She slumped, staring at the fridge as if expecting it to open a portal and suck her away. Her eyes were glassy, red at the rims. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this, you know.” Her fingers traced the spiral of a water stain on the countertop. “I used to think I’d be different. My mother was trash, her mother was trash. I thought I was better.”
I wanted to say she never had a chance, not with that bloodline, that she was always bound to end up here.
But I kept it in, holding the bitterness in my molars.
Instead, I looked at her, really looked, and for a second I saw not the monster but the animal. Tired, cornered, desperate for a way out.
“Then be better,” I said, voice flat. “Quit. Get help.”
Her laugh was a soft wet hiccup. “Easy for you to say.”
I dropped the rest of my apple in the trash and turned to leave. “It’s not easy for anyone, but it’s what you have to do if you don’t want the sickness to consume you until you’re nothing but a rotten corpse.”
She blinked, twice, and I saw the old machinery of maternal guilt trying to grind back to life. “Shut the fuck up,” she muttered. “You want to see me dead? Is that it?” The desperation in her voice was a hairline fracture widening with every word.
I leaned against the counter, arms folded. “No. But you’re doing a pretty good job of that yourself.” The words felt good, cruel and honest, buzzing in my mouth like bees.
I braced for a slap, or a glass thrown, but she only stared, lips pursed,chin trembling.
The silence stretched.
She broke first, as always. “You think you’ll get out, that you’re so fucking pure.”
For a second, I wanted to say yes, maybe I did. That I could still choose a different story, a different ending.
But the truth was there in my mouth, sour as bile: I was made from her. My veins ran with the same rage, the same hunger for oblivion.
Maybe I’d never get free.
So, I shrugged, and we watched each other across the kitchen, two ghosts in a house that had never been a home.
I wanted to look away, to calcify myself against the spectacle, but I kept my gaze locked, holding her in the crosshairs of a daughter’s impossible love.
Her shoulders curled forward, like a rat, and she pressed the heel of her palm so hard into her eye socket that I half-expected to see blood.
“I’m sorry,” she choked, voice slurred and lurching. “I’m so fucking sorry, kiddo. You don’t understand?—”
I cut her off. “You’re right. I don’t. I never will.”
At school, I kept my head down, headphones on. The world shrunk to a single hallway, the floor vibrating with other people’s footsteps but never quite touching me.
Dante hovered in the periphery—at lunch, after school, in the parking lot—but I kept him at the exact distance required to keep either of us from falling into something irreparable.
I didn’t want to be anyone’s project, and I especially didn’t want to be the reason anyone else broke.
Caiden haunted me, day by day. His presence was a fungus: invasive, resistant, metastasizing through all the cracks I’d tried to wall off.
He appeared just as I stepped out of homeroom, an unmoving pillar of violence at the end of the hall. But when he saw me, he straightened like a snake tasting the air.
I side-stepped, hoping to merge with a passing group of girls,but he shifted his weight to block the nearest branch of hallway. The girls peeled off, and I had no choice but to walk right at him.
“Look at you, Little Miss Tragic,” he spat. His voice wasn’t even trying for the usual sneer; it was ragged, frayed. “That hair is really working for you. What’d you do, cut it with your teeth?” The line was lazy and mean, but there was blood on it.
I scowled, walking past. “How about you try a new hobby, like dying?”
He grabbed my elbow and yanked, hard, spinning me around. “Don’t fucking walk away from me,” he hissed. “You think I’m a joke? That I’m not real?”
In that moment I recognized the look in his eyes: raw, wild, like a rabid coyote at the bottom of a pit.
