2. A Hot Beverage
A Hot Beverage
Melody
Since I was a little girl, I’d always known I’d spend my life arguing with men.
Young, old, it didn’t matter. It struck me early in childhood how wrong their entire gender was, and how confidently so they were.
It started in the fifth grade with Joshua Wintour Gray, a classmate trying to tell me Jesus was white.
Even then, I knew a man from the Middle East was unlikely to look like an Italian blue-eyed fashion model, but he stood firm. My teacher, Mr. Nell-Gray, sent me to the principal’s office for upsetting Joshua with something as simple as the truth, and I discovered facts could hurt feelings.
So, I decided to hurt as many people as I could—out of spite—because stupidity did not deserve to be coddled. That was why I always hated the Grays. I never understood why Mom allied herself with them in marriage; they had money, sure. But so what?
It was too bad I wouldn’t become a lawyer now.
Though I did hear the bar exam could be taken even if I were incarcerated…
For now, my skills were limited to sparring with a hormonal teenager going through some serious shit at home.
“Photography is lame!” Marcus said, rolling his eyes so hard it was audible. Impressive.
Milk-soaked cornflakes scattered when he slammed his hand on the linoleum kitchen table—the second replacement of the expensive hardwood one that had had broken eight years ago.
The first time I said no. The first time I tried to stop him. Luke.
Gray-silver light glowed from the windows, but the yellow lamps were still on to help with the darkness. We’d had weeks of rain, and I needed to go into the creepy basement soon to make sure our sump pumps still worked, or we risked flooding.
I couldn’t handle that right now.
There were so much to do around the house. Half the furniture was old, broken, or threadbare. I needed to dust, repaint the walls and the baseboards, and one of the living room windows was held together by duct tape while waiting to be replaced. It’d have to wait for a while.
And this damn table…This stupid fucking breakfast table had to go.
I still felt the wood splintering on my shoulder from when I was thrown into it. The way it split beneath me as I crashed to the ground, my shoulder pulled from its socket, and my forearm broken.
“Marcus!” Miriam wiped milk splatters from her plaid vest, her two long braids swaying with the movement. “Ew!”
Marc and I used to get into heated arguments that were always resolved by sitting on the couch, sock-covered feet up on the coffee table, silently watching a show together while leaning against each other.
An apology. A silent declaration of sibling affection.
Arguments long forgotten. But it was different now.
The three of us used to like each other. Me, and my half-brother and sister.
Now I was supposed to take the place of a parent. A guardian. Stepping into a vacancy I created that frigid day on Mourningkill Lake, when the man who had given Marcus his eyes slipped into the cold, inky depths.
I bit my tongue, taking a breath before responding, because I swallowed my retorts. My complaints about wasted food, wasted money. Both were scarce in this house.
Because this lack of excess was my fault. Not just my failure to provide while working nights for customer service at an insurance company, but because I was a killer. And I hated the position I had put us in.
But I did not hate myself for ending a bad man, the sad excuse for a father, before he had a chance to hurt the two fresh-faced teens sitting at the cheap kitchen table. He ruined me. But these two still had a chance.
I stared at the green folding table. Four years ago, the yellow linoleum one had shattered during one of Marcus’ tantrums. Like father, like son…sometimes. So much broken, replaced furniture, broken by people’s uncontrollable rage.
I needed to save Marcus from becoming…him. Marc’s a good kid. He has a good soul. He just needed to work on his anger, but I didn’t know where to start.
“Lacrosse is way better. Larsonn says it’s the best! And…and…” He leaned forward, switching from petulance to pleading. “It’s my dream! Come on, Mel!”
I drank my coffee, stomach grumbling with hunger. I’d go out to the garden and make a cucumber salad later.
Larsonn Gray. Their cousin.
I tried to hide the growing bitterness at the reminder of their existence.
“I understand.” I kept my voice even. “But I just paid for your last dream, so you’re going to have to deal with Film for at least the next two months.”
The $800 DSLR hadn’t been cheap. Brand new, because apparently a used one was cringe. I’d driven down to Albany to buy it after almost forty hours of overtime, but when I’d proudly shown it to him, he’d winced, said thanks, and walked away. A sure sign that it hadn’t been good enough.
How many hours would it take for sports uniforms, shoes, equipment, and whatever team fees there’d be?
