Heavy-weight Champ

when she was little, before any of this shit happened, she would spend her winters with her dad and brothers. they'd wrap her up in all her coats, cover her mouth and chin with a red knit scarf, hold her mittens open so she could slide her hands inside them. all the while, they'd laugh and smile with their perfect teeth and deep, adult voices. outside, they'd build forts and play tag, lay down and make snow angels. they'd pick up lumps of snow, loosely packed spheres of frozen water. Steven taught her just how to shape her hands to make a perfect sphere. to them, it was never a fight. it was an art, an image of the beauty of life. hurt was not an aim, as this was just a game.
THOSE were snowballs. when her rehab therapist explained to her parents that the situation had "snowballed," she called bullshit. no snowball was this much trouble. the situation was fucked and that's all there was to it. how she'd gotten into it was because she was weak. but she was fifteen. what fifteen year old girl wasn't? two years of emotional body building gave her the strength to get back in the ring of reality, though. at her last session, she said she was expecting to be the heavy-weight champ. there was a lot on her mind, so much in her heart. but she was a regular Atlas, now. in charge of the world on her shoulders.
she had covered her face in makeup. she had a special love for teal. tousling her multicolored mane, she'd smirk at her reflection and make kissy lips as she applied the deepest red lipstick she had. before she left for school every morning, she'd look down her nose at herself, then pass her own test and say,
"you an' me, babe? we're bad."
on the day she later came to think of as The Day the Whole Fucked-Up Situation Got Even More Fucked, she stood and leaned in to kiss the mirror, leaving a perfectly symmetrical lipstick stain on the reflection of her room.
two years later, she scrubbed as hard as she could to get it off. the red stain merely blurred and smeared. she resorted to putting a sheet over the whole vanity. then she slowly pulled the posters from her walls, the one of James Franco and the one of Britney Spears folded neatly to fit on the pile at the bottom of her closet. she took down the streamers and beads from her walls, emptied the contents of her jewelry box, and put it all in a case to sit on the pile of posters. she stripped her bed of the vibrant pink sheets and the orange comforter and traded them for off-white and yellow. she picked up the clothes that hadn't been touched in two years from her floor and put them in her dirty clothes basket. she'd sort through them for the ones she wanted to keep and the ones she wanted to get rid of later.
when she was done, she opened her wallet and unfolded a photograph of her and her brothers huddled in the snow, bundled up in their winter's finest. the memory was a cloud in her head, a foggy remnant of a feeling. her father had taken the picture and she had known that it wasn't the thick layers keeping her warm; it was her family. taking a single tack, she stuck it on the bare wall and curled up on her bed to look at it. she'd worked on getting rid of all the bad things for two years and the consequence was a feeling of emptiness. but now, at the bottom of her lead-lined hole, she was ready to start filling up with good things. her breath slowed and she began to dream about living on a boat on the open ocean.
her mother entered and saw her asleep. looking at the room, she smiled. "looks nice," she thought. she didn't see the photograph on the wall.
if she had, she would've started crying.