Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Skylar
The ceiling’s cracked again.
The plaster’s torn across the surface, a fault line carved by years of silence and bad decisions. This place isn’t held together by bricks or hope. It’s stitched shut with spit and shame. The kind of glue they slap on broken girls and dare them to hold.
I lie here, eyes locked on that crack, barely blinking.
I’m not tired.
Not really.
But everything presses down heavier than it should.
My body sinks into the mattress as if gravity has had enough of pretending to be gentle.
This isn’t sleep pulling me under. It’s something else.
Something quieter.
Meaner. The kind of weight that doesn’t rest. It waits.
Stillness is easier than thinking. Easier than carrying the full force of what last night did to me.
Zane fucking Rivera.
Even his name punches me in the gut.
I keep seeing his face. That smirk with teeth. That grin that doesn’t just promise destruction, it promises pleasure. The kind that lights a match, tosses it into your world, and whistles while everything burns.
And what’s worse is that he made me laugh.
Not one of those hollow things I hand out to keep people from looking too closely. It was real. One stupid laugh on one even stupider rooftop, and somehow it cracked something open. And now I can’t shove it back in.
The bed creaks when I shift. My body feels like it’s made of cement. My shoulder hits the edge of the bunk rail, but I don’t care.
I just stare.
That crack in the ceiling could split open and swallow me whole, and I’d probably thank it.
The fan clicks in the corner, trying to keep rhythm with my thoughts. But all I can think about is him.
That crooked smile.
The voice that crawls under your skin and stays there.
The way he smells, and those hands.
I saw the scars.
Healed over by time but still there. Faint lines slashing across his knuckles, quiet confessions of every fight he’s walked into and every one he didn’t walk out of clean.
I wanted to ask him about them.
But I didn’t.
I know what it’s like to hate a question like that. To have someone’s eyes linger too long on the scar above your eyebrow, as if it tells your whole fucking life story.
I never let anyone ask me about mine. So I wasn’t about to ask him about his. He deserves to keep his secrets. Even if I can’t stop thinking about them.
There are three other girls in this room.
One cries in her sleep, the kind of soft, broken sobs that make you feel like a monster for not caring.
One whispers to the ceiling after lights out. Things no one wants to hear. Secrets she buries in the dark because there’s no one else to give them to.
And the last one’s already half-dead. Her body breathes, her eyes blink, but whatever made her alive left a long time ago.
We’re all ghosts in this place. Drifting past each other, pretending we’re not desperate for someone to notice we’re still breathing.
I pull the thin blanket tighter around my body, even though the room’s already too warm. It’s not the cold I’m fighting. It’s the emptiness. I need something to wrap around me. Something to hold me still. Even if it’s just fabric and lies.
Zane’s grin flashes again in my mind.
Fuck him.
He slipped under my skin. One night on a rooftop. That’s all it took. One laugh that shouldn’t have happened, one moment I didn’t guard hard enough. And now I’m splitting at the seams, cracking open in places I swore I’d welded shut.
I roll onto my stomach, shove my face into the pillow, and scream until my throat’s raw.
I want to forget the way he looked at me. The way his voice dipped soft when he asked that dumb question about the stars. The way my fingers almost brushed his.
I want to forget all of it.
But I can’t.
And that makes me want to lash out and punch something.
I’ve seen him at school.
He moves through the halls as if the place was built for him alone. The girls orbit him, always giggling too loud, tilting their heads at the exact angle they hope will catch his attention.
He isn’t the golden boy with a football in hand, the kind teachers worship and parents parade around. He’s the bad idea that pulls you in anyway. The dare you take even when you know it will end in tragedy. The mistake that leaves bruises you don’t regret.
I could pretend I’ve never watched him, never noticed, never let my eyes catch on his shoulders or that grin.
But that would be a goddamn lie.
I’ve seen him lean against lockers, talking to girls who have no idea what the fuck they’re doing.
I’ve watched him pull that smirk he threw at me a dozen times on other girls. And I hate that it worked on them too. Hate that some part of me wonders if I’m nothing more than another piece in whatever fucked-up game he’s playing.
As if one glance, one cocky comment, could be enough to make me spread my legs.
