I woke sweating. The dream was simple. We were back in the park, when my voice had a higher tone and my knuckles were still pink and unscarred.
Amelia was perched on a swing, chattering about birdsong and the shape of clouds, her hands waving with frantic, childish energy.
In the dream, her teeth were blindingly white and her laugh made the leaves vibrate. I’d wanted to reach over and touch her, justto see if she was real, if her skin was as soft as I remembered, but even in the dream I lurched to violence instead, snatching a caterpillar out of her hand and crushing it in my fist. She cried.
I woke up furious at myself for even in fantasy being so pathetically transparent.
I sat up and rubbed my face hard, trying to shake the sleep off, but the rage didn’t go with it. It never did.
I got dressed fast. Jeans. Hoodie. Boots.
When I walked out, the living room was a mess. Empty cans. Ash. A half-crushed chip bag under the coffee table. My father sat in his chair like a king on a throne made of rot, one hand resting on a bottle.
He didn’t look at me at first.
He never did, not in a normal way. He only looked at me when he wanted to prove something. When he needed a target. When he wanted to remind himself he still owned something in this miserable house.
I tried to move past like I didn’t exist. Like I wasn’t a pulse he could crush with one sentence.
He spoke anyway. “You going to school today or you planning to be a worthless piece of shit your whole life?”
I stopped with my hand on the doorframe. My stomach twisted, but my face stayed blank.
“Going,” I muttered.
He snorted. “Sure. Good. Maybe you’ll learn something. Like how to stop embarrassing me.”
Embarrassing him. How fucking ironic.
I didn’t respond. If I responded, it would turn into a fight. If it turned into a fight, something would break. If something broke, it would be me.
So I swallowed my words like broken glass and walked out the door.
At school, her presence haunted me with the persistence of a toothache. I saw her everywhere: at her locker, bent over an overdue library book; in chem lab, mouth set in a thin, haunted line; at the edge of the quad, squinting into the wind, hair a living flame.
I wanted her wrecked. I wanted her to fall apart the way I did every time I caught my father’s shadow on the wall.
Yet I also felt a weird, painful burn in my chest every time I caught sight of her, a tangle of panicked want and loathing, a chemical spiral that left me dizzy and raw.
I hadn’t thought about these feelings in years. But now, they were in my vision, pulsing and burning.
Friday lunch, the cafeteria was a madhouse, and I took my usual place at the end of the table, a kingdom of empty milk cartons and poverty-tier pizza.
Dante sat across from me.
The air felt electric. Like something was about to happen, something stupid and irreversible.
I spotted her, as I always did. Amelia, hunched over her lunch tray, poking at the limp green beans like maybe they’d bite back.
She looked more hollow than usual. A little less color in her cheeks, her eyes rimmed dark like she hadn’t slept in a week. I hated myself for noticing.
Dante nudged me, noticing who I was staring at. “You see Amelia’s hair? Looks like she’s not doing so well.”
His face held concern, and I scowled.
“She looks like a corpse,” I replied, but the words tasted sour. “Maybe she finally realized nobody cares if she breathes.”
Dante raised an eyebrow, and I could tell my friend was reading me, weighing the danger of pushing further. “Shit, man, you’re obsessed. Just admit you want to rail her.”
