Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Age 15
I chewed on my thumbnail, my eyes glued to the front door. My parents left for the vet with Milo, our dog, but it had been over two hours, and I was getting sick to my stomach just thinking?—
Don’t.
He’s going to be fine.
Our nanny, a blonde-haired hippie my mother found on some website, walked into the living room with Cindy in her arms and gave me a pitying look. I liked Faith—she was cool—but her attention was making my skin crawl. Because if she was looking at me like that instead of being her reassuring self, it could only mean one thing.
The weight of a ton of bricks pushed down on my chest, making it difficult to breathe.
“Can I have string cheese?” Johnny asked her.
He sat on the couch, his attention on the tablet resting on his knees as he played a racing game.
My brother had always loved cars. Picking all his toys apart and rebuilding them faster than a ten-year-old should be able to was his thing. He used to say he wanted to be a mechanic when he grew up, but he changed his mind to mechanical engineer when our mother said it would be more prestigious.
“Sure, Johnny-boy.” Faith beamed, but there was no hiding the worried gleam in her eyes. “I’ll get you some.”
She still hadn’t come back with his string cheese when the front door opened. My mother, my father?—
My stomach sank at the missing presence.
“Where’s Milo?”
My mother didn’t look at me, fishing for something inside her purse instead.
It was my father who said, his voice void of any tact, “He died.”
Two words were all it took for my heart to crash and burn.
Died.
My best friend, our family dog of ten years, was dead .
“W-Why?” My hands started shaking, and my eyesight got blurry. “You said he was okay.”
Milo had been throwing up nonstop for the past two days, but my parents had said it was just a bug, and he’d come back from the vet feeling better. I didn’t think I would never see him again.
“He died?” Johnny asked, looking up from his tablet. There were no tears in his eyes. “Oh. Well, he was really old.”
I resisted the urge to yell at him that ten years wasn’t that old, that his age didn’t matter anyway. Milo died . We’d never get to play with him again or feed him treats or jump with him in the pool. He was gone forever.
As I looked at the dry faces around me, I wondered with no short amount of rage if I was the only one who cared. Faith had left to play with Cindy in her bedroom, my father was scanning the fridge, Johnny took his racing game to the garden, and my mother was fiddling with her recording camera.
Is this a joke?
I went up to her. “Was Milo scared?”
Despite my tears, I was able to see her distinct frown. “How am I supposed to know that, Allison? He was a dog. He didn’t know what was going on.”
Wetness rolled down my cheeks. “You didn’t say he was going to die.”
Die . The word tasted bitter in my mouth. Ugly, dirty, poisoned.
She kept adjusting the settings on the camera. “We didn’t know he was that sick. He had a tumor in his throat, and the vet said he wouldn’t live much longer anyway.”
I sniffed, not caring about the snot running out my nose. “I wanted to say g-goodbye.”
She rolled her eyes. “Dogs don’t understand human behaviors. It wouldn’t have made a difference.”
Her cruel words sliced my chest open wider. And then she poured salt into the wound by pointing the camera at herself.
The rapid way in which her demeanor changed from cold to distressed was… pure evil. There was no other way to describe it.
“Hi, everybody,” she started in that fake voice she always used whenever she wanted to invoke sympathy. “I have some sad news today.”
She took a deep breath and shut her eyes, pretending to rein in tears that weren’t there.
“Our precious boy Milo passed away today,” she told the camera. “He’d been with us for ten years, so we’re all very upset right now. You probably can’t tell, but I’ve been crying nonstop in the car on our way here, and I’ve only just forced myself to stop so I can film this for you guys.”
Her words sounded practiced, calculated. Why was she pretending to be sad in front of the camera?
“Please send your prayers our way.” She sniffed, dabbing at invisible tears under her eyes with a French-tipped finger. “It was so sudden, we couldn’t say goodbye how he deserved. Allison is very upset, as you can imagine. Allison, come here?—”
“ Stop .”
It took me a second to recognize my own voice. It had never sounded as cold and cruel as my mother’s.
She glared at me over the camera, her stare murderous, while she kept aiming it at me. “Behave, Allison. Tell the people how you’re feeling. I have to edit this video for tonight.”
“You’re not even crying,” I accused her, rage swirling inside of me. My hands started sweating when I balled them into fists, my tears falling. “Stop pretending to care when you don’t . And stop filming me. I don’t want to be on camera right now. I never do.”
She rolled her eyes like I was some big inconvenience. “This is my job, and the very thing that pays for those expensive concert tickets you love so much. Now let me film this, or you won’t be getting any dinner tonight.”
Before I knew what I was doing, I snatched the camera from her grip and sprinted to the other end of the living room.
“Allison!” she bellowed after me.
“No!” I shouted back, using the dining table as a buffer between us. “You’re a liar . You don’t care that Milo died or that you couldn’t say goodbye. You weren’t even crying. And I don’t want to be in your stupid videos. Stop forcing me!”
“What’s all this yelling?” my father asked as he walked into the dining room. His voice was calm, too calm, like he didn’t really care and was only stepping in to fill some kind of father-peacemaker quota.
“Your daughter won’t let me do my job,” my mother spat out.
“I never consented to being part of your job,” I bit back.
“ Consented ,” she mimicked. “Some big word that is, huh? You think you’re doing something here? You’re my daughter, and you’ll consent to whatever I say.”
“That’s not how it works.” I looked at my father, knowing this was a lost cause. “You know I’m right. I shouldn’t have to be in the videos if I don’t want to.”
I got kidnapped because of it.
That was something we never talked about in our family. Ever. As if the worst day of my life had never happened. I wasn’t even sure Johnny knew about it.
“Just give your mother the camera, Allison,” he said in an almost-robotic voice, once again confirming he didn’t care about my feelings or decisions. “Those videos you don’t want to be part of pay for all the nice things you have, so behave.”
“You heard your father. Stop being an ungrateful brat and cry for the camera.”
And cry for the camera.
I was ready to throw the camera across the room and smash it into pieces when my anger subsided unexpectedly, and a sudden realization arose.
I didn’t want to be here.
With my family. In this house. In Los Angeles. In California.
I wanted nothing to do with the life I was born into. Absolutely nothing.
Cry for the camera.
Taking advantage of my momentary distraction, my mother snatched her camera from my grip. But I wasn’t expecting her to grab me next by the back of my hair, forcefully dragging me down the hallway.
“I warned you,” she snarled, gripping my hair tighter.
I gasped, her actions taking me back to that man. To the warehouse. “Stop! You’re hurting me.”
She only did after pushing me inside my bedroom and shutting the door.
“You’d better stay there until the morning, or you’ll go without dinner for a whole week,” she shouted from the other side.
I didn’t react. Didn’t yell back. Didn’t say anything at all.
Claudia can’t hurt me anymore. I’m safe.
But was I?
My eyes drifted to the laptop on my bed, and something lit up inside of me. Something that shouldn’t have felt as right as it did.
Sitting on the ground, I kept stealing quick glances at the door to check that my mother was truly gone. And then I typed in what I hoped would be the beginning of the end.
Farthest state from California.