Elle
It would horrify most people to see their father ploughing into anyone, much less their teacher, but I see this as my out. The one true excuse Mum needs to feel justified enough to finally leave Jarett.
His withholding money and spending it on gambling and beer isn’t enough either while we starve. Because, Ellie, he just needs some outlets to unwind.
His screams aren’t enough. Because he’s just blowing off steam from a hard day at work, Elle.
His destroying the house isn’t enough. Because those are just material items, Elle. They’re easily replaceable.
But cheating. It has to be enough, right?
Mum said that’s the one thing she won’t stand for, and finally, I have proof of something we both know has been happening even before my conception.
I lift my phone higher and point it at the pair, but the recording doesn’t make it past seven seconds before the boy rips it from my fingers and covers my mouth again. His free arm locks around my waist, lifting me off the floor.
“Mmm!”
I try to shake him loose, but it’s no use. He presses me tight to his chest and we silently retreat out of the locker room and back into the hall. But he doesn’t put me down. He drags me outside, to the back of the building.
“What the hell do you think—”
“Listen,” he snaps, his minty breath going straight down my throat as the tip of his nose bumps mine from how damn close we are. He’s bent over me, his knee sinking between my legs and pinning me against the brick wall. “You need to forget what we’ve just seen.”
“Excuse me?” I glare up at him incredulously. “I’m not forgetting shit. That’s my dad—Hey!”
He’s typing something into my phone. His number?
In seconds he sends himself the video, but when he goes back to the gallery on my phone, undoubtedly to delete it, it’s already locked.
“Give me the code,” he orders darkly.
A chill runs down my spine. It’s different from the others he’d given me in the studio. This one makes every hair on my body stand at attention because, despite the chill, there’s no heat running through my veins or tingles settling between my thighs this time. These are warnings, driving home the only logical thought I’ve had since meeting this boy.
He’s a stranger. Beautiful enough to be an angel or a demon.I straighten and lift my chin. I know demons. I could be one too.
“Now,” he demands.
Who the fuck does he think he’s talking to like a damn servant?
“No. Give me my phone back.”
He raises it above our heads as if threatening to drop it. “Give me the code.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?!” I shriek, swiping for it, but he simply stretches his arm to its full height. Even on my tiptoes, I can’t graze it. “Give me my freaking—”
The last word doesn’t come out as air rushes from my lungs as his fingers lock around my throat like a vice grip. He uses his hold to pin my head against the bricks, and stars explode before my eyes as I try to escape, only to have him squeeze me harder.
“The code. Now.”
Seconds tick by and I must be turning purple because his fingers loosen a fraction. Just enough for me to breathe, but not escape as I try to pry them off.
Earlier, those fingers had felt so safe and reassuring, so warm. And now? Outside in the snow, they felt as welcoming as hot razor blades, searing my skin and threatening to end it all.
Demon, my mind decides. He’s a demon.
I shake my head frantically. Stubbornly. I need that video, that’s my proof. That’s Mum and I’s out.
“You want to blackmail Madame Pelletier that badly?” he asks, his voice low and frigid.
What?
“You think you can use this little video to blackmail her into giving you individual lessons? To help you with your audition?”
“What?!” I sputter. I hadn’t even thought of that. “I don’t want anything from that bitch!”
His fingers tighten again and I choke, drool flying from my mouth onto his sleeve. If he notices, he doesn’t give a damn.
“But you need her. Now, last. Fucking. Chance. The code.” With each word, he pulses my head against the bricks, using my neck like a damn lever.
I can’t get him off and no one’s coming around back.
Despite my best attempts to stop them, angry, defiant tears run down my cheeks for a second time today and wet his fingers, but no sympathy crosses his features. He isn’t cracking, but neither am I.
“No,” I rasp.
He raises the phone again and then CRACK!
“NO! NO!”
He releases me and I drop to the ground just as hard as my phone by his black leather boot. Before I can grab his ankle to stop him, his heel shatters the already cracked screen over and over again.
I watch helplessly as splinters of glass spring out and shimmer on the concrete steps, and I notice a second too late when he stoops to retrieve the mangled remains. By the time I blink back to this new, surreal reality, he’s already jogging down the small flight of stairs to the little pond nestled in the back left corner of the property. It hasn’t frozen over yet, but when it does, the academy will hold a private ice skating event where all my soon-to-be former classmates will skate over what’s left of my phone because he chucks it right into the middle.
