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JOÃO
After school, Kai skipped out on Poison’s business and hurried home, telling us that he wanted to look into the shit he had found on Principal Vaughn’s computer earlier. Landon, Imani, and I went back to my place.
While Imani wanted to see Ana, I needed to watch Mom. Since they had discharged her from the hospital, she hadn’t gone back to work, and I fucking refused to let her. But if I left her alone for too long, I feared that she’d try because, now, we had hospital bills piling up.
She had worked her ass off these past few years to keep us alive and without growing amounts of debt. And that had landed her raped, beaten, and almost fucking dead outside some rich guy’s restaurant.
Not fucking happening again.
“Imani! Landon!” Ana called, jumping into their arms as soon as we walked through the door. She wrapped one arm around each of them, grinning from ear to ear. “Wanna make brigadeiros with me? I made them on Friday with Vera from across the street, but she makes them bad.”
“Landon’s not going to make them any better,” I said to Ana, kicking off my shoes.
“Come on, Ana,” Landon said, walking to the kitchen. “We’re going to make some kick-ass brigadeiros. Better than João could ever make them.”
Ana burst out into a fit of giggles. “Landon said a bad word!”
Imani scolded him briefly with her eyes, then followed Ana into the kitchen, glancing back at me with worry in her gaze, as if to ask if I would be okay, handling Mom myself. She didn’t fucking understand that I had been dealing with this shit for far longer than she’d been around us.
Sucking in a deep breath, I walked through the hallway and toward Mom’s bedroom. The door was closed, which it usually never was when she and Ana were home alone. Instead of knocking—because I knew that she should be in bed—I walked into the room.
Mom sat up against the headboard with a bottle of pills in her hand.
My entire body tensed. I cleared my throat. “Mama?”
She glanced up at me with wide and guilty eyes. “They’re for the pain, João,” Mom said, struggling to open the orange pill bottle. “My body aches so badly.”
I stared down at her on the bed and clenched my jaw, promising myself that I wouldn’t let it get bad. Last time she had even touched a prescription drug was before Ana became infected. She vowed to never fucking do any drugs again.
And that fucker had messed her up.
With a shaky hand, she handed me the bottle. “Please, help me.”
Pushing away the hot tears welling in my eyes, I swallowed hard, grabbed the pill bottle, and undid the cap. Mom immediately reached for them, but I pulled it away from her and took two capsules from the container before quickly locking it back up.
When I handed Mom the pills, she took them and frowned at me, tears pooling in her eyes. “You don’t trust me with them,” she whispered in Portuguese.
While her tears threatened to spill, that damn look on her face was what got me.
How could I let Mom near pills and drugs again after what happened last time? How could I watch the one woman in my life who I loved more than anything, besides Ana, slip back into that fucking shit? How could I not fucking do something about it?
“João,” she whispered, tears pouring down her cheeks now. “Why don’t you trust me?”
“Mama,” I said, voice cracking.
I didn’t want her to think that I didn’t trust her with them. She was the one person I looked up to in fucking life. She had done so much for us to survive after Dad left us with nothing. I didn’t want to disappoint her, but I already had.
Instead of taking the pills, she placed them on the nightstand and sank further down in her bed, pulling the blankets over her body and turning her head away from me. “If you don’t trust me with them, then I won’t take them.”
“You have to for the pain,” I said reluctantly.
As much as I fucking didn’t like it, Imani’s mother had told me it was essential. I might’ve hated that fucking bitch, but I didn’t want to see Mom in any more pain. She had been drugged, beaten, raped, and left for dead less than a damn week ago.
Grabbing the pills from the nightstand, I handed them to her. “Take them.”
She stared at them, then at me for a long time. Then, finally, she grabbed the pills from me and swallowed them with a huge gulp of water. And as if the drugs had hit her system immediately, her entire body trembled with delight, and she finally relaxed in her bed, closed her eyes, and smiled softly.
“Thank you, João.”
