Tw: animal abuse
Avery. Where do I even start with Avery? My beautiful little sister. She was an adventurer growing up, who loved nothing more than climbing trees and making forts with twigs in the back garden. I’d kill to have her back how she was. How we were. My little sidekick, ready to conquer mountains and anything else life threw at us, together.
We fought but as far as sisterly relationships go we did okay. She was my annoying best friend.
Then she grew up. It was like I missed it completely. I’m five years older and by the time I was leaving secondary school she was starting. I suppose I’d just been wrapped up in my own teenage dramas, enthralled with friends and dissociated from my own family. But one day, out of nowhere, Avery was a teenager and the sister I knew was dead.
It started small, a valiant battle over a tube of mascara and hours of pleading for a phone, just like all her friends. Soon mud pies and conquering the mountain didn’t matter and couldn’t compare to sleepovers with the girls and perfectly posed selfies.
That was what really started to get out of hand. The selfies. It sounds ridiculous, but in this modern age that’s the type of shit you have to worry about. Not staying out past curfew, or bunking off school; they were archaic problems replaced by internet trolls and body dysmorphia; stemming from competing for imaginary thumbs up on the internet.
It was sad. I remember the days of MSN but damn was I glad I missed out on the days of snapchat.
Avery’s generation got the worst of it. I remember the tears my sister shed when some young cretin commented “fat lol” on a selfie she’d posted. Two three letter words were enough for my sister to starve herself for a week, to wreck her confidence.
I watched her change. She did whatever she could to stay in with the popular crowd. She craved attention, adoration and most of all, likes. She rarely conversed with us, opting to spend her time alone in her room, putting on a full face of makeup just to take a single picture.
I passed my a levels and went off to university. I left my loving parents and my self absorbed sister behind and went to study. It’s awful, but I didn’t think about Avery all that much. She was fifteen years old and at the height of teenage ignorance, she didn’t want to catch up with her older sister. Instead I kept up with her through snapchat.
Every day she would post a dozen pouting pictures. All using those ridiculous filters. My least favourite of them all was the one that came with the black and white dog ears. Every photo those ears sat perfectly on her artificially smoothed face. After the first term I’d pretty much forgotten what my sister really looked like.
I stayed at school over the break. Maybe things would’ve been different if I’d gone home and checked on my family but I didn’t. I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t see any cause for alarm.
During the next term I started to take more notice of Avery’s snapchat stories. What had started as montages of happy selfies and group photos with her friends became the same posed pout, in her bedroom, every time.
I don’t mean that Avery reposted the same picture every time. The differences were subtle; clothes, hair, eyeshadow; but the pose and the position were the same. And so was that fucking dog filter. Despite the fake covering I could see in my sisters digitally enlarged eyes that she wasn’t happy. Something was going on.
The day I called my mother was the first I’d spoken to her in two weeks. I hadn’t been great at communication since I left but that morning Avery had posted another photo and I was sure I could see her crying, even if it was as blurred as the rest of her skin.
“You have no idea how bad it’s been Alice, she never leaves her room. Last week she stopped coming down for dinner.
“She climbs out of her window late at night. I’ve gone to check on her before and she isn’t there. I’ve called the doctors, mental health teams, the school but no one’s helping and she won’t budge.”
My mum sounded utterly defeated. My parents had been strict but fair and always tried their best for us, it broke my heart to hear her so crushed. It broke my heart even more to think of the adventurer I watched grow up, reduced to taking sad selfies alone in her bedroom.
I got the next train home. I had to send a few grovelling emails to lecturers but I managed to get extensions on my papers. I needed to know that Avery was ok.
I couldn’t imagine the utter terror on my parents face when I walked through the front door. I expected a warm embrace, a welcome home for the daughter who had been gone for six months. But I suppose I was entirely more present than the one living there.
It was strange not to see Avery come bounding down the stairs, my parents just looked at me, lost for words.
“What’s happened? Is she ok?” I asked dropping my bags in the entrance hall.
“It’s gotten worse the past few days Alice. She’s barricaded herself in the room and she’s refusing to come out. Something’s… something’s wrong with her voice.” My dad managed as my mum sobbed into his shoulder. “Paramedics are on their way but there’s a three hour wait for an ambulance at the moment. She’s conscious so they can’t prioritise her.”
“What’s wrong with her voice?”
Dad looked at the ground, poorly avoiding the question and mum struggled to breathe through sobs, hands shaking. I shared a look with them before charging up the stairs.
“Avery! Open up. I’m home, aren’t you gonna come and say hi?” I rapped on the door loudly with my knuckles. Nothing.
“AVERY! Open.” I tried, a little louder.
I… missed you. A voice answered. It was a voice that I didn’t recognise; lispy and laboured, like a person trying to talk and chew on food. I felt a deeply uncomfortable chill run through my entire body. Who the fuck was in my sisters room? And if it was her, what the fuck had happened?
“Come on Avery. Mum said you’d been sneaking out… meeting boys?” My voice wobbled in fear as I desperately tried to cling to some normality. Our mothers sobs punctuated my words and filled the gravid silence.
I had to find the perfect one.
The vile, unrecognisable voice was responding cryptically. I was almost certain the perfect one hadn’t been referring to a boyfriend. I felt the urge to get away, to get the train back to school and forget about my sister. Unbelievable what a little fear can do to a person, they say we all have fight or flight responses and that day I learned I’m a flyer. It took everything I had not to run.
I sat downstairs with my parents, dutifully waiting for the ambulance to come. I wondered if it would, or if the operator had written off the worried parents, making jokes with colleagues about a teenager who wouldn’t leave her room. I would’ve laughed too if I heard it. But I knew that something was seriously wrong.
I don’t know why it didn’t click sooner. I’d even spoken with “Avery” about her late night rendezvous, but around an hour into my arrival I remembered the trellising at the back of the house. Her entire means of escape.
“Just wait for the professionals. They’ll be here!” My dad called up as I placed my first foot on the lower portion.
“And what if it’s not her? Then we need to call the police too! That didn’t sound like my sister, we need to know!” I answered, not really requiring any response at all as I clung on to gaps in the latticed wood. A few meters and I was at her window.
There she was, my sister, sat on the end of her bed facing the window with her head down. Just like in the pictures.
It had been so long since I’d seen a filter less picture of her that it took me a moment to notice the crude stitches joining her face to the floppy, bloodied, black and white dog ears that expertly mimicked the ones in her photos. Suddenly I realised what she meant by finding the perfect one.
I almost fell from the trellising as she raised her head to reveal her eyes, missing the lower lids in an attempt to enlarge them. Despite the horrors, she sported her signature vacant expression and pout, smothered in red lipstick. She was barely there, just posing in front of me with her disfigured face.
I felt the bile rise in my stomach and sweat form on my palms making it hard to hold on. Avery looked me dead in the eyes as a tear escaped, turning crimson as it mixed with the blood lining her eye wounds. She didn’t say a word and the pout didn’t move. The sight was shocking, but it didn’t explain the voice that I had spoken to through the door. So I asked the only question I could think of in the moment.
“Avery, why?”
She took a breath in through her nose and opened her mouth to answer. As soon as her lips parted a long and grotesque, rough dog tongue unravelled, barely stitched to her own, lulling beneath her chin. The tongue was gangrenous and necrotic tissue barely clung to the sewn thread.