Buried Under the Crabapple Tree

          It was the highest tree in the park behind the rundown building of Asta’s old middle school. A crabapple tree that still supported the weight of the treehouse that was older than herself. Swallowing a bite of its crabapple was a rite of passage at their small town middle school, one that no one failed—except Asta’s best friend, Yvonne. 

          Yvonne was a coward. Even though Asta did not know it back then on their first day of middle school, there were signs in hindsight. Yvonne had introduced Asta to her parents within the first week of their friendship. They all had dinner together and Yvonne’s mother gave Asta a big hug and asked her to take good care of her ‘sweet little angel’. Asta’s mother got a phone call from Yvonne’s mother the next week, asking where her daughter was. Apparently, Yvonne had left the house seven hours earlier claiming she was going to be at Asta’s house.

          Two months later, Yvonne convinced Asta to use her credit card to buy her a lingerie set, saying ‘I’ll pay you back soon! I just can’t use my card because my parents track it.’ Two days later Asta was sitting at the dining table getting shouted at and questioned by her parents because a highschool boy was found in Yvonne’s bed, and she was wearing a lingerie set that she claimed was a gift from Asta that she ‘was forced to accept’. 

          They were both grounded, while Asta’s punishment was much shorter than Yvonne’s, Asta was still faced with dire consequences. Her parents stopped trusting her, and she stopped trusting Yvonne. Three days into their punishment Asta tried to stop being Yvonne’s friend but the girl guilt tripped her with ‘I'm an only child. It’s so lonely that I'd rather just die!’

          Another thing about Yvonne that she only realized later was that she was a leach. She would demand expensive gifts for birthdays and Christmas but only gave the cheapest in return if Asta ever got any in return at all. Whenever they went out to eat, Asta would have to pay for both of their food because Yvonne would always ‘forget’ her money. Yvonne complained about every detail of her life, and yet Asta could never open her heart about her grandmother’s death or her brother moving across the province for college. 

          Halfway through seventh grade, Yvonne was admitted in the hospital because her appendix burst and everything became so much worse. Asta brought her everything she missed in class everyday, and would often bring her a pastry from the bakery near the hospital. After a long talk with her older brother on the phone, Asta had come to the realization that Yvonne was toxic, manipulative, and would only drag her down in life. 

          Yet there was nothing Asta could do about it. Everyone at school hated her and loved Yvonne and Asta couldn’t figure out why. If she stopped being friends with Yvonne, she would have no one left. So she stayed, in a miserable friendship getting used and sucked dry. It was right after Yvonne came out of the hospital that the burning started. 

          At that point in her life, Asta had become so numb. No one other than Yvonne talked to her at school, she would space out so often that her grades were plummeting, she always felt fat and gross compared to Yvonne, and her parents were stuck in their own problems with her mother working over time because her father was laid off. 

          One morning when Asta was getting ready for school, she accidentally burnt her hand on her curling iron. She would remember that moment for the rest of her life, because in a way, harming herself saved her life. The sharp pain that spiked from her finger through the rest of her body and straight into her heart lurching out of her chest. For a moment, about half a minute or so, Asta saw herself clearly in the mirror after months of only seeing a blurred image. She was beautiful, incomparable to her toad-like friend Yvonne. Asta fell in love with her beauty, and so she would burn herself every morning. 

          After that, it didn’t matter that no one liked her. It didn’t matter that her grades were terrible, and her parents problems definitely didn’t matter. Asta was beautiful, and beauty got you far in life—it definitely took models on cruises to the other side of the world. She didn’t say anything to anyone, and just stopped approaching Yvonne. If Yvonne came to her, Asta would just walk away. Blocked her on all social media, ignored her no matter what, and didn’t back down even when classmates got involved. 

