10 | Mike
Mike
This morning cannot be more complicated than it is right now.
It is not even morning anymore. The day came and passed, the night followed quietly, and yet I am here, trapped in my own mind, trying to figure out what happened.
Because this woman on the screen is too familiar to be a stranger.
She is looking straight into the camera lens of whoever took that photo of her, and those eyes are staring into my soul through the photo.
The same eyes that once gave me comfort.
The same eyes that once gave me terrors.
They are the same fucking eyes. She is a ghost emerging through my nightmares, and at the worst time possible.
The anniversary of their death is almost here.
The anniversary of what I did. What I became that day.
Some people claim monsters are born; others claim monsters are shaped.
I disagree with both. I believe monsters are there from the beginning, inside all of us.
They stay quiet, waiting for the need to protect us.
Some people simply go their entire lifetime without the need for the monster within to protect them, and others like myself need it earlier than they should.
They need it before they are even old enough to understand the reason.
And that is truly cruel. Because children are the ones who need the most protection.
It’s often true, though, that the monsters who prey upon the innocent—the ones who never deserve it—are the people who once were in that place themselves.
They used to be nice, polite, a delight to have around.
They used to be someone you could trust, maybe a friendly neighbor or a smile that brightened your day.
Someone changed that for them, and even though that doesn’t take away from the horrors they might have caused, it truly makes you think: aren’t we all the monsters we fear?
My mind is stuck between the past and the present, and I feel lost in more ways than one.
I used to think my mother was my safe haven, and until I reached the age of eight, she truly was.
I can say this with certainty, even years after everything that happened to me.
I can still say that once, this woman felt like she was my protector.
Then things changed, and the person I once believed would protect me from my nightmares looked the other way as the man she let into our lives created them.
I am not sure I blame her. Maybe she was a victim herself.
Maybe looking the other way was her way of dealing with the monster hidden inside her.
I am looking at the laptop’s shattered screen, which somehow still works.
I am starting to think I must be delusional, because the woman smiling with people around her in those photos is the exact same woman I saw struggling to breathe, struggling to escape while the car was filling with water, sinking to the bottom of the lake.
One memory in particular stands out from all of the horror that day included.
It’s that of my sister before we entered the car.
That beautiful smile of hers, the happiness hidden behind her complaints against another ‘family’ night, as my stepfather liked to call it when he forced all of us into an outing designed to show the town the perfect family he had built.
Lena was never meant to be with us that night.
They came to pick me up from football practice like they had done all the times before, but this time I had a plan to end my nightmare before we reached home.
I made sure not to wear my seat belt and to leave the window open on my side of the car.
It was all planned. Carefully. Calculated.
As much as a ten-year-old’s plan for a car accident can be calculated.
But Lena was never included in my plan. I thought I had made sure she wouldn’t be in the car, but I was terribly wrong.
Father had an idea to take us all out for dinner because my mother hadn’t cooked again.
She was in a spiral of her own, filled with drugs and alcohol—a way to ignore what was happening in her house every night.
She learned to silence it; I learned to expect it.
I tried locking my door, and I tried saying no.
But I was never able to keep him out of the room, and eventually I started waiting for it.
I counted the minutes of his visits. I learned the nights when I was safe, and the nights when it was most likely he would find himself in my bed.
I learned how to shield my mind from what was happening, not that it did me any good.
It’s truly amazing what the human mind can do to protect you.
How easy it is to drift off to another place entirely while your body remains in the present.
Yet it does so little to actually help you.
It’s just a drug, designed to numb you from the pain—the metaphorical, the physical, the psychological.
All at once. But when everything is done, the pain remains, and the drug eventually wears off.
My plan was clear that night. Perfect, even.
As perfect as a plan could be conjured by a child.
I called my father, claiming Liam’s dad wouldn’t be able to drive us home.
I made Liam tell his father that my father would pick us up instead, and then I made sure to find an excuse for Liam to join another teammate’s family on the way home instead. All a lie.
While my mother and father were talking to my coach about the fight I had started earlier—a part of the plan designed to keep them busy while I did what I had to—I messed with the brakes of the car.
No one would have known, but then I saw my sister running toward the car right before we were getting ready to leave.
She had stayed behind for an art class that took place after school hours.
My mother let her know that they would pick me up so she could join us for a family pizza night.
This wasn't in my plan. She didn’t deserve to be in that car.
I never intended my sister’s death, and it haunts me to this day.
If I were to be honest, I would admit that this is probably why the game started.
My need is to numb my pain. The hunt is what does that for me—the sight of blood.
Their screams make her screams faint inside my head, and everything falls silent for a moment or two.
And I need those moments as a man needs air.
I know the boys are trying their best to help me through this, even when they don’t really know what is happening in my head.
