33. The Rest of the Story
SOUNDTRACK: Atlantic by Sleep Token
~ brIDGET ~
“When the police caught up with us, he shot one of them before they got him,” I said first, pacing Sam’s living room again. I couldn’t look at him while I talked about this stuff, because it always made the words freeze in my throat when people got freaked out. “Luckily the officer lived, but it added to his charges.”
I was seven. I didn’t know anything except my family, my life. My Dad had guns. The Police had guns. Ergo, men had guns.
I thought the Police were just as bad as him. So when they shot him, I screamed and tried to run. And they had to chase me down.
I thought I was being kidnapped.
It took them four hours to get a woman officer—in plain clothes—to come help with me. I didn’t know she was a Police Officer. I thought she was someone coming to help me.
She was nice, but a little cold.
She arranged for my aunt to come be with me. My aunt that I barely knew. The aunt my mother had always said was a bitch, but she was super-nice to me. She treated me nicer than any adult in my life ever had.
She let me sleep on the floor in her room every night because I always had nightmares.
She got mad that I kept crawling into her bed in the middle of the night, then wetting it, but other than that, it was pretty good for the first few months.
But I kept having to talk to the Police. They told my aunt to change my last name before I went back to school—a new school—because otherwise the kids would all want to hear my gory stories and it might retraumatize me.
Instead, all the warnings about not revealing who I was made it feel like a dirty secret. Like there was something wrong with the real me. Probably because there was.
I never made any friends at that school.
Then the Police told me I was going to need to testify. And they kept bringing me into the station and reading me things I’d said in the first few days, and even though I didn’t remember them, I just kept saying yes.
By then I was nine and Aunt Pattie got a new boyfriend, so I couldn’t sleep in her room anymore, which meant I didn’t really sleep much at all.
By the time I was ten, I was a zombie, failing elementary school, and getting molested by her boyfriend.
He never fucked me, thank God. But he was a pervert who touched me and snuck into my room at night—one more reason not to sleep—and it was one more secret. And he stole the one person I’d been able to talk to about my real life—my aunt. He told me if I told her what he did, he’d kill her. And I believed him. After all, men have guns, right?
So, she was off limits.
I pulled away from her.
I started acting out at school because I was so fucking tired, and so fucking angry all the time.
And I didn’t even have my real name anymore.
But then I had to testify against him and I did it. I was so fucking proud of myself. I had just turned eleven years old and I hadn’t seen him for that whole time.
Dad looked fatter and older. And he never once looked me in the eye.
I cried, and felt stupid about it, but the judge was really kind.
He got convicted, and I got told by a lot of adults that I was strong.
But I wasn’t. So it was one more lie that I lived.
Then I hit puberty, and the ticking time bomb of my life finally detonated.
My aunt found her boyfriend in my room during the night and blamed me. At least, that’s how it felt. She kicked him out, but she always looked at me with rage in her eyes. And nothing I did after that was ever good enough.
She fed me, clothed me, and showed up at the school when they asked her to come in to talk about my behavior. Which got so bad in middle school that she—very reluctantly—started paying for a private school that was better equipped to help me.
I was the weird girl there, but it was better. I met Richard. I made a couple of friends. They weren’t close, but I had people to sit with at lunch.
And then my aunt bought me a car when I turned sixteen.
It was the nicest thing she’d ever done for me, and I was really touched. It was a cool car, too. A truck because she said it felt like I’d want something I could run people over with.
She wasn’t wrong.
Trucks also had “beds,” which at that point in my life, was very useful.
Everyone knew I was a slut, and I didn’t give a fuck. Or rather, I gave too many—according to everyone else. Richard was the only man who ever talked to me about it without telling me to be ashamed of myself. He was more worried about why I did it.
But he was old and out of touch and even though I started to trust him, I never really let him see everything.
Probably because, soon after that, I started thinking.
Why had my aunt—who still looked at me every day like I was a roach that crawled across her floor—bought me the car? It was my sixteenth birthday, sure, but… she hadn’t been kind since those first couple years. Why now?
As my teachers always told me—I was very intelligent and clever, but didn’t want to apply myself to academics.
I sure as shit applied myself to investigating my aunt’s motives though.
It took a few weeks, but eventually, while she was at work, I found the box of papers she’d hidden.
Lo and behold… my mother’s life insurance wasn’t just enough to provide for me…it was a fortune. And some clause in my father’s meant his got paid out too—if he had a medically determined date of death. My aunt went to court to argue that life without parole was a medical date of death and… I guess she won. And it made her a rich woman. Because she was named as the trustee to my inheritance, which gave her free rein to spend on “my behalf.”
