Chapter 41 The Past
THE PAST
CAIDEN’S CONDITIONING
I was halfway through senior year, and I was counting the days until graduation.
The day when I could maybe escape, the day when I could maybe be free. But freedom was an empty dream, and I knew the inevitable was suffering in the claws of my father.
Today, something was bubbling inside me. I could feel it the second I woke up. The heat in my blood, the sorrow in my heart, the loudness of my father.
My hatred for Amelia was blooming into something dark, possessing me like a fucking hungry beast.
But last night, I had a dream. No, a memory.
I dreamt of Amelia. Her innocence, her hair, her scent, how fucking adorable she was when we were kids.
I woke sweating. The dream was simple. We were back in the park, when my voice had a higher tone and my knuckles were still pink and unscarred.
Amelia was perched on a swing, chattering about birdsong and the shape of clouds, her hands waving with frantic, childish energy.
In the dream, her teeth were blindingly white and her laugh made the leaves vibrate.
I’d wanted to reach over and touch her, just to see if she was real, if her skin was as soft as I remembered, but even in the dream I lurched to violence instead, snatching a caterpillar out of her hand and crushing it in my fist. She cried.
I woke up furious at myself for even in fantasy being so pathetically transparent.
I sat up and rubbed my face hard, trying to shake the sleep off, but the rage didn’t go with it. It never did.
I got dressed fast. Jeans. Hoodie. Boots.
When I walked out, the living room was a mess. Empty cans. Ash. A half-crushed chip bag under the coffee table. My father sat in his chair like a king on a throne made of rot, one hand resting on a bottle.
He didn’t look at me at first.
He never did, not in a normal way. He only looked at me when he wanted to prove something. When he needed a target. When he wanted to remind himself he still owned something in this miserable house.
I tried to move past like I didn’t exist. Like I wasn’t a pulse he could crush with one sentence.
He spoke anyway. “You going to school today or you planning to be a worthless piece of shit your whole life?”
I stopped with my hand on the doorframe. My stomach twisted, but my face stayed blank.
“Going,” I muttered.
He snorted. “Sure. Good. Maybe you’ll learn something. Like how to stop embarrassing me.”
Embarrassing him. How fucking ironic.
I didn’t respond. If I responded, it would turn into a fight. If it turned into a fight, something would break. If something broke, it would be me.
So I swallowed my words like broken glass and walked out the door.
At school, her presence haunted me with the persistence of a toothache. I saw her everywhere: at her locker, bent over an overdue library book; in chem lab, mouth set in a thin, haunted line; at the edge of the quad, squinting into the wind, hair a living flame.
I wanted her wrecked. I wanted her to fall apart the way I did every time I caught my father’s shadow on the wall.
Yet I also felt a weird, painful burn in my chest every time I caught sight of her, a tangle of panicked want and loathing, a chemical spiral that left me dizzy and raw.
I hadn’t thought about these feelings in years. But now, they were in my vision, pulsing and burning.
Friday lunch, the cafeteria was a madhouse, and I took my usual place at the end of the table, a kingdom of empty milk cartons and poverty-tier pizza.
Dante sat across from me.
The air felt electric. Like something was about to happen, something stupid and irreversible.
I spotted her, as I always did. Amelia, hunched over her lunch tray, poking at the limp green beans like maybe they’d bite back.
She looked more hollow than usual. A little less color in her cheeks, her eyes rimmed dark like she hadn’t slept in a week. I hated myself for noticing.
Dante nudged me, noticing who I was staring at. “You see Amelia’s hair? Looks like she’s not doing so well.”
His face held concern, and I scowled.
“She looks like a corpse,” I replied, but the words tasted sour. “Maybe she finally realized nobody cares if she breathes.”
Dante raised an eyebrow, and I could tell my friend was reading me, weighing the danger of pushing further. “Shit, man, you’re obsessed. Just admit you want to rail her.”
My jaw flexed.
I wanted to punch Dante in the mouth for saying that. But it was true, a sick, festering truth, and the urge coiled hotter than ever.
I hated her, I did. But sometimes, the pull of hatred and the lust of desire became a confusing haze in my head.
“Fuck off,” I muttered, stabbing my fork into a clotted wad of mashed potato.
Images conjured in my mind that made my pulse throb: Amelia’s mouth, parted with surprise, the soft arch of her throat when she laughed.
