Eventually, even my confessions ran out. I’d scraped through every memory until the marrow was visible, until shame and exhaustion coiled together and left me numb. I’d told him that I hated him those years ago, and that I hated myself more for letting it matter.
I began to lose grip on the boundary between memory and hallucination. The past swelled, sticky and insistent, until it eclipsed the present entirely.
In the dark and in the day, my nervous system revolted.
The cold glass propping up my cheek became a portal, and I fell through it, cascading backward through the years so fast I felt my stomach twist. Some were hallucinations, others were warped memories.
I was standing in the hallway of ourViolet Road house, fourteen, feet bare and icy against the floor. Lillian was at the kitchen table, bent over a notebook, her hair a fog of static. Mom was slumped in the recliner, one eye open, cigarette trembling in her fingers.
A poltergeist memory: A shadowed voice, echoing through the drywall, “You’re a fucking disease, Judy.” The sound reverberated.
Lillian looked up at me and smiled, but her teeth were the jagged shards of a broken glass. “You’re next, Amelia.”
I blinked, and I was in the school gym again, thighs chafing against cheap polyester shorts, sweat-slicked hair sticking to my neck.
Caiden’s voice rang out from the bleachers, pitched high and cruel, “Hey, Langston! Is your mom still a sex worker, or is she, like, retired?”
Laughter, shrill and rising. I could smell the raw gym floor, the mildewed towels, the desperate sweat of girls who wanted to be anywhere else.
I remembered the red bloom of humiliation spreading from my collar to my scalp. I remembered the way my fists clenched, the urge to jump the bleachers and tear his voice out at the roots.
Instead, I did what I’d always done. I shut my mouth and endured.
Even when I knew I should have screamed, or fought, or run, I stayed still and silent.
Back in the dark, I counted the ribs exposed at his neck, the way his Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed.
I wondered if he also replayed every miserable second of our youth, or if the poison in his father’s house had burned those memories out of him.
The memories grew darker, more insistent.
The sound of crashing glass and shrill arguments, the clang of my mother’s voice, the way she’d drag me and Lillian down the hallway by our wrists, nails sharp as sewing needles, when her moods turned. The salty bite of tears I could never let loose in front of her.
The way, when she’d finally crashed out on the couch, her breath thick and rattling, Lillian and I would creep barefoot to the laundry closet and curl up inside, knees under our chins, handslaced together, like that would keep us safe from whatever skeletons thrashed their way through the drywall.
Sometimes, I’d wake up shaking in the dark, clutching my knees so hard I’d leave bruises.
The scratch of my mother’s laugh would fill the silence, echoing down the stairwell and through the vents, spiderwebbing every surface in the house.You’re not special, Melly, You’re just like me. Just like your sister. Just like every woman who ever clawed her way through this world and still ended up nowhere.
I remembered the night she OD’d in the tub, the way the water was streaked with her hair dye and rusty with blood from her knees, the way the paramedics spoke in low, bored voices, as if this was a routine plumbing problem and not the slow erasure of a person.
I remembered the way they looked at me, the girl with the tangled hair, and how I had wanted nothing more than for one of them to reach out and touch me, just once, to prove I was real.
But they didn’t. Nobody did, until the next day, when Lillian and I returned home and found Mom on the couch, an ice pack taped to her temple, already lighting up again.Don’t ever call the ambulance unless I stop breathing for real. You hear me, Amelia? Don’t play the victim. I’m fine.
Sometime’s, I saw Lillian in the dark basement. Her voice was the same as it had always been: soft and mocking, just short of kind.You’re really doing it, are you? Rotting away with the boy who ruined you. That’s so you, Amelia. You never could let go.
Sometimes she’d bring souvenirs from the past. A sliver of bloody glass, a cigarette stub, a yellowed library card with my name misspelled in loopy fourth-grade cursive. She’d hold them up and shake her head, a private joke at my expense.
You always wanted to be seen. Well, you got your wish.She’d vanish then, leaving me with the echo of her laughter and a film of shame that clung to my skin. I wanted to ask her if it hurt, dying alone, choking on your own breath.
When I saw Caiden through the glass, I sometimes saw him as the boy with the dirt-crusted knees and wild, furious eyes, the boy who’d chased me down the railroad tracks and dared me to jump the creek, who’d smiled like hell itself couldn’t touch him.
Sometimes he was just a hollow echo of that boy,all tendon and hunger, bruised in places the light never reached. Sometimes, under the sick-yellow bulb, he was hardly even human, slumped against the wall like a heap of forgotten laundry.
I remembered the first time he hurt me on purpose. Not with words, but with his hands. A shove in the hallway, a twist of my wrist during gym class, marking me purple where nobody could see.
He’d sneered something about not being weak, about how nobody in Pathosbury cared if you cried. I’d wanted to punch him so hard his nose collapsed, but I couldn’t. I was too scared, of him, of myself, of becoming what everyone seemed to expect me to become.