Suddenly the bathroom renovations and that cool leather jacket, and all her “business trips” took on a whole new light.
And the car? It was a fucking guilt gift.
She’d never told me that all of this was waiting for me. I would have bet everything I owned that she wouldn’t have told me ever. If I understood the paper, when I turned eighteen she would become the executor of my mother’s will, and the person who had to manage my small fortune.
If she hadn’t spent it all by then.
I seriously considered murdering her in her sleep. But the urge inside me to actually remove her life was a wake up call for me. That was the day I realized I had the same monster my father did, and I was flat-out determined never to let it out of its cage.
So I faced it inwards, instead.
At Richard’s urging I got into martial arts and was remarkable at it. Mainly because I didn’t give a shit if I got hurt.
Turns out a girl who doesn’t care about breaking a leg or getting bruised can scare the shit out of other girls.
I won the age-group for sparring in the first tournament I entered. Everyone said I was awesome. I was just raging and unafraid of pain.
And I was planning.
Junior year of high school, I had almost everything in place—I’d spoken to a lawyer, convinced my aunt that I needed money to visit colleges early so I could do early declaration and get more scholarships.
It was a test.
She had tons of money. Or rather, I did. But she’d never told me.
She could have said, “Don’t worry about scholarships, you’re provided for.”
She didn’t.
She gave me money to travel to college campuses and fuel for my car. And I used it all to pay the lawyer who was getting ready to emancipate me and subpoena her for the financial records.
Then I got kicked in the chest at Karate and after a few hours at the hospital, found out that sparkling in my vision wasn’t my rage. It was my heart warning my brain that I was about to die if I didn’t get more oxygen pretty quick.
All those pretty lights in my eyes that I used to love were a sign that I was dying.
Who knew?
Then my whole life changed. That is to say… it got worse.
So, a heart condition meant there wasn’t going to be any more karate, or kicks to the chest for me.
Running? Also bad.
In fact, anything fun was a bad idea.
We had great insurance (shocking) so my aunt made sure I got all the fancy tests, and they found out the cancer genomes were there too.
I was the walking dead. Even the doctors looked at me with wary eyes.
The medications were awful and I had to miss a lot of school. But at least my aunt was motivated to make sure I got what I needed so no one would ask questions. Before I graduated high school, she’d found an experimental vascular treatment that helped my heart without making me feel sick or weak all the time.
Then I found a sketchy property manager who’d sign a post-dated lease to a minor as long as I slipped him some extra cash to cover the rent until I was eighteen. And then, when I had my birthday—two weeks after graduation—I walked back into the lawyers office and told him to do the subpoena.
Turned out the bitch was investing and everything. Hiding money left, right and center. She’d still never told me about the inheritance at all. I was still driving the Toyota she bought me when I was sixteen. She was driving an Audi.
It was a mess, but in the end, I had an apartment in another city where I would attend college. A car that wasn’t tied to her insurance. And enough money to keep me alive longer than my body was likely to. If I wasn’t stupid about it.
I barely remember college.
I have a degree, but I’ve never used it.
All I remember is that it was during those years I discovered the dark web and other people who thought like me, even if their experiences were different. I found my tribe. And I’ve been walking deeper and deeper into that world every year since.
It’s true, I’ve fucked half of California.
It’s also true I stopped, because it stopped feeling good.
It’s true I want to die, because what’s the point?
It’s also true that when Ronald came at me and I saw that light in his eye, it reminded me of the serial-killer dude from last year and everything I had to go through to get rid of him.
So yes, maybe I don’t want to just die for the sake of it. Because I’ve had two chances now, and didn’t take either of them.
But that just means I want to die on my own terms. And they weren’t it.
When I met Cain it was obvious he was different. More like me. And I find that fascinating. He’s got the monster, I can tell. But then again, lots of men have.
Am I fooling myself? Maybe.
But I’ve kind of stopped caring.
This life is nothing but isolation and pain. Even the fun parts are only fun for moments. Everyone is hurting. They have enough on their plates dealing with their own lives. They don’t even know where to start with mine. And I can’t blame them.
My life has been fucked since the moment I came into this world to an abused mother, and a psycho dad.
So let’s not even talk about whether or not I’m going to die, because I am. If Cain doesn’t get me, my heart will. Or the cancer will show up. But I don’t want to wait that long. The idea of facing one more Christmas like this is… God, it feels like I’m suffocating.
I’m done.
I’m just done.
And if Cain’s going to help me let go, I’ll ask God to forgive him for whatever the sin is, because in my mind, he’ll be doing me the biggest favor anyone ever did.
I’m exhausted. This world is terrifying. And it’s not even the fun kind of scary. Now I’m just starting to create pain for other people, instead.
It’s time.