I forced the thoughts down, hid them beneath the layered misery that shielded me from myself.
“She’s nothing,” I spat, louder than intended. Other heads turned. I felt the heat rise in my neck.
I stood abruptly, chair scraping across the floor, and stalked out of the cafeteria, leaving the tray and my friend behind.
I didn’t stop moving till I reached the gym, its echoing dark a sterile, familiar comfort.
I ducked into the empty weight room, let the clang and grind of metal be the only sound. I loaded the bar with more than I could handle, let it pin me to the bench until my arms shook and my vision blurred at the edges.
Every rep was a red purge, a wrenching away of the weakness. I thought of Amelia. Her delicate neck, the light in her eyes when she stood up for herself.
I pictured her hands, how they’d shake when I got too close, how she would go pale and shiver even when it wasn’t cold.
I kept pushing, letting the weight crash down, black stars swimming at the edges of my vision, until I lost count of the sets and couldn’t feel my arms anymore.
After, I sat on the rubber matting, sweat soaking through my cutoff, and let my head fall back against the wall. The world pulsed with each beat of my heart.
I didn’t want to move, ever again. But even there, in my exhaustion, the images of Amelia wouldn’t leave me. They layered over the ceiling tiles, invaded the bloodshot dark when I closed my eyes.
I was fucked, and I knew it.
After the workout, I showered in the empty locker room, letting the hot water scald me until my skin was streaked red. I scrubbed harder than I needed, trying to sand away the feeling that I was unclean, that something formless and shameful was crawling just under my skin.
I caught my face in the mirror. There was no softness left in my features, only harsh lines and angry shadows. I looked older than I should, like my father in a certain light, and that terrified me more than anything.
I ditched the rest of afternoon classes, prowling the length of the football field until my legs ached and my thoughts spun out into static.
The sun was pale and useless this late in the year, but I craved its warmth like a junkie. I lay on my back beneath the home bleachers, squinting through the bars at the empty sky, and let the chill leech through my clothes.
For the first time in years, I let myself feel the thing I’d spent a lifetime beating to death. The want. It was a pure, destructive force, the untamable animal inside me, and it hurt in a way that almost felt good.
I thought of the dream again. Amelia, the swing, her hair catching gold in the sun, and the ache in my chest flared so bright it made me want to scream or laugh or both.
There was something in her that called to all the ruined pieces of myself, some echo of softness I’d never been allowed to keep.
When the last bell of the school day rang, I lingered in the empty quad, watching the slow migration of students leaving the school.
I flexed my bruised knuckles, rolling my thumb over the scabbed skin, and searched for her. Amelia.
She always cut through the courtyard at this time of day, her gait quick and stilted, her eyes locked on a point somewhere beyond the horizon. I could almost time her presence to the minute; there was a discipline to her misery, a schedule for her pain.
And there she was. A distant shape, arms cradling textbooks across her chest, dark hair streaming behind her like a flag of surrender.
I pressed my tongue to the cut inside my cheek, tasted salt and metal, and for an instant the world tunneled to just the two of us, all noise and color collapsing into a single point of gravity.
I hated how my body reacted, how the sight of her sent a current through my nerves, how my heart stuttered and then snapped into double-time.
It felt like weakness. Worse, it felt like hunger.
I stayed hidden, just watching.
She didn’t notice me at first; her eyes flicked left and right, scanning for threats but never seeing the ones that mattered. When she finally sensed me there, her pace faltered. She tightened her grip on her books, as if the extra pressure would keep her from shattering on the spot.
She was close enough now that I could hear the faint rattle of her breath, the uneven steps she took to keep her distance.
I could have reached out and grabbed the strap of her backpack, reeled her in like a fish on a trembling line.
The urge was there, as always, to close the gap.
To see if she’d fight back, or just crumple and cry.
But I didn’t.
I took the long way home, a route through side streets and half-abandoned lots, letting the chill of late spring scrape the heat from my skin.
The memory of the dream clung to me, damp and persistent, the way cigarette smoke clings to a thrift store jacket. I flexed my hands until my knuckles cracked, as if I could squeeze the image of her out through my palms, but it only grew sharper, more insistent.
By the time I reached my house, the sky had gone the color of old bruises, and the porch light buzzed with a swarm of moths.