Scarred Love
M.S. Brannon
Prologue
It’s not my fault. I didn’t kill my mother. She killed herself, I shout over and over in my mind while the lashings come down upon my body with brute force. The welts from this morning’s beating are still throbbing as he adds more to my already disfigured body. I see nothing except an infinite abyss of blackness. My eyes are forced into darkness behind a blindfold as they are every time he beats me. Stop! I am screaming in my head. Stop! Shaking my head back and forth, I plead with God to take my life, put me out of my misery that has been going on for the last eight months. The handcuffs are digging through my delicate flesh, piercing my skin each time I twist and pull against the restraint. With each jerk of my body, the clinking sound of metal against metal sounds as I struggle to pull myself into a ball and protect my already bruised body from each blow. It’s no use. I can’t move. There’s no way to defend myself. The crack of the belt connects with my skin once again, followed by the intense, agonizing burn and the ripping of my flesh. I taste the salt of my tears as they leak from my eyes. I feel the warmth of my blood trail down my arms, legs and stomach.
When it’s done, my stepfather tosses the belt to the floor, winded from my beating. “Are you ready to be mine, my little Margaret Darcia?” he whispers in my ear then turns on his heel and slams the door shut.
The sound of gravel under his Mercedes travels to my ears and I know he is gone, but this time, he won’t stay away. He’ll be back; he’s left me with a warning. His words couldn’t have been clearer than if he wrote them on the wall. Once my stepfather returns, this time it will be different. This time I will need to be clean. The rancid smell of urine is to be washed away from my body, he will come back with a new bed, new clothes, and I will now have to fulfill the duties of my mother now that she is dead. Once he returns, I will no longer be the fourteen-year-old girl he blames for her death, but a fourteen-year-old replacement for his dead wife.
It’s been months since he brought me here. Years since the first scar decorated my body. Almost ten years total of abuse, and I can’t do it anymore. I have two choices, survive or die. Which one would I choose? I burrow through the dark depths of my soul. Trying to find a reason to live because, every path I take, tells me death is my best choice. The only choice. Death will take away the guilt over my mother. Death will eliminate the aching pain of my scars—inside and out—and my soul will finally be at peace. Death will be easy. Do I have it in me to give up, though? If I die, he will win. If I survive, there’s a small shadow of hope that I will be free. Rescued from the hell that is my life.
I ultimately decide I am a survivor, a fighter. I want to live my life like any other teenage girl. I want friends, to go to sleepovers, attend school, and do everything else that accompanies a coming of age teen. I have no one to fight for me, though. From the moment I was a toddler, no one has saved me from his abusive hand, not even the one person who’s supposed to protect me. I can’t let him take the only innocent part left of me. I won’t be my mother. I can’t be weak.
As soon as the thoughts of survival cross my mind, a frantic sound rips from my mouth. It starts out meek and then instantly escalates to pleading. I scream. I scream with the only fight I have left. I scream in hopes someone will finally come to my rescue. I scream because I am a fighter and I truly want to live. I can’t exist in this hell any longer, so I scream. I’m hoarse with desperation, but I continue to cry for help.
Then I hear it. My death is coming with the sound of a door slamming against a wall and feet traveling up the stairs. The fast plodding of footsteps gets louder with every second and I prepare myself for his wrath. I release a sob from my throat, knowing my fight is over. My stepfather will kill me and I welcome it. I’ve thrown in the towel. I’m done.
As the door to the bedroom flies open I continue to scream. Instead of pain, I feel comforting hands slide down my arms and the blindfold is tugged from my eyes. I’m too scared to open them. If this is a dream, I don’t want to wake up. Yet, as an unknown smell passes through my nose— a smell of a men’s cologne and the sweetness of sweat—I know instantly this is not him, this is not my stepfather. This is the smell of salvation. After months of darkness, my eyes focus on the only color in the room, aqua blue. Suddenly, I am lost in an ocean blue pool. I hear the key unlock the handcuffs and my arms and feet are finally free, but I keep my focus on his blue irises. The small pang of relief subsides as I look at this stranger and I know in this moment he’s my protector. The one person who would keep me safe from the hell that exists in this world. Weakly, I pull myself to my elbows and whisper, “Are you…my knight in shining armor?”