I don’t care that the water’s shallow.
I don’t care that I could bend down and pick up my ruined phone in hopes of saving the SD card.
There’s no way I’d go within a foot of that pond.
Or any body of water.
I have Jarett to thank for that.
“How hard was it for you to just listen?” he asks icily when he returns, his fingers gripping the door handle as he stares down his nose at me.
The disgust in his eyes, like I’m nothing more than gum on the bottom of his shoe, thaws my shock and ignites my anger. “Why the fuck would I listen to you?” I spit.
“You did earlier in the studio.”
“A once-off. Trust me.”
“Trust that not listening to me only sparks nightmares.”
A thought stops my incredulous snort as I take in the backdrop of the darkening, cloudy sky that casts him in shadows, turning his handsome face haunting.
“Cloud…” I mutter to myself. “It’s still on my cloud…”
“It would be,” he says coolly, “if it’d been backed up.”
Dread trickles down my spine, as my eyes snap back to his. What?
“Your only notification was from your storage provider. A reminder to buy more because yours is full.” His lips curl cruelly as he slides into the dance studio before locking the glass doors with a distinctive click and disappearing down the hallway.
Under the locker room window, the moans of my father and Madame rise to a crescendo, and then silence permeates the air like a sickness.
***
I hop off the night bus and get home two hours later to the sound of glass shattering.
My mother huddles beneath the countertop of the breakfast nook as my father rips every dish we own out of the cabinets, tossing them in her direction.
He never hits her directly. No, this is his way of keeping his conscience clear. If something hits her, it’s her fault for being a dumb bitch that got in the way.
“Why am I late? Why don’t you ask your cunt of a daughter?” He doesn’t spare me a glance, yet he throws a saucer with such precision it hits the wood panelling right where my head would’ve been. I stifle a whimper, falling into a crouch and protecting my head with my arms.
“I went to the fucking studio, thirty minutes off my route for her ass just to find out from some lanky kid that she’d already left.”
I swallow. That kid is probably… damn, I don’t even know his name, yet he’d touched me, held me, choked me, and destroyed my phone.
“Then she has the nerve to cut her phone off,” he roars, hurling Mum’s favourite casserole dish at the wall, where it explodes into a dozen pieces. One piece bounces and grazes my tights. The only decent pair of tights I owned.
I hiss as blood pricks at my skin and bubbles to the surface, along with my anger.
Jarett always talks about me as if I’m not here, not inside the room beside my cowering mother.
I daren’t say anything, though. It’s better off this way.
For my sake. For mum’s sake, I keep quiet. I keep my eyes on the linoleum floor. Peas litter the chequered pattern, crushed with muddy, melted snow from Jarett’s boots. The two-day-old deli meat mum got half off at work is stuck against a cabinet, a chair, and in her hair.
“You think I have gas and time to waste?”
My mother’s pitiful gaze meets mine. It’s imploring me to come and hide beside her.
What good would that do?
I try to resist, but then a teacup ploughs into my elbow. The impact rings through my bones and shatters my nerves.
I crawl towards her, seeking the counters’ shelter too. If I try to make it past him, he’ll only haul me back into the kitchen. Maybe even to the filled sink…
No, no one’s allowed to leave until his tantrums are over.
“I’m so fucking tired of your questions. Your accusations. You want answers, there she is!” He gestures to me mid-crawl, chucking a saucer at my head. It flies past me and hits the hallway wall, the sound piercing the air along with my shriek.
I freeze, covering my ears and humming like I have ever since I was six years old and cognizant of my existence.
“The ungrateful bitch,” Jarett says, spittle flying from his mouth that he wipes on his collar. “If you had just aborted her, I wouldn’t be trapped here with either of you. But no, you and your morals. Should’ve kicked the bitch out of you like all the others.”
The others???
“No, I had to do the right thing. I had to be a stand-up guy, listening to my fucking family spew their bullshit virtues.” He pauses, his expression growing distant. “I could’ve been someone. I could’ve been like my brother...” He blinks and suddenly he’s back, back in the present as he points an accusing finger down at Mum. “Instead, I’m stuck in this hellhole you trapped me in the moment you started growing her.”