Liam, even when we were kids, despite everything done to him by his own family, always had a kind word to say.
Even sitting in silence with him next to me helped back then.
It was a comfort I didn’t know I needed.
And Nathan, the loving man he is, has always done everything in his power to make sure I survived every moment since we met.
He even started convincing his family to take us in, long before there was a need for it.
He knew about my plan to kill Liam’s father, and instead of looking the other way or turning me over to the police, he found a way to convince his own family to protect me afterward.
He made sure lawyers were standing by, waiting for the call.
He made sure we had a place to stay, and later a family to call our own.
The truth is, killing Liam’s father was always a plan in the back of my mind.
I knew his family would have to take me in after mine was gone, and I had promised myself that I wouldn’t exchange one horrific childhood for another.
I was ready to take this man down with me.
Cruel thoughts for a child, yet this is what you become when your mind is shaped by things you should never have lived through.
I knew about Liam’s father’s habits long before I went to live with them, and while I was planning to take out my useless mother and the monster I called my father, I already had a plan to end my cousin’s nightmare as well.
I would have done it even if I ended up in a foster home, if I’m being honest. No one deserves to grow up with a father like that.
One would think a kid can’t be thinking that way, but I stopped being one the first night after I turned eight—when he entered my room and created the nightmare I was trapped in until his death.
That was the day I stopped being the person I was and became a monster needing blood to survive, or maybe I was always one.
Some psychiatrists tried to deem me a psychopath years ago, but the label never actually stuck.
Nathan’s father dismissed it the moment it was written on that paper.
It was a little after the fire, and the town was still convinced this was my doing.
Can you blame them? They were right, after all.
My mind drifts back to the day the social worker brought me to Liam’s house.
After I spent two days in the custody of the state while they were working on the specifics to assign my mother’s brother as my legal guardian, his wife welcomed me with a smile.
But he was clearly not happy; he had gotten another mouth to feed.
I wasn’t happy to be there either. None of us truly had a choice in the matter.
I had noticed the bruises Liam had, and how dark his eyes got when his father was around.
His gaze, full of terror, told me everything he would never tell me.
But it was that day my suspicion took root.
Because you can suspect all you like, but you never know how bad things are until you experience them yourself.
We were eating dinner, and I had been starving for two days because of the group home they had assigned me to until they figured out who would get me.
It’s not like they withheld food from me—the opposite, actually.
I was offered a meal three times each day, but there were too many kids and not enough food for everyone.
A small boy around seven years old who looked incredibly skinny was sharing my room, and I made sure to give him every ounce of food I got.
He needed it more than I did. I could survive a few days without it.
Besides, it’s not like I could eat. My sister’s screams still echoed in my mind days after I witnessed her drowning. Her death was on my hands, and even though my parents' deaths were too, hers was the only one I ever regretted.
The moment I finished my plate—what little my aunt had to spare—I asked in a low voice if I could have anything else.
I didn’t care if it was leftovers from two days ago.
I was still starving. She got up to get me more, and that was when her husband decided to get up and bang on the table with both hands.
He showed his frustration in a theatrical way that shocked no one around the table.
They all stayed still. Looked down. Avoided him at all costs.
I didn’t. Because I wasn’t afraid of him, I had already taken two monsters out of this world; he wasn’t the one to fear.
“You will be grateful for what we give you, boy,” he said, his voice firm, full of an authority he didn’t deserve to own. I remember the night like it was yesterday.
He approached me quickly from the other side of the table and pulled me off my seat by my shirt, ripping it in the process. I loved that shirt; Lena got it for me on my last birthday.
His breath reeked of alcohol. The smell was unbearable, almost making me vomit what little food was in my stomach.
He pushed me to the floor, stepping on my back.
No one moved. No one tried to stop him. He removed his belt, and it wasn’t long before I felt the worn leather, soaked with my cousin’s blood, hit my own flesh.
I held my breath for as long as I could.
Each hit hurt more than the one before it, and eventually I couldn’t hold back anymore.
I screamed—a scream full of rage. It wasn’t one of pain.
I wasn’t screaming for that. I was screaming because I needed to stay down, to bear this punishment.
It wasn’t time yet to act. Tears filled my eyes with every lash, with every spiteful word that left his mouth.
“Your whore of a mother had to go get herself killed,” he said, and I laughed inside my head.
If only he knew. “Always having to bear the burden of her mistakes. The stupid slut had to dump another useless boy on my lap.” I remember his words so clearly.
They are still a sound in my mind, clear like that night.
His voice echoed in the room, with nothing else but my screams and cries to fill the void in between.
Because eventually the pain became too real to bear, and my screams of agony blended with those of anger.
“You are worse than the other one,” he said, and my eyes found Liam’s. In silence, I could tell a pact was forming. An agreement to stick together. Even if that meant we would die together.