Perfectly Flawed

by Nessa Morgan

  “What needs to be occupied, Joey?” Dr. Jett presses, hoping that I’ll openly tell her, that I will confide in her like a good little patient.

  My ring finger is next.

  “Just answer the question.” She sighs. I didn’t know that waiting on me to talk was so exhausting. Not like it’s your job or anything, Doc.

  I roll my eyes. “Me.” The easy answer escapes my mouth in a mousy squeak. I feel bare, I feel open now. Thanks, Doc. I’ve never been this open with her. I’ve never admitted anything to her, not even when she was begging me to trust her, not even as she tried to build and gain a friendship with me.

  “You?” Her eyes narrow as she tries to analyze the statement to better understand what I’m trying to say so she can better understand and decipher the thought that I refuse to tell. Good luck with that, I really want to tell her, but it never leaves my lips. “Do you mean your mind, Joey?”

  My eyes cast down to the speckled carpet beneath my feet. It is gray, overall, with tiny flecks of brown, black, red, yellow, and other colors I’m too nervous to mentally identify. It’s not an attractive carpet. I’m avoiding her gaze by trying to pretend that I care about her stupid carpet in her stupid office.

  “Have the nightmares started again?”

  Crap!

  With her words, I feel my metaphorical wall crumble to the metaphorical ground. I’m open for the battle, I’m open to be wounded, and I am weak.

  Slowly, my eyes rise from the carpet, locking with her steely blues. She knows. Of course, she knows, she’s a trained professional prepared to read people. From my noticeable discomfort and my uneasy body language, she nods her understanding and jots something down. I know that she’ll want to talk about it; she’ll want to drag it out of me kicking and screaming.

  Damn, I hate body language.

  “I don’t remember them,” I tell her before she can fire the first question at me. “I just…” How do I say this? “I just know they’re bad and they scare me—terrify me.” I shrug my shoulders, seemingly defeated. “That’s it.”

  If only that was it.

  Immediately, I try and rebuild my shattered wall, the wall she seemed to demolish with one question—five words, to protect me from anything else she may ask. We shouldn’t talk about this, I’d rather we not talk about it, or anything close to this topic. She is paid to listen to me but I just want to pretend the nightmares don’t happen—they don’t exist. Since I can never remember any of them, it’s easy to do.

  Until she brings them up.

  Dr. Jett, because she must know, or at least speculate, tries to press the issue more. She tries to get me to explain what I mean and what happened, but my lips seal themselves and I don’t reply to any of her questions for the rest of the session. After a while, with a loud, long sigh, she gives up, clicking her pen closed, and checking the clock. Our session ends, thank God, and I’m on the road heading home to finish my calculus homework.

  Hilary sits at the dining room table wearing her dark blue robe when I walk through the door. It’s speckled with golden stars to appear like the night sky. Her robe is open, revealing her flannel floral-printed pajama pants and baggy white t-shirt. I fling my purse into the nearest chair in frustration; drop the keys in the hideous bowl by the door, then take a seat on the overstuffed couch. I fight the urge to prop my legs on the coffee table in front of me. I tend to get lectured for doing that. A lot. I’m a repeat offender.

  With all the noise I make, she doesn’t stir.

  “Hello?” I call when she doesn’t notice me in the living room. I’m basically sitting next to her. She snaps to attention, shuffling something in her hands. It looks like the mail. I can see envelopes of various sizes and different colors.

  “Hey, Joey,” she says nervously, her voice an octave higher than usual. I raise an eyebrow, staring at her skeptically. She’s up to something. “When did you get here?” Hilary asks; obviously flustered for some unknown reason. I want to know the reason.

  “Two minutes ago…” I answer, trailing off and dragging out the words, confusion and wonder apparent in my voice. If I asked why she’s nervous—around me, of all people—would she tell me? Probably. Probably not. I don’t want to press it.

  “How was your session with Dr. Jett?” Her cheeks flush pink, briefly, clashing with the orange of her hair.

