Dear Frankie...

Dear Frankie,
It starts with me munching down my lunch, then Alice’s and then looking around for some jell-o. Only I’m still anxious after all that eating and I don’t know why. It feels like when you’ve had too much coffee and sugar and rewired your brain into crazy mode. Only I haven’t had any coffee in weeks and since I can’t smoke, I can’t stop eating .
It goes on with the breast buttons on my blouse looking like they’re about to pop out and me eating my sister’s leftovers of lunch on the way home.
Then there’s my grand entrance into a party of some rich kid named Zach or something like that, who supposedly fucked Jean Bantry from Lower sixth up the arse in his dad’s corvette. And I’m just standing there in the doorway, wearing my jeans to their absolute stretch level and eating a spicy Italian sub. So Zach, who opens the door already pretty drunk, just looks at me and chuckles and says some asshole comment like “woah Ava, I always though you had no meat on your bones.” And stares at my newfound rack. Boys, I have noticed, seem to think I don’t notice this, but I do and I feel like slapping each and everyone of them. The ugliness in this is I can imagine every single boy I know (you included) doing this, even my dad or Father Ted. It’s horrible, it kind of makes me glad I never had a rack to show off before.
Anyways the party sucks. Alice is completely wasted and every guy there just wants to dance with her and she just giggles driving them like moths into the light. Your average party I guess. Only I keep twitching and biting my nails and know, just know something’s gonna happen. My response to this foresight is just stuffing my face with anything edible I can get my hands on.
But the Zach guy keeps tagging along my search for food, asking me the most stupid questions in the world and offering me colored drinks I keep handing over to Alice who is drunker by the minute until the Zach guy pulls a move on me to which I respond rudely. Very rudely.
And because he’s drunk and he doesn’t know any better, he gets violent and starts calling me a whore and screaming at me, and I just shake my head and ask him to chill out. I’m not arguing with a drunk, I’m not THAT stupid.
By the way I know you don’t care but this is my letter and this is my life. Bare with it.
So Finn comes out of his double smoke cloud (in which him and Shawnie dwell must of the time) and starts pushing the guy around, only it’s really pitiful to watch him with his eye patch and his bandaged ear and all the violet bruises on his face pushing a drunk asshole who can totally kick his ass. But Finn keeps pushing and calling him shit names, grinning like mad all the time. I think he’s gone crazy.
I feel like puking because it’s so degrading to watch this, Finn getting his ass kicked again while he laughs his head off and loses more limbs or something, but instead I go into hysterics. Very lady-like of me, I reckon. I should have just sucker-punched him myself, saved Finn the pleasure.
So I stand between the gents and play the damsel in distress. You must have seen a scene like this at some party, some lads calling each other names and some gal in the middle screaming her head off. Then something uncanny happens, I dunno if it was hysterics, the condensed human breath and heat in that jam packed room or that fucking anxiousness that caused it, but I just fainted.
And then it happened. The thing I was dreading all day without knowing. I know it’s coming because when I come to, my stomach suddenly feels empty like in a roller coaster and I suddenly feel like puking. But mostly because I’m in a stranger’s car.
I barely have time to react between all those “are you okay’s” and Shawnie measuring my pulse and checking my pupils and stuff.
It’s ironic how it comes announced by Alice’s bimbo voice, it’s like having Barbie tell you about the apocalypse. It’s the fucking odds that really make it awful.
It’s those two sentences that really end it all:
“Hey Ava, this guy who carried you out knows that punk guy from that band you hooked up with!! They used to be in a band together!!!”. And it’s like I can’t fucking get rid of you. You might be miles away living out your dream and shit like that and yet you still manage to fucking screw me over. It’s not enough that I’m pregnant, I have to fucking learn about you and your life and meet your friends. I am constantly forced to think about you and in this moment it quite frankly makes me sick.
I already have your DNA multiplying inside me, that’s quite enough.
And it’s the end because I can no longer hide. I cannot longer sit and watch from the distance, secluded in my letters. I can find you if I want. I can get a cell phone, or your email or something real like that. That’s even worse than you haunting me. Why would I want to do that? So you’ll come back and fuck your life just like mine? Or worse, so you’ll run away and screw your life as well because you will know all your life you abandoned your unborn child? Maybe you’ll feel you have to marry me and then the shit will hit the fan. Let’s not kid ourselves here, ignorance is bliss.
This is not something I want to think about. I didn’t think when I sent that first letter and since there was no reply, there was no need.
Fuck this, I want to stay in wonderland.
I panic and try get up, escape though the crowd of voyeurs only I’m held down and I know it’s useless. There is no exit to this backseat and this is I’m forced to meet John Hambone and know about Prencey Prep and how you’re such a nice guy and like naming your bands after books it’s likely you’ve never read. And that John guy, well he can go on ages about you only salvation comes in it usual cloud of smoke and out of it comes Shawnie who just pulls me over and says we really must get going now.
The whole ride I panic thinking how you are just a call away. Alice is probably shagging that guy in that fucking backseat and then they’ll date because he’s nice and charming and I’ll be forced to see him and wonder. Wonder if I should really find you. Wonder if it’s worth it. Wonder what you’ll do. Wonder if it’s the right thing.
I hate this. I should be wondering about college and boys and shit like that.
Shawnie talks to me as if from another room. She tells me she’s moving to New York to be a singer, she hates being a nurse and she’s new at the hospital.
She tells me her old job gave her nightmares for months, she’s in love with Finn but he’s too damaged and that she always wanted a sister.
I answer in monosyllables and Finn snores in the backseat.
We stop by my door and she tells me to get a blood work, she tells to try to keep calm due to “my condition” so I won’t faint and she tells she knows me from before, from when my name was Tina.
The end has no end. I get home and eat a pint of ice cream.

From decaying wonderland,
A.