Chapter 2 The Past
THE PAST
AMELIA’S brEAKING POINT
Everyone at school knew about Mom. Whispers trailed after me like vultures, curiosity and pity colliding in their eyes. Most steered clear, either intimidated or repelled by the messy fragments of my life.
I rounded the corner to the classroom door.
Thwack.
My toe caught something solid. One second I was upright, the next I was tumbling onto a pair of scuffed Converse.
“Whoops. My bad,” Caiden drawled, voice dripping with disdain.
I scrambled upright, fists clenching at my sides. He looked down at me with those coal-black eyes. Cold and empty caverns where light dared not tread. “Sorry? Are you even capable of remorse?” I spat, studying the cruel smirk curving his lips.
“Not really,” he shrugged. “Doesn’t look like you mind.”
My jaw clenched so tight it ached, but I forced myself to breathe slowly. A handful of students had paused to watch; I refused to give them the triumph of my reaction.
Caiden had mastered the art of feigned innocence. He’d done it before, in fifth grade. He’d shoved me off the playground steps, leaving me with a bruised arm and no apology.
The teachers believed his smooth lies, where he deemed me as clumsy, and I hated him for it.
“Why do you have to be such a bastard?” I yelled as he pivoted to leave. Tears stung my eyes, and my voice cracked on the word “bastard,” raw and broken.
A flare of anger painted my vision in dark crimson. He paused, his back rigid, then spun around and stalked toward me.
I felt his breath, warm and tainted, brush my face. “You’ll never understand my pain, Amelia,” he hissed, eyes blazing with something like fury. “So don’t pretend to.”
My heart thundered. “You’re not the only one who hurts,” I shot back, voice steady with the weight of all the mornings I’d spent praying for strength. He didn’t answer.
He simply turned and melted into the tide of students pouring into the halls.
“I loathe you,” I whispered after him, but the words dissolved into the swirl of pre-class chatter.
When pain and hatred churn between two people, there are only two roads: you face the inferno together and try to rise above, or you run until it consumes you.
Between Caiden and me, the embers of resentment sputtered into flame.
Let the war rage, Caiden. Let it burn until one or both of us falls.
Home was meant to be my refuge, a safe harbor, yet the thin walls and simmering tempers transformed it into a pressure cooker ready to explode at any moment.
My mother drifted through rooms like a ghost, cloaked in a haze of exhaustion. Her eyes were distant, sunken behind dark, weary circles that told tales of sleepless nights.
Lillian was either hiding in her bedroom, or slouched on the couch, headphones clamped tightly over her ears to drown out reality.
Above our roof, black storm clouds seemed permanently anchored, heavy and ominous, threatening to unleash chaos at any moment.
They were at it again, and I was not surprised; it had become a familiar refrain in my life. "I’m over eighteen, so stop trying to tell me what to do," Lillian's voice crackled with irritation.
Peering around the corner, I saw them locked in a battle of glares in the living room, expressions like daggers.
"I don’t give a fuck if you're eighteen. You still live in my house, so you will obey me," my mother's voice was a whip crack, cutting through the tension.
"That is such bullshit logic, mom! Get over yourself. You’re barely even here most of the time to claim this as your house," Lillian countered, her words dripping with contempt.
"If you do not like it, then you can just get the hell out. It was your decision to drop out of college and move back in," my mother shot back, her voice a mix of frustration and resignation.
Silence settled like a heavy fog, and I was about to turn away when a sound, unmistakable in its violence, echoed through the room.
I spun around, heart pounding, to see my mother holding her own face, her expression a mix of shock and disbelief.
Lillian’s hand hovered in the air, trembling.
My mother’s eyes went flat and cold, as if all the anger had been drained out in one cruel siphon. She didn’t move, didn’t even lower her palm from her stinging cheek, just stared at Lillian in shock.
Lillian shrank in on herself, mouth working, then she backed up until the backs of her knees hit the sofa. “I didn’t mean—” she started, but her voice was a strangled croak. She pressed a fist to her mouth, eyes fixed on the red bloom spreading across my mother’s cheek.
I watched, paralyzed. My body wanted to fly at Lillian, to shield our mother from more, but the rest of me just stood there, wooden, like I was watching actors on a sound stage.
My mother recovered first, turning her back on us both, her steps stiff and unsteady. The kitchen light caught the wet tracks on her face, and for a moment I saw her not as a monster, but as a woman undone by her own life, her daughters grown wild and bitter.
