Chapter 7 #2
“I am your mother,” she insists, almost gentle, almost a knife in the gut. She glances at me, eyes darting past me, never landing on anything other than my flaws and failures. “Everything I do, I do for your own good.”
Rage fills my mouth with copper. I won’t go quietly. I won’t let her dismiss me, belittle me, make me a kid so she can parent the legitimate fucking questions out of me. I rip the box from her hands, flinging it away.
“What happens next year?” I demand and thunder rends the sky open, a blistering crash close enough to rattle the windows, the floor vibrating through my feet. “What haven’t you told me?”
Mom lurches forward.
“Enough!” Her hand flies back and freezes. It trembles there, upraised in the space between us. I stare, eyes tracking from my mother’s fist to her horrified face, staring—daring—hurting in a heart that doesn’t beat.
Do it, I want to whisper. Everything would be so much easier if I could hate you.
White-faced and trembling, my mother gathers herself. She turns away, arms wrapped tight around her chest—won’t even look at me. She says, “I’m done entertaining this. Go to your room. You’re grounded, Persephone.”
Cheeks burning, skin over-hot and overfull, I’ve never felt more like an idiot child.
Fury squeezes my throat so tight I can’t speak through it, a hundred insults and rejoinders crowding my head, but none of them are good enough.
I am not good enough. There’s nothing I will ever say that will make my mother see me.
Screw this. Why bother? I’m done trying.
Spinning on my heel, I snatch up my bag and my boots and fly up the stairs.
Blasting into my room, I shove the door shut behind me, my back against the wall.
My whole body trembles, eyes stinging, my skin somehow clammy and overheated at the same time and oh my god, I want to peel my meat off.
I dig my fingernails into my jaw, scratching fiery trails down my neck, my chest, into my arms; but I can’t scratch the poison ivy welting up my soul.
Nothing fits. Not this body, not these thrift store clothes, not even this room—gray and beige and nothing, just an empty box with me inside it, safely packaged away. So she can forget about me.
I throw my boots at the wall just to hear them connect. Shuck off my coat and whip it into the closet. I fling my bag onto the bed, even though it’s sopping wet and still stinks like wet animal. Would have flung myself down next except a pine cone tumbles out onto the mattress.
Something about it seizes me, freezing me in place with one hand still raised to bash open the closet door.
My world narrows to that single, stupid pine cone teetering off the bed, falling with a clatter to the fake-wood linoleum.
I can’t tear my eyes away. My body throbs.
My palm aches with the ghost imprints of its spines, burns with the memory of Bas’s empty chest beneath my palm.
My lungs clamp down so tight I can’t breathe, even grinding knuckles into my sternum, clawing at my throat.
Outside my room, footsteps climb the stairs, pacing the hallway.
A prison warden on patrol: every five minutes the shadow of her feet stripes the gap beneath the door.
I can’t do this anymore. I can’t stand this awful nothing room in this awful nothing house.
I don’t want to be choked down like a fish bone, digested into something appropriate.
I can’t be the kind of daughter she wishes she had, the kind of girl who fits here.
I’m a monster in girl skin, a feral dead kid—I’m protesting my reintroduction to this oppressive, un-wild world.
Slapping off the lights, I throw myself underneath the bed.
Army crawling elbow over elbow, I drag myself under, scrabbling with breaking claws, pushing with knees and toes until a run pops in my tights.
What came easy as a kid shoves me so flat my hair sweeps the floor now, low-hung bed stringers scraping across my shoulders.
But once there, side by side with my childhood monsters, I can finally breathe.
Sucking in big, unsteady lungfuls of air, I grope for my phone, its blue glow illuminating the undercroft beneath my bed. Somehow, though I only met him this morning—and kissed him by lunch, I can’t help reliving with a blush—I know with bone-deep certainty that Bas will understand.
I text him: I think my mom is hiding something big.
He texts back, almost immediately: Like what?
Like my missing heartbeat.
A pause stretches out between us. I have just enough time to miss my headphones, the red cord binding us together, the sour blue-raspberry memory of his mouth.
My phone pings.
Where would she hide it if she took it?
I blink in the haunting dark, caught sideways.
It’s such a bizarre Bas answer, but something about it catches at me.
I turn it over in my head, considering it.
Outside my room, my mother crosses the hallway again.
She pads down the stairs, her footsteps pausing on the landing.
I can feel her eyes burning on my door. Watching me, listening, making super sure I don’t leave.
Where would she hide it if she took it?
Where she hides everything. The one locked room in every house we move into, every new address christened with a trip to the home improvement store before we even unpack the van, a key-coded entry lock her perpetual first priority.
I text him: brB.