Right. It’s all because of me.
It’s my fault he didn’t graduate from year twelve.
It’s my fault he’s stuck working a dead-end job.
It’s my fault he drinks himself into comas and has stage one cirrhosis.
Every reason and every excuse as to why Jarett’s life is a shit pit is because I exist. And yet, all of those things were true before I was even a foetus.
If only I hadn’t popped up like a wart or pus-filled boil between his ass cheeks. He could be this savvy businessman billionaire he always daydreams about. Like his ultra-wealthy and unimagined family members who never answer his calls or come to visit.
Ever.
I suppose Jarett blames their lack of existence in our lives and the world at large on me too.
My mother only whimpers and the pitiful sound combined with more of Jarett’s lies angers me enough to stop my childish rocking. Still, I flinch as another dish smashes against the breakfast nook, but I don’t cower.
It’s mum’s favourite teacup, a porcelain, hand-painted mug that came nestled inside of her bassinet when her parents abandoned her at the convent.
Shards bounce back, stopping at my knee and cutting into it. The image of the red-haired little girl wearing a bonnet smiles up at me sweetly. The writing’s broken now, but it had said, “To Jaime, our little princess.”
Mum thinks at least one of her parents must be an artist, given the incredible detailing of the painting. It’s a replica of Mum’s infant photo. She swears she’ll rejoin a ceramic class one day and track down the little branding on the bottom of the cup, a tree with a fish jumping over it. She thinks there may be some connection between the company and her parents, but the logo’s obliterated now.
That singular mug had held so many irreplaceable memories for us both.
Mum would tuck me in, the mug loaded with tea, and she’d tell me stories about the red-haired little girl every night. She’d go on all these adventures and get into all sorts of funny troubles, but in the end, her parents, the artists, always welcomed her home with open arms.
It wasn’t until I got a bit older that I realised the parents always changed. First, the mum had red hair, then the father, then both. They were Aaron then Amos, Carolina, then Charlotte. Finally, she’d settled on Dawson and Rosalie. Her mum would be a Rosalie, she’d thought.
Then I realised these were all just thoughts. No, fantasizations of parents she’d never known.
I’d been jealous of her dad Dawson, wondering why I’d been hand-selected for Jarett. Wondering what my little soul had done to be placed into this body, into this family. What had I done in another realm to be given and kept by someone who hated me?
Then I realised Dawson hadn’t kept the little red-haired girl at all.
I watch Mum pick up the remnants of the mug with shaking, bleeding fingers, and for the first time since I can ever remember Jarett’s tantrums, she finally lets out a wail.Anger and heat bubble up inside me at Jarett’s deranged laughter that erupts around the kitchen, his face contorting with pure vitriol.
Then why don’t you just leave?! I want to scream as blood rushes through my ears and bile rises in my throat. If we make you so miserable and you can be free and happy away from us, why don’t you just leave? Leave us the hell alone!
Say it, Elle!
Say it!
Say it…
But the minutes drag on with mum’s heart-wrenching cries and my lips remain sealed. When the dishes are finally out, Jarett opens the beer-filled fridge and pulls out a six-pack before heading for the couch in the living room. Seconds later some car remodelling program blares through the speakers.
I gaze at Mum who’s still fixated on the broken logo. She looks like a little girl again, just like that painted little girl. Helpless, innocent, all alone.
A revelation washes over me at that moment. I would never be like Mum again, hunched and cowering and helpless. I’d fight back. I’d be strong enough for us both. I won’t have the same excuses she always does, like her spirituality that’s beautiful until it isn’t.
She always said she’d never leave Jarett unless there was proof of his infidelity. That was her final straw.
Not the abuse.
Not him openly admitting that he wants me dead.
Just proof of him screwing another woman.
Fine, so be it.
I swallow my resentment as ten minutes tick by and Jarett starts in on his third beer. I sit frozen as Mum timidly comes out from the counter to pick up the ruined dinner she’d slaved over.
She doesn’t stop to console me as I sit there watching her. She doesn’t take my hand, or assure me in any way that none of this is my fault.
She doesn’t look at me at all.
She can’t.
She’s nothing like Rosalie.
Nothing like the mother she wishes to have.
Nothing like the mother she wishes to be.