I jerked my arm free, and his grip left a white mark on my skin. “You’re not a joke. You’re a cautionary tale.” I tried to keep my voice flat, but the tremor betrayed me.
His mouth twisted. “You have no idea what I am.”
I wanted to laugh, but my jaw was stiff. “Sure I do. I’ve seen enough battered dogs to know when one’s about to bite the hand that won’t feed it.”
He lunged closer, jaw working, so close his breath burned bitterness into my eyes. “Maybe if you tried to be nice for once, people wouldn’t hate you so much.”
I wanted to spit at him, to scream, but I just shook my head. “People don’t hate me because I’m not nice. People hate me because you tell them to.”
“I swear to god, you think I control the whole universe.” His voice crackled dangerously. “Earth to Amelia: nobody gives a shit about you. You could disappear and they wouldn’t even pause to blink.”
“Same could be said for you,” I said. “The world would keep spinning. Your dad would just punch a new face.”
The words landed. He went still, lips parted, a dumbstruck moment where I thought he might actually hit me. Instead, he just breathed hard, the fight leaking out slow. For an instant he looked like he might cry. Or kill me.
“You don’t know shit about me,” he finally muttered.
“I know what fear smells like,” I said. “I grew up inside it.”
“Maybe. But, you don’t know my fear. I could show you, then you’d really know.”
We stood there, locked together by hate and something else, gravity pulling our bones too close for comfort or escape. Every muscle in my body screamed to hit him, but instead I just made my breathing slow, even, until the pulse of dread shrank to a pinprick.
“I’m not scared of you,” I said, and hated how much I wanted him to believe it.
He stared, the black wells of his eyes glittering with emptiness. “Liar,” he said, almost gentle. “You’re scared of everything.”
The bell rang, breaking the moment. I slid past him, brushing his arm just long enough to feel the shudder run through his body. His heat lingered on my skin.
Now, it had been almost three weeks after the night Lillian and Caiden detonated my last scrap of trust, I came home to find Mom on the living room floor, curled around a bottle of cheap gin. The TV was on, but the volume was muted. She was mouthing the words in the dark.
“Mom?” I asked as I walked over to her frail shape, afraid that she finally lost what was left of her sanity.
Her lips moved, but no sound came out. I reached down, nudging her shoulder, and she startled awake. Her eyes were wild.
For a moment, she didn’t recognize me.
Then her features slumped into a kind of relief.
“You’re here,” she said, and it was almost a plea.
She tried to sit up, but her legs didn’t work right. The bottle rolled away, sloshing onto the carpet, and I had a flash of how a crime scene tech might catalog this mess: one adult female, collapsed, surrounded by evidence of slow self-destruction.
I knelt next to her, uncertain whether to help her upright or just let her stay collapsed, where the air was safely close to the ground.
She reached for me and caught the sleeve of my sweatshirt. “Don’t go,” she said, the wordssticky and slow. “Everyone leaves. I can’t take it anymore.”
I closed my eyes and inhaled, waiting for the rest.
“Your father, that prick, he left. Lillian’s gone now, too.” She began to cry. “She left this morning. Just packed her shit and went.”
A black balloon of silence expanded between us. I didn’t trust myself to speak.
“She said she had a place with her friend. I think she’s lying.” Mom’s head drooped. “It’s my fault. I ruin everything. I did it to her. She said I’m poison.”
She wailed as she spoke and I crumbled amongst her weeps, feeling the walls close in further around my lungs.
She grabbed at my wrist, and would not let go. She was less than a mother now. Just a banshee in a bone-white t-shirt, eyes so raw they looked peeled. “You don’t leave me, Amelia,” she said, voice shaking from some vein-deep wound, “If you ever go, I’ll die. You’ll see. You’ll be the one to kill me in the end.”