The stranger yanks the hooded sweatshirt from his body and places it over my naked skin, drowning me in fabric. He lifts me into his strong arms and my head instantly falls to his chest, absorbing his safety. As he rushes down the stairs he says, “Always. You’re safe now.” For the first time in my fourteen years of life, I feel what I’ve craved all along…hope.
Chapter 1
Darcie
Three years later.
The warm, fall, Michigan air is blowing through my ebony hair as I sit on a picnic table, picking through my lunch. Indian summer has brought most of the students at Sulfur Heights High School outside, enjoying the last moments of warmth before the inevitable darkness of winter rears its ugly head.
I look across the open space and begin to observe the opposite side of the common area. It’s full of plush, green grass, bird shit free picnic tables, and every rich high school kid who resides north of the railroad tracks. I hate watching how the other half of Sulfur Heights lives. Like everything else in this godforsaken town, it’s always shoved in your face. Jocks toss the football to one another, while the stuck-up, snobby tramps sip frappuccinos, gossiping about the latest party.
A sneer stretches across my face as I take note of their side of the common area. It’s reserved for the students who are members of country clubs, drive luxury cars, and dine on caviar at dinner parties. Really? Would you want to speak to, let alone kiss anyone, who puts that putrid shit in their mouth? That is a world I will never be a part of and that’s perfectly fine with me. I would rather slice my arm off with a rusted knife than be anywhere near those pretentious assholes.
Drawing my attention elsewhere, I take note of a girl sitting by herself at a table. I’venever seen her before, which surprises me, because she is technically on the white trash side of the common area—my side. The girl is very petite with extremely long, chestnut hair and olive-colored skin. She’s wearing a black, zip up sweatshirt with her hood pulled up on her head, skinny jeans, and black, combat-looking boots. I tend to notice new blood when they’ve arrived to Sulfur Heights, yet this one, I’ve never seen her before. If she’s from the pompous side of town she definitely wouldn’t be sitting anywhere near us poor folk or dressing in anything that didn’t come from Bloomingdales.
I flip my attention back to my side and witness what I normally see out my front door. The poor kids live one of two ways in Sulfur Heights. They disappear amongst the crowd—never drawing attention to themselves—and they do what they can to make their way out of the hell hole and never look back. Or, you’re the complete opposite—not afraid to express your opinion no matter who’s listening, getting into fights with anyone who pisses you off—and are referred to as worthless by anyone who drives a BMW or others who are like you. Yep, this is the pack I belong to and the handful of people in this group are my best friends, my family.
I’m one month into my senior year and counting down the days until I can be free of this place. Free from the high school clicks, snide bitches, weak teachers, and everything that encompasses the city of Sulfur Heights. I am not sure what I’ll
do or where I will go, but it will definitely be far away from here. I’ve had the plan in place—to disappear from Sulfur Heights—the moment I arrived when I was four-years-old. I’m mere months away from my freedom. I just wish I could take those I love with me.
The town is much like the high school. It’s divided into a team of them and us. Them being the over privileged, self-absorbed, douche bags; and us being blue-collared, crime infested, low class. As cliché as it sounds, the railroad tracks separate the elite side of town from the poor side and it’s unheard of for one group to socialize with the other. I would be lying if I said all the kids who live on my side of the tracks get along. Most of them are trying to escape their broken home life by the means of drugs, alcohol or fighting.
My trance is broken when one of my best friends, Jake Evans, tosses a French fry at my head. “Hey Darcie, you gonna go to The Slab tonight?”
I glare at Jake while picking the half eaten fry from my long, ebony hair. “Fuck, Jake! Why are you always throwing shit at me?”
