The paper lands in front of her with a faint slap.
“Well done, Kym,” the teacher says, sounding pleased. “Exceptional work.”
She doesn’t move.
“Kym?” I whisper, watching her closely.
Still nothing.
Her eyes flicker to the test in front of her, her hand trembling as she picks it up. Her gaze drops to the score, and I see her entire face change. The colour drains from her skin, and her jaw goes slack. She blinks once, twice, as though trying to process what she’s seeing, but her expression is frozen—pure horror.
“Kym, what’s wrong?” I ask again, my voice sharper now with concern.
She doesn’t respond. Her breathing is uneven, and her hands shake as she folds the paper roughly and shoves it into her bag. Without a word, she throws the strap over her shoulder and bolts out of the classroom.
I sit there for a moment, stunned and staring after her, my chest tight. She just looked soscared.Not how she usually is. Not at all.
TWENTY-ONE
Kym
Before I can do anything else, my legs are moving. I’m running—just running—with no direction, no purpose, just the desperate need to escape. I can’t breathe; and every time I try it feels almost suffocating. It hurts; everything hurts. I need it to stop. My chest burns, my throat aches, and my legs feel like they could give out at any second.
But the pain? It’s nothing compared to what’s clawing at me inside. Clawing and scratching, and something I can’t outrun. Because you can’t outrun what’s inside you; you can only hope it kills you silently.
I clutch my bag tightly, because as of right now, it feels as if it’s the only thing tethering me to reality. My mind is a complete mess, a mess of jumbled thoughts spinning out of control, and I feel like I’m drowning.
Drowning without water, like screaming without a sound.
How can you fight a storm when it lives inside you?
I want to cry, to let it out, but I can’t. Not here. I bite down hard on my lip, holding back the sobs clawing their way up my throat, but the tears blur my vision anyway. It’s like I’m trapped in a cage, and the more I struggle, the smaller it gets.
I know I’ll never escape. Not really.
No matter how far I run, I’ll end up right back where I started. That’s the most terrifying part—this isn’t just about a house or aplace. It’s about them. It’s about me. And this place I’ve hoped for so long to escape is rooted inside me. Woven into my very being. So deep I can’t tear it out without tearing myself apart.
Even now, as much as I hate it, there’s a comfort in it. There’s a terrifying comfort in the arms of those who hurt me. It’s a messed-up kind of comfort, an immoral one. But it’s real. And it’s all I know, all I’ll ever know. And maybe that’s why I’ll never truly leave. Because the outside world somehow seems scarier.
It’s like growing up in a house full of smoke—eventually, you stop noticing the fire. Instead, you learn to breathe through the damage. And when someone finally opens a window, the clean airhurts.
That’s what real love felt like when I first met it. Not comforting. Not warm. It felt wrong. Because when you’ve only been fed poison, kindness feels like a trick.
Love, to me, is a scary and confusing thing. I don’t think I’ll ever truly be able to understand it. And though that may come from growing up in a not-so-ideal household, I wonder if anyone actually has it figured out.
As for me? I think I’ve confused love with relief for most of my life. Relief that someone isn’t yelling. Relief that they stayed. Relief that I’m still alive. It’s not love. But when it’s all you’ve ever known, it’s enough to make you stay.
And yet, how would I go about telling anyone this? They’d likely think I’ve gone mad.
But madness—at least in my opinion—is just the price some pay for feeling reality too deeply. It’s feared by society, because it shows how fragile our “normal” really is.
There comes a certain awareness about life in general when you aren’t sure you’re going to have a tomorrow.
Pain can humble you into wisdom; comfort can trap you in ignorance.
That’s how I also know I’m just likethem. I’ve felt it for years—this dark, creeping thing inside me. Telling me that I’m no better than him. Than Will. Than my father. Than Pete and Annie. It tells me that I’m just as twisted, just as broken.
It’s right.
