Chapter 7 The Past
THE PAST
AMELIA’S brEAKING POINT
As the days passed by, my heart grew colder, and I felt as if a breaking point was heading my way.
I was in the kitchen, staring at the blue-black bruise on the apple in my palm, when Mom drifted in on silent feet and opened the fridge, the glass bottles rattling like teeth. She didn’t look at me.
I watched her pour orange juice into a mug already crusted with last night’s wine, and I thought: this is what it means to inherit suffering, to watch someone lose themselves so slowly you almost get used to the vanishing.
She caught me watching. Her eyes were slits drawn tight, but there was a flicker of embarrassment under the surface. An old, familiar shame. “What? Never seen a woman drink her breakfast?”
She forced a smile that was more snarl than anything.
I wanted to fight her, to scream, to tell her she was hollowing us out one sip at a time, but my rage had burned itself into embers. There was nothing left but the tired, brittle bones of disappointment.
Instead, I shrugged and took a bite of the bitter apple. “You should probably eat something.”
She laughed. “Food makes me sick.” She drank, wiped her mouth, and looked past me to the window, where the ice rimed the edges and made the yard look like a frozen battlefield.
A silence grew between us, one that felt like it might swallow the whole house.
I let it bloom, then said, “Everything makes you sick because you are sick, mom. Addiction is just sucking the life out of you, day by day.”
I knew the words would cut, but I didn’t flinch. I wanted to see if she’d bleed, or if, like me, she’d finally gone numb to pain.
She set her mug down with a hard clink and leaned her elbows on the counter, pinching the skin between her brows. “You always were a little bitch,” she said, but her voice was thin and losing altitude. “Even as a baby. Wouldn’t let me hold you, wouldn’t stop crying.”
I shrugged, letting the words bounce off. “Maybe I sensed what was coming.”
She slumped, staring at the fridge as if expecting it to open a portal and suck her away.
Her eyes were glassy, red at the rims. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this, you know.
” Her fingers traced the spiral of a water stain on the countertop.
“I used to think I’d be different. My mother was trash, her mother was trash. I thought I was better.”
I wanted to say she never had a chance, not with that bloodline, that she was always bound to end up here.
But I kept it in, holding the bitterness in my molars.
Instead, I looked at her, really looked, and for a second I saw not the monster but the animal. Tired, cornered, desperate for a way out.
“Then be better,” I said, voice flat. “Quit. Get help.”
Her laugh was a soft wet hiccup. “Easy for you to say.”
I dropped the rest of my apple in the trash and turned to leave. “It’s not easy for anyone, but it’s what you have to do if you don’t want the sickness to consume you until you’re nothing but a rotten corpse.”
She blinked, twice, and I saw the old machinery of maternal guilt trying to grind back to life. “Shut the fuck up,” she muttered. “You want to see me dead? Is that it?” The desperation in her voice was a hairline fracture widening with every word.
I leaned against the counter, arms folded. “No. But you’re doing a pretty good job of that yourself.” The words felt good, cruel and honest, buzzing in my mouth like bees.
I braced for a slap, or a glass thrown, but she only stared, lips pursed, chin trembling.
The silence stretched.
She broke first, as always. “You think you’ll get out, that you’re so fucking pure.”
For a second, I wanted to say yes, maybe I did. That I could still choose a different story, a different ending.
But the truth was there in my mouth, sour as bile: I was made from her. My veins ran with the same rage, the same hunger for oblivion.
Maybe I’d never get free.
So, I shrugged, and we watched each other across the kitchen, two ghosts in a house that had never been a home.
I wanted to look away, to calcify myself against the spectacle, but I kept my gaze locked, holding her in the crosshairs of a daughter’s impossible love.
Her shoulders curled forward, like a rat, and she pressed the heel of her palm so hard into her eye socket that I half-expected to see blood.
“I’m sorry,” she choked, voice slurred and lurching. “I’m so fucking sorry, kiddo. You don’t understand—”
I cut her off. “You’re right. I don’t. I never will.”
At school, I kept my head down, headphones on. The world shrunk to a single hallway, the floor vibrating with other people’s footsteps but never quite touching me.
Dante hovered in the periphery—at lunch, after school, in the parking lot—but I kept him at the exact distance required to keep either of us from falling into something irreparable.
I didn’t want to be anyone’s project, and I especially didn’t want to be the reason anyone else broke.
Caiden haunted me, day by day. His presence was a fungus: invasive, resistant, metastasizing through all the cracks I’d tried to wall off.
He appeared just as I stepped out of homeroom, an unmoving pillar of violence at the end of the hall. But when he saw me, he straightened like a snake tasting the air.
I side-stepped, hoping to merge with a passing group of girls, but he shifted his weight to block the nearest branch of hallway. The girls peeled off, and I had no choice but to walk right at him.
“Look at you, Little Miss Tragic,” he spat. His voice wasn’t even trying for the usual sneer; it was ragged, frayed. “That hair is really working for you. What’d you do, cut it with your teeth?” The line was lazy and mean, but there was blood on it.
I scowled, walking past. “How about you try a new hobby, like dying?”
He grabbed my elbow and yanked, hard, spinning me around. “Don’t fucking walk away from me,” he hissed. “You think I’m a joke? That I’m not real?”
In that moment I recognized the look in his eyes: raw, wild, like a rabid coyote at the bottom of a pit.
