Chapter 6 #2
I move through the room. Searching. If there's one notebook, there are more.
The chest at the foot of the bed. Old, wooden, thrift store find. I lift the lid.
Notebooks.
A stack of them. Eight, maybe ten. Different colors, different sizes, different stages of wear.
The oldest ones are falling apart—covers peeling, pages yellowed.
And underneath, the older volumes. Years of writing.
Years of a person processing the world through words because the world was too much to process any other way.
I sit on Max's bed. Pick up the oldest notebook. The cover is red, faded to rust. The first entry is dated seven years ago. Max was thirteen.
I read.
I woke up with the sheets wet again. Not pee—I know what pee smells like and this isn't that. It's something else. Something thick and slippery and sweet-smelling that soaks through my boxers and stains the mattress and I can't make it stop.
I tried to wash the sheets before Linda woke up.
Got them into the machine at 5 AM, used extra soap, scrubbed the mattress with a towel.
But the smell was still there when she came downstairs.
She can always smell it. It's like she has a sensor in her nose tuned specifically to whatever is wrong with me.
She didn't say anything at first. Just stood in the laundry room doorway and watched me trying to shove the sheets into the dryer with shaking hands. I could feel her staring. Could feel the temperature in the room drop.
Then she grabbed my arm. Twisted it behind my back. Marched me into the bathroom. Shoved me to my knees on the tile floor.
"Strip," she said.
I did. I always do what she says when her voice sounds like that—flat, disgusted, like she's talking to a cockroach she found in the kitchen.
She turned the shower on. Cold. As cold as it goes.
Pushed me under the spray and held me there by the back of my neck while I gasped and choked.
The water was so cold my muscles locked.
I couldn't move. Could barely breathe. Just kneeled there on the shower floor, naked, shaking, while she scrubbed me with a washcloth and dish soap.
Not body soap. Dish soap. The yellow kind that strips grease.
She scrubbed until my skin was raw and red, especially between my legs, especially where the slick had been.
"Disgusting," she said. Over and over. Like a prayer. Like saying it enough times would make it true. Like she was washing something out of me that soap can't reach. "Filthy. Unnatural. This is your fault. Your body. Your sickness."
I tried not to cry. Crying makes it worse. Crying means I'm weak and weak means more punishment.
I cried anyway.
She left me on the bathroom floor afterward. Locked the door from the outside—she had a key installed last year, the kind that locks from the hallway, just for me. I sat on the tile for three hours. Counted the tiles. There are 147 full tiles and 23 half tiles where they cut them to fit the edges.
My knees bled from kneeling so long. The tile is textured. Little ridges that dig into skin. I have scabs there from last time that opened up again.
I took my pills when she finally let me out. Three of them. The doctor says I should only take two but two doesn't stop the slick completely. Three makes me nauseous for an hour. I threw up in the kitchen trash can and Linda told me to clean it up and stop being dramatic.
I don't know what I am. I don't know why my body does this. I just know it's wrong and I'm wrong and the pills are the only thing standing between me and more cold showers and more tile and more of Linda's hands and her voice saying disgusting like she's trying to scrape the word into my bones.
Four years of this. When will it end?
I keep a bag packed under my bed. One bag. Clothes, toothbrush, twenty-two dollars I've saved from returning cans. In case I have to leave fast. In case she decides the pills aren't enough. In case she decides I'm not worth the state money anymore.
If I count the tiles enough times maybe I'll stop existing.
My jaw locks. Something hot and sharp pushes behind my eyes. I blink it back. Keep reading.
Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to have a family. A real one. Not a placement. Not a woman who keeps me because the state sends a check.
I watch other kids get picked up from school. Their moms hug them. Their dads ruffle their hair. They climb into cars that smell like fast food and dog hair and someone else's laundry detergent and they don't even think about it. Don't even realize what they have.
I don't know what safe feels like. Not really.
I know what the absence of danger feels like—the days Linda doesn't hit me, the hours between punishments when my body can unclench.
But that's not the same thing. That's just the space between storms. That's not warmth.
That's not someone choosing you because they want to, not because they're paid to.
I wonder if I'll ever know the difference.
I turn pages. Skip ahead. The handwriting shifts. Gets smaller. Tighter.
