she hasn’t so much as glanced at most of her stuffed animals in years, and the crafting supplies lined neatly on laura’s desk are from sixth grade art class. none of the pictures she has lying around are much more recent. the walls, her paintings, her bedspread — all chosen by her mother, when she was too small to even remember. the space is lived in. it’s warm, inviting. but it’s also a shrine, in its way.
that normally wouldn’t bother her: it’s nothing she’s ever even considered in those terms until now. until audrey was here, all but going through her room with a magnifying glass, now and then stopping to pick up some trinket, feel its weight in her hands. laura barely manages to keep from offering backgrounds for each: not as a gesture of friendship, but rather as someone on trial might. someone desperate not to be associated with her own memories, her own existence.
(her own tiny plastic quarter horse, a much-loved novelty for having cost a quarter.)
her life seems so impossibly small — so, well, tawdry — in audrey’s delicate, meticulously manicured hands. i can explain, she imagines herself saying, knowing full well that she never will. this isn’t me. maybe it never was.
“i’m sure you’ve been up here before,” she says instead, though suddenly laura isn’t sure at all. whatever’s been between them the past eighteen years has rarely been reciprocal, at least in the hornes' direction: even when she’d trespassed, even when she’d done her worst, part of her always knew that none of it mattered. that she’d go home at the end of the day having stolen her fifteen minutes of acknowledgement, and they’d all stop pretending that she existed in any other context. it's too much to consider that audrey might wonder about laura in the same way laura wonders — has always wondered — about her, about what her life is like when she isn't there. "i don't — it's not much," she starts and stops, uncharacteristically somewhat shy from her vantage point on the bed. painfully aware that the other girl will not cut her off, regardless of how long she flounders. "but it's — it was nice of you to come. good. of you." no one else has, laura doesn't add, but they both already know it's true. laura looks down at her hands, folded in her lap, heat rushing to her face. "you can go through my shit if you want. i don't care."