The Most Beautiful Thing In The World
By Auzin Ahmadi
When Olive was nervous, she removed parts of her body. Eyelashes, dead skin, blackheads. Hangnails, bitten off. Chin hairs, plucked out. Nothing anyone would miss. Right now, she was attacking an ingrown toenail with clippers, after reducing every other nail to tiny half-moons with thin veneers of blood.
“Don’t mutilate yourself, it’s not helping anyone. And you should probably get that toe looked at,” sighed Kiera. She was sprawled out on Olive’s bed, her head propped up on her arm. Tight brown curls spilled out from under her beanie and brushed her shoulders. Olive grunted and put down the clippers. She hated when Kiera acted like a wise sage, eternally disappointed with Olive’s immaturity. Being four years older did not, in Olive’s opinion, make Kiera a respected elder.
“I just don’t get it,” Olive said, “Suddenly, she won’t talk to me. I mean, she’ll talk to me, but not about anything important. And she keeps making excuses for why she can’t hang out after school. She won’t make graduation plans, and she hasn’t said anything about summer either. We’re running out of time.” Olive took a deep, shaky breath, and continued to purge her racing thoughts. The girl on the bed fell silent, watching her.
“I think all of this is because I was concerned about whether she was eating. I was just concerned!” She broke off and stared at the carpet, blinking. A clump of moving hairs attracted her attention. She killed the daddy-long-legs with a nearby shoe, growling. Kiera made a small huffing noise from the bed, and sat up. Her gaze bore into Olive’s face.
“So, you told Madison you were concerned? About her eating habits?” Kiera’s voice didn’t betray any judgment, yet. She just seemed curious.
“Uh, I mean,” Olive said hesitantly, “I guess I was asking about it a lot. Like if she didn’t eat anything for lunch, I’d ask why. And I started buying snacks from the vending machines just to give to her. She always looked so annoyed when I got something for her. A lot of the time she’d refuse it or make an excuse. So I stopped doing that.”
“Sounds like you were being annoying about it, not helpful,” Kiera said in a tone that made Olive want to start removing more keratin from somewhere, anywhere. “Did you tell anyone else you were concerned?”
“I’m telling you,” Olive said. “And I didn’t need to tell anyone else at the time. All these guys started…surrounding her. Conner and his friend group. I don’t get it. She mentioned having a crush on him in sophomore year, but I thought she’d gotten over it. Especially after dating Arthur.”
“Arthur was that older guy, right?” Kiera interrupted. “Fucking creepy.”
Olive nodded.
“So,” Kiera mused, “She liked Connor. He didn’t like her back. Then she dates Arthur, maybe in a misguided attempt to engender jealousy. It goes badly. She starts to grow apart from you, her best friend since third grade. At the same time, she stops eating at school. Hmmmm.” Kiera was sitting up fully now, talking in a monotone, flicking her zippo lighter open and shut as she stared into the distance.
Olive nodded again and closed her eyes. She thought about her best friend’s horrible silence. Dozens of uneaten lunches, gathering flies and mold. Conner’s crew, ominous and hovering, like vultures on the periphery. Was any of this her fault? How much influence did she have over Maddy, really? How much did she deserve to have?
“A concerning situation. You were right to bring it to me,” said Kiera, with a quick nod. The hand playing with the lighter stilled. Kiera had beautiful hands, expressive and strong, with tapered fingers. She never painted her nails, but they always looked clean and shiny. Olive looked at the ragged shreds of polish on her own nails, and started to strip them off with her teeth. In between spitting out bits of purple, she continued to rant.
“Conner and Devin and the other guys are always treating her like one of their homies now, like doing little dances with her and going ‘yoooo’ when they see her and stuff like that. They never used to. And it seems like she really loves the attention. She always walks off with Connor while laughing and joking. I think he’s actually into her now? It’s so weird. I don’t get what I did,” Olive said. Tears threatened to spill from her eyes, and she swallowed them down. Her mother would have told her to “stop acting” before bustling away to do some household task. Kiera, despite her condescension, was the closest to safety that Olive could get.
Kiera’s feet planted staunchly on the floor of the bedroom as she stood up. One sock red, the other blue. She pulled a cigarette from the rim of her rolled-up beanie and put it in the corner of her mouth, hanging precariously, unlit. “Oh, Olly, so naive,” she sing-songed. Her sarcastic tone was softened by the way she looked at Olive, her eyes red around the edges. “Don’t you know the most beautiful thing in the world is a dying white girl?”
THE END
Author Bio: Auzin is a writer from the Pacific Northwest. With over two dozen publications, she has also published two chapbooks, and was nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net Prize in 2022. Auzin was awarded an Outpost Foundation residency in 2023. More of her work can be found at byauzin.com.