I once saw an old painting in an alleyway, its canvas pitted with mold and moisture, the portrait of a woman forever ruined. She was still pretty and poignant and I wanted to take it home, but Paula said it was already ruined. So she sat, day after day becoming shabbier and shabbier until finally the rain and mold and rats ate through her smile and she was gone.
Lydia reminded me of that picture. Beautiful and sad all at once. She had a smile that used to be brilliant but now couldn't be born by anyone. She once told me she wasn't supposed to be happy anymore, that her mother screamed at her for laughing even months after Shannon's funeral. Like many families they'd buried an empty casket, and inside of it laid all their hopes, their happiness, and thoughts of their still-living daughter. All the next year I watched as her family fell apart, watched as she fell apart, and I never so much as reached out my hand to help her. Our parents had been friends, Shannon and Paula had been best friends, but after the funeral it all just stopped. I left her alone, the world left her behind, like an oil painting in the garbage used to being fawned over and admired. Once the world had called her a treasure, then one day it passed her by.
As the year wore on I recognized my friend less and less. On the last day of school we'd tried to talk, but it wasn't the same. It felt suffocated and forced. Lydia couldn't be happy anymore, just a bitter black hole that sucked the life out of everything around her, overshadowed by the shade of a sister that Gotham loved more. The Lydia I knew was immortalized on a forgotten canvas, and the girl before me grew like the portrait of Dorian Grey into a twisted, soulless shape beyond recognition.
I was too young. Didn't understand. We'd been friends for forever, because Paula and Shannon and our parents had already been friends even before we were born. But that was crumbling, falling, and the foundations of our friendship had never been as deep as either of us had thought. That winter she pierced her nose with a needle, said the cuts on her arms were from a cat, stopped eating because she wasn't hungry and I drank up all her untruths and I believed her. I was too naive to know differently. My friend was hurting, cursing at the wounding world as only an adolescent could, yet all I heard was silence.
The school yard was teeming with screaming kids and celebration as we made our way to the bus stop. The sun was bright, the clouds like wisps of cotton above us, the sparse grass green, and she scowled at it all with a palpable resentment that clung to her like cigarette ash. Urban decay, smog, and gum-stained concrete surrounded us and she strode across the skin of the world like she was queen of the dismal, the damned, and mundane.
"So I'll see you?" We'd been—well, I'd been—discussing plans for our usual summer.
"Whatever." After Shannon died, whatever had quickly became Lydia's favorite word. It meant hello, goodbye, fuck off, leave me alone. But I was still so naive. And desperate. Lydia Faucett was my only friend.
It shames me to say I don't think I was ever even that for her.
"Okay?" I asked her.
"Okay." Fuck off. Fuck you.
It wasn't for another two years I learned she'd fucked Micheal instead. She fucked both of them. She fucked us all.