Page 161 of Breathe Like Hell

But he hadn’t.

He was handsome. Well-liked. Successful. Engaged.

The knot in my gut twisted tighter and tighter and tighter.

My mother disappeared back into the kitchen.

“Dakota,” Anthony said gently. My palms were clammy, my stomach turning, sweat beading on my pale forehead. I couldn’t speak. His fiancee was staring at me with concern, and I swallowed, feeling like I was having an out-of-body experience.

“Hey,” I said, my voice rough. I cleared my throat, attempting to be normal.

“Samantha, this is my half sister, Dakota,” Anthony said and his fiancee extended her hand. I just stared at it. A cold sweat bloomed along my spine. “Dakota, this is Samantha. My fiancee.”

“Hi,” Samantha said.

I couldn’t say anything back to her.

She eventually let her hand drop back to her side awkwardly. My eyes flicked between her and my brother and my mouth was so, so dry.

“Are you sick?” Anthony asked.

“I don’t know,” I said quickly under my breath, then speed walked away from them, heading straight to the bathroom. I flicked on the light switch, the fan humming to life over my head as I shut the door and turned the lock.

In the dirty mirror, I could see just how terrible I looked.

Pale skin, the whites of my eyes bloodshot, my sunken and dark undereyes.

I looked away quickly, down at my shaky hands, my chipped black nail polish. It was bad enough to be back in this trailer at all, but having to see him again? I whipped my phone out of my pocket and pulled up my texts, thumbs hovering over the screen. But who could I text? What would I say?

I swiped out of the app and put my phone away, then turned on the water and stuck my wrists under the cold stream.

Why did he get to move on with his life?

Sobs were building up in my chest and I didn’t know how to stop them. My sadness just kept growing and growing and growing, consuming me, shoving me into the worst parts of my mind. My shame ate me alive. How did it not eat him alive? How was he so happy?

But was he happy?

His mom just fucking died, and thinking about that made me remember how he used to be when he first came to live with us. He’d been halfway through eighth grade then, dealing with the fact that the only parent he’d ever lived with was now gone. He’d had to switch schools because we didn’t live in the same school district he was coming from.

I used to think he was the coolest person ever. I loved him so much, so quickly. He got in trouble a lot at first, which made me scared of him, but not really. I was scared of how my father was acting, not what Anthony was doing. Scared of all the yelling and slamming doors.

Then he started getting me out of the house when our parents were fighting, and it was like I could breathe for the first time in my whole life. He took me to the beach, showed me how to look for shark teeth, and didn’t care that I didn’t speak much. He didn’t mind my cold-reddened cheeks or my runny nose or my too-quiet voice that he probably couldn’t even hear above the surf. I loved being around him. I idolized him.

This trailer only had two bedrooms, so we had to build a shitty wall in the middle of mine to separate a space for him. I remembered going over to his side whenever there was a thunderstorm, not because they scared me, but because they scared him. In my ten year old brain, it made sense to try and comfort him. He’d just lost his mom, in a way.

Now he’d lost her for real.

I didn’t like thinking about that.

I hated him more than I had words to explain, but I’d never be able to erase all the love that I’d had for him. It’d stained the walls of my heart, solidified into the foundation on which I built my eventual hatred. But I could never get rid of it. I covered it with layers and layers of traumatized animosity, but I could never forget it’d been there, and still was. At the very core of me.

Every once in a while, when I was doing really bad, when my loneliness and my sadness were too overwhelming, I wanted him to come back. I started convincing myself it hadn’t been so bad. It might be nice to have a relationship with my brother again—a normal one this time. We could do that, couldn’t we?

No.

We couldn’t do that because he’d fucking ruined me forever.

He’d reshaped my brain into something backwards and terrible. And I could never shape it back, no matter how bad I wanted to.