And I don’t go to sleep.
I just lie there as cracks spear through the foundation of my entire world, threatening to topple my reality on top of me. I just lie there and wait to be buried beneath the debris.
Yesterday morning, I woke up in a world where Ezra—psycho that he is—cared for me. At least, in his own fucked-up way, he did.
Before things in the Jordan household took a turn for the better, they got really, really bad. Living in that trailer park was torture. We never had money for anything. Dad kept losing his job, but it was never his fault. Just bad luck.
So, Mom got a job. Then two. Eventually three, just to feed two growing boys and a depressed husband who’d sleep most of the time. When she finally had enough of it, she began picking fights with him.
And he’d take it out on us.
First it was just snapping. Then yelling.
The first time he hit Ezra, I wasn’t even there. I’d been in the woods with Haven, trying to get away from all the yelling. When I got back home, Ezra had shut himself in our tiny room in the single-wide, refusing to open the door.
I thought he was just mad I went outside to play without him.
Until I saw the bruises the next day.
When I asked Ezra about them, he said he fell.
When Dad started yelling at us again a week later because we hadn’t woken him up when the phone rang—it could have been a job, are we both fucking idiots?—Ezra bundled me out of the house so fast I left without a shirt.
Dad called us back inside.
I’ll never forget the look on my brother’s face as we stood outside our shoddy mobile home, staring at each other, both knowing what would happen if either of us turned back. Because I knew he hadn’t fallen.
“Don’t,”I’d told him.
“He’ll be mad.”
“He’s already mad.”
“I’ll be fine. You go play with your friend.”
“Come play with us.”
“I’m too old for that crap.”And when I didn’t move, he pushed me so hard I fell on my ass.“Go!”
That was before he knew Haven was a girl. Before I started spending every afternoon out there with her in the woods. Before Ezra became withdrawn and sullen.
And selfish fuck I was, I never again asked him to come play with us again. I never waited around, either. I came home from school, then fucked off to the woods while my brother stayed home and put up with the brunt of Dad’s abuse.
Ezra never asked for anything in return.
Maybe that’s why I said nothing when my brother started punching me. He told me he was toughening me up. And it worked. Eventually, I stopped crying.
Ezra’s fists taught me that love and pain were the same thing.
Is it any wonder I keep hurting Haven?
It’s the only way I know how to care.
I roll onto my side, watching the rise and fall of Haven’s chest in my football jersey. She looks so small beside me. So fragile.
I’ve broken her so many times already.
Me, Rooke, her dad, her uncle.
