The furrow in his brows deepened, his jaw working. “What are you talking about exactly?”
“I’m just like him.” My vision suddenly blurred as the tears began to pour again.
“No, you’re not.” He grabbed my hand in his warm ones.
“I tried to kill her.” The confession rang across the room, heavy and deafening.
“I went to her room with a knife. I stabbed the bed, over and over, hoping she’s there so I could make her scream, make her beg, make her bleed the way she had made me bleed for years.”
My chest heaved, breath ragged.
“I tried to kill her, Kenzo.” The weight of the truth made me dizzy. I could no longer look at my best friend, couldn’t bear to see the horror in his eyes, the disgust twisting his features. If he snatched his hand from me right now and stood up, if I heard a movement right after, it would be him leaving.
Instead, his grip on my hand tightened reassuringly, heat pressing into my side as his arm wrapped around me, solid and grounding.
“You’re not like him.” His voice was low and steady. “Anyone would have done the same thing. Trust me, if she walks in here right now, I’m driving a knife through her chest.”
Liar.
Kenzo wouldn’t do that. Not the same boy that had let a spider live in his bathroom for days because he was too kind to kill the creature. Not the boy who would apologize to furniture when he bumped into them. He would never hurt another soul…except for that time he beat Banks to a pulp.
“She wasn’t on the bed,” I murmured, picking at my arm warmer. “She was sitting on her brown couch all along, watching me.” If she had been there…“If she was there.” My voice trembled at what my reality would have been right now if I had killed my own mother—sirens blaring, cops littering the lawn, just like 10 years ago at House 4797, Rue Augustin Boulevard.
“I would have killed her. I would have been just like dad. They would put me in cuffs. They would take me far away.”
Kenzo didn’t say a word. But his arms tightened around me, his fingers rubbing slow circles on my arm. And all I could think was, why wasn’t this boy running? Why was he sitting so close to a monster?
We sat there like that in silence until my sobs turned into soft breaths and gentle sighs. He sat right there with me, holding me.
“Where is she now?” he asked after a while, breaking the silence.
“I don’t know,” I pressed my face further into his chest. “I slept off on the bathroom floor last night. Then I woke up on the bed this morning, neatly tucked in. I haven’t seen her.”
“Maybe she went to work?” he suggested.
Or maybe she ran away because she was afraid I would kill her.
“By the way, did you clean the house?” he suddenly asked. I raised my head from his chest, looking up at him.
“No.” My brows were furrowed as he sniffed the air. I did notice something faint in the air, but I wasn’t really in the right frame of mind to place it or think too hard about it. I had been moving around like a zombie since I stepped out of bed.
“What does it smell like?”
“Disinfectant,” he said. “Like someone scrubbed really hard.”
34
BETH
Broken girls didn’t get love.
It had been three days now since I last saw my mother. Kenzo had driven me to the nearest phone store to get a new phone that day. When I returned home, I found a sticky note I had earlier missed that morning, stuck to the fridge’s door.
But the mystery was, Mother wouldn’t leave sticky notes. She didn’t do reminders written in loopy ink or any gesture that suggested warmth. With her, life was ran like some military regime; strict schedules, precise, joyless and unforgiving. There was no room for cute. And for me, sticky notes were cute.
The note said that she was going for another outreach somewhere out of the State. She said she would be gone for a while. And that I should take care of myself.
It was really odd; the sticky note and asking me to take care of myself. It was perhaps just another ploy to keep me tethered, chained. An attempt to gain my trust, maybe.