That isn’t me. It has never been me. Not once.
Not when boys whispered promises they could never keep, not when men in my mother’s orbit looked at me with the same hunger they wasted on her. I’ve never given anyone that power, and I sure as shit am not about to hand it over now.
The men I grew up around taught me early what it means to be used.
They showed me how it looks when someone takes until there’s nothing left but scraps.
They taught me how to spot it coming, how to slam doors before hands could reach in, how to make sure it would never happen to me. My mother never learned that lesson.
She let men grind her down until she was dust, until her body was just another stop for someone else’s hunger. She let them treat her as if she was disposable, leaving pieces of herself in every fucking ashtray, in every half-empty bottle, in every bed she should have walked away from.
I watched her hollow out, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but skin wrapped around regret. It was then, I swore I would never let anyone turn me into the same kind of nothing.
So I keep people out. It is not hard.
At school I wear the don’t-fuck-with-me mask. I build it every morning, layering cold eyes over tired ones, sharpening my words into blades, tilting my shoulders just enough to make even the bravest boys think twice before stepping too close.
It works.
They keep their distance, but the girls still hate me for it. They whisper, they laugh, they spit the same names into the air as if saying them makes them true. Slut. Easy fuck. Whore. They see confidence where there is only armor and assume I am opening my legs behind closed doors.
The truth is that no one has ever touched me. Not once. Not the way they imagine. I am still a virgin, though I hate the word because it sounds soft and delicate and breakable.
I am none of those things. I am iron welded shut.
Every time a guy tries—and they always try—I slam the door in his face. They flirt, they push, they think persistence will melt me, but I shut them down until they finally walk away, muttering insults to save face. I make it look easy, but it isn’t.
It’s just survival.
Because needing people only ever gets you hurt.
That is the first lesson I learned, and the one I keep relearning every time I forget myself.
It is the reason I ended up here in the first place.
I needed my mother. I trusted her when I should have known better.
And in the end she made her choice, and it was never me.
She picked the needle, every single time, and left me holding the empty space where a mother was supposed to be.
Now I am here. In this fucking dump that pretends to be a home, surrounded by shadows who shuffle through the same hallways, and breathe the same air.
Morning creeps in, dragging its feet through the cracks in the blinds.
The light cuts across the room in slanted stripes.
I groan, every sound weighted, and force myself upright even though my body fights me.
It feels heavier than it did yesterday, which is impressive when I think about how far down I already was.
Every bone protests, every muscle aches, and my head is thick with the hangover of thoughts I never wanted.
Today is going to be shit. I already know it.
It sits heavy in my chest, drags through my limbs, sours the taste of the air.
The room stinks of morning breath and half-washed hair. That sticky blend of sweat and cheap detergent suffocating the room. I sit up slowly, every muscle aching like I ran a marathon in my sleep.
I hear Alyssa whimper again in her bed, that same soft, broken sound she makes every night.
Marnie’s already up, sitting cross-legged on her mattress, staring at the wall with her blank, empty expression like someone hit pause on her brain three years ago.
The third girl, Kelly, I think, but it could be Kara who knows, mumbles to herself from the bunk below mine, words slurring in a whisper I’m too tired to decipher.
I reach for the end of the bed where my jeans are bunched in a knot. Same pair as yesterday. The knees are ripped open, threads curling like wounds that never healed. There’s a faint burn mark on the thigh from when someone’s cigarette slipped too close.
I stretch out flat on the mattress, shove my legs into them, and lift my hips to drag the fabric over my skin.
My jacket’s on the chair, sleeves inside out from when I stripped it off last night. It’s frayed along the edges, worn through at the elbows, and the zipper only works if I hold my breath and pray.
I don’t give a fuck about trends or fashion.
Those things belong to kids with clean closets and parents who still pay attention.
They are luxuries for people who aren’t clawing just to survive, people who don’t measure their worth in how long they can keep breathing in a place that wants to choke them out.
My clothes aren’t about style. They are about endurance.
I don’t bother with breakfast.
There is nothing to eat here. There never fucking is. Hunger has become background noise, a constant hum I carry with me.