I know what I am now. I looked it up. Spent three hours in the library reading medical journals on a computer in the back corner where no one could see the screen.
Omega.
The word looks wrong written down. Too small for what it means. Too clinical. Like it should come with a warning label or a cage.
0.3% of the male population. Capable of carrying offspring. Biologically wired for bonding with alpha-designation individuals. Heat cycles. Slick production. Scent-based attraction that is, quote, "involuntary and largely uncontrollable."
So that's what I am. A body designed to be wanted by people I can't say no to. A biological lock waiting for the right key.
Terrific.
A later entry. Different tone. Quieter.
What do I want? If I'm being honest. If I'm writing in a notebook no one will ever read and I can say the thing I'd never say out loud.
I want someone to see me. Not the omega. Not the foster kid. Not the charity case or the quiet one or the boy who doesn't cause trouble.
Me.
I want someone to look at me and see the person underneath all the hiding. And I want them to stay anyway. Not because they have to. Not because Margot asked them to. Not because biology made them.
Because they choose to.
I want to be chosen.
I've never been chosen. Not once. Not by parents who gave me up. Not by foster homes that sent me back. Not by Linda, who chose to keep me only because the state paid her to.
Margot chose me. But Margot chooses everyone. That's who she is. She'd choose a stray dog. A broken lamp. She sees damage and reaches for it.
I want someone to choose me who doesn't choose everyone. Someone selective. Someone difficult. Someone who looks at me and decides I'm worth the effort even though I'm complicated and damaged and scared.
I'm probably asking too much.
I'm definitely asking too much.
I flip back a few pages, my heart pounding in my throat.
Margot came today.
She's different. She looks at me like I'm a person. Not a case file. Not a charity project.
She looks at me like I matter.
It's terrifying.
Because if I let myself believe it—if I let myself think someone actually sees me and chooses me anyway—and then she leaves...
I don't think I'd survive it.
I've survived Linda. Six homes in four years. The pills and the hiding.
But I don't think I could survive being chosen and then unchosen.
So I'll keep my bag by the door.
Just in case.
I put the notebook down. My eyes are burning. My chest is a wreck—cracked open, exposed, the careful armor I wear peeled back to reveal something underneath that I don't have a name for.
This is a boy who wants to be chosen. Who's spent his entire life being returned, recycled, reshuffled—a human library book nobody kept past the due date. And he wrote it down in a notebook he hid at the bottom of a chest because even his wanting felt like too much to ask the world to hold.
And I looked at this person and saw something to take.
I pick up the brown notebook I brought with me. The current one. Flip forward past the entries I've already read. Past the suppressants. Past the kitchen. Looking for—
I find it.
The entry is short. The handwriting is different—shaky, uneven, pressed hard into the paper like the pen was a weapon and the page was the only safe thing to stab.
I let Zero fuck me in the basement.
The opening line hits like a car wreck. My name again. In that sentence. In his handwriting. In his private diary.
The next line is crossed out—hard, violent scratches of ink—and rewritten:
No—that's not right. It wasn't "letting." He didn't ask. I didn't say yes. But I didn't say no either. I just stood there when I should have run. Why didn't I run?
He bent me over a weight bench and took my virginity while acting like I was nothing. That I was just an omega. Just a body. Just a hole to use.
And I came.
I came while he fucked me like a pathetic fuck toy. While he held me down. While he hurt me.
The handwriting changes here. Shaky. Jagged. The letters crooked like the pen was shaking in his hand.
I don't understand what's wrong with me. Normal people don't want this. Normal people would have fought back or screamed or done SOMETHING.
I just took it.
Worse—I wanted it.
Even now, sitting here barely able to move, everything hurting, I can still feel him inside me. Can still hear his voice. Can still smell him on my skin even after the bath.
And my body—god, my body—
I'm getting hard just thinking about it.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
The ink bleeds through the paper in places where the pen pressed too hard.
Linda used to hit me when I showed signs. When my scent started leaking through the suppressants at thirteen. She caught me without my shirt once. Saw the changes.
Her hand cracked across my face so hard I tasted blood.
"Disgusting," she said. "You're disgusting. Do you know what you are? What this makes you?"