CHAPTER 5 #2
Not that I’d been present for that, of course, but apparently some guy they’d gone to see a while back had pulled a gun on the two of them. It just so happened that Angelo had been quicker on the draw.
“Goddamn, you bust my balls like your mom!”
“Fuck you, Conner. Fuck. You! You never deserved my mother.”
“Yeah? None of you ungrateful shits deserve me. So, fuck you, Lilia.” He slammed the door on exiting, rattling my mom’s painting off the wall.
Pissing me off even more.
The rims of my eyes burned with the threat of tears. Don’t break . Angry heat rose in my cheeks, and I ground my teeth, wishing I could’ve blinked myself somewhere else. Somewhere far away. Like the tree and the swing and the open sea.
I plopped down on my bed and cradled my face in my palms. Do not break .
I couldn’t live in the same place as Angelo.
I couldn’t. What little sanctuary I’d made of the apartment would be torn to shit by his presence.
Hopefully, Conner would come to his senses about it.
Otherwise, I’d have to make arrangements to have Bee stay at the dorms for the holidays.
I’d make a point to visit her on Christmas, still a few months away.
It wasn’t like we’d had wonderful Christmases at the apartment anyway, since Mom had died.
It’d mostly been Bee and I sitting in our bedroom, playing Mom’s old Beatles records and drinking too much hot chocolate.
Technically, we could’ve done that anywhere.
As for me? I needed to find a way to pay at least two months of Bee’s tuition up front. If I could do that, then maybe, just maybe, leaving this place wouldn’t be so impossible.
* * *
“E ver consider, like, an OnlyFans, or something?” Jayda peeled off a white sheet that bore an enormous yellow stain.
Still scrubbing at dried piss that’d somehow dribbled over the bed’s rails, I shook my head. “Definitely not.” Nothing against those who posted there. Hell, if I had the guts, I might’ve actually considered it. I didn’t, though.
“I can tell you, I’ve thought about it a few times myself.
Shit. Be a whole lot better than grabbing up bedsheets, praying not to get stabbed by a dirty needle.
” She tossed the wadded-up ball of sheets into a soiled linen bag.
“A friend of my cousin’s did it. Was making a couple grand a month before she found herself a sugar daddy.
Now her lazy ass sits by a pool all day long, reading romance novels. ”
I didn’t know why I chuckled in response. Probably just needed something to laugh about, after the conversation with Connor.
“This is your chance, Lilia. The Lord put you on a path that you did not see coming, and you need to walk it.”
Sighing, I paused scrubbing the piss and tried to imagine myself walking the halls of an ivy league university. “I know. But …”
“But nothing. You took care of your mama. Now you’re taking care of your sister and her daddy. You’re done. The Lord is telling you, it’s time for you now.”
Even though I wasn’t all that religious, I didn’t mind Jayda’s Lord talk. I’d have loved to believe that all this turmoil actually meant something. “Why didn’t you become a preacher, if you’re so up on what the Lord has planned?”
“Because I like fucking too much,” she said, rubbing her hand over her rounded belly. “And Lord knows his daddy is good at it. So he didn’t put me on that path.”
Back to my scrubbing, I huffed. “Can I just come live with you and Quentin?”
“You know you can. You’re always welcome. But that’s not what you really want. You want to be some Harry Potter bitch living it up with all those pretentious, rich, white folk, and don’t tell me you don’t.”
I snorted and shook my head. “Actually, the thought of living with them kind of scares me. I don’t know that life. Covington is my home.”
“ They don’t matter. What matters is your dream. You deserve to be wearing a lab coat, not some nasty, shit-stained scrubs.”
“Well, posting videos of myself on OnlyFans isn’t going to be good for my reputation.”
“Why not?” She set her hands on her hips. “Why the fuck not? Some girls strip to get themselves through med school. You do what you gotta do, Lilia.” Brow raised, she pointed a finger at me like a mother chiding a kid. “Don’t let nobody shame you.”
“Why do you always have to be so …”
“Right?”
“Positive, is the word I was going for.”
“Because I’ll be damned if I’m sitting here scrubbing floors and trash with you next year, when you have a full ride scholarship waiting on you like that. Go. Figure the rest out later.”
What if I did? My mother had always been spontaneous like that.
Always throwing caution to the wind. She believed, wholeheartedly, that things worked out.
Maybe I was just obtuse to all her struggles, but it seemed like we always ended up okay.
We’d never starved. We’d never gotten kicked out, or had the heat turned off in the winter. We’d survived.
I wanted more than anything to study the disease that’d ultimately killed my mother, and Dracadia was my chance, as Jayda had said.
I needed this. To know that I wasn’t crazy, that I had seen those damned worms crawl out of her and that it hadn’t just been a figment of my imagination, as I’d been led to believe.
I had to figure something out, anyway–whether I considered Dracadia, or not–because I had a bad feeling about the crap Conner was getting wrapped up in with Angelo lately. For my and Bee’s future and the sake of our safety, I needed to find a way out.