The Coincidence of Callie and Kayden

101 on me, so I fold my arms and stare out the window, watching the leaves blow across the street and into the gutter.
     
    ***
     
    When I get back to my room later that day, I write until my hand hurts, needing to get it out, but only daring to tell it to a blank sheet of paper. There are no accusations with writing, no judgment, no shame, only freedom. As the pen touches the paper, for a moment, I’m alive.
     
    The day I changed is like a scar. It’s there, a memory in my mind, something I always remember and can never erase.  It was the week after my birthday party. I’d locked myself in the bathroom and stared in the mirror for an eternity. I used to love how I looked, the length of my hair, perfect for braiding. I had always been tiny for my age, but suddenly I wanted to be smaller—invisible. I didn’t want to exist anymore.
     
    I grabbed a pair of scissors out of the drawer and without even thinking, began hacking off my long brown hair. I didn’t even bother trying to make it look nice, I just cut, even shutting my eyes sometimes, letting fate take over, like it had done with my life.
     
    “The uglier the better,” I whispered with each snip.
     
    When I was finished, I didn’t look like myself. I hadn’t been sleeping very well and my blue eyes had dark circles under them and my lips were chapped from dehydration from all the vomiting. I felt ugly and the thought formed a tiny smile on my face, because I knew no one would look at me and want to come near me again.
     
    When I walked into the kitchen, with my brother’s jacket on and the baggiest pair of jeans I could find, all the color drained from my mom’s face. My father had been eating his breakfast at the table and looked up at me with horror in his eyes. My brother and Caleb stared at me too, making repulsed faces.
     
    “What the fuck happened to you?” My brother said with wide eyes.
     
    I didn’t reply. I just stood there, blinking at him, wishing I could be smaller.
     
    “Oh my God, Callie,” my mom breathed, her eyes so wide they looked like marbles. “What did you do?”
     
    I shrugged and grabbed my bag off the doorknob. “I cut my hair.”
     
    “You look… you look.” She took a deep breath. “You look hideous, Callie. I’m not going to lie. You’ve ruined yourself.”
     
    I’m more ruined than you think, I wanted to tell her. But she kept looking at me in disgust, like she wished for a second I didn’t exist and I felt exactly the same way. I bottled everything up, knowing I could never tell; that she would look at me with even more hate and revulsion if I told her.
     
    For the first few years of my turmoil, she tried to understand. And I give her credit for that. She asked questions, took me to talk to a counselor, who told her that I was acting out because I needed more attention. He was a small town shrink and had no idea what he was talking about, although I didn’t try to help him understand either. I didn’t want him to know what was living on the inside. At that point, all the good and clean had been spoiled and was rotten like eggs left out in the sun.
     
     The thing about my mother is she likes things happy. She hates seeing bad things on the news and refuses to watch it. She won’t read the headlines of the newspapers and doesn’t like talking about the pain in the world.
     
    “Just because the world is full of bad things, doesn’t mean I have to let them bring me down.” This is what she would say to me all the time. “I deserve to be happy.”
     
    So I let my shame own me, kill me, wilt me away into a thousand dead flakes, knowing if I kept it all in, she would never have to learn the dirtiness that was forever inside me—the bad, the ugly, the twisted. She could go on living her life happy, just like she deserved.
     
    Eventually, she stopped asking me so many questions and started telling everyone that I was suffering from teenage angst, just like the therapist told her.
     
    I heard her tell the neighbor once, after he accused me of stealing his garden gnomes, that I wasn’t that bad of a kid. That one day, I would grow up and look back at my silly little time spent locked away in my room, writing dark words, wearing excessive eyeliner and baggy clothes as something I wished I’d never done. That I’d regret my lonely adolescence, learn from it, and grow into a beautiful woman who had a lot of friends and smiled at the world.
     
    But the thing I regret—will always