“You are such a coward!” I screamed, tears streaming down my face. It was impossible to explain to these people why I was exploding so badly.
“C’mon, Amelia. Let’s take a walk,” Dante suggested, dragging me away before I could unleash my fury again.
My energy drained suddenly, and I leaned into him, feeling completely spent. Caiden had exhausted every fiber within me.
“Why is he so cruel?” I whispered, defeated.
“Lots of reasons,” Dante replied, always so vague about it.
“Whatever. I hope he rots in hell one day,” I said, disdain lacing my tone.
We arrived at Dante’s car, a run-down vehicle like mine. “I think we can afford to skip one day. You shouldn’t be going into class like this,” he said, looking at me carefully, as if afraid I might snap at him too.
“Yeah, I can’t be here right now. Just take me somewhere else.” I exhausted all my fight, and now I wanted to decay.
“I’ll drop you back off later so you can get your car.”
I nodded, settling into the cushioned seat of the car, grateful for the momentary escape.
“Nice ride,” I said, trying to make some sort of normal conversation.
He chuckled, starting the engine and giving it a pat on the wheel. “Not really, but it’ll work for now. I bought it for three thousand dollars. Thankfully, I’m good with cars, so I was able to fix it up.”
I stared at the dashboard, at the way the speedometer needle trembled with every pothole, the way Dante’s hands stayed ten-and-two, white-knuckled even when the road was empty.
We drove in silence until the town blurred behind us, the dense woods hemming the highway in on both sides like the world was closing its jaws around us.
My head was so full of static, the only thing I could do was watch the trees streak by and try not to let the pressure inside me blow out the windows.
THE PAST
AMELIA’S BREAKING POINT
As the days passed by, my heart grew colder, and I felt as if a breaking point was heading my way.
I was in the kitchen, staring at the blue-black bruise on the apple in my palm, when Mom drifted in on silent feet and opened the fridge, the glass bottles rattling like teeth. She didn’t look at me.
I watched her pour orange juice into a mug already crusted with last night’s wine, and I thought: this is what it means to inherit suffering, to watch someone lose themselves so slowly you almost get used to the vanishing.
She caught me watching. Her eyes were slits drawn tight, but there was a flicker of embarrassment under the surface. An old, familiar shame. “What? Never seen a woman drink her breakfast?”
She forced a smile that was more snarl than anything.
I wanted to fight her, to scream, to tell her she was hollowing us out one sip at a time, but my rage had burned itself into embers. There was nothing left but the tired, brittle bones of disappointment.
Instead, I shrugged and took a bite of the bitter apple. “You should probably eat something.”
She laughed. “Food makes me sick.” She drank, wiped her mouth, and looked past me to the window, where the ice rimed the edges and made the yard look like a frozen battlefield.
A silence grew between us, one that felt like it might swallow the whole house.
I let it bloom, then said, “Everything makes you sick because you are sick, mom. Addiction is just sucking the life out of you, day by day.”
I knew the words would cut, but I didn’t flinch. I wanted to see if she’d bleed, or if, like me, she’d finally gone numb to pain.
She set her mug down with a hard clink and leaned her elbows on the counter, pinching the skin between her brows. “You always were a little bitch,” she said, but her voice was thin and losing altitude. “Even as a baby. Wouldn’t let me hold you, wouldn’t stop crying.”
I shrugged, letting the words bounce off. “Maybe I sensed what was coming.”