          ‘We’re worried about you’, ‘The two of you’ve always been so close’, ‘After everything Yvonne’s done for you’. The last one confused Asta. What had Yvonne done for her? The answer was absolutely nothing. A little asking around solved the small mystery. Yvonne had made herself out to be the caring friend that had to deal with Asta’s constant ‘problematic behavior’, which caused others to pity her and dislike Asta. 

          The discovery didn’t shock Asta at all. But it did cause Asta to want to lash out. She wasn't content with just the burning anymore. So she started burning herself twice a day, every morning and night. It still didn’t help, so Asta decided to do something to Yvonne that she would never recover from. Asta wanted Yvonne to feel the misery that she did for over a year and a half, and so she would fulfill all of Yvonne's dreams. 

          Yvonne always wanted to be a model, because her mother used to model and most of the women on her side of the family were models. Asta knew she couldn’t just jump into modeling right away, and so when a new family owned clothing store needed a model she signed up to model for free. They loved her so much that three months later they referred her to their relatives that owned their own store in the next town over. Her mother’s sister lived in that town so she would stay at her aunt’s house on the weekends and model, and this time she was paid. It was a small amount, but it was something. 

          Asta continued this same routine, small paychecks to model for small stores. By the time eighth grade started, Asta had started phase two of her plan to make Yvonne miserable. The resumes she had sent to various agencies over the summer had reaped their results, and Asta had a large pile of agencies to pick from. Yvonne had always wanted to live in a big city, and so Asta chose an agency in her brother’s city. She was easily able to convince her parents to let her live with her older brother with a promise to call her mother everyday. 

          Asta had never been happier, and soon a new routine set it. Wake up, burn herself, eat breakfast, go to a city school where everyone thought she was exotic for being from a town, model for a few hours where she had people fussing over her hair and makeup, come home, eat dinner, burn herself again, and then sleep. A year passed, her contract with her agency was halfway over and she had made enough money to move on to phase three—hiring a private investigator to dig up everything possible on Yvonne. 

          Another year passed, Asta’s contract had ended, she was in grade ten, her brother graduated, and phase three was almost over. The last part of phase three was leaking everything she found about Yvonne to all her old peers back in her hometown, anonymously. 

          By the time Asta and her brother made it back home to their parents, phase three was complete. Her mother told her everything that had happened that month. Many of Asta’s old peers got photos and videos of Yvonne from spam accounts from different social media platforms. Nudes sent to boys that already had girlfriends, videos of Yvonne smoking, cyberbullying, and so much else. Yvonne couldn’t deal with the pressure so she jumped off the roof of their old middle school and a couple weeks later her parents had packed up and moved away. 

          Asta had never felt so content in years, all her misery and hard work had been worth it. She won, she never killed herself, but Yvonne did. So Asta went to school proudly and had more friends than she could count, but she didn’t care about them. She didn’t care about anything. All she cared about was the fact that she was beautiful, and how she won. 

          After graduation, Asta went back into modeling, and worked on phase four, the last part of her plan. Yvonne might have been dead, but she left an impact. People would always wonder why Yvonne chose her old middle school as her suicide spot and not the high school that she was going to. So a year later, Asta bought the middle school property that had since been abandoned, no one wanted to be associated with a suicide site. Every year when the crabapple tree had lots of crabapples, Asta would visit the tree for the sake of an old childish promise. 

          ‘My mom says that if your grave is close to a fruit tree, its fruit will feed your soul and tastes like the best thing you’ll ever have.’   

          ‘So if you buried me here I’d like how crabapples taste?’ 

          ‘That’s a great idea! If you die first, I'll bury you here and we'll both eat crabapples.’

          ‘Promise?’

          ‘Promise.’

          It had been eight years since then, but for some reason Asta still came. It had been a year since Yvonne jumped from their middle school roof, and yet there she was standing right in front her. 

          ‘You didn’t die?’

          ‘I tried to. You were behind the leak, weren’t you?’

          ‘Does it matter?’

          ‘I guess not.’

          In that same way, it didn’t matter that Yvonne still lived. She still tried to kill herself, and Asta never did.