  “Fine,” I reply–half lying—while I watch her pick through the mail; some envelopes opened, a few still sealed. She selects one envelope and stares at it, her eyes narrowing slightly as she reads the front of it.

  “That’s good.” She tucks that envelope into the largest pocket of her robe. It must be something for her, that’s why she’s nervous. It’s something that she doesn’t want me to see. I wonder if it’s something that I could use to embarrass her, blackmail her, anything to get that extended curfew that I’ve always desired. As if. If that’s the case, then it can’t be anything good. An admirer, maybe? That’d be cool for her, assuming it wasn’t some crazed stalker with an Oedipal complex. I just want to know what it is. “I’m going to get ready for work, okay?”

  I won’t be asking about what’s in her pocket, now.

  “Cool,” I answer her as she walks past me to the stairs on the other side of the room. My glasses slide down my nose and I push them up before looking toward the stairs, following my aunt as she walks. Hilary turns to look at me. It’s something that she’s always done when she worries about me. What’s going on, now? Her green eyes cast over me, the sadness in her eyes dark and obvious, turning her emerald gaze into a hollow pool. She pities me, she cries for me on occasion. It seems that she is sadder that I lost my mother than she is about losing her sister.

  It makes sense. Her own mother died when she was young, leaving her within the custody of a father that didn’t want her. He didn’t take the time to be a father before he decided that it was too much effort to raise a little girl. He never cared about her. He’d leave her anyplace he could sneak a child within as he dated, screwed around, and snorted so many drugs; he forgot he was a father. Then, after he left her in a bar at three in the morning, the state took control of the situation, placing her within the system that would almost lose her, ruin her, destroy her, creating a little girl that thought love was a fleeting thing. A girl that believed abandonment was the best she could get.

  That was how Hilary met my mother; they were in the same home a few times before a Scottish couple adopted them both.

  My mother was the product of a teenage pregnancy and while the girl thought the beautiful baby she was giving up would go to a good home, something that she couldn’t provide, it turned out that my mother had a serious heart condition, one that needed immediate attention and surgery. All interested parents quickly backed away because they thought it was too much effort. They even thought that she wouldn’t make it past her second birthday. By the time it was over, she had the surgery, she was good and even better than before, she was three years old. Most people want to adopt babies, not toddlers. That was how my mother found herself in foster care, bouncing from home to home.

  Hilary told me that when my mother spoke of this, she would dive into this pit of depression, the old feelings overwhelming her. She felt hurt and unloved and unwanted. Tears would flood her large honey eyes. She was only in search of a family to love and care for her the way she deserved the way her birth mother intended.

  As she searched for it, my mother decided to look after a little redheaded girl with large green eyes and no smile on her freckled face. My mother was older than Hilary by seven years but that didn’t stop her from watching over Hilary when they were in the system together. She felt that it was her duty to keep Hilary on the good track, not letting her keep any, um… bad company.

  When my mother turned fourteen—Hilary was seven—the same family took them both in. The couple couldn’t have kids of their own and thought that fostering children was better than nothing. Soon, my mother was adopted, as was my aunt, and they were officially fam
ily. Hilary always told me how much of a dream it seemed, to have a family and a sister.

  My mother was the only family Hilary knew before that.

  Not long after that, the couple adopted a four-year-old boy, Sam, adding him to the puzzle that was their family. He fit like the perfect piece, adding dysfunction and love to their lives.

  Glancing around the room at the pictures lining the walls—the pictures of Hilary and my mom, of Uncle Sam and my mom, of my grandparents, of my siblings and my mom, of my family as a whole one Christmas when I was two. It’s easy to assume that they were just close friends—that they kept in touch after they went to school together. My mother had dark chocolate skin and long dark curls that sprang like a coiled mattress spring. She was tall with model-like features. She had the body and motion of a well-trained dancer, all grace and beauty. I look most like her, I’m told on occasion.

  I don’t see it.

  Never have.

  Hilary is short, just a millimeter north of five-feet-one, with fair freckled skin and bright orange-red hair that falls to her shoulders in an even line. Her eyes are a lovely, vibrant green, like emeralds. She has an athletic body brought on by running track and playing soccer, volleyball, and basketball throughout high school and most of college.

