Now she seemed to be on something far worse than pills. She’d lost a bunch of weight, for one. Her jeans sagged off her hips, and she’d already been pretty thin to begin with (her mom basically stocked the fridge only with flavored seltzers and imitation eggs). For two, her skin, which had always been clear and sun-kissed, was now ghost-white and splotchy. Her