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Chapter One
Clementine
I was thirty seconds away from parking in front of my house. As usual, I grabbed my bag from the passenger seat and placed it in my lap. I wanted to get inside as fast as possible.
It wasn’t cold or raining. We were living in Southern California, so I wasn’t hiding from a bad weather. It was already dark but not particularly late, not that anyone was keeping tabs on me, and we lived in one of the most pretentious rich neighborhoods in the state, so I wasn’t afraid of being mugged.
I was scared of a pair of ocean blue eyes that belonged to my neighbor. It was ridiculous and childish of me to consider Lucas Cole would try to ambush me here. Or anywhere else for that matter. Me avoiding him was more of a habit than a necessity. But I wasn’t ready to test that theory.
I popped out of the car with the speed of a cartoon character, not a normal human being, and, another ten seconds and approximately one thousand heart attacks later, I was inside the house. Lucas Cole was successfully avoided once again.
I was trying to take deep calming breaths by the front door when a smell I thought was in my past for good hit my nostrils.
Not the fucking candles again.
I went to the living room and found the boxes filled with these bio weapons my mother made two years ago. It was another one of her post-divorce hobbies.
An empty bottle of wine was standing next to the speaker. Ed Sheeran’s voice was deafening every sound around the house. I laughed at the irony. My mother was always so concerned with her image, and yet she was harassing the neighbors with loud music like a fifteen-year-old.
I had no desire whatsoever to see her and, presuming she was in the kitchen, I went upstairs to my room.
And there she was. Standing by my desk looking through my drawings with a judgmental look on her face. Her glass of wine had made a spot on one of them and I wanted to scream. There were at least twenty candles burning in different corners of the room. The stench was beyond repulsive. The smells got so mixed together that the aroma could make you vomit faster than two fingers in the throat after drinking half a bottle of tequila. I presumed. I wasn’t into drinking unlike my mother.
But first things first. I had to close my curtains as I did every night for years. It was like a ritual for me. Not that I thought Lucas would look at me. He never did. I was dead to him. And yet every time he passed me by in the hallway in school with a new girl clinging to his neck, as if I wasn’t there, the hurt and humiliation echoed in every bone of my body.
I saw the lights in his room were on but he wasn’t there or at least I couldn’t see him. When we were little, our curtains were always open. He used to come up with funny faces just to make me laugh. I needed those laughs back then.
After I made sure I was protected by the thick black curtains, I turned to face my mother. I wanted to kick her out of my room, but I preferred to piss her off first.
“Are you trying to get high?” I asked as I walked around blowing out candles. “’Cause it’s only been a minute since I got home, and I already have a headache, and you look like you are about to pass out.”
Not that it would be a surprise. Every night for some time now she did pass out on her favorite expensive white sofa she had bullied my father into buying just months before he left her.
A chuckle. That’s all I got from her. I was about to sleep in that stench, and she just chuckled at me.
“Is wine not enough for you anymore?”
A burning memory of me spending my early childhood wishing she would stop criticizing me, that she would stop yelling at me for everything she hated about me, flashed before my eyes for a moment. These days I was going out of my way to make her scream again.
Pretty pathetic, huh?
“Watch it, Clementine!”, she hissed still looking at my drawings.
Clementine…
Everybody knew I hated my name. Not only because it was completely inadequate and so rare I had never met anyone named Clementine, but because she was the one who gave it to me.
My siblings had normal names. But then again Tyler and Madison were the wanted children as we were all reminded of by my mother when we were still a pretending-to-be-functional family before the divorce.
“Don’t get me wrong,” I started again crossing my arms over my chest. “I’m glad you got bored with the gourmet cooking because you were definitely not good at it. This, however, suits you perfectly, but it’s still a cliché you know? A drunk middle-aged divorcee burning handmade candles. You’re not working. You’re just sucking cash from your ex-husband’s pocket”, I paused for a moment and cocked my head sideways. “Does dad know how much money you spend on booze?”
She laughed.
“If you think your father cares about what we’re doing, you’re more stupid than I thought,” she slurred.
I couldn’t say she was wrong about dad. His approach to everything even before the divorce was to put some cash on top of the problem and run in the opposite direction.
That’s how I got my car. I was constantly bitching about my mother. So, for my sixteenth birthday, he decided to buy me a fiftythousanddollar ride I had never wanted. It was completely inappropriate for a high school student. It took me three months to summon the courage to take it for a spin.
