Chapter 1 #2
My head lulls back as a bellowing laugh rumbles in my chest. I type out another message to Caroline, wiping away the tears collecting at the corners of my eyes.
Ebony: Why are you like this?
Caroline: I fell in love with a man named Steve who left me for my brother, I spend most of my day questioning every life choice I’ve ever made in great detail, and I’ve been waiting for a promotion for what feels like forever.
So now I’m clinging to you, my court-mandated emotional hostage.
It’s called being a grown-up—welcome to the real world.
FYI: One hundred percent would not recommend.
The three little dots ripple across the screen, and I stupidly wait to see what fucked up offering she has to share next.
Caroline: I feel like you need some parental guidance.
Ebony: Don’t you do it—this is already weird enough, and God made you barren for a reason; this is not your skill set.
Caroline: Hot take—don’t romanticise the trauma. You survived it; dating it would not be advised. Unless he’s hot. Hot trumps unhinged any day.
Ebony: Jesus Christ.
Caroline: His hotness is debatable.
Ebony: You’re insane. You been dipping into your own stash?
Caroline: Beside the point, shrooms should be classed as one of my five-a-day. They enhance my abilities.
Ebony: They enhance your personality defects. How you got this job is beyond me.
Caroline: My manager accepts references or enthusiastic fellatio—I have no gag reflex, and the blowjobs raised less questions.
Asked and answered.
I chuckle, and the tired driver eyes me warily in the rearview mirror.
I knew the second he repeated my destination back to me when he picked me up that he was questioning why a girl like me would be going to a place like Hells Haven.
The posher side of town where the university stands is known for accommodating the wealthiest of Grimmville elite.
Shockingly, no one has ever confused me with being either wealthy or elite.
Maybe it’s the clothes, the attitude or the I’ll cut you stare that seems to be permanently etched into my features lately.
Running my hand through my long dark waves, I twirl the ash blonde section that frames my face around my fingers.
I can’t remember the last time I even sat in a hairdresser’s chair, opting to bleach and trim it over my bathroom sink when it gets too unruly to manage.
I’m a stranger to self-care, and it shows.
The dark wash t-shirt I’m wearing is oversized and hangs off one shoulder just the way I like it, the strap of my peony pink bra on show.
My style is an eclectic mix of a Fraggle Rock rager and a Sex Pistols meet and greet—you know, the epic ones in the eighties where blow was lined out on glass tables as a party favour.
I liked to melt into the shadows where possible, and I would argue until I was blue in the face that black was in fact a colour.
Those yelling about the absence of light are usually the same ones screaming at me about my moral thoughtlessness when chowing down a four-stack beefburger deluxe because meat is murder.
I’ve witnessed more murder than most, and growing up the way I did, as long as it wasn’t scraped off the side of the road, it was considered an acceptable meal. Put simply—being morally fastidious didn’t get you fed.
Caroline: Not everyone gets a fresh start, Firestarter. Eye contact is optional. Arson is not. Burn it down if you have to - just don’t get caught this time.
As social workers go, you’d probably be shocked to find out Caroline here isn’t the worst I’ve had.
She struggles with boundaries, is questionably qualified, and is holding on tight to that passive-aggressive mum vibe like it’s the only thing tethering her to reality, but to her credit, she’s the only one who has checked in on me in the past six months.
I close the window and wrap my arms around myself.
My life reads like a Freudian docu series on how best to fuck up a kid, the adults at the helm haven’t exactly been stand up members of the community, but Caroline O’Hare is one you’d consider stable—for the most part.
Our current text exchange aside. But she hasn’t abandoned me like everyone else, and that has to count for something.
It’s a surprise to everyone who knows me that I’m even still here with the shit I’ve already experienced in my short life so far.
‘Resilient, Ebony—that’s what you are,’ Caroline stated in her earlier assessment when we met a year ago. How true those words are. ‘A glutton for punishment’ feels more apt of a sum-up, but who am I to start self-diagnosing?
I slide my phone into my rucksack, hugging it to my body as though it can give me the comfort I need, left alone with thoughts that have no business haunting me; even now, all these years later, my senses recall every moment of the worst day of my life with perfect clarity.
Yet another stab to my already fractured heart as I imagine how differently my life could have played out if I had made different choices.
The cab driver swerves onto the motorway, green and brown scenery like never-ending paint strokes on a bleached-blue canvas rushing past the partially open window.
The melodic thumping bass of Alex Warren’s “Burning Down” spills out of the speaker, each note tugging at something buried too deep inside me to be reached by human hands.
Returning to Hells Haven was never going to be an easy decision—it feels like forever since I’ve been in my hometown, and honestly, forever will never be a long enough amount of time for me to forget everything that happened there.
My chipped, black polished nails absentmindedly pick at the frayed fabric of my jeans pulled taut across my thighs, the pad of my thumb skating over the rough raised skin of the scars that decorate my legs.
Quiet echoes and a dull burn of a time when pain was the only way I knew how to feel, each one a reminder I’d happily forget.
Then it hits me—the acrid stench of smoke in the air, soot and ash seeping down my throat and filling my lungs like a sand timer.
The ache of pressure making my head light as a hot pain sears behind my eyes.
It’s not real. Not now. But it’s real enough to have me lowering the window in a panic and spluttering for a mouthful of clean air.
Ambushed by the memory. The sirens. Shattered glass and smouldering wood.
Heat from the flames licking at my flesh; my socks soaked through with rain on the pavement.
The screams are too loud, too far away to place, as the nightmare unlatches its hold on me, the memory slipping away.
But their eyes—those striking emerald green eyes—they stay.
I cling to them, desperate, as if staring long enough could ever bring them back to me.
Eyes that once looked at me with trust, with adoration, with respect…
before I shattered it. Before I betrayed them.
And still, I miss them with a kind of ache that no sleep, intense therapy session, or waking hour can dull.
Time doesn’t heal all wounds—sometimes it’s a blade that brutally reopens scars until you just can’t take it anymore.
They hate me, and honestly, I don’t blame them. I hate myself for what I did.