Title: The Scar

Words: 831

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I watch my best friend sleep, giving up on my pursuits to make her fidget by molesting her with that leaf. Her chest moves slowly up and down, face turned into the sun, her features completely still, the pale skin and slight shadows under her eyes the things that truly identify her. Black eyelashes curled against her snowy skin, the sunlight bringing out the lines slightly deeper than they should be on her brow; I know why he calls her beautiful, though I'll be damned if I ever say that out loud.

My best friend.

I don't even know how we ended up friends, to tell you the truth. The differences between us are like day and night, even in appearance. People still do double-takes when they see us together, and then they assume that the only way we tolerate the other's presence is that we're related. Sisters.

I resist touching her with the leaf just to wake her up and see her irritated. With her hand limp against her stomach, the hard sunlight falls across the lines on the back of her hand, the wrinkles and valleys created by skin and veins, and just below all that, on the back of her wrist, I still see the scar.

Light like this really brings it out. A mark almost perfectly parallel with the line her arm makes, it's a light red darker than her skin tone, the mark that she's had for almost three months now. It scares me that it doesn't bother her. To me, it's the symbol of all that could have gone wrong in their relationship, the only twist of pain that she has to endure, though God knows she endures a lot, even though now it's with a sunny disposition and a smile on her face. Loving a man who lives over two thousand miles away isn't exactly easy.

Every time she looks at me, I wonder if she wishes he were standing in my place. I wonder if she wishes that he were the one watching her right now, about to run the tip of the leaf from her collarbone up the side of her neck along her jaw, against her cheek. I know she does, but I don't know if she'd want me replaced by him.

I mean, of course she doesn't. I'm her best friend. She's said so once or twice before, always when both of us are at our weakest, when we've endured hell again for the sake of each other and the look in her eyes says that she is so close to running back to the way she was before.

I watched her change. I know what he did for her. Sometimes, I wish he were standing in my place, too, because he's done a hell of a lot more for her than I have. She says I was one of the only reasons she survived, but sometimes I feel like I only pulled her further into the darkness with me, like I brought her down somehow.

That scar always bothers me. She's never going to be able to forget him, and I know that right now she doesn't want to, but if something happens, she'll never be the same. If they fall apart like everything else in her life has, she will wish she was never distracted that night; she'll wish she hadn't acquired the scar that would remind her forever of him.

The bell rings. Her eyes flicker open, catching the sunlight and glowing a briefly brighter green before fading back to a murky greenish-brown. Her hand lifts, scar fading in and out of sunlight and shadow, my eyes always watching it until it fades from sight and I look back at her face.

She looks up at me, studying, I know, how my eyes turn a burnished yellow in the glare of the sun, how the dark circles under my eyes seem to be growing deeper, and how her black shadow only seems to shrink as she grows stronger. Her eyes are sad. She notices these details because she's the writer, after all; she's the one who's recording it all.

Swiftly, easily, her hand reaches up and snatches the leaf from me. "Nice try," she says, with a smirk and a sarcastic intellect burning in her eyes, and we get up and start walking.

It started off with the two of us. People have come and gone, but it always comes back to the two of us. That scar proved that we're the only ones who can't leave a mark on each other – we're the only ones incapable of wounding the other.

That scar distracts me to this day, every time she looks down at it and sort of smiles, tracing it with a fingertip, thinking of how much she loves him. I only hope that love lasts forever. It never did for me, and I don't want to see her broken as I was by the memory.