Chapter Fifty
Cade
B efore coming to Hillcrest, my mom always made dinner for us. Whole roast chickens with all the sides. Taco nights with every topping you can think of. There were homemade cookies as dessert almost every week, and a never ending supply of snacks in the cabinet. There was always so much food. And it showed. It showed in the way my friends would eye my mother appreciatively. In the way her cheeks plumped when she smiled. In the healthy glow of her skin. She never ‘watched her weight’ and never batted an eye at the haul of junk food I would set up in front of the TV. She would gorge with me while my father slept nearby, his head lulled on the back of the couch.
He was a contractor, not the kind that delegated, but the kind that actually put on a hard hat, and frequently came home tired, and with new calluses. It was decent money, but we were not wealthy, not like the students of Hillcrest. With my parent’s combined income—my mother was the vice principal of the high school I was supposed to attend—we barely managed a mortgage. I was unaware of this—jarringly unaware. But I couldn’t see it. Not with the state of our home. It rivaled my friend’s even though theirs were in nicer neighborhoods. My father put so much work into it, work that I helped him with, that I didn’t appreciate at the time, that by the time I did, it was too late.
When he died, his income died with him.
And my mother had to sell the house.
It was the summer before I was supposed to start high school, and not only was my father gone, my home was gone. It sucked, but I was dealing with it. I was even looking forward to coming to Hillcrest. Stupidly, I thought it would help the state my mother had fallen into. That with the change and a new job with a shiny salary, that she would pull herself up from the couch cushions. It pulled her up from grief alright, just in a direction that ripped away the mother I knew.
The Hillcrest pay stub came with room and board and a place for me as well. It meant stability, a stability that we desperately needed. But it also came with expectations. Ones that I would rather die than uphold. Ones that I thought my mother could never succumb to. But I didn’t know who she was without my father. I didn’t know she was weak. Malleable. Insecure. Susceptible to manipulation and easily influenced into unsustainable standards.
When she got involved with Rykes, it was only a year since my father had died. It was too soon and too wrong. And no, it wasn’t because I was the kid that couldn’t cope with his mother dating. I wanted to be happy for her. The dinners had started back up, the baked goods too. She was smiling and laughing. But with Rykes at the table instead of my father, my mother suddenly didn’t have an appetite. The small comments he made took root somewhere fragile in her mind.
Are you sure you want to eat all that?
I don’t think your figure needs dessert.
Maybe you should just stick to a salad tonight.
I brought it up. I was fourteen, but I wasn’t stupid. She agreed that maybe his remarks ‘weren’t the kindest’ but that he meant well. I didn’t give a fuck what he meant, but after that she went back to loading her plate up. I was happy enough.
Until the bathroom excuses started coming after dinner. The odd way she would return smelling like mouthwash. The way that regardless of how much food I watched her eat, she was still losing weight.
I will never forget what it looked like to walk in on my mother, frail and bent over a toilet, with a finger down her throat, throwing up the stacks of snickerdoodle cookies we had only just inhaled while watching Gone With The Wind.
That’s why the disgust that rolls in my stomach causes me to narrow my eyes in disdain as I take in the hollows under the headmistress’s eyes. The sallow gray of her cheeks. The way the tendons in her neck are too severe, and how the points of her shoulders protrude gauntly under her jacket. The tentative smile she sports is too thin, her hands too bony as she gestures between me and Sky.
It makes me sick to look at her. To see what she’s become. And I snap a response that cuts me just as deeply as it cuts her.
“None of your business,” I spit at my mother.
Her eyes lose a bit of the light they had gleaned just a second before, and her lip falls as she stuffs her hands in her pockets. And as if that alone doesn’t scrape against my insides like a sharpened spoon, Sky elbows me in my side.
She extracts herself from me, smiling politely up at my mother as if she didn’t do anything, and piously clasps her hands. “We’re friends,” she says.
I snort. Friends don’t let friends rub their blood on their clit. As far as I’m concerned, we’re eternally entwined. My soul fused to hers like a fucking parasite, the tendrils of blight tightly coiled, waiting to consume. I couldn’t be her friend if I tried. And I’d rather die than try.
I yank her back against me. “We’re not friends, ” I growl.
Sky turns scarlet and tries to wriggle free, her scowl as threatening as a bomb, but this time I have her locked in. She’s not going anywhere.
Ever.
Especially with this skull fuck closing in. The guts of this guy to be in her room. I don’t even go in her room at night, and god knows I dream about it. The twilight state of the sleeping pills causes vivid fantasies of being a shadow in her dark corners. If he touched her, I will kill him. I will find a way to bury his body in the woods and still keep my plans.
“Well,” my mother titters nervously. “You two are obviously friend- ly .”
The attempt at a joke makes me roll my eyes.
“Is…” Sky twists to face her in my grasp. “Is that a problem?”
A problem? What the fuck?
“Oh, no! No, of course not.” My mother steps forward. “It’s wonderful. I’m so…” She reaches a hand out for my cheek, but I flinch away from her touch. It’s abrupt, harsh, and guilt rears its familiar head as a look of hurt passes over her features. I don’t want to hurt her, but I can’t lean into her embrace. Her hands are too cold now, too skeletal.
She quickly recovers, tucking her hand back into her pocket. “I’m so…” She tries for a smile, but it’s forced now, weak with wounding. “Happy for you two.”
The wound comes from a double-edged sword, and my chest aches with a remorse that threatens to take me to my knees. Every time I push her away, the severing of how we used to be grows more jagged and irreparable. That’s never what I wanted, but that’s what we’ve become. And I hate myself for it.
I hang my head, either from the lack of sleep or the guilt finally eating through me, and surrender.
“Thanks, mom.”