This question was not mere curiosity. I knew Principal Reid would have called Aunt Vera to inform her of the incident, so the question was a means of building up to my punishment. There was a linen cupboard waiting for me, no doubt. I massaged my wrists, remembering the way the rope sliced into my skin, lemon juice burning my raw flesh.
“I am a twelve-year-old boy plagued with an impenetrable forest of guilt and a fear that I will be discovered. Of what? I could not tell you. But once everyone knows, they’ll bury me so deep into the Earth I’ll sink down into Hell itself, consumed by dead souls who share my rotten heart.”
There was a long silence as Aunt Vera and I appraised one another.
“Poetic, right?” I smirked.
"Did you steal that from somewhere?" she asked.
"No, the Devil told me to say it."
Another long silence hung between us.
“Augustus,” she sighed, unperturbed. “Your day.”
“Just tell me what my punishment is.”
“Punishment?”
I barely suppressed an eyeroll. “I am not an idiot.”
“Clearly you are, if you think I go around punishing children for expressing their emotions.”
“So…you’re not…?”
“I’m disappointed,” she clarified, leaning back in her seat, one leg crossed over the other, “but I don’t believe a punishment would be beneficial at this moment.”
“I’m sorry.”
Shakespeare meowed and jumped off Aunt Vera’s lap as she leaned forward to hand me a leather-bound journal.
“What’s this?” I frowned, turning the journal over in my hands.
“It belonged to your mother.”
Every muscle in my body tensed at those words, and it was a divine miracle I managed to keep hold of the journal instead of flinging it into the fireplace warming the room.
“It was amongst your father’s things that Brady and I divided,” Aunt Vera explained. “I think you should have it.”
“I do not want anything from that woman.”
Aunt Vera assessed me with an unreadable expression. “You don’t miss her?”
“Why would I? She left.”
“I met your mother only a few days after you were born,” Aunt Vera hummed, leaning back in her armchair. “She looked so proud, holding you in her arms.”
I rolled my eyes. “That pride died the minute I learned to speak.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“You don’t know what it was like,” I said, leaning forward in my seat to glare at her. “She treated me like I was a fucking demon!”
Aunt Vera should have scolded me for my filthy language, but she didn’t. Instead, rather calmly, she said, “You’re right, Augustus. I don’t know what it was like. But I don’t want you spending your life believing your mother hated you when that simply was not the case.”
“How would you know?!” I scoffed. “You weren’t there. She said it. She said she hated me.”
“And did you say you hated her?”
