The Misfortunes of Lolita

24 | when lolita chose (2)

THIS IS AN UNEDITED AND SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENT VERSION OF THE MISFORTUNES OF LOLITA. I AM PUBLISHING IT IN FALL 2021—PLEASE FOLLOW ME ON IG @/ls.akhter and GOODREADS (L AKHTER) TO STAY UPDATED. I am so excited to share TMoL with you again.

(please read the author's note at the end!)

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Lolita couldn't walk for a few days after she woke.

She couldn't put her feet on the ground long enough to stand up straight, and her words faltered all the time, twisting around her tongue but never leaving. She couldn't look straight at anyone, not the officers who tried to ask her questions about what happened-she couldn't even talk to them. Not her father. And especially not Frank.

The bruises on her face were wilted flower petals, blue and yellow, and her hands. Her hands kept shaking every time she spoke. Her voice was rougher than usual, and softer, and she swallowed her words a lot. Frank felt like he hadn't seen her black coffee eyes in what felt like years, and then he realized he kind of hadn't.

She wouldn't look him in the eye.

She'd woken up, but she felt out of reach, out of his grasp. The doctors put her on bed rest as soon as they realized she couldn't walk yet, and told the sheriff that he should walk her every afternoon for at least fifteen minutes. They did a thousand tests, and talked with the sheriff after each. Martha called Frank every day, telling him to come home now, she's awake, she's alive.

Frank was needy. He wanted to see her face light up when she saw him, but it didn't. He wanted to feel her smile against his neck when he took her in his arms, but there was nothing. Lolita was awake. Lolita was alive.

He should be happy. But he was needy. Selfish.

They-the sheriff and Akima and Evelyn-took turns as her crutch, walking her around the hospital. It was three days after she woke, that Frank got his turn. She never asked for him. She never called his name. He waited for her to, every day, he waited outside her door, sat on the chairs across the hall, but she never wanted to see him.

He felt like he was losing his head.

Frank remembered waking up.

He'd heard her voice and he remembered raising his head and his heart must've leapt to his throat because her hand was around his fingers, holding on like he wasn't even real.

"Frank?" she'd asked, and his fingers had tightened around hers without him even knowing and he'd sat up.

"Jesus Christ," he'd muttered.

Frank had gotten up, striding out to the doors and yelling for a nurse or a doctor or something, and then he'd gotten back inside, pulling her up almost carelessly, the wires that attached her oxygen mask to her face sticking underneath his arms as he'd wrapped them around her.

He'd said a thousand times then, I love you, I love you, I love you I love you I love you-and she'd trembled in his arms, her hands grasping onto his shirt, and her breaths made a trapped sound inside her mask and she cried and cried and cried and cried.

He remembered, now. She held on so lightly, like she barely even could, until the doctors ran in and he had to leave the room. He remembered how shaken she looked, god, she looked like an open wound, she felt like an open wound.

He remembered. She didn't say that she loved him back, the day she woke up.

He was too happy to even think of it then, but she hadn't, and now, now it crawled up his throat, the fear.

Could people change like that? Could she wake up and not love him anymore?

He remembered her holding the gun. He remembered Lana and Robin and all the blood that Lolita coughed up, all the cuts and bruises on her face-everything that had happened since then.