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When I was about seven, I made my parents a card for their anniversary.
I don’t know what I was thinking, but I guess I wanted to impress them. I wanted to show them that I was normal, like any other kid.
I wanted them to be proud of me.
But I guess that was too much to ask.
My dad took one look at the card and his face scrunched up. I remember him crumpling it in his hands and throwing it in the fire.
“You’ll always be an illiterate freak, won’t you?”
I didn’t know the meaning of illiterate but from his expression and the way he chugged down the whiskey in his glass in one go, made me think that it wasn’t a good thing.
I remember my mother barging in and trying to console him. “It’s okay, Ben. We have the best tutors. With practice, by this time next year, you won’t even know –”
“That he’s defective?” My dad clenched his teeth. “Maybe it’s you. Maybe I shouldn’t have married you. Because I know it isn’t me. I know I am not making him slow. It didn’t take me that long to learn how to write.”
I watched my mom cry at that, and then my dad turned to me. “Go to your room and stay there. No food for you until you can spell your fucking name right.”
I don’t remember much after that. I remember screaming – my parents fighting, and I know Nora snuck some food into my room later that night.
She loved the card I’d made. She even told me that she loved me.
I never said it back. I never said I love you too. Something made me clam up. Maybe the fact that she was looking at me with pity, or it could be that I never believed her.
Even though by that age, I understood that that was what you did, when someone said I love you.
That was why I had it on the card.
On the card, I’d written I love you, Mom and Dad, along with my full name; I’d been practicing a lot, getting the hang of the letters just right.
I was expecting them to say it back to me, but I guess I messed up the letters and there went my I love you too.
In my defense, I was seven. I was pathetic. I was still trying to win my dad’s approval by trying harder, being good, making stupid cards.
I’m not anymore.
I don’t need love. I don’t need acceptance or approval. I reject them before they can ever reject me.
But Blue’s different. She’s still naïve. She thinks love is this amazing, magical thing. She wants to fall in it.
It’s funny how people forget that it’s called falling in love. There’s a reason for that. You fall and you break your fucking leg and you bleed. That’s what love is. Bleeding, cutting yourself open on purpose.
It’s a weakness to be that crazy, that you’ll hurt yourself for someone else. Or that you’ll love someone despite how much they’ve hurt you.
But whatever.
She’s not my problem.
Though I will admit that I acted foolishly tonight. I knew it was a mistake. The moment I made up an excuse to ruin her date.
Honestly, I have no clue why I did that. Maybe I was just doing her a favor. That Ryan guy isn’t for her. He isn’t man enough to be with her.
But maybe I should’ve let them go. Maybe Blue needs a little heartbreak in her life to get the real picture.
I look at the bed where I found her asleep, her blue hair sprawled out on my pillow.
And then, there are her sandals: also blue and caked with tiny droplets of her blood. There are little indentations where her toes and her heel dug into the cheap plastic.