Lillian’s breathing quickened. “She started it,” she muttered, almost childlike, but the words dissolved into a dry sob. She sank to the carpet, fingers clutching at her temples.
From the kitchen came the crash of glass, my mother shattering a cup, maybe on purpose, maybe not.
I realized I was holding my own breath.
The house shuddered with silence. I crept past Lillian toward my room, trying not to disturb the air.
I could still feel the echo of Caiden’s hands on my skin, the heat and shame of it lingering like radio static.
At my desk, I opened my sketchbook and tried to let it out the only way I knew how.
But all I could manage was a pathetic tangle, a wild, unfocused bramble instead of the careful portraits I used to make.
My wrist ached from the pressure, but it didn’t dull the noise inside my chest. I tore the page out, crumpled it in my fist, and shoved the sketchbook away.
The walls stifled me. I needed air, the kind that froze your skin and made your lungs remember how to work.
I grabbed my cardigan and slipped outside, letting the front door whisper shut behind me.
I didn’t have a destination. My sneakers found the sidewalk, then the sloping curve of the street, then the dirt path that wound past the soccer field and into the old park.
A single swing creaked in the empty playground, chain links singing a metallic lullaby to no one in particular.
I wandered aimlessly, brushing my fingertips along the ridged bark of an elm. The world was locked in a gray half-light, neither day nor night. I felt invisible, a ghost in my own life.
That’s when I saw him. Dante, alone, hunched on a half-rotted bench with his elbows on his knees, watching the puddles at his feet.
A cigarette dangled from his lips. The glow of it caught the last scraps of sunlight and set his shadow flickering on the ground.
He looked up, his expression startled for a heartbeat, then softened into something almost apologetic. “Hey,” he said, voice rough. “You okay?”
I nearly laughed. The answer was written all over me, and he could see that. My lips parted, but nothing came out.
Dante flicked the cigarette away, grinding it into the gravel. “You can sit, if you want.”
I hesitated, then folded myself onto the bench, keeping a careful slat of distance between us. The silence buzzed.
He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and spoke without looking at me. “Is it your mom again?”
“Always.” The word came out small, like a cough. “Or my sister. Or both. Or some other fucking cosmic joke.”
He nodded, slow and grave. “You want to talk about it?” His voice was low, respectful of the dark.
I wanted to. I wanted to spill every broken thing in my chest onto the mud and let it rot there, feeding the worms.
But I just shook my head. “I don’t know how.”
He let that hang for a minute. A breeze whipped a strand of hair across my face, and I tucked it behind my ear, suddenly aware of how hunched and childish I must look.
The breeze enveloped me, and I wished I could float into it, fly away into some other reality.
The wind picked up, raking through the empty swings and making them squeal.
I shivered.
Dante shrugged off his jacket and draped it over my shoulders. His warmth lingered in the cotton threads.
I tugged the sleeves over my fists, felt the heat seeping into my bones.
“It’s not going to get better, is it?” The question was a pebble dropped into a vast, black well.
He didn’t flinch. “Maybe not soon. Maybe not ever. But sometimes it helps to have somebody who gets it.” His words were careful.
The gesture gutted me. I shook under the weight of his kindness, anger and shame tangling in my throat. I wanted to tell him to take it back, to stop pretending I was worth the warmth.
Instead, I crushed my fists in the jacket’s sleeves and stared at my sneakers.
“You don’t have to babysit me, you know,” I said, voice small and watery. “I’m not going to break.”
He scuffed his boot against the gravel. “That’s not why I’m here.”
“Then why are you here?” I pressed. “Is this some guilt thing? You feel sorry for the girl with the fucked-up family?” My words came out sharper than I intended, but I was tired of being a charity case, tired of people acting like I was a kicked dog in an ASPCA commercial.
Dante’s jaw flexed. “I don’t pity you, Amelia.” He said my name like it hurt him.
He looked so tired. I wondered what it cost him to be good when his best friend was Caiden. What it cost him to be the one in their duo who still had a soul.
The silence grew, crawling between the slats of the bench, pressing in on my chest until I had to speak or suffocate. “He hates me, you know. Caiden. I don’t even know what I did.”
Dante shook his head. “It’s not about you.
” He ran a hand through his hair. “His dad, he’s worse than you can imagine.
