Chapter 34 The Past #2
The words went off like a car bomb in my head. I sat up straighter, fists clenching, my neck prickling with a cold reptile awareness, like I’d just spotted a knife in a friend’s hand. “No she’s fucking not,” I shot back, louder than I meant, the words burning on the way out.
Dante looked at me sidelong, testing. “Calm down, man. She’s… I dunno. She’s nice. Not a drama queen like the rest.”
I wanted to grab Dante by the skull and drive his face into the concrete, see if I could knock the softness out of him.
Instead, I balled my hands hard enough to leave bruises on my own thighs.
“You ever talk to her?” Dante pressed, as if he didn’t hear the warning in my voice. “Like, really talk?”
“Why the fuck would I?” I snapped. “She’s a freak.”
Dante shrugged, chewing a hangnail. “Just saying. She’s different, is all.” He smiled again.
I stood up so fast the world tipped sideways and for a second I saw it all: the autumn rot along the bank, the scum swirling on the surface, Dante’s face split by the line of shadow from the old birch.
“Don’t ever say that again,” I said, my voice flat. I let the silence stretch, let the threat live in the air, the way my father had taught me.
Dante raised his hands, palms out. “Fine, man. Jesus.”
But his eyes never left me, dark and careful. Measuring.
A wind shivered through the trees and I felt the cold crawl inside my hoodie, settle against my ribs. I wanted to break something but there was nothing there except Dante, and Dante was the closest thing to family I had left.
It was a sick, twisted dependency.
I jammed my fists in my pockets and stalked away, crunching over dead leaves and brittle sticks, not looking back even when Dante’s footsteps followed at a careful distance.
I walked until the trees thinned and the town reasserted itself, until every porch light and warped picket fence reminded me of the world’s smallness, the impossibility of escape.
Dante peeled off toward his house without a word, leaving me to pace my own block like a caged animal, circling the perimeter until the streetlights flickered on.
I killed time at the playground, scuffing my boots on the fire-blackened slide, watching as the day’s heat bled away into a bruised evening sky.
I didn’t want to go home, and I didn’t feel like crashing at Dante’s house anymore.
I just wanted the ache beneath my skin to stop, for the meat of my body to quiet down and leave me alone with the white noise.
I pictured my father, already half-lobotomized by a bottle, sprawled in his recliner with the TV muttering in the background.
Maybe tonight would be peaceful. Maybe the bastard would just pass out and leave me the hell alone.
I was wrong.
As soon as I slipped through the back door, the stench of vodka and microwave burritos hit me, followed by the pulsing bass of some rock song.
The living room was a disaster of empty cans, ashtrays, and crumpled boxes, and my father lay stretched across the couch in nothing but boxers and a sweat-stained undershirt, eyes half-lidded and mouth hanging slightly open.
The man’s chest rose and fell with the slow, heavy rhythm of the nearly dead.
For a minute I watched him, seeing the future mapped in the bloat of my father’s gut and the purple rings beneath his eyes.
I hated the bastard, but more than that, I was afraid of turning into him, of repeating the cycle so many times the lines between us blurred and it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
I stepped into the kitchen, the floor sticky underfoot, and opened the fridge. There was nothing but expired milk, a six-pack with one beer left, and a Tupperware container of something that might have once been chili.
I grabbed the beer and popped the top with my teeth, letting the cold foam cut the taste of bile in my throat.
“Boy,” the shape on the couch growled, not even opening its eyes. “Bring me a cold one.”
I said nothing. I just set the beer down on the coffee table and retreated to the far side of the room, hands tucked into the sleeves of my hoodie.
The old man grunted, took a long swallow, and then finally cracked one eye open.
“You late,” he slurred. “Where you been?”
I shrugged. “Out.”
“You got a fuckin’ attitude on you,” my father said, his voice rising. “Come over here.”
I didn’t want to. I wanted to smash the glass coffee table, hurl the bottle at my father’s head and watch it burst, see the old man’s skull finally crack and spill out the rot.
But I moved closer, step by step.
“Sit down,” my father said, gesturing vaguely at the threadbare armchair across from the couch. I sat, but only at the edge, my body coiled and ready to spring.
My father watched me for a long minute. “You been fighting again?” he finally asked, eyes narrowing. “Heard from the school. You got a problem with authority, boy, and it’s gonna get you fucked up real good some day.”
My jaw clicked as I clenched it. “Don’t see what it matters to you,” I said, my voice flat. “You’re passed out most days, anyway.”
The old man laughed, a dry, wet sound. “You’re a smartass. You think I don’t see? I see everything.”
He levered himself upright, and for a second I watched the struggle.
He lurched forward, bracing his elbows on his knees so our faces nearly matched, the stench of vodka and rotted teeth an assault all its own.
“You wanna be a man, you gotta learn how to take a hit,” my father said, slapping a meaty palm against my cheek, “and keep standing. You keep folding up like tissue paper, you’ll end up nothing but a stain on the floor. ”
“I don’t fold,” I whispered, my voice so thin it almost vanished between us.
“Could’ve fooled me,” he said, wagging his head.
“You get that from your bitch of a mother. She ran, and now you run too. You can’t even hit back when a man comes at you.
” He leaned in and spat the words. “If you want to stop being a disappointment, you gotta start hurting people for real. You gotta finish what you start, boy.”
I didn’t blink. I just stared at his ruined face, every bad decision and old bruise mapped into folds of skin, and saw my own future. Saw that this would be my inheritance, unless I found a way to burn the lineage to ash.
The urge to strike him was tidal, but I kept it coiled inside. Someday, I promised myself. Someday.
“Go to your room,” my father finally spat, dismissing me like an animal. “And keep your goddamn mouth shut.”
I did, moving through the hall with the stealth of a hunted thing, every sense tuned to the creaks and groans of the house.
I locked myself inside my room, and lay on the bed, my hands folded on my chest like a corpse in a casket.
I kept my eyes open, staring up at the sawtooth cracks in the plaster until my neck ached, until the sting of my father’s slap simmered down to a numb afterglow.
Sleep was a last resort, a submission I tried to delay as long as possible, because I knew what would wait for me there.
The old reruns, the memory loops, my mother’s back dissolving into fog as she walked away from the house, the blood-warm taste of my own teeth after a bad night, the way Amelia’s eyes looked before she started crying.
Always Amelia, even when I tried to knock her out of my head with fists and venom. It was like a sick addiction.
I pressed the heel of my palm into my eye socket, as if I could mash her image into a pulp and wring it out through my tear ducts. I almost wished she’d fight back, that she’d snap one day and cut me open with a few sharp syllables in front of everyone.
But she always just took it, absorbed the blows like a black sponge, and that made me want to peel her skin off and see what she’d look like underneath.
I hated the needing most of all. The sick, pathetic hunger that craved her eyes on me, even if they were full of contempt or terror, because at least then they were real, and pointed at me, and not through me the way the world usually did.
I’d rather be despised than invisible.
I sat up in the darkness, every muscle in my arms and back rigid with a need I could not name. My hands, when I looked at them, were shaking.
Anger mingled with those thoughts, but hatred was easily blurred. Those feelings were born from something deeper, something pure. I didn’t dwell on it, though.
The two emotions blended, anger and Amelia, until they became one.
She made my blood boil. Her existence was a disease to my mind, infecting my bones, devouring me. Amelia was the bane of my heart, leading me into an abyss of agony. She haunted me.
Her innocence, her smile, her pain, her presence. She was a phantom in my shadow, lurking in my dreams.
It swallowed me entirely, until I was a rotting ghost.