Chapter thirty-four:
I turn on the television again and I watch the news while I drink my bitter coffee.
There’s nothing about a man leaving the hospital with a stab wound, so that’s good, because it means that they aren’t looking for me. Or at least I’m not a priority to them. At least something is going right today.
I can hear Carrie upstairs, banging on the floor. There was a loud thump earlier as she rolled herself out of bed.
Idiot!
Then silence. Dead? Knocked out? Tired?
But she’s awake now, and she’sbanging and banging and banging, to get my attention.
But I won’t give it to her.
She’s acting like a spoiled brat.
A child.
A toddler.
A baby.
A fucking princess who needs to learn her lesson.
She should learn how to control that wicked temper of hers. Control it like I learned to control mine. I’d teach her my calming technique but I don’t want to see her right now. I can’t see her right now.
I’m disappointed in the woman you turned out to be, Carrie.
She needs to learn to have patience, because the more she bangs the more I will ignore her. It’s as simple as that.
You can’t go through your life demanding to be heard, Carrie! Sometimes you have to wait for things to come to you. Sometimes it’s not always about you!
I take another mouthful of coffee and I grimace. I’m so sick of this shitty-tasting coffee. I want to go home. I want my own things. My own food. My own bed. My own coffee. I want the familiarity of the whore upstairs banging johns all night long, and the crying and arguing and the noise and the fighting from my apartment building and the filthy streets outside my window.
I want my hot shower with my own body wash. I want the peeling paint on my front door and the constant puzzle of what it says on it. I want to be at work—I was good at my job and I’ve probably lost it now. Even if the police aren’t looking for me, my parole officer will be. I’ve been gone too long, and Charlie will have called him. He only hired me as a favor. He told me that the day I started
‘I only hired you as a favor, kid. Don’t really like your type.’
By type, he meant murderers. Or mental heads. That’s what so-called normal people called the not-so-normal people like me. But I knew all that even though he didn’t say it, and I didn’t bother to try and correct him. I actually miss him, I realize. Good ol’ Charlie.
I wonder if he got the roof fixed.
I wonder if he gambled away everyone’s money last week.
I wonder what everyone is doing.
I miss the familiarity of my life. Of knowing what each day would bring and who would be in it.
I hate it here. I hate it here. I really, really hate it here!
I throw my mug across the floor. The coffee spills but the mug doesn’t break. And I’m glad, because she only has one mug and if that broke I’d be completely fucked, because even though the coffee tastes like shit, I need coffee to help me think straight because I’m tired.
I’ve been tired my whole life because of Carrie.
And if I broke her mug, the only mug in this shit-hole house, I wouldn’t be able to have any coffee.
Wait, she only has one mug…just one.
