Chapter 33 BETH
BETH
Liar.
I didn’t know when I slept off or how I did. I remembered staring at my broken devices, the shock refusing to wear off, the night refusing to end so I could wake up from the terrible nightmare.
I remembered sitting there for hours and hours, hearing the clock tick, watching the world pass me by.
And when the shock eventually wore off, I remembered it all, the throbbing in my jaw, the burn in my eyes as tears blurred my vision.
My years of hard work was gone in a puff of smoke. My arts, every single one of them. My comfort. My home. My utopia. Gone.
Reality made my eyes twitch and my fingers clench. Heat built and simmered low in my chest, each breath shallow, feeding the fire.
I didn’t know then what was wrong with me. I just knew I had never felt such emotion before, never. The world around me had blurred out, the edges of my vision tinting in red as I abruptly rose to my feet.
I remembered how I felt nothing but the anger cracking like a forest flame in my chest. I didn’t feel it when the sharp pain of a broken glass embedded itself into my foot as I trudged out of the room.
The air was bitter then, the tension in my chest corded like a wire ready to snap.
All I saw was red, and my mind bounced between grey, bleak, and black.
I was in no control when I charged into the kitchen and grabbed a knife.
And all I heard behind the crack of the closed door in my head was kill her, kill her, kill her.
So, when I barged right into Mother’s room and reached the bump hidden under her cover, all I wanted to do was kill her.
It was all her fault. She had ruined everything.
The one thing that managed to keep me afloat.
Drawing, and my silly little poems were my way of taking back control from the world that had rendered me unwanted.
Every time my stylus glided against my screen, every time I wrote, I felt whole. I had the power of creation in my hand. And I had created so many universes inside that room, safely inside those devices. Some were completed, some were work in progress.
But she wiped them all off.
She took everything from me. And that night, I thought she deserved nothing but death.
I remembered driving the knife right through the cover, over and over again.
I poured all my years of hate, anger, neglect, and regret into every motion of the knife.
I wanted her to bleed. I wanted to hear her scream and beg.
But there was a problem.
I couldn’t hear anything, nothing at all that sounded like the cry of agony.
And I couldn’t see anything.
No blood.
Violently, I pulled the cover from the bed and all I saw were the pillows whose cottons were spilling out and flying around.
A loud roar sliced through the air like a primal cry of rage as I continued to stab the bed and the pillows over and over again, until I was worn out. Until my lungs burned from screaming.
My breaths were shallow, sweat coating every part of my body as I collapsed beside the bed, body trembling.
Then all of a sudden, something snapped inside me. Like the light that was momentarily snuffed out had been breathed back into me. It felt like a dark cloud finally clearing to give way to the blue, like a mask being pulled away from my eyes. I could see clearly, think clearly, hear clearly.
That moment hit me like a cold wind, gasp ripping from my throat. The knife had slipped from my trembling hands, hitting the floor beside me with a loud thud.
I had raised my hands to my eyes, my heart pounding. I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t believe what I almost did. I almost took a life with these hands.
“I told you, didn’t I?” Then a voice suddenly slithered through the quiet, and my head snapped to the other side of the bed.
There was a brown chair. That was where Mother would usually sit to read her Bible. And that moment, she was right there, perched on the chair, hidden by the dark.
“You are just like him,” she said. “Like father, like daughter.”
“No.” Panic broke through the haze of shock as I shook my head frantically. “No, no, no. I’m not. I’m not like him. I didn’t. I couldn’t.”
“Why not?” She raised a taunting brow. “His blood burns in your veins, doesn’t it? His darkness lives inside you.”
“No,” I sobbed, clawing at my hands, at my face, feeling the need to peel off my skin and rid myself of this body.
“See why you have to stay here with me?” She rose to her feet gently.
“I am the only one who knows you. I am the only one who stayed despite it all. No one will accept you when they know the monster that lives in your head, the darkness that breeds inside you. No one will ever accept you like I have accepted you.”
“Stop!” My hands had flown to cover both of my ears. “Stop.” I had roared, my chest burning. I didn’t want to hear her truth. Her truth was wrong. Her truth was vile.
“It’s time to stop dreaming, Beth.” She stood by the door, her body angled slightly as she watched me. “You can’t fly too far away, now. The world will not accept a filth like you.”
She didn’t come back to the room after that. I didn’t know where she went. I remembered staggering up and rushing to the bathroom, throwing up until my lungs nearly came out. Then I laid there on the cold bathroom floor, unmoving, my body numb, my head empty.
I remembered my lashes fluttering when the wariness took over.
I had fallen asleep in the bathroom.
But why did I wake up on my bed, tucked under the covers so neatly?
???
When I opened the door for Kenzo later that morning, he just stood by the entrance, facial muscles frozen, backpack hanging loosely on his shoulder.
“I knew it,” he finally said, voice low but firm, and I could detect it, a hint of anger he couldn’t quite express. “That fucking bitch, I knew it. I knew she was going to pull this shit.”
