There were nights that I prayed to a deity I didn’t fully believe in, begging the divine to have him arrested for drunk driving or something worse.
It was the only way we were going to survive.
Though part of me worried that it was already too late. I was filled with the kind of anger that festered deep down, that never found a release, that changed who you were as a person.
As hard as I tried, I couldn’t seem to unfist my hands.
He had done this to me.
It wasn’t so much the pain. At least not anymore. It was the humiliation. His demands that Mom and I both cater to his every whim. His belief that he was the center of our universe. That our needs were secondary to his own.
I was big enough, strong enough that I could fight him if I had to. He realized that now. He realized it and hated me even more for holding back from doing just that.
I didn’t want to be him, and he knew it. So he was going to do his best to break me. And if I wasn’t there, he continued to break my mother.
Broken men broke women.
That refrain echoed in my head as I got to my feet, helped my mother to hers, and then slipped out into the backyard.
The autumn chill cooled my skin. Dead leaves crunched softly under my feet.
I wanted to run. To leave this place far behind and never look back. But without me, it would only be a matter of time before he killed her. Before he pushed her too hard or lost control and couldn’t stop swinging.
I was the only thing keeping her alive.
I didn’t know why the three of us continued to pretend that college was an option. That I’d actually take the football scholarship I’d worked so fucking hard for. We all knew what would happen if I left. Yet we never spoke about it. We never talked about the dirty secret we shared.
I spit out the blood and bitterness into the dark and started to work out the pain in my right shoulder with arm circles. He always knew just where to hurt me. Just enough to remind me he could but not enough for anyone else to take notice.
Until tonight, I reminded myself, flexing my jaw. There would be no hiding the bruise on my face.
“Psst!”
I stopped circling my arm and peered around the side of my house, beyond the dingy beige siding, past the patches of weeds to the fence that divided good from bad in my life.
And there she was in the window beyond the cherry tree. The good.
“What are you doing up? It’s late,” I scolded in a whisper.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Sloane called back.
I wouldn’t be able to now either. He wasn’t coming back. Not tonight. He’d go to a buddy’s house and drink until he passed out. I, on the other hand, would lie there awake, staring at the ceiling, wishing he’d never come back. That he’d drive that truck off a bridge and put us all out of our misery.
I looked back at my house. The lights in Mom’s bedroom were on. She’d be curling up in that tight ball like she always did after. She used to curl up around me. When times weren’t quite as bad. When he wasn’t quite as vicious. But somewhere along the way, she’d started curling in on herself, and I became the protector.
I should stay. I shouldn’t taint Sloane’s life with the ugliness of my own.
“I got a new CD. Wanna listen?” she hissed in the dark.
“Fuck it,” I murmured to myself and entered her yard.
The gnarled bark of the cherry tree abraded my hands as I climbed to her.
“Hi,” Sloane said, pretty and perky in a pair of pajama pants and a David Bowie tank top when I climbed through her window.
“Hi,” I said, carefully stepping over the books littering her window seat.
She had a pillow crease on her cheek under her glasses. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a knot so messy it was clear she’d been sleeping at some point.
She was…cute. Adorable even. I was drawn to her, but in a way that wasn’t what I was used to.
“What woke you up?” I asked uneasily.
Her gaze darted to the window and then back again. She raised her chin. “I don’t know.”
She was a good liar, but I could still tell. “Did you hear something?” I pressed.
“You’re bleeding,” she said, ignoring my question and jumping into action.
My fingers found the corner of my mouth and came away red. “Shit.”
She grabbed a box of tissues and yanked several free. “Here. Sit.”
“No, it’s fine. I should go,” I said, starting for the window. I should have known better than to bring this here. Just because I was feeling sorry for myself didn’t give me the right to bleed all over her room.