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I remember how I used to hide under my bed when I knew he was home. How I used to run away from home and sleep in the woods when I knew he was in one of his moods. Which meant he’d find any excuse to hit me.
Not that he needed any.
The mere sight of me would set him off.
His wife’s killer.
And it didn’t help that I was so small, so sickly.
If I was stronger, bigger, healthier, my father would probably have been able to stomach my presence. But not only did I kill my mother, I was also such an anomaly in the Marshall family.
So yeah, that kid was weak.
That kid was a target who later got exactly what he deserved.
A beating within an inch of his life for being so fucking stupid.
“And that’s their fault. Not yours,” Mo says, breaking into my thoughts. “For picking on you.”
“If I wasn’t so tiny and weak begin with, they wouldn’t have.”
And she loves me. Me.
What a fucking joke.
The night when she fought with me on the roof, she was fourteen. She stood there, taking on the wrath of the sky and the man she thought was the devil.
And what was I doing when I was fourteen?
I was still keeping my head down while walking through the school corridors. I was still hiding in the library until dinnertime when I knew my father would be home. Kids were pushing me into lockers and I wouldn’t make a peep because I knew giving them a reaction would only make things worse.
There’s no way that she could love someone like me.
Someone as polar opposite of her as possible.
Someone so unworthy of her.
“I wish you saw it differently,” Mo whispers, as if reading them, my thoughts.
And even though I know that she didn’t, my reply still pertains to it. It still pertains to being unworthy of her. “Well, I don’t.”
“I wish you wouldn’t hate him either.”
“Mo,” I warn.
“Or punish him for things that weren’t his fault and —”
“Jesus Christ,” I snap out, my fingers raking through my hair, pulling at it in clumps. “I’m not…” I sigh sharply. “So what if I am? What if I am punishing him, that boy? It wouldn’t be anything less than he deserved. He killed his mother. Do you understand what that means?” I thump a fist on my chest. “I killed my mother. And then I had the audacity to be born half dead. I had the audacity to be born an anomaly. Do you understand how helpless it feels when your own body betrays you? When your body is so weak that you spend the better part of your childhood stuck to a hospital bed? When your own father doesn’t visit you. So yes, maybe I’m punishing him, the old fucking Alaric. Maybe I’m fucking torturing that little boy for being born the way I was. But so what? So the fuck what? And can we please stop talking about me in third person?”
She has tears in her eyes now but her voice is as calm as ever. “Yeah, you’re right. We shouldn’t talk about old Alaric as if he were a different person. He is you. He is inside of you. Even though you have buried him under layers and layers of resentment. But as much as you hate him, as much as your father or this town picked on him or hated him, there’s one person who loves him. One person strong and brave enough to love that sweet innocent little boy, and that’s my Poe. That’s my brave and courageous Poe who’s up there right now, shut up in her room, probably crying over you. And I wish you could see what she sees.”
With that, she leaves.
Finally.
But any control or focus that I’d gathered in the past couple of hours is gone now. And my head is full of her voice.
Her face. Her smiles and her laughs.
My head is full of her I love you.
And I wonder how easily that love might turn into disgust if she ever knew who she loves.
If she ever knew she loves a man like me.
“You need to do it.”
That’s Wyn.
She has a pink strapless gown on with a lacy corset style top that accentuates her big breasts and her tiny waist. I also made satin gloves for her and I’ve left her hair all loose and curly, and paired her dress with Gucci sandals.
My girl looks like a Cinderella and so I named her dress The Dreamy Cinderella because Wyn is super artistic and dreamy.
Oh, and she’s dressed up because today’s the party.
St. Mary’s very first graduation party, that we’ve all been working toward for the past few weeks.
Which also means that I graduated.
Well, I don’t have my grades yet but I’m pretty sure I did.
And summer school is over.
