Darker Places

Dirty Little Lies (Mia's Story)

I've always been an excellent liar. Girls like me, we usually have no choice but to lie. We lie to our parents about sneaking out to the Seven-Eleven for Slurpees and cigarettes, we lie to our friends and insist that we're just so in love with the latest boy band, and we lie to ourselves about almost everything.

That's why it's kind of ironic to me that my undoing wasn't the girl who first offered me a smoke in eighth grade, or the football player boyfriend who took my virginity two years later.

No, the person who almost got me kicked off the dance team, ruined my social life, and made me spend four hours being questioned by an intimidating police officer was someone I had known and trusted since I was eleven- Kendra Monroe.

I remembered when I met her, at the orientation for our middle school Gifted and Talented program. To say that I didn't want to be there was the understatement of the year; little fifth grade me had thought junior high was my chance to become a cool, mature teen and I certianly couldn't do that surrounded by dorks who panicked at the mere possibility of a B+. So when a petite girl with braces and neon orange beads in her cornrows walked up to me and introduced herself as Kendra, I started looking for an escape route.

But she wouldn't leave, and soon we were sitting together in the back of the room, snarking about the cheesy ukelele music in the background of the PowerPoint they showed us. And while I was already thinking about how to lose the last of my baby fat before sixth grade started, Kendra impressed me by eating no less than three scoops of free ice cream- a rebel from the start, I guess. She explained to me how she had screen printed the detailed design on her shirt, and by age thirteen she was jailbreaking other kid's phones for money and helping the teachers use the new grade tracking software.

It wasn't like I hadn't been accomplishing things myself at that time as well, but they weren't as glittery. In the age of Edward Snowden and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, even though I was still popular- suddenly I didn't matter anymore.

That's not to say that everybody saw it like that. I was cool, and I think both Kendra and I knew it. I had dance, she had computers. At our cores we were both just weirdo teens with an obsession, but while I was making the varsity dance team sophomore year and settling in a nice upper position on the social ladder, Kendra kept to herself. But we never stopped being close friends, so when she called me a couple weeks ago and asked me to come over I didn't think anything of it.

"Hey, it's the last day of spring break; want to sleep over at my place tonight? Drew dared me to watch some supposedly terrible video and I could use the moral support," she said, laughing.

I know I only have eighteen years to look back on, but if I could hit rewind on any moment in my life, it would be this one. I'd go back in time, make up some stupid excuse as to why I couldn't show, and none of this would have happened.

I would have gone to sleep without seeing knife-shaped shadows on the walls, I wouldn't be living a double life, and I'd still have my best friend. There would have been no talking to police about unspeakable horrors caught on video, no sex, lies, and videotape, no careful falsehoods to my friends about where I was at 10PM on April 18th, 2015 and no obliteration of what little innocence I might have had left.

But I didn't make up anything, and I regret it every day. Not only because it makes me sick to think about the things that must have been done to that girl, but because it ran counter to everything I thought I was supposed to be. I was the poised, confident, feminine one and I knew my reputation would be ruined. Maybe that was a stupid worry, considering the obviously much greater harm being done to the little girl, but I still found myself unable to look anybody in the eye.

"What's in the video, exactly? I'm not sure I want to see this," I remember jokingly responding next.

We bantered a lot about it, but Kendra's digital adventures were always exciting, and slightly daring. I thought I had nothing to worry about.

"Mia Christine Randolph, you are officially the least fun person ever. Just come over. I need a witness, you know. What if it's, like, a snuff film?"

If I had read this exchange in a book, I would have called it clichèd foreshadowing (minus the snuff film part- but I have to admit, even though it makes me sound terrible, sometimes I wish the little girl would have died onscreen so I wasn't up late worrying and crying until she was found.)

When the familiar anxiety surfaces, I try once more to convince myself of something: I am a hero, I am an angel, she might be alive all because of me. I am the smart, innovative, badass lady cop who gets it done and saves the day, I am innocent.

The positive affirmations rattle around in my head, never quite being absorbed but not disappearing ethier. I am alone, confused, drifting- and I can't talk to anyone my age about it because according to them? I was never even there. I have a reputation to uphold, after all.

My subconscious instructs me to start speaking to Kendra already; I should stop being so childish. She's the only person who understands what I saw and what I'm going through. But as much I'd like to sit down with her over Starbucks passion tea lemonade to, talk, cry and remember, I can't. I'm eighteen, unlike her. I have a scholarship, a dance team to lead, and a social circle of cool girls who have an endless supply of Aeropostale leggings and bleed sugar-free iced coffee.

I guess girls like her are used to isolation. It's a lifestyle, and in Kendra's case I know it was definetly a choice. But the thing about being an outcast, is that it offers you transparency. You don't have to lie about the things you've seen and what keeps you up at night, because you don't have anything to lose if you bare yourself.

Kendra doesn't know how lucky she is. She's got a freaking therapist, for God's sake- the only thing gone from after watching the video is me.

I almost lost everything.