Mia needed help.
She was the only person who had ever really understood me,
and she was sick,
that's what they told me.
Our friendship was always a bit of a roller-coaster;
one year we'd be inseparable,
another year we'd grow apart,
almost becoming strangers to one another
before we connected again.
Even though she seemed healthy,
she was far from okay.
And I got too involved.
So I asked her,
"what's wrong?"
because even though she confided in me,
Mia was always very vague about her feelings.
There was something she wasn't telling me.
Until this one time
we snuck out of school together,
and Mia told me she wanted to confess.
Initially,
she just told me about her parents' divorce,
how it really affected her,
and that's why our friendship kept taking breaks.
She told me, "you're all I have",
and before I could give her the hug she deserved,
the story took a dark turn.
Mia began revealing all the secrets that went on in her house;
how her mom abused her,
how her dad would constantly call her degrading names
and accused her of smoking,
and how they would abuse the dogs
just to blow off steam.
Eventually, they sent her to a therapist because it was...
for her own good apparently.
THIS was why she had been distant,
and she wanted me to know,
to understand.
She was sorry even though she shouldn't have been.
This therapist would continuously ask questions about her smoking
and doing things she had never done before.
Saying that
"it's better if you admit it",
and would try to make her say it for hours on end.
She said that her parents probably fed the therapist lies about her,
and that same therapist labeled her unstable
and said that she could have some disorder
that makes her act out and lose control,
that she needed special care.
But she didn’t.
She was healthy.
But even then,
she started to lose her mind from all the breaking they had been doing to her
- her mom, dad, therapist.
She cried
and begged for me to save her.
I wanted to.
I really did.
But what could I do?!
I couldn’t just take her in.
When she eventually told the teachers, it backfired.
They didn't believe her because...
she had always been a "troublemaker".
As the weeks went by
and the visits to the therapist became more frequent for her,
Mia grew depressed
and started to speak about death.
That's when I saw her cuts.
I couldn't watch my best-friend do this to herself,
so I did what I could:
brought it up with Ms. Carter,
the only teacher I trusted.
I don’t know how it happened
but soon
my best friend was out of her house
and into foster care.
She still went to school,
so I checked on her every day
and noticed she started to get better
and happier than she had ever been.
She smiled more often,
and her cuts began to heal.
But it was not to last.
One day when we were hanging out after school
waiting for her foster mom to pick her up,
her real mom came instead
and dragged her into the car.
I screamed and yelled and tried to grab her.
But nobody was around to see or hear us.
We grabbed and tugged on each other's arms, refusing to let go,
but her mom screamed at me saying that
she had the right to take her back,
"Mia was her daughter."
And they were gone.
I couldn’t believe it,
I still don’t know exactly what happened
but she took my best friend back.
Then the cycle started again,
Mia grew depressed
and bruises started to show up.
She would tell me she was fine,
but every time a teacher threatened to call her parents
she would get scared and retreat.
What was happening to her?
I couldn't do nothing so I asked her,
but she refused to answer
even though her eyes screamed for help.
It wasn't until we snuck off to the bathroom,
away from everyone else,
that she told me everything.
Her dad and mom were abusing her again,
they refused to feed her
and treated her no better than they treated the dog.
They took away her phone
and crushed it,
they locked her windows
and sometimes locked her in her room.
She was a prisoner
in her own home.
Mia's parents
had told all the teachers to report to them
if she was doing or saying anything out of line,
and since none of the teachers trusted her,
they all complied.
All except for Ms. Carter,
who always brought extra food for her
and would give “detention”
just to make sure she would stay after school
and eat something before leaving.
For the rest of the year,
Ms. Carter and I gave Mia the love she was denied.
So while other students looked forward to summer break,
I was hoping it would never come,
because it would mean
Mia would lose the only excuse she had to leave the house.
And sure enough,
as soon as school ended,
I stopped hearing from her;
and I wondered if I would ever see her again.
And just thinking about the pain she might have been going through
bought me to tears.
When school started again,
Mia was nowhere to be seen.
Maybe they moved her to another school,
or better yet,
another foster?
But a week later,
there she was;
she was okay!
Or so I thought.
She didn’t speak
or look at anyone,
not me, not Ms. Carter.
Obviously, we grew concerned,
so we tried talking to her,
reassuring her that "you can trust us",
and tried to break through to her,
find out what was wrong.
And eventually, she did.
And one Friday,
she invited me to her house.
It was quiet
and no one else was home.
Then, we went into her room
and she started to smoke.
Before I could even react to that,
she pulled out a bottle of whiskey
and drank from it.
"Why?" I asked.
She just shrugged
and tried to explain how she was trapped under house arrest all summer
and how this was all she had;
it numbed her pain.
As I listened,
she would breathe the smoke into my face
and I started to get light headed.
She smiled,
put the smoke in my mouth
and squeezed my nose shut,
forcing me to smoke with her.
I coughed like crazy after
and she started to laugh.
Then she handed me a glass of whiskey,
and I knew this wasn't the Mia I knew anymore.
But I just wanted her to be happy
so I took the shot
but regretted it immediately;
I started to feel woozy
and I knew something was in that drink.
What did she put in that?
I slowly got on my feet,
told her I had to leave
and stumbled out the house as quickly as I could.
On Monday,
she didn't show up.
After school, Mia's parents came to me
and DEMANDED to know where Mia was.
It had been 3 days since I saw her.
I told them I didn’t know
but they didn’t seem to like my answer.
And they accused me of letting,
or worse helping her run away.
They were livid,
screaming at me and my parents,
accusing all of us
of stealing their daughter from them.
I insisted I knew nothing,
and my parents defended me.
But I had lied.
To everyone.
I knew where she went.
It was that previous Friday,
before the whiskey,
when she told me her plan:
she was going to run away.
She couldn't take it.
Her life was at best a mess.
At worst, it was a living nightmare.
She was going to take a couple of buses
and go somewhere she wouldn't be found
and told me I would be the first to know
where she'd ended up once she settled.
And a few days later,
she did.
She actually called me,
and said she was "somewhere safe".
It wasn't unlike Mia to be this vague,
so I asked her
"please, I want to make sure you're okay,
where are you?",
but before I finished my question,
she hung up.
A couple weeks later,
I hear a rumor that she was found
and taken back to her dad's.
A week later,
another rumor that she escaped.
I still don’t know what happened to her
or where she is now.
But
I do hope she’s in a happier and better place.
Sometimes I wonder if this was all made up;
if maybe she had never been healthy.
Maybe she needed a therapist.
But
I'll never know for sure.
I did all that I could,
and sometimes that's not enough.
Just know that things will be okay in the end,
and if it's not okay,
then it's not the end.