James leaves the bag I requested by the door. I have Andi lying on the bedroom floor, a towel pressed to the now open cut to stop the fresh bleeding.
“I didn’t realize you were so well-versed at this,” she says as she stares at the ceiling, and we hold the towel tight to her side. “I think… I honestly thought Tina cleaned you up most of the time.”
“Not every time,” I reply, unable to look away from our scarred hands lying atop one another. “There were days when I couldn’t move. Days when he was home too long for me to sneak out.”
“Never the hospital?” she asks.
“Going to the hospital meant CPS,” I say in a low voice. “CPS meant possibly getting taken away from your family. Fuck my dad. I couldn’t lose the only people who didn’t believe I would turn out just like him.”
She sucks air through her teeth when I peel back the cloth from her thigh. “Keep putting pressure up top," I tell her as I open a butterfly closure.
Familiar rage pulses through me again as I see the cut. Even so, I have to stifle it.
“Reed used to tell me if music didn’t work out, I should become a nurse,” I say after a few minutes, and the smile that raises her lips causes my heart to flee.
“He isn’t wrong,” she replies.
My hands move as if I've done this a thousand times. I’m reminded in glimpses of memories I’ve long tried to forget. And not solely memories of my father but of the taunts surrounding me. From early fights in my childhood to the ones in college.
I see myself staring in the mirror and placing these same closures on my eyebrows, pressing ice packs to my eyes, my nose…
Staring back at the kid still running from something that was never his burden to carry.
“You know you’re not him,” she says as if she can sense my thoughts. “You would never do the things he did.”
“Which part?” I ask, my voice sounding nearly comical. “The abusing his kid and telling him he’s worthless and will never amount to anything, or the drunken benders and rapes?”
Andi’s eyes meet mine for a second too long, and I huff as I shake my head, almost unwilling to answer.
“Did you ever know?” she asks. “About the girls, I mean.”
I pause. “No,” I admit. “He never brought them home—at least not while I was there. By the time one went to the police about it, I was eighteen and living with your family.”
“Hence the college across the country,” she says.
“Even running states away didn’t stop people from putting together who I was. Every time they did, I ended up in jail overnight for knocking some asshole on their back. The fucking way people looked at me… It’s like they thought I would come after them, their girlfriends. Like his fucking ghost was sitting over my shoulder and telling me what to do.”
“Is that why you never graduated?” she asks.
“I threw myself into our music instead,” I reply. “It was a better home than the classrooms of people who only thought of me as yesterday’s trash. Once Reed graduated, I decided I’d had enough. I cut my hair and started wearing the mask all the time. People were so… god, they were so different. Like night and fucking day. It nearly gave me whiplash.”
Andi beams. “Humorous,” she teases me.
“You’re laughing,” I say.
Her stare makes me want to rush the last few closures so that I can get back to healing her in a different way. Instead, I give her a smile that feels almost foreign, the feeling weaving through my abdomen an unfamiliar ache.
Somehow, as my eyes flicker to hers again and again, I feel the anvil on my chest lift the smallest amount. It’s minuscule and faint, yet enough of a shift that a lump builds in my throat.
I finish the last few and bandage the wound so that it doesn’t dry out or get infected, and once I’m satisfied, I lay down on my side by her.
“I know I’m not him,” I say, fingers tracing up and down her arm. “Doesn’t mean the rest of the world will believe it if they find out. They never have in the past.”
Andi takes my hand into hers and kisses my fingertips. “That was the past,” she says softly. “If people knew you—the person you’ve become… they’d know you’re nothing like him.”
A heavy sigh leaves me as I stare at our entwined hands atop her stomach. “My terms,” I finally say. “If I'm going to take the mask off and tell the world who I am, I want it to be on my terms. Not fucking… not by some asshole with a hero complex—a fucking backward hero complex, at that,” I say, referring to Adam.
Her lips flinch in the briefest of motions. “He thought the mask would turn me on tonight,” she says. “Because he realized who you were. He thought it would just flip me or something, and I’d fall right into his arms.”
