By Brooke Kelly
The fall after Ella and I gave away our old dolls and packed away our favorite stuffed animals, we giggled or griped or gossiped as we shrugged off our schoolbags with dramatic thuds in the middle of the carpet.
“No, because why would she give us a quiz on a Monday? That means I have to study on the weekend!”
Her bedroom walls absorbed our conversation just as they had absorbed the thousands of conversations from years prior; less often, in these days, did I allow my voice to be muffled by spoonfuls of ramen or fistfuls of mini marshmallows.
“I don’t get why you sit with him during lunch. Why can’t he come sit with us the rest of us?”
After some time of sitting on the unmade bed, rehashing the events of the week, we grew sick of our school clothes and decided we needed change into pajamas immediately, despite the sun streaming through the blinds.
Ella changed first, having her own dresser and closet at her disposal, and I waited for her to decide which faded pajama pants she wouldn’t miss for the weeks it would take me to remember to give them back. Once the soft, gray pants and oversized t-shirt were handed to me, she sat on the edge of her bed with her legs crisscrossed in front of her. Unwilling to pause our conversation, the concepts of privacy and modestly were lost to us.
As I stripped off my ripped blue skinny jeans—the pair that used to be skin-tight, the pair gapping around my waist and falling baggy behind my knees—her sentence tapered off. I pulled on the pajama pants, re-covering my bony knees and pale, thin thighs. After I tugged off my baggy sweatshirt, I turned my head to the unexplained silence. I stood in the center of the room, clad in an off-white bra, yellowing under the arms, the loose band riding up over the ridges of my spine.
Ella wore a face I’d seen her throw at geometry tests and piles of dirty laundry, brows drawn into each other, sending creases through her youthful forehead, her pink lips pressed together and turned down at the corners of her mouth. “You look skinny.” She drew out the last word with a raspy, judgmental edge.
I turned my head back towards the wall, covered my mouth with my hand, and grinned into my palm.