Pretty Little Bones

Long Live the Car Crash Hearts

Long Live the Car Crash Hearts

There was something about watching Ava do ordinary things that made life seem kind of extraordinary. You never appreciated boring until you watched someone that lived for the mundane moments of life, because hers was so screwed up. It was kind of like glancing at the clock every couple of minutes while sitting in a classroom. You knew there would be very little change, but you still did it, because sometimes you could catch the hour hand shift ever so slightly and suddenly you would feel like you'd just seen the impossible happen. You'd just literally seen time move.

That's why I loved watching Ava do stupid, boring things: it was kind of like seeing magic. She spent hours and hours trying to make anyone that happened to glance her way think she was doing nothing strange, because she longed for everything to be ordinary. People always said they wished something different would happen to them and she'd laugh. If only they knew how lucky they were to be normal.

But even if Ava had had a boring life, she still would have been fascinating. Her personality was something like walking outside at midnight during a full moon. She was dark and mysterious, but also bright and beautiful. At the center of her being was an intense desire to make people happy. She wanted to see them smile and laugh at all the funny little things life offered. But that part of her was surrounded in a night that was as endless as it was dark. Maybe there wasn't a tragic tale behind every shadow, but even the good things were cloaked in her dark humor and quick, merciless wit.

Those thoughts were plaguing my mind when I took her out that day in August. That horribly normal Sunday when we went to meet our friends for some boring, afternoon fun at the lake. It was a sorry attempt to hang on to the last bits of summer, the last weekend of August, but we clung to it like it was a rope around our necks.

Junior year had started. The water was beginning to cool off. The days were getting shorter and the nights getting colder. Yet nothing much seemed to change. I was invited to have the kind of fun that was only fun because it wasn't mediated by any authority, so I drug Ava along. It was normal and noticeably unremarkable but we did it because although adults weren't telling us no, they weren't exactly screaming yes either. We did it because we wanted to and we didn't need excuses. We didn't need the promise of an unforgettable adventure or the excitement of a once in a lifetime experience. We just needed a few hours at a stupid lake, swimming in cooling water, drinking cheap beer, and pretending we were having a great time that one day we'd look back and maybe vaguely remember.

And I was thrilled to see Ava do normal things in her weird way. It distracted me so much that I hardly thought about where we were going until she said, only half as annoyed as she sounded "Jesus. Go back, I think you missed one," as we passed over bumps in the dirt road we were flying down.

I'd been watching her paint her toenails black instead of watching the road and she was right. Nearly every hole dug up in the poor excuse for a road had welcomed my tires. I resumed my glance at the red rocks, trying to casually pull the truck away from the ditch slowly so she wouldn't know I hadn't intentionally drifted that far to the side, and only sneaking a look at her once. She was wiping off some stray polish from the side of her toe, then wiping the rogue polish on her pants, then wiping her entire hand across the blue threads she'd painted black accidentally, trying to fade the new stain.

"Look what you've done," she said to me, taking her fingers from her mouth and using their new dampness to try to clean up her under thought and over accomplished plan. "You made a mess."

I quickly reminded her that I wasn't the one who decided to paint my toenails on a dirt road.

"Whatever," she grinned. "You made me make a mess."