Unreachable (Ink Duet)

Prologue

What Have They Done To US

Mako, Grey, Sasha, Alex Sloan,

Arcane, League of Legends

The plate my father threw at my mother shattered against the wall, and one of the shards flying uncontrollably through the living room grazed my cheek.

In horror and out of habit, I crouched down next to the couch, crawled behind it, and pulled my knees up to my chest while pressing myself against the curtain of the window behind me.

“You useless piece of shit!”

I flinched.

My mother's whimpering made my vision blur.

Fear pulsed in my chest as it heaved up and down.

“I'll kill you!” my father yelled, and my eyes widened, causing tears to well up. “I'll kill you!”

Before a sob could escape, I pressed my hand, covered in countless pen marks, against my mouth.

Make it stop. Please make it stop.

“First you don't do the dishes for days,” my father continued to yell, and I knew he was just getting started. It was my fault. All my fault. “Now I have to put up with this brat bringing home Fs.” More tears. “Fs!”

I had tried. I had really tried. But no matter how hard I tried, my grades didn’t get any better. They got worse.

The teachers talked about me in front of the whole class just like he did, only they didn't yell.

They wrote warnings in my report card, which I left on the kitchen table with stomachaches and shaky hands until my father came to visit us on weekends and I hid from him.

But no hiding place was safe from his words.

When I put on my Walkman headphones, he ripped them off my ears, took away my Walkman, my coloring books, and all the things I was working on.

He left me nothing. No way to escape from that house, at least mentally.

“Our child is a failure!”

I wanted to sob, but then I would draw attention to myself.

I wanted to disappear into the worlds of my audiobooks, where no one cared how stupid I was, where I didn't have to be afraid of ending up on the street someday.

A useless piece of trash.

“And what is this?! Why does the whole house look like you've done nothing but be a lazy piece of shit?!”

Make it stop. Please.

“Nothing!”

Please

“Nothing! You filthy, neglected slut!”

Shards shattered against the wall and I flinched, sobbing into my hand.

“Another one? You want another plate? If you're not going to wash them up anyway, you may as well pick up the shards from the floor!”

Why didn't it stop?

Another plate shattered against the wall.

“Please, Joseph...” Mama sobbed.

I squeezed my eyes shut until it hurt, imagining my invisible best friend hugging me, stroking my back with one hand and whispering in my ear that he would take me with him to Wonderland. Soon. I just knew it.

No one yelled in Wonderland. In Wonderland, I was enough. I was someone special.

“Please take me to Wonderland,” I whispered into my hands, imagining even more strongly how my friend was pulling me with him. I squeezed my eyes shut again, but no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t disappear.

“When you’re ready,” he whispered in my ear. “I’ll come and get you, and then we’ll both go to Wonderland. Forever.”

Sobbing quietly, I nodded.

“You ruined my life!”

I flinched again.

“You and that useless, lazy kid who's good for nothing!”

I didn't want to be any of that, wanted to be better, tidy my room, help around the house, get better grades, no F's.

But whenever I tried, it never seemed to be enough.

Three washed dishes weren't all the dishes.

My tidy closet wasn't my tidy room. A C wasn't an A.

All those things weren't sufficient. Not enough.

I wasn't enough.

“You're just as lazy and stupid as your daughter, Josephine!”

Mama whimpered and I wanted to go to her, wanted to hug her until Papa left her alone, but I was paralyzed.

Make it stop. Make it please stop.

“Onera!” The shock petrified me and I felt my friend dissolve into thin air, vanishing back to that place where I would eventually follow him. For sure. I just had to figure out how. “Where the fuck are you?!”

I hastily brushed the chin-length brown hair out of my face, which he had cut short in a tantrum three months ago because a thick, fat knot had formed in it.

I looked like a boy, and the girls at school laughed at me, just like they laughed at my worn-out pants with holes in them.

Papa hadn't given Mama any money for me in a long time. She had spent the last of it on the hidden supply of beer in the basement.

“If you don't come out, you'll see where your markers go!”

Something in my chest tightened in panic.

Not the markers…

Normally, I would disappear into my room and hide all the things that didn't usually survive his tantrums. Nothing was safe from him except Wonderland.

“Onera?!”

I wanted to come out, but I couldn't.

“Fine!” he yelled. “As you wish!”

“No!” I screamed desperately and crawled out from behind the couch, but he had already disappeared into the hallway.

Mama sat behind the door with her legs pulled up, crying, her eyes empty, her nose red from all the beer she had already drunk today.

With a pain in my stomach, I jumped up from the floor, ran after my father, and stopped in the doorway of my room.

The feeling of losing control sent me into another state of shock.

Papa kicked the cardboard castle I had made for my friend. Once, twice. He tore it apart.

“No...” I whimpered, wanting to beg him, but he wouldn't understand me. He would only take more away from me because I had lost my mind.

“Please, Papa...”

The tall, slim man in the expensive three-piece suit, whose few thin brown hairs were already turning gray at the roots, ignored me, grabbed the cups with the felt-tip pens, opened the window, and...

“No!” I shouted at him, and when I heard all the pens hit the hood of Mama's old car, my vision blurred completely.

At least he hadn't broken them like he had done to my colored pencils two weeks ago.

