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Ever since the accident, Ava has had trouble sleeping. She tries everything her parents used to do for her but no matter how much she tosses and turns and whispers the bed time stories her parents used to tell herto herself, sleep evades her. It’s more than just the thin mattress and flimsy blankets she has to make do with. It’s more than the gaping vacuum in her chest that the death of her parents left behind. It’s the constant ringing in her ears even when she’s sitting in a silent room. It’s the way the only thing louder than the ringing in her ears is the sound of her mother’s voice as she ran after her, back into the room that held their certain death. When she closes her eyes, all Ava sees is flashes of light and the panicked look on her father’s face. Worst of all, whenever the ghosts of her parents finally quieted, she’d slip into sleep — and straight through her bed, the floor, any solid surface until she was drowning in the foundation of the orphanage. If she isn’t slipping through she’s floating up, up, up until she’s rudely awakened by the shrill scream of one of the other kids, blanket clutched to their chest in terror as they stare at her.
Ava wants to yell that it’s not her fault. She didn’t choose to be like this, stuck somewhere between here and not here, unable to escape to her dreams when it got too hard.
Her sleep problems ease slightly after she meets Bill Foster. He’s kind to her, asks her about herself. He knew her parents and he lets her cry when the pain becomes too much. He watches over her kindly, patiently, when he brings her a white teddy bear and encourages her to learn how to focus and keep her cells together. She takes the teddy to bed every night, curls her fingers into its soft white fur and remembers what Bill taught her. The first time she wakes up with the bear in her arms her feet are through the bed, but her upper half is still where it should be and Ava feels real, actual hope for the first time since she lost her parents.
She can sleep now. Even if she wakes up with her feet in her mattress, she can sleep properly. It doesn’t matter that her sleep is plagued with happy scenes that warp into that one fateful night, it just matters that she can finally sleep. The teddy bear becomes her anchor, her good luck charm, and a symbol of hope all at once. As long as she can feel it, she’ll be okay and this new body of hers will obey her soon enough.
When Bill takes Ava away, it looks like everything will actually be okay.
“I know some people, some scientists like your parents. They’re going to help us figure everything out, okay,” he says as he takes her hand in his and leads her into a building.
It’s cold and sterile and it seems to make the shrill ringing in Ava’s ears louder than it was even in the orphanage. The adults aren’t scared when they look at her, but they look at her the way her parents looked at samples under a microscope, and even though Ava doesn’t understand much about her new life just yet, she understands that that’s worse.
They take away her teddy bear, and put her in a hospital gown. They shine lights in her eyes and make her hold herself together for as long as possible so they can take blood from her. They play strange noises that make her grind her teeth and send involuntary spasms through her body. They make her take multiple x-rays, and nod and write things on their fancy clipboards. They ask her questions until she can no longer hear their voices over the shrill ringing in her ears. They never answer her questions when she asks. She doesn’t know how much time passes, but she wants to be left alone. She wants her teddy bear back. She wants to see Bill. She wants to sleep.
When they finally let her go, they lead her to her room. It has all white walls and a big window and it’s in the middle of another room. Bill Foster argues with a strict looking man in a very tidy suit — the type that her dad would wear when he had important meetings. She hears the words “just a girl” and “inhumane” before she’s ushered into her room and told to wait.
Outside her room, she hears Bill’s muffled voice. She presses herself up against the window and falls through trying to hear the rest of the conversation. Her clumsy reintroduction breaks up the argument as Bill rushes to her, her teddy bear in hand.
“Fix the walls and the window,” she hears the man say as she watches him walk away from over Bill’s shoulder. “That can’t happen again.”
“Ava. Ava are you listening to me?”
She nods, dazed as Bill presses her teddy bear into her hands.
She lets him usher her back into her room and help her into her pyjamas. His hands shake more than hers, and it’s at that point that Ava decides that no matter how scared she is, she’ll be brave for Bill. He brought her here so she could get help, and she doesn’t want him to worry.
She keeps this promise to herself even when the scientists push her beyond her limits. Strength training, endurance. There’s always something to be tested. They watch her while she sleeps and while she eats. She’s not allowed to flush the toilet because they need to test that too and it makes Ava feel like a robot.
The worst days are the days where they test her phasing. She’s in a room with a timer and walls of different materials. She is given goals — get from A to B in X amount of time — and she is punished when she doesn’t meet those goals.
“Control, Ava. You must have control,” she hears from the speakers, over and over again when her concentration slips. These days are the hardest, because she soon learns that the harder she focuses in these sessions, the harder it is to keep her control out of them.
She phases through complex metal sheets with no difficulty, but can no longer hold a spoon at dinner.
She spends hours learning to hold her invisibility for more than twenty seconds, and spends the rest of the day glitching in and out of reality, here one second then gone the next.
The worst are the days when she can see inside of herself, when the phasing strips her layer by layer until she can see smooth bone and everything hurts to touch. When Ava was little, a boy at her kindergarten had fallen out of a tree and broken his ankle so badly everyone could see the bone pressing up against the skin.
She’d thrown up immediately, and decided it was the worst thing she’d ever seen.
If only she’d known that the only thing worse than seeing the hint of bone was seeing your own skeleton. She’d once pressed a finger to her femur, curious if it would hurt, just as her body began to stitch itself together again, the muscle and nerve bursting to life around her fingers as she hissed in pain. She watched people recoil from her as she felt her skin strip back, and cool air hit the muscle of her jaw. She cried sometimes when she looked in the mirror and could see her little heart beating strong before the muscle came back into view over it.
Ava tries not to look at herself for too long, and instead wills her cells into normalcy every time, pretending she doesn’t feel the sting as skin and muscle stretch tight over bone. Even the doctors who check on her everyday shy away from the way she unravels stitch by stitch on these bad days, but never Bill.
Bill Foster just watches over her, talking to her even as the fibres of her muscle come into view. He tells her jokes that make her snort with laughter every time he sees her ulnar nerve. He reads anatomy books to her, gets her to point out the different nerves and bones and joints until Ava’s sure she can talk about herself in scientific terminology. She doesn’t know how, but it helps. It helps her stop being afraid, even when others around her wear their fear on their face.
She stops shying away from herself, because if Bill can see her undone and love her all the same, she can learn to love herself too. Part-time visible bones and all.