Fiction
Little Lily Sang
“Watch me walk Maddie,” little Lily sang, and before I could respond, her chubby frame began to strut across the small room.
She was dressed in her usual ill-fitting clothes; a too-tight tank top that folded around her belly button, and sweatpants that bunched awkwardly around her ankles. Atop her head, she wore a silver crown fashioned from foil.
At eight years old, Lily was oddly shaped. Her small legs, prominent round belly, and large arms earned her the silent nickname “Johnny Bravo” among the kids at school. She simply had not grown into her form, but how could kids have understood? The nickname infuriated me, and I never hesitated to physically confront anyone who dared to use it.
Lily always wondered why I constantly attracted so much trouble, but I never told her the truth.
She struck a sassy pose at the end and turned back to me with a piercing, almost angry, glare which quickly softened as she asked, “How was that?”
Her eyes gleamed with excitement. I couldn’t help but laugh.
Lily was always like that; like a bit of sunshine on a stormy day. She was, in every conceivable way, as beautiful as the flower she’d been named after.
She crossed her arms and looked down at me where I sat, soft curls framing her rosy cheeks, “Don’t laugh!”
“The face,” I said, still giggling, “We need to work on the face if you’re going to become America’s next top model.”
That was her dream. It became her dream the day she watched her favorite contestant ‘Eva the Diva’ win. And it became my dream to help her achieve it.
“Tyra says you need to SMIZE,” she said, as she attempted to school her features back into the ugly glare.
I stood and walked towards her, “Smiizzee” I said, pulling her lips into the wide smile that always brought me joy. Her eyes crinkled in that pretty way they always did. “Now relax your mouth without moving your eyes.”
Her entire face dropped, her eyes assuming an almost dead-like quality.
“Like this?” she asked through clenched teeth as she struggled to maintain the pose.
Even as her self-assigned agent, I couldn’t bear to tell her she was doing it wrong.
“Perfect.” I said with a gentle smile, “That’s perfect.”
It was around 6:00 pm on a warm evening in July when I got the news that Lily had taken her life.
This was the first memory that came to my mind. How Lily and I would play dress-up in her parent’s dusty attic: She’d always pretend to be a model, and I, her dutiful manager. We’d orchestrate phone calls from Vogue and Covergirl, get into fake arguments with designers, and throw around fancy words we had picked up from TV shows — Play the roles like it was real when it was all just make-believe.
Lily never thought of it as fantasy, and that was always the trouble.
When I arrived at Lily’s mom’s house for the vigil, she looked at me and her eyes grew wide. “Lily!” she exclaimed, before embracing me in a hug I knew wasn’t meant for me.
“Maggie…” I whispered sympathetically, cautiously. “It’s Maggie.”
People had always said we’d looked alike when we were younger, but I’d always attributed the comment to our similar overweight physique. Looking back, I realize that our skin tones were also the same shade of brown, we had the same soft hair texture and we were both roughly the same height — though I was always just a little bit shorter.
In more ways than one.
Compared to my friend, I was the lesser one. She was far more beautiful, got better grades at school, had more friends, and dreamed more vividly.
The sky was the limit when it came to Lilian Okono, whereas I only ever saw the clouds.
Lily’s mother then pulled away but held firmly onto my jacket. “I know, I’m sorry,” she said, as she wiped a stray tear and smiled warmly at me.
No, I’m sorry.
“Thank you for coming. I’ve missed you.”
She had missed… me. Me, who had not spoken to her daughter for over 10 years. Me, who had abandoned my best friend when she needed me the most. Me, who had contributed to the bullying Lily had endured when she started cutting. Me?
“I’ve missed you too.” The words came out before I could stop them.
She nodded. We exchanged a brief knowing glance, and in that second I apologized. I told her how I wished I could take it all back and that I’d always loved Lily dearly. She told me it was alright and that she understood. No words took form but in that brief moment, we communicated.
Lily had been through a lot in her short 30-year life. She’d been unfortunate enough to inherit her father’s genetic weight predisposition and her mother’s unyielding ambition for fame. Her dream had always been to become a world-renowned model, but her body had betrayed her fiercely.
She started hurting herself when we were 15. A teacher said something to her and a few days later one of our classmates found her bloodied shirt in the dorm bathrooms. From that point on, she wouldn’t eat and when she did she wouldn’t keep it down. The students at school now called her ‘Loo’ — not because those were her initials but because you’d rarely find her far from one.