  With a small, tight smile, as if it’s taking all that she can muster not to cry at the sight of me, she turns to walk up the stairs, leaving me in the memory-decorated living room, fighting the urge to cry myself.

  Two

  After Hilary leaves for the hospital, I’m tempted just to lie back on the couch and nap. I’m tempted to dive into my subconscious and swim among the darkness. The thought of sleeping for a good ten hours or so is so overwhelming, so tantalizing, that I can feel my body unconsciously lean back to succumb to the wanted escape, but, unfortunately, I have work to do. Damn homework! So I go and work on my remaining calculus problems like a good little girl, successfully finishing what I couldn’t in class. I practice my violin, playing through Brandenburg twice until my fingers can find the notes on their own. After that, I am dressed in Spongebob Squarepants flannel sleep shorts, which I bought because they were fuzzy, with Beowulf open in my lap.

  My alarm wakes me before I can even realize that I fell asleep. Beowulf is on my chest, my body as the bookmark. I only made it ten pages before I clonked out for the night, succumbing to the pulls of my exhaustion.

  Forcefully, I start my morning routine in a hazy blur—too tired to move, really—still smiling, though. I realize that I didn’t wake up screaming from a nightmare like a normal morning. That is great news! My nights are usually filled with scary, unseen moments coupled with the feeling of drowning, suffocation, and falling, and my mornings are usually spent stripping the nervous sweat from my body as I try and calm my nerves before I face the rest of my day.

  My celebratory happy dance is short but sweet; only four twists of my Spongebob-clad hips because I don’t dance. But I continue to bounce when I walk. I like the little hop in my step, now that I think about it. I should be happy more often.

  I tug on my clothes, deciding on a pair of light blue jeans, minus the frayed holes at the knee, a dark green t-shirt that brings out my eyes, and a green beanie that I knitted myself during the summer. Yes, I’m a nerd that likes to knit in her spare time. I run down the stairs, still feeling euphoric, and flip the lock on the door for Zephyr and Jamie. Like normal. It’s all normal for me.

  I distract myself, while singing a New Medicine song lightly under my breath, as I slide everything I need—all the finished homework, every large textbook, all pieces of sheet music—into my striped Dakine backpack.

  The door opens, the hinges crying out for oil, and I turn to greet Zephyr with a wide smile on my face. I wonder how he’ll act when he spies my good mood. He’s always the first one to walk through the door, usually leaving Jamie to walk over by herself and complain about being abandoned. Sometimes she even smacks him on the back of the head. I normally have a makeshift breakfast for them but I am running a little behind on my normal schedule. The dancing threw me off.

  Red drops splatter soundlessly against the white carpet by the door, dripping from something long and metallic, glinting in the early morning light streaming through the thin slits in the venetian blinds. A knife—a large butcher knife—the kind that you would normally find sitting in a wooden block in your kitchen or sheathed for protection in a drawer, that’s what my eyes identify, that’s what’s dripping.

  …blood?

  It takes forced effort, but my eyes slowly trail from the hand clutching the blade up the bare arm splattered with red to the face that I don’t recognize but I have seen somewhere. I stare into the ocean blue eyes, pale and dark like the center of the Pacific Ocean, almost as deep as the Mariana Trench. But familiar, so very familiar, as they stare back at me.

  An eerie smile splits his stone face. It’s as if he’s finally found something. Me?

  “Josie, honey,” the man says with a voice that chills my blood, locks my bones in places, and freezes me where I stand. The vibrato of his tone sends a strong chill down my spine, shaking my body viciously. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” he continues, his voice haunting.

  Josie?

  I heard the name Josie.

  One day, Dr. Jett told me about Fight or Flight. Whether, when in a stressful, scary situation, you fight your way through it or you flee to protect yourself from it. Then she mentioned how some people add Freeze as one of the options. That’s when you’re too scared to do anything, too scared to move, too scared to scream, too scared to fight for your very life.