I jerked my arm free, and his grip left a white mark on my skin. “You’re not a joke. You’re a cautionary tale.” I tried to keep my voice flat, but the tremor betrayed me.
His mouth twisted. “You have no idea what I am.”
I wanted to laugh, but my jaw was stiff. “Sure I do. I’ve seen enough battered dogs to know when one’s about to bite the hand that won’t feed it.”
He lunged closer, jaw working, so close his breath burned bitterness into my eyes. “Maybe if you tried to be nice for once, people wouldn’t hate you so much.”
I wanted to spit at him, to scream, but I just shook my head. “People don’t hate me because I’m not nice. People hate me because you tell them to.”
“I swear to god, you think I control the whole universe.” His voice crackled dangerously. “Earth to Amelia: nobody gives a shit about you. You could disappear and they wouldn’t even pause to blink.”
“Same could be said for you,” I said. “The world would keep spinning. Your dad would just punch a new face.”
The words landed. He went still, lips parted, a dumbstruck moment where I thought he might actually hit me. Instead, he just breathed hard, the fight leaking out slow. For an instant he looked like he might cry. Or kill me.
“You don’t know shit about me,” he finally muttered.
“I know what fear smells like,” I said. “I grew up inside it.”
“Maybe. But, you don’t know my fear. I could show you, then you’d really know.”
We stood there, locked together by hate and something else, gravity pulling our bones too close for comfort or escape. Every muscle in my body screamed to hit him, but instead I just made my breathing slow, even, until the pulse of dread shrank to a pinprick.
“I’m not scared of you,” I said, and hated how much I wanted him to believe it.
He stared, the black wells of his eyes glittering with emptiness. “Liar,” he said, almost gentle. “You’re scared of everything.”
The bell rang, breaking the moment. I slid past him, brushing his arm just long enough to feel the shudder run through his body. His heat lingered on my skin.
Now, it had been almost three weeks after the night Lillian and Caiden detonated my last scrap of trust, I came home to find Mom on the living room floor, curled around a bottle of cheap gin. The TV was on, but the volume was muted. She was mouthing the words in the dark.
“Mom?” I asked as I walked over to her frail shape, afraid that she finally lost what was left of her sanity.
Her lips moved, but no sound came out. I reached down, nudging her shoulder, and she startled awake. Her eyes were wild.
For a moment, she didn’t recognize me.
Then her features slumped into a kind of relief.
“You’re here,” she said, and it was almost a plea.
She tried to sit up, but her legs didn’t work right. The bottle rolled away, sloshing onto the carpet, and I had a flash of how a crime scene tech might catalog this mess: one adult female, collapsed, surrounded by evidence of slow self-destruction.
I knelt next to her, uncertain whether to help her upright or just let her stay collapsed, where the air was safely close to the ground.
She reached for me and caught the sleeve of my sweatshirt. “Don’t go,” she said, the words sticky and slow. “Everyone leaves. I can’t take it anymore.”
I closed my eyes and inhaled, waiting for the rest.
“Your father, that prick, he left. Lillian’s gone now, too.” She began to cry. “She left this morning. Just packed her shit and went.”
A black balloon of silence expanded between us. I didn’t trust myself to speak.
“She said she had a place with her friend. I think she’s lying.” Mom’s head drooped. “It’s my fault. I ruin everything. I did it to her. She said I’m poison.”
She wailed as she spoke and I crumbled amongst her weeps, feeling the walls close in further around my lungs.
She grabbed at my wrist, and would not let go.
She was less than a mother now. Just a banshee in a bone-white t-shirt, eyes so raw they looked peeled.
“You don’t leave me, Amelia,” she said, voice shaking from some vein-deep wound, “If you ever go, I’ll die.
You’ll see. You’ll be the one to kill me in the end. ”
I could not breathe. Her grip was a shackle of guilt.
For a second, I saw the whole future unspool, a straight line from this room to a hundred empty apartments, a thousand bottles, my own face reflected in cracked glass, always running, never free.
The room was close, fetid. I felt the heat of her collapse. I tried to peel my arm away. She would not let loose. “I mean it,” she kept saying, “I mean it, I mean it—” each repetition smaller, a heartbeat losing pressure.
I don’t know how long I stood there, tethered to her grief, staring down at the top of her head, the scalp visible through thinning hair.
I wondered if she realized how small she’d become, how easily one could break her if they wanted. How easily she’d let herself be broken.
My skin crawled. I wanted to vanish between the floorboards.
Finally, I twisted my wrist hard and she let go with a yelp, fingers curling back to her own chest, sobbing into her knuckles.
I stood, watching her unravel across our borrowed beige carpet, and thought for the first time that maybe she was right: maybe she’d never be anything but poison, and maybe I was next in line to inherit the taste.
Maybe daughter’s were only meant to carry their mother’s grief.
When I finally made it to my room, I pressed my back to the door and slid down to the carpet, knees hugged to my chest, forehead against the cool hollow of my arms.
I tried to slow my heart, to dislodge the cold lump stuck behind my ribs, but it wouldn’t move.
I wanted to scream, to shake the walls until the house collapsed and buried all the ghosts for good.
Instead, I sat there, breathing shallow and fast, until my stomach cramped and my tongue tasted of copper.
Eventually, there were no more sounds from the living room. I pictured her there, fetal, curled around the empty, shatterproof bottle, eyelids flickering with dreams of before.
The shame of it—my shame—was a gluey, sluggish thing. I let it harden around me, a second skin I’d never be able to peel off.