Over the years it became increasingly difficult for me to defend her. I never understood her obsession with modelling, or her persistent will to break a body that had never been molded for the career she so dreamed of. She excelled at nearly everything else yet she never saw it. Her eyes remained glued to a singular desire from which they never strayed.
I once gathered the courage to ask her why. She responded by misquoting Oscar Wilde,
“It is my punishment to become it.”
And a punishment it remained until her dying day.
Lily and I got into a fight sometime when I was in University. She had just started getting gigs in the industry and was out nearly every night. We bumped into each other at a club in the city. It had been a while, we had drifted apart in high school and had not seen each other since our graduation two years before. She seemed happier that night than I’d ever seen her, and she spoke in all the pretentious jargon we used to mindlessly toss around when we were kids.
The argument began over something trivial, spiraling into a confrontation where buried resentments and lost truths surfaced. She told me I’d been a bad friend in high school for still hanging around the kids who made fun of her. I said she’d been a bad friend for putting me in that position my entire life. One after another accusations came crashing down, bringing with them the scant remains of our friendship.
I was clearly on the wrong, but I didn’t see it that way for far too long.
By this point, she was stick-thin and her skin seemed to present a permanently pale appearance. I’ll never forget how she looked when she walked away from me that night, bathed in the club’s blue neon lights — frail, broken, and ashamed. I’ll never forget knowing how I’d contributed to it all.
Lily went on to become a successful local model. I would sometimes see her on billboards and tell my friends to park so they could see my “Old best friend”. Just like when we were kids, my claim to fame was in knowing her. No one believed me, but I knew, and I always took a picture when I saw her radiant smile on an ad for a lotion or hair product.
I incessantly stalked her social media to see how well her life had bloomed — how much her face had changed, how tiny her body had become, and how her glamorous circle had evolved. I often wondered if they adored her as I once did. Surely, they must have. It was impossible not to be enchanted by Lily O’s grace and charisma. Yet, beneath her perfect facade, I knew she was unraveling; I knew the effort it took to maintain her perfect image.
Then Lily vanished. No more magazine covers, no salon posters, no billboards, not even a whisper on social media. For years all I knew of her were the rumors that swirled around our shared circles — that she had gone abroad to chase her modeling dreams; that she was hospitalized in a rehabilitation center. I heard them all but never sought out the truth, despite how easy it would’ve been.
I finally learned a few years before she passed that both rumors had been true. She’d gone away to become a model, then she’d returned a while later, rejected for being “Too short”, “Too Pretty” and “Too skinny.”
Lily had opted to forgo higher-level education, believing her destiny was not in the books but in the world.
So, without a backup plan, she’d had little else to fall back on but a bottle.
“Whisky or wine, my favorite W’s” she’d once been heard slurring to a young bartender before fleeing her tab.
Whisky or wine. Those words still haunt me. She’d had a world of possibilities, yet her choices had been narrowed down to Whisky or wine.
As I walked towards her casket, my eyes burning with the tears I’d been holding all evening, I finally beheld my oldest friend for the last time.
She was paler now than she had been that night at the club. Thinner now as well, but just as beautiful as she’d always been — dressed in a light blue strapless chiffon gown and a small crown.
I stared at the familiar face, which was now painted perfectly in the dark colors she had always preferred. I stared at her neck and the simple dark line that marked it, and I stared at the bones that poked through the skin on her collar. I stared and stared until it was time for me to walk away, and as I did, the painful irony of it all suddenly struck me.
Her body. That was all that was left of the incredible Lily Okono. Not her glowing personality or her brilliant mind.
Just her body.
The very body she’d cursed as a child. The body she’d tormented for every year of her life until it wilted and withered, and finally gave out… had been the only thing she’d carried to her grave.
Right then, I wept as I realized that I would never hear little Lily sing my name again. I would never see her bright smile as she spun mythical tales, or gossiped about annoying boys. I would never hear the bubbly laughter that echoed throughout a room, or giggle as she attempted karaoke tunes in her parent's old living room.
I had always assumed that we would have time. That we would one day meet up again, share drinks as old friends do, reminisce over tea cakes, marvel at how our lives had changed… apologize for the fight that had taken place.
But that would never be the case, for Lily and I. Time was up, and she was gone.
A few days later, as her casket was lowered into the muddy earth, I whispered a solemn farewell to my dear friend. The words were a quiet promise that was carried away by the wind:
“I will find you in our next life. I will be a better friend. I will not be late again.”