  I always wondered, hypothetically, what I would do if I were in one of those types of situations. Would I fight or take flight because I couldn’t possibly freeze. I couldn’t possibly let something happen to me.

  But I don’t move. I don’t flee. And I don’t think that I can fight.

  Instinct only tells me to scream. My instinct tells me to scream loudly, and I do.

  My body falls to the floor, my knees crashing to the carpeted ground, because the sight of this man in my living room holding a bloodied knife scares me too much to move in any other way. I’m still screaming, unable to stop, unable to protect myself when he walks over to me. I can feel his footsteps vibrate against the floorboards, sending something similar to shards of glass up my legs. He’s like an earthquake, shaking me until I fall to the ground, my hands splayed against the carpet, and trying to make myself smaller. I try to shrink away from whatever is happening, what this is, and become invisible.

  At this one moment—I only want to be invisible.

  Shaking like a leaf, I know that I’m unable to prevent what’s inevitable.

  His hand grips my shoulder, his fingernails digging into my flesh, drawing blood, stealing a piece of me. His voice growls for me to shut up, to stop screaming, but I can’t. I won’t. This is all that I can do. This is all that my body will allow me to do. This is…

  “JOEY!” a familiar voice seeps in, crying for my attention, warring with the man standing before me. I’m saved. They won’t let this man, this beast; hurt me. “Joey, please wake up,” the voice begs of me. My body shakes harder, vigorously quaking back and forth.

  My eyes pop open to stare into a pair of blurry brown eyes, wide and scared, staring back at me. I open my mouth, take a deep breath, and prepare to scream against, but then I recognize the brown eyes—they’re not here to hurt me, they’ll never hurt me—and I take another deep, shuddering breath.

  “Zephyr?” I sigh, surprised with how much I’m shaking.

  He is sitting on the edge of my unkempt bed—what the hell happened to my blankets?—shirtless. Shirtless? He’s also barefoot in flannel plaid pajama pants. I can see the two tattoos on his side, the two quotes he had inked into his skin by a tattoo artist that didn’t care he was underage.

  The memory of the day comes back to me, pushing my dream from my brain. I was with him when he got them at the beginning of the sum
mer last June. The minute the last bell rang signaling the end of the school year, we walked to the tattoo shop near school.

  I can still remember the alcoholic smell of the shop, how it smelled clean and sterile. If they didn’t care about our age, at least we could tell that they cared about infection. I can still remember the wide, toothy smile on Zephyr’s face when he sat down, leaning back in the seat, before the needed started dancing along his skin. I can even remember how that smile fell from his face after the guy drew the first line, the needle stabbing his skin repeatedly.

  All those memories draw my eyes to my left wrist, the one that holds my own tattoo. It’s a treble clef, simple. I couldn’t really think of anything else to permanently ink onto my body.

  But all those memories don’t comfort me now. They quickly disappear in a vapor-like state, quickly covered by the large man with the knife, the one that called me Josie and told me to shut up, to stop screaming. The man that was looking for me.

  I can feel Zephyr’s hands on my shoulders, his grip tight and hard against my skin. I realize that it was him; Zephyr, that I felt gripping into me, not the man with the knife. The man with the knife never touched me, he never touched me, he never touched me. He never got close enough to touch me.

  It was only a dream, Joey.

  “Holy. Crap, Joey?” Zephyr snaps, letting out a large sigh. He drops his head—I notice his long hair is tangled and messy, wild about his head, as if he were in a hurry to get to me, to save me from something. I silently thank him for that. “What the hell was that?” he asks loudly.

  I can’t answer that. As much as I want to spill what’s in my brain, as much as I want to open up and let Zephyr in, I can’t. That makes me a horrible person and a worse friend. It hurts me, hurts my heart to keep this from him.

  “What time is it?” I ask instead, hearing the terrified tremble in my voice as I ignore his question. I grab my glasses from the bedside table—I guess I took them off at some point—sliding them onto my eyes, and everything blurry comes into focus.