I hold it until it hurts.
I’d thought they’d be the worst days, the ones where she was so high, I was terrified she was dead. However, they were nothing compared to when her stash had dwindled out. When I’d find her bloody and beaten; when she couldn’t get the rot into her veins quick enough to numb everything she had just done to get it out.
Resentment swells in my stomach, then fizzles into something much deeper, more complex.
It had begun with cocaine, racking lines at the kitchen table before breakfast. It had been her way of waking up, of moving, of getting out the front door.
But my mother had always preferred her sleep.
And now, at sixteen, I watched her shoot up all while simultaneously begging for the mother I once knew to come back to me. Back before she was giving her body away for her next rush. Back to the way she was when my father was alive,back before he…I shake the thought away, squeezing my eyes closed.
My heart thuds.
I feel my blood heat.
I never had a whole lot of anything growing up, but the three of us had each other and that seemed to be enough.
And it was, until it wasn’t.
It took the speculation of one stuck-up local to throw our family into the fire.
We had sat beneath the embers for a while, until the rest of the town fueled the flames. Because it was easier to believe the fat-nosed, pig-looking gossip filter, than to take a gamble on a family man that had worked his ass off every day collectingtheirtrash from all corners of the streets so he could feed his family at least one decent meal that week.
The problem with humans is they’re always looking for a scapegoat.
Was it the Campbell name?
Was it because my grandfather was the Devil’s Peak Killer?
Did they believe my father’s,ourblood was tainted likehis, too?
My father, Charlie Campbell, had been labeled ‘The Second Killer of Devil’s Peak’when the body of an eighteen-year-old girl had been found in Devil’s Tunnel two years ago, twelve years after my grandfather's killing spree.
And after numerous unlawful and unsuccessful raids of our trailer, carried out by the police force of Devil’s Peak, they didn’t find a thing.
But they tried, three times to be exact, and all three times my father was left working harder to clean up the mess, fixing what they had broken.
And yet, he couldn’t mend what the accusations had done to his heart.
After the third and final raid, the heckling and constant bullying, the noise had become too much.
And it was Jade, my best friend, and Chase Keller, her older brother, and Harlen Graves, his best friend too, who were with me that same night.
Nine Months Earlier
The moon's reflection had caught on the river's edge. Its glow rippling in the murky water, skittering and looping as the breeze of the early morning smoothed its way across the dark surface.
We had been out here for hours.
My mother was on night shift at the hospital as a fill-in receptionist at the emergency department. Her shifts were sporadic and sparse. Some months she was working full-time, others she could barely catch a shift. However, this was her third night working consecutively and the bounce in her step was much greater, and I knew it was because she’d be able to offer her assistance with our expenses this month, especially because my father hadn’t been to work in the past week.
Another raid of our trailer had resulted in the heckling starting all over again, only this time it was much worse.
The noise was louder and the bullying that much stronger. I couldn’t blame my father for wanting to hide away from it all. There were only so many times you could be told to neck yourself before actually considering it, and I had known for some time now that my father had been teetering dangerously on death's edge.
He hadn’t blinked an eyelid when Jade came around just after ten in the evening with her older brother, Chase, and his best friend, Harlen. He had us wait while he put the last of the hot dogs in the microwave, stuffed a bag of slightly stale rolls into Chase’s arms and threw the mustard and ketchup in Harlen’s direction.
With our arms full of food and a cooler loaded with drinks—that Harlen had managed to pinch from the motorcycle club his father is Vice President of—we had trekked our way down the length of the river. It was a fair walk in the opposite direction of the trailer, especially in the dark, but it was worth it because a year ago Chase and Harlen had hung a tire swing at the deepest part of the water and it had become one of our favorite places to hang out.