My father turned toward me, and his wide-open eyes sent a chill down my spine.

“Should I throw something else out? The window's open!”

“No...” My voice was frail, much too quiet for this loud world. “Please. I'll do anything you want!”

Just please. Stop.

His gaze wandered down my body.

“What happened to your hands?!”

I looked down at the pen strokes and words I had written in class, which now covered my entire left hand.

The names of my other friends, whom no one but me could see.

The only ones who didn't laugh at me, who understood me and waited for me in Wonderland.

I had been writing stories about them ever since I knew how to write.

About all the adventures we had together.

“And would you perhaps like to tell me what this is?!”

He held up my math test. One more bad grade and I would have to repeat the year.

Unable to answer, more tears streamed mercilessly down my face.

“I’m sorry,” I whimpered, gasping for air as my nose began to run.

I sniffed.

“Please, Papa.”

I would do anything to stop him from ever yelling at me again, I would try over and over again, even though I knew all my attempts were doomed to fail.

He threw the test away and it landed on the trampled remains of my cardboard castle.

“You're stupid, Onera!” He stepped toward me, pointing his finger at me. “As stupid as your incompetent mother!”

His index finger moved toward the door.

“Useless!”

I flinched.

He was so close to me. So angry. Unpredictable. He could slap me, as he sometimes did when I found the strength to break out of my paralysis and defend myself.

But it wasn't his palms that left temporary red marks on my cheeks that hurt the most. It was his words that ran through my head day and night.

“You'll end up just like her!”

I had to block it all out, believe even harder in Wonderland, until he finally stopped talking and left me alone.

“Those stupid little stories you write in class instead of listening, and that your teachers send me every weekend...” He looked around as if he were searching for them, and I glanced frantically at the loose floorboards at the back of the room, but quickly looked away again. “Where are you hiding them, huh?!”

“Please don’t...,” I sobbed as he began rummaging through my messy toy boxes and tearing open my desk drawers, which were just as chaotic as the floor of my room or my bed. “Please...”

Finally, he stormed out of my room and I heard him shouting in the living room.

“I'm done with both of you, Josephine!”

I covered my ears, not wanting to hear what he was going to say next, and then the door slammed shut.

Carefully, I lowered my hands.

No matter how often he threatened to never come back, he would always return. Every second weekend.

I waited until I heard him start his car before he hurriedly pulled out of the parking space and drove away. Then I rushed out of my room to make sure Mama wasn't doing the same.

I was afraid for her.

She told me so many times, in tears in the middle of the night by my bed, that she wanted to die, and it hurt because I knew she couldn't stand being alone with me. That I was too much for her.

Sometimes, I hid her car keys after she had emptied three beer bottles in a row.

Mama was still sitting behind the door, staring at the wall opposite me, looking right through me when I stepped in front of her.

Did she also have an invisible friend who wanted to take her to Wonderland? Was that why she wanted to die? What if that was the only way to get to Wonderland?

I knelt in front of her, carefully placed my hands on her arms, which she had wrapped around her knees, and stroked them, feeling overwhelmed.

She began to cry, burying her head in her knees so that all I could see was her greasy brown hair.

I wanted to be with her, stroke her back until she fell asleep.

“Send me to boarding school, Mama,” I said quietly. “He said he'd pay for it.”

Mama wouldn't have any more problems because of me. She would be happy.

She looked up, her face contorted as if I had just caused her pain.

“Don't be stupid, Gravia.”

Stupid.

I swallowed.

“But I won't be a burden there.”

She let her head fall back onto her knees and sobbed.

“Please, Mama. I just want to help you.”

Mama didn't answer.

“Mama. Please.”

She shook her head rapidly in her arms and her breathing quickened.

“What can I do?”

Mama sucked in the air shakily, as if it hurt... as if she was having trouble breathing.

More panic. More helplessness.

Why didn't she answer?

I shook her.

“Mama?”

My tears returned.

She coughed, gasped, and threw her head back. Her entire body was shaking.

“Should I call an ambulance?”

She shook her head again.

“Please go to your room.”

I didn't want to go, wanted to stay. But if I didn't go, it would get worse until she suffered from gasping for breath and screamed all night long, only to collapse sometime in the morning.

Feeling helpless, I got up and walked to the door, but stopped when I saw her rise, gasping for breath, and stagger toward the coffee table on shaky legs, reaching for the beer bottle as if it were her last lifeline.

I didn't want to watch. I wanted to escape to my wonderland.

And so, I disappeared into my room, closed the door, and sank to my knees amid the chaos.

The sight of my broken cardboard castle brought tears to my eyes again.

I would build a new one. In wonderland, where Papa wouldn't find it.

Determined, I grabbed the last half-dried midnight blue marker pen lying on the floor, pulled one of the white sheets of paper from my math folder, and began to write a new story. One in which I could be all the things I would never be in this world. One in which I found a way to Wonderland.

It had been 5,999 days since the pointy grinning rocks had lured me to them from the deep. For 5,999 days, I had believed I had escaped them. But they have been haunting me ever since. At night in my dreams. When I closed my eyes.

They waited patiently. For this day. For tomorrow.

– Leaking Batteries Diary