“My birthday was over a month ago,” I say flatly. Shut down. Shut down. “And honestly I don’t want to celebrate the day I came into this world.”
“God, what the hell is wrong with you. You’re always so down all the time.” He dips his lips to my ear and nibbles at my lobe. “Don’t I do everything for you… give you everything you want?” His fingers slip underneath the waistband of my pants and brush my skin. “Let me do something special for you or better yet, let’s do something together.”
“I’m not in the mood to sit around and get high while you cop feels.” I want to run. Take off down the road and never stop. Outrun what I’m feeling inside. The confusion. The disgust over this and the last couple of months. The obligation, something I know Preston will remind me off if I tell him to quit touching me.
His fingers dig into my skin, his flirty mood shifting to anger—I’ve said the wrong thing again. “Why can’t you be more grateful? Jesus, sometimes I think it might be best if I just kick you out. Just let you go live on the street. You could be a whore and make money that way.”
“Maybe I should.” I bite down on my lip as soon as I say it because I don’t want to be homeless right now, not with everything else going on. “Fine, if you want to do something for my birthday, we can.” I attempt to clean up the mess I made while I focus on picturing what it would be like to come to the end of the fall and crash. Would it feel like I was flying for a moment? Or would I just fall? Would I feel the pain when I hit the ground? My bones breaking? Or would I blackout before I even made it there?
“Good girl,” he says. “You’re always so good at doing what you’re told.” Then he kisses my neck, sucking on it before pulling away and my heart accelerates rapidly, but I remain dead on the outside and let the images of me splattered on the ground completely take over and consume me, but then they shift into something else, which happens sometimes. My mind goes from being on that ledge to falling into Luke’s arms.
Safe.
It would be so much easier if that feeling had stayed, but I know all too well that nothing good ever does.
Chapter 2
Luke
There are always two things on my mind. Booze and money. Or booze and gambling. It’s all I can focus on because the moment I stop and I let my mind catch up with life is the moment I think of her. Violet Hayes. The one girl who wrecked me in what I once thought was a the best kind of way possible when she broke me down, made me only think about her—made me want only her. But then it was taken away. Or stolen away by what my mother did. I should have known that I couldn’t escape my past—that leaving to go to college wasn’t enough to get away from the madness that is my mother. That she would find a way to have control over my life, like she used to when I was a kid. I should have known it wasn’t over yet.
After Violet moved out of the apartment two months ago, I called the police and reported what facts I knew about the murders. It was only a little bit, but I knew I owed Violet at least that much. But the phone call hasn’t led too much, unfortunately. The police haven’t found any real hard evidence to arrest my mother, but they’re trying to and I keep my fingers crossed everyday that something will happen.
I think part of me hoped that by telling the police, Violet would come back to me. But she didn’t. And the more time goes by, the less I think she ever will. If I was stronger, I’d go to my mother’s house and search for evidence myself, even though I have no idea where anything would be. But I wonder, what could be hiding in the chaos of that house. That perfect, clean house upstairs, covers up the years of crap she’s held onto that’s piled up in the basement. But the idea of going there and seeing that woman…feeling that kind of rage with her there… it makes me afraid of what I might do to her. So the wall remains between Violet and I, building higher and higher with each moment while I die a little bit more every day.
To help wake up every day, I try to tell myself that I’ll get over Violet eventually, because time is supposed to heal all wounds or some stupid shit like that, but it seems like time is having the opposite effect on me. The wounds have become infected and their seeping through my body and rotting me from the inside out. To add to the crap going on, I got a copy of my sister, Amy’s, journal she had before she committed suicide when she was sixteen years old. I didn’t ask for the journal, but my mother found it in one of her boxes and randomly sent it to me, playing her usual mind games, trying to tear me open by reminding me of my sister’s death.
“Remember how your sister left me,” my mother said when I’d called her up after I’d gotten the journal in the mail, wondering what the f**k it was. “You need to come back to me, Lukey. Don’t leave me—don’t be Amy.”
“Go to hell!” I’d yelled and hung up on her, feeling a fire so potent in my chest, I ended up tearing apart my room just to settle down.
I wasn’t planning on reading the journal because nothing that came from my mother has ever led to anything good. But with too much free time on my hands, the damn thing started haunting me and I finally cracked. The first thing I discovered is there was no way my mother even took the time to read it before she sent it to me and she should have. The stuff on the pages paints a horrible, very true picture of the kind of sick, messed up person and mother she is. Whenever I read a page or two, I learn more and more about how much stuff was going on between Amy and my mother that I didn’t understand while living with them. For example, the time my mother tried to whore Amy out to one of her drug dealers for payment.
Twelve years old and my mother is asking me to do something that sounds so wrong at my age. To be with a guy… like that… I don’t know what to do. But she says it’ll help pay the bills and other stuff. I’m not sure what the other stuff is but I’m guessing it has to do with that shit she keeps making my brother inject in her veins, which I know isn’t diabetic medicine like my mother keeps telling me. I’m not stupid. I know she’s doing drugs.
But I wonder, if I can sleep with this guy she owes money to… give up my virginity to save the family from getting kicked out on the streets, if my mother will finally say thank you to me for helping out and that maybe, just maybe she’ll tell me she loves me.
Each word I read makes my hatred for my mother grows and the rage in my chest expand. Pretty soon I’m going to be filled with so much hate, I’m going to drown in it. So I do the only thing I can do to cope with it.