Caiden learned early how to hurt before he got hurt.
He thinks if he makes you the target, he’ll be safe.
” His voice darkened. “He’s not. Nobody is.
Somebody’s always bleeding in his house. ”
“I can’t handle being someone’s punching bag forever.”
Dante’s lips curled in a sad smile. “I know. But you take it, every day. That takes guts. More than you think.”
The wind cut through my sweater. I huddled deeper into his jacket, a borrowed shell. “Some days, I want to disappear.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. I wondered if he, too, ever wanted to vanish, if the world’s rough edges ever dug into him the way they did me.
“I feel like that too, sometimes. My dad works too much, drinks often, my mom is always stressed. It’s nothing like your situation, or Caiden’s, but it weighs me down some days.” Dante leaned back on the bench, his head turned sideways to look at me.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
He shrugged, as if it wasn’t a big deal. “I get through it, I tell myself that it could be worse.”
I wanted to believe him.
But my anger wouldn’t grant me peace; it hungered, gnawed, begged for someone to blame.
“Maybe I should just stoop down to Caiden’s level next time,” I said. The words surprised us both.
“I wouldn’t blame you,” he said. “But you’re not like him.”
Wasn’t I? I could feel it deep in my marrow, that sickness, that generational rot.
Maybe I was just another version of my mother, bottling up poison until it overflew and scorched everything in its path.
I stared at the raw crescents my nails had left on my palm, thinking I should cut them short, before they hurt someone else.
Dante’s hand hovered, hesitant, then landed on mine.
I let it stay, neither flinching nor grasping, and we sat like that for a long time, listening to the wind try to tear the world apart.
The sky overhead bled from iron gray to navy, and the streetlights flickered awake, casting cones of sickly gold onto the crumbling sidewalk.
The world shrunk down to the bench, two bodies pressed close but separated by an ocean of silence.
I thought of all the times I’d watched other girls orbit each other, arms slung over shoulders, mirroring steps, swapping secrets like friendship bracelets. Their laughter was a language I’d never learned. I wore this isolation like a badge.
Dante’s jacket weighed on me, a tangible reminder of kindness I could neither accept nor repay.
My fists balled up in the warped sleeves, skin itching, and I let myself picture what it would be like to lean into him, to rest my head on his shoulder, to cry until the ache hollowing out my chest spilled onto his shirt and left a stain.
But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I didn’t even know how to start.
My teeth ached with the effort of holding myself together. I didn’t realize I was rocking, just a little, until Dante’s hand landed gentle and steady on my knee.
“Hey,” he murmured. Warmth, simple and unassuming, radiated from his palm. “I’m not going anywhere, okay?”
I managed a nod, small and jerky. I was afraid if I tried to speak, I’d scream.
“I know you think nobody sees you,” he said, eyes fixed on the scuffed toes of his boots. “But I do.”
My throat tightened.
His words should have comforted me, but instead they scraped at some raw place inside.
People always left. They got tired of the mess, or bored, or just forgot. You could count on that as surely as sunset.
The swings squealed mournfully. The sky overhead pressed down, bruised and swollen with the promise of rain.
I wanted to believe him, but all I could see was the way I flinched from loud voices, how easily I cried, how I let people trample my boundaries until nothing was left but a muddy doormat.
“I should go,” I said finally, hating the way my voice trembled.
I peeled off the jacket, holding it out to him like an apology, but Dante shook his head. “Keep it. I’ve got others.”
He said it like he believed I’d be cold again, like I’d need it.
I bundled the jacket close, wrapping myself in its borrowed armor, and walked home through the blue dusk. Every footstep sounded too loud.
I wanted to evaporate, just drift up through the clouds and never come back.
Inside, our house was dark except for the jaundiced glow of the kitchen. I stood in the doorway, invisible, while my mother scrubbed at a wine stain on her shirt.
Lillian crouched on the floor, gathering shards of glass into her palm, not bothering with a dustpan.
Nobody looked up when I closed the door. It was like I wasn’t even there.
I drifted to my room.
I laid on my back and tried to name the shapes on my ceiling, to convince myself the shadows were just dust and not monsters with outstretched arms.
The world outside darkened by degrees, one streetlamp at a time. I let my mind drift, searching for a safe place, but everything ended up looping back to the moment at the wall, to Caiden’s hands and the taste of his hate on my tongue.