“It wouldn’t be this bad if Dad was still here,” Marcus muttered.
I bristled. My hands shook as I put my coffee down. It clattered onto the kitchen counter near a chip on the edge of the granite. I touched the scar on my forehead, hidden by my hairline.
I lifted my eyes to all the reminders.
The pictures on the mantle displayed over the fireplace—a symbolic hearth. The heart of a family.
My fingers twitched as nervousness bubbled like the roiling of boiling water. Hollow, nervous, and uncontrolled.
I couldn’t stop myself from looking at the photos I tried so hard not to look at. Like the elephant in the room.
I always stared at my mother’s face first. Family photos of my mom.
Then, a single photo, in a tiny frame, of me and my father—my real father—when I was young.
The one reminder that I’d once had something different was dwarfed by the wedding pictures linking my mother to that man.
She’d been his nurse, and he’d showered her with gifts, swearing to raise me as his own.
Then there were the family photos where Luke’s hand was a little too low on my waist or a little too high on my ribs. My face changed from joyful smiles of having a family into stiff, forced grimaces as happiness soured into a waking nightmare.
My vision was a pinprick focused right on his face. His blue eyes. His smile. Always on his smile. A smile under the sunlight that turned predatory behind the shadow of closed doors.
And always, his smiling face looked back at me. Square-jawed, blue-eyed, and that stupid, perfect blond buzz cut that made him look like GI Joe.
He was a charming prince; if devils came with forked tails, hooves, and horns, they wouldn’t be very effective, would they?
Seeing him made my airway constrict, as though the silence he’d forced on me was still a real thing. A physical thing. Like he still controlled me from the bottom of Mourningkill Lake, his ghostly hand keeping the secrets stuffed down my throat.
“Are you even listening?” Marcus complained from somewhere in the distance.
Nausea turned the coffee in my empty stomach into bile that burned my throat. I fought the dizziness threatening to take me down. My skin felt tight, my muscles twitched, and I had no control over anything. Just as it had been under his control.
Miriam and Marcus argued.
The world slowed as my stiff fingers tapped on my yellow mug, and I struggled to clench them into a fist. When I did, my arms shook up to my tensed shoulders and to my neck. I shivered all over, my chest heavy as I held in a whimper.
“It’s time for school.” I said it on a breath, trying to steady myself even as my knees felt like buckling from underneath me.
“What?” Marcus asked in that oh-so-fucking teenage voice that was too arrogant. If he had been treated the way I had been, it would have been smacked out of him from the very fucking beginning.
“It’s time for school, idiot!” Miriam’s voice grated on my nerves. Its high-pitched whine made me want to shrink.
I should tell her not to talk to her brother that way, but holy fuck…he was an inconsiderate idiot sometimes. In many ways, he reminded me of our father.
The volume of their argument rose as unrelated irritations were spat at one another. All of it blurred as a buzzing started in the front of my head, spreading until it filled the hollow of my skull like a scream.
“Fuck you!” Marcus snapped.
The buzzing silenced.
“Marc!” I snapped back. “Don’t talk to your sister that way!”
I had so much more to say. Don’t treat your sister that way, don’t treat women that way, don’t become the man I hated most when you share half of my blood!
The doorbell rang, followed by five sturdy, rapid knocks.
I stilled, barely able to breathe. I felt like my entire body was being squeezed by a vise as my heart fell to my feet.
“Get your things,” I said in a rush, waving for Miriam and Marcus to pick up their backpacks by the door and leave.
Was today the day? I’d been waiting. Hoping I’d last until both—or at least one—were eighteen.
I was ready to lose everything. Everything but them. Everything but Marcus and Miriam, even if I hated them half the time, because I had signed up to be a sister, not a mother.
But here we were.
Because of my choices. Because of what I had done.
When the kids didn’t move fast enough, I narrowly stopped myself from slamming a fist into the counter.
“Get your things!” I shouted.
“Okay,” Miriam said, getting up with her bowl and spoon, ready to wash them in the sink.
Another knock on the door.
“Just leave it. I’ll clean it!” I was too fast and too loud, making Miriam wince. Gentler, I said, “I don’t want you to be late for school.”
Nervous, frantic energy pushed through me; what I didn’t want was them being here if—when—the sirens went off.