Part II
Somebody
By. Misery's-Toll
Chapter twelve: Ino's Interlude
Used to be one of the rotten ones
And I liked you for that
Now you're all gone, got your make-up on
And you're not coming back
(Can't you come back?)
- "Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl" by Broken Social Scene
She was born beautiful. rich. lucky.
A world of dresses, make-up, smiles, tea, luncheons.
Childhood was a blur for her. Full of nothing. The only things she could remember of her mother was the smile her she would give her other rich country-club friends even though her husband beat her, that bright lipstick she wore (the coverupcoverupcoverup), and the shocking ice-blue of her eyes.
Children should be seen and not heard.
One.
Ino is four years old. She dresses in the frilly skirts and blouses her mother gives her. She plays with her real-china tea-set (luckyluckylucky), pretending to drink from the tiny cups, even though she doesn't like tea. Her mother is gone at a brunch with the pretty ladies she's always with. The ladies that show up at the front door, and Ino is supposed to smile for them, because she got her mother's dimples and her mother wants her to show them off. There is no speaking. Just standing, looking pretty as she wears her pricey-dresses and just wisheswisheswishes she could look as beautiful as her mother. Ino is like a doll. Because as long as she's silent, she gets to hold mommy's hand when she gets home, and she gets to have the maids curl her hair into perfect ringlets, and she gets to have a cookie after dinner, even though she's got more baby-fat than her friend Sakura, whose mother cleans the house, and so Ino gets to go to their house sometimes.
Ino only sees her daddy at dinnertime, when mommy and he talk about grown-up things, and she sits in her booster-seat silently, pretending that she has an imaginary friend who sits across from her, and they can speak to each other through their minds.
But mommy's gone and Ino is tired of drinking tea with her imaginary friend, and so she goes into mommy's room, even though she's not supposed to, and she wants to be beautiful like mommy is, and so she puts on mommy's lipstick and mommy's eye-shadow, mommy's blush, and she wonders why she looks like a clown, and not a princess. But mommy comes home and sees the mess she's made, and Ino gets slapped across the cheek, and sent to her room, and she doesn't get dinner that night.
Two.
Ino is six.
Sometimes she leaves her room at night for a mid-night snack because her tummy is so empty it hurts, and when she tries to sneak down the stairs, she sees daddy hitting mommy, yelling at her because it's 'all her fault' (luckyluckylucky).
Ino isn't allowed to hold mommy's hand, or smile for the pretty ladies when they come to the door because she's 'too old for that now.' She spends most of her time with Sakura and her mommy instead, because she can hold Sakura's hand whenever she wants.
Ino's pretty dresses get prettier and prettier, and she sort-of hopes she won't be a princess because she doesn't want to get bruises like mommy.
Three.
Ino is eight.
She tells her teacher about her imaginary friend, and for some reason, her teacher tells her that her friend doesn't exist. And that makes Ino cry because she wants her to exist so much, because the other kids in her class know that her daddy hits her mommy and they say that her mommy is a whore –that she sleeps with the other kids' daddies, and Ino doesn't understand what's wrong with sleeping. But somehow because of it, she has no real friends.
Ino's teacher calls her father and tells him about Ino's 'pal.' Ino's father doesn't let her eat until she admits that it doesn't exist.
Ino goes without food for three days before crying and apologizing to her friend over and over again, because her tummy hurts sososo bad, and she just wants to eat dinner with mommy and daddy or make cookies with Sakura again, so she tells her daddy that her friend doesn't exist.
At dinner that night, Sakura and her mother eat with the Yamanaka family. Sakura giggles and tells Ino she eats like a pig and Ino's daddy says, "She's right Ino. You're going be fat and ugly if you keep eating like that."
Ino decides that maybe she doesn't like eating so much, if it means that daddy is going to talk to her like that.
Four.
Ino is ten.
She feels weightless, like maybe she will be able to fly if the wind blew hard enough. And even though hers stomach hurts all the time, she thinks it's worth it so that she might be able to become like one of those angels that Sakura is always talking about, though she would never admit it. Because she'd rather be an angel than a princess, because her mother looks anemic and sickly all the time because she has something called and STD that she got from sleeping with someone's father (she knows what 'sleeping around' means now) and she's going to die soon.
Ino goes to a different school where the students love her. They practically worship her, looking past the bones that stick out at unnatural angles, and the bruise-like shadows beneath her eyes, and instead they look at non-existent cleavage she displays, and her full lips, and she kisses everyone because they pay her for just a little pleasure, because maybe she's just not silent enough for her father to give her what she wants anymore.
Half-way through the year, Ino's mother dies, but she doesn't cry, because the only part of her that Ino can remember is the cracked cherry-red lips and the ice-blue eyes that she wishes she hadn't inherited because she knows her father sees the failure her mother was in her own eyes, because now he takes his beating out on her, and every now and then she can remember her mother's soft hands around her tiny ones, but the memory is so faint that it hurts and she will go out and kiss someone because she'd rather feel someone else touching her in a different way than remember.
Five.
Ino is twelve.
She is admitted to a hospital because of her 'disorder.' Ino hates her father for admitting her to this horrid place full of faceless people with binge-eating disorder and bulimia, because they're nowhere near as pretty as she is, because she had the control not to eat, whereas the binge-eaters ate and expanded, and the bulimics ate and then expelled it, their teeth decaying and their lips blistering (because it's his fault that she's like this).
She decides she hates Sakura for her talk of angels because they can't exist in a world where with every attempt she takes to fly, another feather is plucked from her wings. So she decides that maybe she doesn't want to be a princess or an angel –that she'll leave those to her mother and Sakura, and that she'll be a queen instead. Because a queen has power, control.
So she forgets about that doll with the blonde curls and the frilly dresses with the tea-sets and the dimples. Because if she wants to survive in a world where mommies die of STDs, and dolls are broken, and imaginary friends are killed, she's got to be the one to inflict this damage.
Six.
Ino is thirteen.
She has been released from the hospital. Her father is taken to prison for fraud, and he dies shortly after from cardiac arrest. With no other relatives, Sakura's mother adopts her, and Ino keeps her father's small left-over fortune to herself, treating herself to expensive clothing and make-up while she feels pleasure at seeing her 'sister' that made her suffer feel pain.
And maybe sometimes she shoplifts birth-control pills from the corner store, because as she gets older, the boys don't want kisses, they want something else, and she needs the money because without looks she can't be queen, and if she's not queen, then she's just Ino, and the thought of being just Ino makes her want to cry.
But she doesn't ignore Sakura like everyone else at school does, just because the pink-haired girl grew up funny, with Schizophrenia, though maybe ignoring her would hurt more than physical abuse or making her pull pranks for her so that she'd get caught. Maybe because she keeps remembering that doll with the curls and the dimples that wanted so so badly to be what Sakura was, that she doesn't want to see the only proof of possible happiness to die.
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
A/N: I wrote that at the same time I wrote Hinata's Interlude. I did a whole lot of writing that week…Sorry about the delay, but I'm having trouble deciding which path I want to take with this story. If you actually read my A/Ns, please tell me whether or not you want me to wrap this story up soon, or if you want it to continue for a while. Thanks! And by the way, there may be some chapter reformatting. Having the playlist at the end seems a little weird, because if I want to have people associate a song with a chapter, shouldn't have it before? I dunno. Anyways. I'm probably going to go back through a few chapters and fix some spelling mistakes and inconsistancies.
Edit: Reformatting has been completed.
Please review!
-MT