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“Did Warren catch me?” she offers and watches me slightly nod. “He caught me before I hit the last step. Pretty swift when he was hiding somewhere. I wasn’t as good at noticing where he was in the mansion back then. Either way, he was the one torush me to the hospital and get treatment. Father had been in a meeting, and Mother was in a photoshoot.”
She smirks just slightly as if the memory amuses her.
“It was the first time I’d seen them be so concerned for me, but when I couldn’t feel my legs and ended up having to be flown to Turkey for surgery…”
Surgery… it was that fucking bad.
I see how her expression darkens then.
“I accepted then and there that Domino would keep to his word. That he’d always hate me. No matter what I did or became. That was the wake-up call to realize if I didn’t remove myself from this cycle of torture, I’d die.”
“He wouldn’t have killed you,” I quietly voice. Not to defend Domino per se, but I don’t see him hating her to the extent of murder.
“You’re right,” she agrees. “He wouldn’t be the bringer of death.” She shakes her head for good measure before she looks up at the sky.
“I would have done it myself.”
It’s not her words that leave me speechless, but the resolution in her eyes that confirms she would have kept her word.
“Did you tell your parents then?”
“No.”
“No?” I don’t understand. “Why not? Weren’t they questioning you as to who injected you? Or get pissed that you wouldn’t reveal the culprit? Did those white-coat people threaten you to investigate or throw you in a padded room?”
“White-coat people,” she whispers. I mentally curse for my slip-up, but she continues, “The doctors? They did. So did the police, private investigators, and child services. They all did their part to get me to cave.” She doesn’t seem bothered by it. “I told them to fuck off.”
Wow.
“Gemini.” It’s the first time I’ve sternly said her name. That could be why she gives me her full attention.
“You know what would have happened if I ratted on Domino, don’t you?” she offers as if I can’t comprehend what could have happened to my friend back then. “His world would go crumbling down, just like mine was at that very moment. Tempting. Very tempting if you ask me, but honestly, that’s easy.”
“Easy?” I’m baffled yet fully invested.
“He’d expect me to rat him out. To throw the blame his way. Predictable. Deserved. Ready to use against me in the future for whatever payback I’ve earned for admitting I’m a victim of circumstance,” she summarizes. “Where’s the fun in that?”
Fun?
I can’t stop my jaw from going slack. Maybe she can see it, but she pretends not to.
“When I got a bit of feeling in my legs after treatment, that was what broke me. Feeling that tingled pain at the tips of my toes. It made me picture my spine being nothing but cracked and ready to crumble into dust. That’s the image that haunted me during the months I was in Turkey recovering from the surgery. When that sensation trickled through me, my parents and sister were present with the doctors. It’s when I couldn’t mentally take it. I just broke down and cried.” She smiles and even blinks her eyes a few times.
“To Domino, he’d seen me cry all the time as a child, but my parents? The only time my mother saw me cry was when I got my period.” She laughs at that. “As for my father, he hasn’t seen me cry since the day he adopted me.” She shrugs and adds, “Cry as in ugly, sobbing, inconsolable, can’t breathe crying.”
I slowly nod my head, watching how she sighs and looks to the sky once more.
“My younger sister has never seen me shed tears. Never. She was so shocked and watched in the corner as I cried to the point of hysteria. I begged them not to let me go back to school. If I could get a second chance to walk, I’d never enter a school property again. I didn’t care if I didn’t go to college, university, or another academic institution ever again. I just needed to never be in that space that almost stole my chance to run away.”
“Run away,” I quietly whisper the words.
“That’s what most children who are outcasts revolve their purpose around,” she vouches as if she can see through me.
See that the fucked psychotic version of me today began his journey when he was but a child who wished to run away from it all.
“Running away felt like the only way to acquire my freedom back then. To find a place where I could have a newfound purpose in my existence. Enduring all the pain and agony my current life delivered would make me strong enough to endure what the outside world had to offer. As long as it didn’t kill me, I could endure it.
“However, within those school walls, in the classroom that I hated to enter every day, was where that happened. So, in my mind, school was a negative factor in obtaining freedom. Unless I was taught in a safe space, would I be able to thrive? Not in a public space where Domino and his friends had control in ruining me.”
