Chapter 4 #2
Now I’ve got Dorlores, who is a whole different breed of bitter. The woman never hides the fact that I’m nothing but an easy pay check. Every word from her mouth tastes of resentment.
The thermostat’s locked at freezing, her way of reminding me comfort costs extra.
She counts the cereal down to the crumbs, sharpie-marks her name on the milk, bolts the bathroom door after ten as if I’d break in and steal the fucking toilet.
Every rule is a knife, and she twists them daily just to watch me bleed.
Now I’ve got to walk into that fucking house and tell her I’ve been suspended again. Another failure stamped across my forehead, another reason for her to remind me I’m a burden she never wanted.
See if she lasts longer than the last one.
And I hate needing any of them.
Hate being passed around from one door to the next, shuffled like a playing card in a rigged game. Strangers collecting kids the way people collect tax deductions, then patting themselves on the back and calling it charity.
But the truth is heavier.
I’m seventeen and I’m exhausted.
My bones ache with it. Survival isn’t strength anymore. It’s just repetition. And it’s killing me slower than anything else could.
I’m two months away from freedom, but it drags out in front of me as if it’s years.
Every day stretches thin, a sentence I can’t appeal.
I can see the end, taste it, almost touch it, but it still feels out of reach.
I can’t outrun the name stamped on me at birth or the hands that taught me violence before they ever taught me love.
That shit clings. It brands you, burns you, follows you into every fucking room.
I kick a rock down the sidewalk. It skips once, twice, then rattles hard against the gutter before vanishing into the drain. Gone without a sound. No explanation. No fight. Just erased.
Lucky bastard.
Some days I think about running. Getting out. My own life. No caseworkers, no locked thermostats. Just me, no leash, no one waiting to drag me back.
I picture it sometimes.
Walking until the streets blur into highways, until the houses thin out into dirt roads and sky. Finding a place where no one knows my name, where I don’t have to explain the bruises on my knuckles or the fire in my chest.
Freedom.
It sounds cheap when I say it in my head, but fuck, I crave it.
Two months might as well be two years, but I keep walking towards that fucking house instead.
It sits at the end of the street, ugly and slumped, peeling paint flaking off in strips, half-dead lawn patchy and yellow.
The screen door dangles off one hinge, groaning every time the wind pushes it, a sound that says nobody here gives a shit.
The porch sags under nothing but air, still tired, still defeated, like even the wood gave up on holding itself up.
Dolores’s car is parked crooked in the driveway. The passenger mirror clings on with duct tape and spite. That car’s her, in a way—broken, patched with cheap solutions, too stubborn to die.
I stop when I reach the front gate, and just stand here, letting the house stare back at me.
I know what waits inside. I don’t need to step through the door to see it.
She’ll be on her throne.
That busted recliner sagging into the floorboards, the armrest patched with gray tape that sticks to her skin when she shifts.
The paperback will be clutched in one hand, her pink highlighter in the other, ready to drag neon lines across the filthiest parts.
Always the sex scenes. Always those moments, as if the words could open a door into a life she never had.
Trashy romance novels with covers that scream cheap fantasy, more bare skin than story, men painted to look powerful enough to carry someone out of misery. She devours them, page after page, her lips pressed tight, eyes glazed over. Addicted to a world that was never hers.
She eats them up the way starved kids tear through candy, desperate, greedy. And when the book closes, when the highlighter cap clicks shut, she sinks deeper into the chair, drunk on the fantasy, whispering to herself that she deserved better. That she could’ve had it. That the world robbed her.
And every time her eyes flick to one of the many kids in that house, I know she’s found her thief.
She’ll already know by now that I’m suspended again.
The school would have called the second the ink dried on that slip. The phone’s probably still warm from her hand, her fake sympathy voice still echoing through the receiver.
The lecture will be waiting, loaded like a bullet.
She’ll tell me I embarrassed her, that I dragged her name through the dirt, that every mistake of mine reflects on her. That she stuck her neck out for me. That she’s tired. As if I’m the weight breaking her back instead of the reason her bills get paid on time.
I don’t need to hear it again.
So I keep walking.
Past the front steps, past the peeling door daring me to come inside. Around the house and down the alley.
Down past the old buildings where someone tagged the back wall of a shed with dead kids don’t talk in red spray paint. It’s faded now, cracked from years of weather, but I still read it every time I pass.
I don’t know why it sticks.
The river waits ahead, if you can even call it that. More mud than water, slow and sluggish, a vein clogged with filth no one bothers to clean. A place bloated with the things everyone wants to ignore. It suits me.
I drop down near the bank.
Not too close.
The ground’s soft, the kind that swallows your shoes whole if you’re dumb enough to test it. I hunch forward, elbows digging into my knees, bury my face in my hands.
Three days off school. They think they’re punishing me. But school’s a shitty thing I don’t want to deal with anyway. They basically did me a favour. I don’t care about the classes, the teachers, the constant noise. None of it matters.
It’s the consequences that come with it.
The threat of a group home.
I’ve been there once before, for a short time when I was eleven, when they couldn’t find a placement and dumped me in with the rest of the kids nobody wanted. And if Dolores wants me out, I just gave her the perfect reason to hand me back.
Group homes don’t hand out second chances.
Back to dorms that stink of sweat, back to shared bathrooms with locks that never worked.
Metal beds that froze your bones. Cinderblock walls that pressed in until you couldn’t breathe.
Boys who watched you too long, eyes crawling over your skin, waiting for weakness.
Kids who tested your patience with every word, every look, just to see how far they could push before you snapped.
They wanted to see what you were made of.
And you either proved it, or you got crushed.
I learned quickly. Came out colder.
Because when you’re the angry kid, it doesn’t matter what pushed you. They don’t care about the match. Only the fire.