Chapter 02
Bianca Ferrucci
The smell of mildew clung to the air in my room, if that tiny windowless box even deserved to be called one.
There wasn’t enough space for me to stand without touching the slanted ceiling or bumping into the piles of discarded things my mother threw in there.
A thin mattress covered with a worn sheet was my bed, and the faint light seeping through the crack beneath the door was the only thing illuminating nights that seemed endless.
My clothes, if they could even be called mine, were whatever my sister no longer wanted. Faded dresses, stained skirts, shirts that hadn’t fit her in years. They carried the smell of contempt, just like I did.
“Don’t you dare show up in the living room dressed like that,” my mother said once, looking at me with that expression of disgust I knew so well. “People will think I don’t give my daughters decent clothes.”
I knew there was no point in answering. Talking only made things worse. I learned early that silence was the shield that could protect me, however poorly. But that day, I couldn’t hold myself back.
“Maybe if I had something that was actually mine, it wouldn’t look that way,” I murmured. The words slipped out before I could stop them.
Her hand came like lightning, fast and precise, cracking across my face. The impact snapped my head to the side, but I didn’t cry. Not anymore. Crying was what she expected, and I wasn’t going to give her that.
“Insolent girl!” she shouted. “You want to compare yourself to your sister? Your sister, who does everything right, while you’re just this?”
She didn’t need to finish. The word “this” hung in the air like a sentence.
That night, I went without dinner. It wasn’t the first time. Hunger was nothing new, but that day it seemed stronger, as if my stomach wanted to punish me too for speaking. Lying on the mattress with my knees pulled to my chest, I tried to ignore the emptiness consuming my body.
“You don’t deserve anything better, Bianca.” My mother’s voice echoed in my mind, repeating a truth she had planted inside me from an early age.
But there were moments when the weight of everything seemed to ease. They were rare, but they existed.
Early in the morning, before the chaos of the house began, I would escape to the garden.
There, hidden beneath a fig tree that grew crooked in the farthest corner, I found some relief.
It was the only place where I could breathe without feeling my mother’s watchful eyes or my father’s indifferent gaze.
Sitting beneath the shade of the tree, my bare feet pressed against the cool earth, I would open the only book I had managed to save from my mother’s “cleaning sprees.” It was an old romance novel, its pages already yellowed, but the words were still alive.
I read each line slowly, as if savoring something that couldn’t last.
“In another world, maybe,” I whispered to myself, touching the worn cover.
In that world of pages, I was someone different. Not a shadow, not a burden, but someone who mattered.
My father never raised his voice at me, but sometimes I thought that was even worse.
He didn’t need to shout to hurt me. His silence was worse than any words.
When I walked past him carrying trays into the living room or sweeping the floor, he would simply look over the top of his glasses, frown, and go back to whatever he was doing, as if I were invisible.
“There’s nothing I can do, Bianca,” he said once, when I asked why he never defended me. “Your mother knows what’s best.”
Those words scarred me more deeply than my mother’s slaps. I was nothing even to the man who was supposed to protect me.
Sometimes at night, when everyone was asleep, I listened to music in secret. It was nothing extravagant, just a melody drifting through the neighbor’s window. That music seemed to carry me far away from that room, to a place where I was free.
I would close my eyes and imagine a future where no one could control me, where I belonged only to myself. A place where I was more than “this.”
No matter how hard my mother tried, there was one thing she could never take from me: the quiet hope that one day, everything would change.