“Then quit staring at those douche bags and answer my question.” He’s impatiently waiting for me to answer. “The Slab, Darcie?”
I roll my eyes and shrug my shoulder at him. “Ugh…I don’t know. I’m not really feeling it tonight.” The Slab is the one place we all like to hang out to escape the reality of our life. The converted, steel building was a former meat packing warehouse located on the outskirts of town. Jake’s older brother, Reggie, bought it two years ago and transformed the dilapidated structure into a bar. It accompanies a stage for live music, pool tables, and every kind of whiskey you could ask for. Last year, Reggie helped us score some pretty sweet fake IDs. As long as we have them with us, he could care less if we drink. I usually went along to keep Jake from doing anything stupid to get us caught or get his brother in trouble. It worked most nights.
“Darcie, it’s not like you have anything else to do on a Friday night.” I love it when Jake points out the obvious. “You’re going to go home, draw something in your little sketch pad, and pass out. You might as well come kick it with us,” he says while pointing to the handful of people sitting at the table.
He gives me his best brown-eyed look and flutters his long, black eyelashes. “Fine, I’ll go. Now stop looking at me like that you creep.” I toss the French fry back at his head.
Jake is one of the four Evans brothers I call my best friends. The five of us are like our own mismatched family. We have different fathers, drug addicted mothers, and have been perpetually labeled rejects by the socialites of Sulfur Heights. We spend every waking moment together. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for these guys, and even though we are not related by blood, they’re my family. Besides, on a cold winter night three years ago, one of these boys became my salvation. They took me in when I had nowhere safe to go and I’ve been living with them ever since.
Reggie is the oldest at the ripe ole age of twenty-seven. He’s over six and a half feet tall, with a rock hard, muscular build, sandy blonde, shoulder length hair, and a left hook that could render anyone lifeless. He has worked hard his whole life and will do anything for us. At the age of eighteen, Reggie was forced to leave his promising MMA fighting career to raise his younger brothers when their mom was found dead in the alley behind a liquor store. Her last hit of meth is what ended her life and began Reggie’s on the path of responsibility. He had to stop it all to raise a six-year-old and twin eight-year-old boys.
Next in the line-up are Jake and Jeremy. They’re eighteen-year-old twins with carbon copy looks, but personalities that couldn’t be more different. Unlike Reggie, both the boys are about six inches smaller with short, dark brown hair and a slender build. What Jake lacks in size, he makes up for with his mouth. That boy can talk some shit, and his foul mouth has gotten us into more trouble than I would care to count. Jeremy is definitely more reserved than Jake, known as the strong, silent type. He’s backed up his twin brother’s mouth with his fists on several occasions and has been my savior a time or two. He hangs with the group, but mostly keeps to himself.
Last, but certainly not least, is Drake Evans. He’s the sixteen year biracial angel who was sold to the Evans family for two vials of heroin when he was three-years-old. Drake is almost six-feet tall, and can eat more in one sitting than I do in one day. He has a rich, brown skin tone, and I speculate his biological father was Black or Latino; however, he’s never met him, so we’ll never know. Unlike his older brothers, Drake is the lover versus the fighter of our group. He only has to smile before he’s got every female lined up around the corner ready to lie down and spread their legs. Fortunately, Drake lets me express my very critical opinion to help him weed out the decent girls from the VD-infested skanks. Although his young life started tragic, I know he’s happy, loved and is better off living with us than in foster care.
Then there is me, Darcie Claiborne, once known as Margaret Darcia Claiborne-Stein. I’m a seventeen-year-old orphan, thinly built, green-eyed bitch. Or, so I’m told on a daily basis. I was rescued from the pits of Hell just in time when the nightmare known as Daddy was getting too close. The scars that plague my body are my permanent reminder of how lucky I really am. I like to keep mostly to myself and often times my ebony hair serves as a vale, hiding my imperfections inside and out.
