This notebook only covers the last six months or so. The newer volume. Whatever came before is somewhere else.
I start reading.
Someone flushed my suppressants.
I came home and the bottle was on my bed. Empty. Cap loose. All the pills—gone. Someone went into my room, found them in my dresser, and flushed every single one.
I know who it was. I don't have proof but I know.
I can’t call Dr. Yao. Can't get a refill. It's been three days since my last prescription. Three days. She can't give me more without an in-person visit and even then she'll ask questions I can't answer. Why do you need more already? Where did they go? Are you taking more than prescribed?
I can't tell her someone stole them. She'll tell Margot. And then Margot will worry and it will ruin everything.
I haven't missed a dose in eleven years. Not once. Not since I was nine.
I don't know what's going to happen to me.
I flip several pages and keep reading.
I woke up in Atlas's bed.
I don't remember how I got there. Last thing I remember is the kitchen—the floor tilting, my vision going gray at the edges, my legs giving out. Then nothing. Then waking up in sheets that smelled like cedar and leather and something darker. His sheets. His pillow. His smell soaked into my skin.
I felt safe.
That's the worst part. Not waking up in a stranger's bed in a house where I'm barely tolerated. Not the headache splitting my skull or the nausea rolling through me in waves or the fact that my body is doing things I can't explain and can't control. Not even the humiliation of collapsing in the kitchen like some damsel in a period novel.
The worst part is that for one second—one stupid, reckless second—surrounded by his scent, I felt safe. In this house where Bane told me I'm nothing. Where Zero looks at me like I'm something to break. Where Richard smiles politely and doesn't mean it. Where I eat dinner at a table full of people who wish I wasn't there and pretend so hard my jaw aches from smiling back.
I felt safe in Atlas's bed. And I hate it. Because safe is how you get hurt. Safe is the feeling right before the floor drops out.
I won't make that mistake again.
I turn pages. My throat is getting tight. Each entry is a window into a person I thought I understood and didn't understand at all.
I confronted Zero about my pills.
In the lounge. He was at the pool table like he owned it—because he does, because everything in this house is theirs and I'm just the charity case taking up space in their old room.
I told him to stay out of my room. He smiled like I'd said something funny. I told him he flushed my pills. He said "I haveno idea what you're talking about" with that smile that's all teeth and no warmth.
I said fuck you and tried to leave. He grabbed my arm. Iron grip. Fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. Asked me what the pills were. Called them "mystery pills." Asked if I had "a little habit" I was hiding from Mommy. Like it was a joke. Like my entire life isn't held together by those pills.
I shoved him. He grinned. Actually grinned. Said "there it is, I knew you had some fight in you" like I'd done exactly what he wanted.
Then he slammed me against the wall. I hit him—connected with his jaw, felt it in my knuckles for days after. He punched me in the stomach. Then he grabbed my hair and slammed me face-down on the pool table and pinned me there and I couldn't move and I couldn't breathe and he smelled like gunpowder and black coffee and something electric, like ozone, like a storm about to break.
And I hated him. And my body was on fire. And those two things lived in the same moment and I wanted to scream and I wanted to arch up against him and I wanted to disappear.
I hate that I don't actually hate him.
My heart pounds. I flip another page.
What if I can't keep pretending I'm normal?
The way they all look at me now is different. Like they know something. Like they can smell something I'm trying to hide. Especially Zero. He looks at me like he wants to devour me. Like he's trying to figure out how I taste. Like he's angry that he wants me at all.
I know that feeling.