Mother didn’t even really hit me that hard. On a normal day, I wasn’t supposed to be able to stand properly for the first 24 hours. My bones were supposed to riot, my body fighting pain. There would have been blood clot at the corner of my lips, bruises on my thighs and face.
All she did was slap me two times. The only thing Kenzo was seeing right now were just the faint presence of her finger prints.
My grip on the door tightened as I waited, not so excited for the inevitable–his outrage, pity, the way he would want to look at me like something fragile, breakable…a victim.
“Well, are you coming in anytime soon?” My voice was low, hoarse from how much I screamed last night. Each word scraped out, dragging pain with them. Seven little words and each felt like I was swallowing a glass.
Kenzo still stood there, looking at me, out of shock now as his jaw feathered lightly.
Tired of holding the door open for him, I released my grip and turned away, shoulders stiff. But before I could reach the three-seater couch, he was there, as though he teleported.
He crouched in front of me, hands hovering over my face before finally pressing on my jaw gently. But I jerked away, not out of pain. His touch was too warm, too gentle. And I didn’t deserve it.
“This isn’t fair.” His voice was ragged, torn. His hands fell helplessly to his lap, curling into a fist so tight his knuckles went bone-white.
“Look at you.” He sucked in air, his eyes turning glossy. “How could she do this to you?” He trembled with restraint.
This wasn’t the first time he was seeing me like this after innocently coming to pick me up for school. Yet every time, every damn time, he was always in shock, unable to believe a human being could be treated this way.
He stood abruptly as if trying to shake off something. “I need to take you to the doctor.”
“Are you kidding me?” My brow raised. “What for? A dislocated jaw? Gosh, Takahashi, it was just two mere slaps across the face.”
He exhaled loudly, shoving his hands into his hair, and the careful golden strands of a few seconds ago stood on end like he had been electrocuted. That was him when there was anger inside him but he didn’t know where to place it.
The silence stretched as he paced the room, muttering a series of curse words in Japanese under his breath.
“I don’t have any device anymore,” I whispered.
“What?” His eyes flashed with anger and shock. “Why?”
I shrugged. “You must have called.”
“I tried your number like a hundred times when I woke up.”
He came to sit beside me. “I started to panic when none went through.”
“She was right, you know.” The words left my mouth, barely audible.
“About what?” he whispered, gaze raking over my face.
I sank further into the couch, the worn cushions swallowing me whole.
“I know you want to take her down so badly, but it turns out she was right all along.”
The furrow in his brows deepened, his jaw working. “What are you talking about exactly?”
“I’m just like him.” My vision suddenly blurred as the tears began to pour again.
“No, you’re not.” He grabbed my hand in his warm ones.
“I tried to kill her.” The confession rang across the room, heavy and deafening.
“I went to her room with a knife. I stabbed the bed, over and over, hoping she’s there so I could make her scream, make her beg, make her bleed the way she had made me bleed for years.”
My chest heaved, breath ragged.
“I tried to kill her, Kenzo.” The weight of the truth made me dizzy.
I could no longer look at my best friend, couldn’t bear to see the horror in his eyes, the disgust twisting his features.
If he snatched his hand from me right now and stood up, if I heard a movement right after, it would be him leaving.
Instead, his grip on my hand tightened reassuringly, heat pressing into my side as his arm wrapped around me, solid and grounding.
“You’re not like him.” His voice was low and steady. “Anyone would have done the same thing. Trust me, if she walks in here right now, I’m driving a knife through her chest.”
Liar.
Kenzo wouldn’t do that. Not the same boy that had let a spider live in his bathroom for days because he was too kind to kill the creature. Not the boy who would apologize to furniture when he bumped into them. He would never hurt another soul…except for that time he beat Banks to a pulp.
“She wasn’t on the bed,” I murmured, picking at my arm warmer.
“She was sitting on her brown couch all along, watching me.” If she had been there…
“If she was there.” My voice trembled at what my reality would have been right now if I had killed my own mother—sirens blaring, cops littering the lawn, just like 10 years ago at House 4797, Rue Augustin Boulevard.
“I would have killed her. I would have been just like dad. They would put me in cuffs. They would take me far away.”
Kenzo didn’t say a word. But his arms tightened around me, his fingers rubbing slow circles on my arm. And all I could think was, why wasn’t this boy running? Why was he sitting so close to a monster?
We sat there like that in silence until my sobs turned into soft breaths and gentle sighs. He sat right there with me, holding me.
“Where is she now?” he asked after a while, breaking the silence.
“I don’t know,” I pressed my face further into his chest. “I slept off on the bathroom floor last night. Then I woke up on the bed this morning, neatly tucked in. I haven’t seen her.”
“Maybe she went to work?” he suggested.
Or maybe she ran away because she was afraid I would kill her.
“By the way, did you clean the house?” he suddenly asked. I raised my head from his chest, looking up at him.
“No.” My brows were furrowed as he sniffed the air. I did notice something faint in the air, but I wasn’t really in the right frame of mind to place it or think too hard about it. I had been moving around like a zombie since I stepped out of bed.
“What does it smell like?”
“Disinfectant,” he said. “Like someone scrubbed really hard.”