Never Coming Back

• Jessica Gadsden, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2011

Leah stood in her bathroom, staring at the mirror, scrutinizing her image. She tugged at the ends of her short, slashed hair. She hated it. She hated the way you could tell she hacked it off in a mad frenzy, days after his wedding. She hated the fact that he had loved it. Then suddenly her lighter was out of her pocket and into her hand and she was burning the ends of her hair. And she was laughing. Hysterically. Laughing as the chunks of singed hair fell to the floor.

Then all she could remember was Jack. How he used to twirl long strands of her hair around his finger. And how he made her swear never to cut it.
Just after he swore he’d never leave her.
HA! She thought derisively. See, I can break promises too Jack.

Her hysterical laugher spilled into wracking sobs. She turned all the faucets full blast, hot and cold, shower, bath and basin. She sank to the floor where her sobs dissolved in to frenzied laughter. She let all thought of Jack plague her mind, consume her. She lay, laughing hysterically and sobbing crazily, losing track of when it changed.

The thoughts of his wedding night plague her mind, and the laughter is gone. She’s sobbing uncontrollably. All she can see is his cold, lifeless eyes, staring at her as she told him she loved him. The moment replays in her mind, over and over like a broken record.

The water begins spraying against her, and she’s laughing again. Laughing like a child. She sits and splashes the puddle she’s sitting in, and blocks up the bottom of the door with a towel. She can pretend it’s California if she closes her eyes. I’ve always wanted to go to California.

She lets herself fall to the floor again, laughing hysterically, ignoring the throbbing pain of where her head hit the marble floor, pooling blood, red staining white and making her hair sticky on the marble floor.

Marble...perfect marble like Jack’s wife, she thinks to herself, crying loudly again. She pounds the marble floor, laughing and crying and sobbing and shrieking.
Her brother hammers on the door. ‘Leah, are you okay in there?’ he asks.
‘I’m fi-ine’ she sings, laughing again.
Her brother freezes. Nowadays, the laughter scares him more than the tears.
‘Leah, I can hear water!’ he shouts, as water seeps past the towel and into a puddle at his feet.

She just lets her laughter spill into tears and back again.
‘Leah! Open the damn door!’
Leah merely sits in the fetal position and lets the water lap over her head. She lets water into her mouth and spurts it out again, just like California, wishing it was salt water.

In a second, her brother rips the door off his hinges. He gasps at the sight before him, Leah rolling in a pool of blood stained water, hair matted with crimson. He turns off all the water and lifts her up.

The laughing stops. The crying stops. She begins to whimper. For the first time, she is truly vulnerable in his eyes. It makes him want to be sick and cry at the same time, knowing how she used to hide all her emotions. Now she was showing everyone how she felt. And she felt nothing. She was numb.

He knows Leah’s never coming back. He’s forever stuck with this crazy, broken girl, in Leah’s body. He knows she’ll never be the same. He swears to his god, and to his now gone sister Leah’s grave, that he will get the man who broke her for this. Because she isn’t Leah anymore, she’s someone else.

Leah’s never coming back.