It hasn’t been easy, over the last three years, learning how to adjust to life outside my stepfather’s house. I never attended a normal school. My mother was an extremely intelligent woman and she convinced my stepfather she was capable enough to home school me. She had explained to him it would give her a project to work on while he was slaving away at work.
My stepfather adored my mother and rarely told her no. His acceptance surprised me because I was told on a daily basis what an embarrassment I was and how Mother Nature played a cruel joke on my mother when she got pregnant with me. I was never allowed to leave the house when he wasn’t home, and when he was, I was confined to my room.
That was my routine from the age of four. Between my punishments I was let out of my room to sit in the kitchen and listen to my mother teach me how to read, write and solve math problems. When my stepfather was home, I was locked in my room, usually nursing my latest injury. Anyway, I absorbed the information like a sponge, knowing the day I was finally released from that prison, I would need to put my education to use.
For the first few years, my mother was an excellent teacher. She was engaged in my learning and was genuinely proud of my accomplishments. However, after awhile, she lost her desire to work with me on a regular basis and, by the end, I was basically teaching myself. She was either passed out from her lovely concoction of pills and wine or hung-over, trying to recover from her headaches. One of the worst punishments I received before she died happened when my stepfather caught me working on homework assignments using the computer while my mom was passed out. She’d been asleep for several hours and I was bored. I opened my history book and started working away. Engrossed in my reading, I didn’t even see him coming. Afterward, I had been laid up in bed for a few days, waiting for the knot on my head to recede and the swelling in my eye to go down.
After I was rescued and taken in by the Evans’, I had to learn how to socialize with people other than the four boys I lived with. The first year in public school was a dizzy nightmare and I hated every moment of it. Unlike what I pictured in my head, every single person was either rude, stuck up or withdrawn. Considering the alternative, though, I forced myself to get out of bed in the morning and seize every opportunity I could to make this life better because this was the second chance I had begged for. I would not let it be in vain.
I will never forget the pep talk the boys gave me on the ride to school. Jake was in the front seat, trying to explain the social structure at Sulfur Heights High, telling me who was okay to talk to and who wasn’t. My head was spinning from the dos and don’ts by the time we pulled into the parking lot, but I soaked up every word because this is what I’d been fantasizing about since I was f
our-years-old. To go to school, make friends and finally have fun for once. Like everything else in my life, though, nothing was easily handed to me.
It’s funny when I think about it now, but when I was a kid, I would lie on my bed and daydream of what school was like. I pictured kids wearing sweaters draped over their shoulders, everyone had flawless teeth with matching, perfect smiles, I would be surrounded by friends full of acceptance, and we would laugh, tell jokes and gossip about boys. The halls were clean, everything in pristine condition, and I may have even heard Disney music playing in the background. Teachers were the old grandparent types, who always greeted you with welcoming smiles while holding the class textbook in their arms. They would address you by name and express genuine interest in you as a person. It was a magical place and a charming daydream. Wow, was I ever wrong.
When Jake and Jeremy led me through the door, it was like I had entered the twilight zone. Graffiti covered the lockers, trash littered the dirty, stained tile floors and the sound of yelling, loud guitar music and laughter echoed down the halls. My jaw came unhinged when I walked deeper into unpredictable corridors, completely unprepared for what lay ahead; and everything Jake told me on the way to school, vanished from my brain instantly. I witnessed money being exchanged for a bag of powder, a couple practically having sex against the wall and tension-filled conversations. The girls were not wearing sweaters and khakis, but skintight t-shirts, skirts short enough to show their business the minute they bent over and heeled boots. They were shellacked in make-up and a few of the girls’ hair were the color of skittles. The guys wore old t-shirts, heavy soled boots and baggy jeans. Many of them had tattoos, piercings, and looked like they had just left a bar fight. I barely heard Jake say these were our people—as in the white trash side of school—where I will make friends. Was he kidding? These people looked like they were ready to destroy me.
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