Little Battles

by N. K. Smith

  I knew my mother hadn’t started off a drug addict; I wanted to see what she looked like before it had begun.

  After she died, my father rarely spoke of my mother, except to say that only the righteous survived and the weaker souls burned in Hell. He said it every night, beginning on the night that she’d done it. He could talk for hours about the perils of being like my mother, of letting the demons within us take hold and succumbing to their will. He would never say her name or the words “your mother.”

  He always called her “The Fallen.”

  Regretfully, I had to return Sophie to her home. Before she could open the car door, I took her hand. There was so much I wanted to say, but I couldn’t even form an intelligent sentence in my brain, so anything verbal was doomed from the start. Instead I just looked at her. Her eyes were so beautiful, so sad and so hurt. Why couldn’t everyone in the world see that about her?

  Sophie was good at hiding.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Elliott.”

  “D-don’t…I’ll hhhhelp you.”

  She turned back to me, putting her hand in my hair, and I closed my eyes. It had been an emotional day, and I was tired. The sensation of her touch was almost too much, and yet not enough. Then she brushed her lips against mine, and I settled on not enough. I wanted more of her. All of her.

  When I responded, she wasted no time licking my lips. Then I licked them myself, loving the flavor she left on them.

  Before I could even think, she was on top of me, straddling me like she tended to do. Both of her hands were in my hair now, tugging and pulling, soothing and searching, her mouth frantic, her tongue sweeping everywhere.

  I was hard underneath her and I knew she felt it, and the thought made my head spin.

  It was incredibly wrong and inappropriate, given what she’d just shared with me, yet I couldn’t tell my mouth to stop kissing her, and I couldn’t tell my hands to stop gripping her hips like I owned them. I ignored the ache in my broken fingers and I pulled her closer to me as she rocked.

  She moved her mouth to my neck and put her hand between our coat-covered bodies. When she pressed it against me, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  “SSSSSoph-ph-phie,” I said, gasping for air as I grabbed her wrists and pulled her hands away from my groin and my hair. I shook my head, hoping that I wouldn’t have to speak, because I couldn’t.

  “What?” She curled and snaked her body, searching for contact. “Elliott, I—”

  “I c-c-c-can’t.” I took two deep breaths. “Your ffffather is p-p-probably w-wondering w-where you a-a-are.”

  “My father?” She pulled her hands back and ran them through her hair. Then suddenly she was off of me and I felt cold. “You need to come up with a better excuse, Elliott. That one’s getting old.”

  I shook my head, but knew she was right. “You’re ssssstill hhhhigh.”

  I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t Chris and I wouldn’t have sex with her when she wasn’t in her right mind, but I doubted I could even say the word “sex” while I was hard like this. And her mental status wasn’t the real reason anyway.

  Sophie turned and grabbed her bag from the floor, holding it to her chest. I hated that I disappointed her. I hated that she took it all wrong.

  “Whatever.”

  “I llllllike k-k-k-kissing you, but you hhhhave to understand that I c-c-c…”

  “Yeah, I know, you ‘can’t’ do that shit with me.” I reached out for her because I hated that she thought I didn’t want her, but she wouldn’t let me touch her. She pulled away and opened the door.

  “I don’t get it. How can you not do that with me but you can fuck Megan Simons at a bonfire?”

  I froze. My breathing stopped. My fingers hurt as I gripped the steering wheel tightly. How did she know about that? Why did she have to use such crass language? There were strangled noises that I suddenly recognized as the stuttered sounds of my own voice.

  “Shit.” Sophie turned around, brushing the hair away from my face that stuck out from under my stocking cap. “Never mind,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. I…” she stopped and drew a breath. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, right?”

  Although I nodded, I barely had time to process her question and the fact that she was pulling away from me again, before she was out of the car and disappearing through her door.

  She didn’t talk to me for three days, but her eyes were clear.

  And that was enough.

  It wasn’t like she ignored me. We drove to and from school together and we hung out, once at her house, and once at mine. She even sat with me during Study Hall and at lunch.

  She just didn’t talk.

  It was okay by me. I respected silence and the need for it. I wished more people understood that sometimes there was nothing in the world worth saying.

  We didn’t e-mail either. I seemed to be procrastinating with her questions. I would answer them eventually though, except maybe the Christmas one. I would rather not get into that whole thing, especially when I wanted to be focused on her. She needed help right now because even though we hadn’t given proper voice to it, I knew that she wasn’t doing the things she normally did to avoid actually feeling. That had to be difficult for her.

  The answer to the question she posed was just more of the same, and I didn’t want to burden her with it. I wasn’t ready to give that to her yet.

  In time, she would forget that she asked.

  Friday night brought about the regular ritual of therapy and time with Sophie. When Robin let us break off into pairs, instead of going to my room, Sophie and I grabbed our coats and headed toward the greenhouse. I wanted her to see how quickly the plants were growing. Maybe she would be excited that the little buds had started to grow on the stalk, and soon she’d have fresh Brussels sprouts to eat.

  We’d been sitting on the overturned buckets for nearly forty minutes before her soft voice broke the silence. I looked up at her in shock, since I’d grown used to the quiet. I’d been content just being with her.

  But the sound of her voice was lovely, even if it was pained.

  “Do you want to hang out this weekend?”

  “You haven’t had a panic attack in a while. That’s wonderful.”

  I nodded in agreement, though my mind was less on panic attacks and more on the fact that Sophie would be online later and instead of chatting with Robin, I wanted to be chatting with her.

  “Why do you think that is?”

  I shrugged. It was hard to let myself panic when I was trying to keep someone else afloat. Not that I was the one saving her from drowning. I wasn’t doing much to help her, but I was focused on her, which helped me subdue all of the signals my body threw at me when a panic attack was near.

  “SSSophie hhhhasn’t gotten hhhigh f-f-f-for three days.” At least not around me.

  Robin smiled and nodded. “That’s an amazing accomplishment. I take it this makes you happy?”

  “Sssshe can be hhhhealthy now.”

  “Let’s talk a little bit about you though, okay?”

  I said nothing, because I didn’t want to talk about me, but she already knew that. It would be a wasted effort.

  “Is there anything you want to talk about?”

  I shook my head in response.

  “I think we should probably talk about your anger.”

  “M-m-mmmmy anger?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m n-not angry.”

  Robin folded her hands in her lap and leaned forward, her eyes narrowed in scrutiny.

  “Elliott, you broke another human being’s nose and jaw. Stephen didn’t tell you, but Chris Anderson could very well have some permanent hearing loss in his left ear, in addition to a crooked nose.”

  I understood what she was saying, but I coul
dn’t bring myself to care or have any compassion at all for Chris. I was happy that I hit him, and I was happy that he would have some permanent reminders. He needed to be reminded every day of his life that he was an ass. He needed to be reminded every day of his life that he couldn’t just do whatever he wanted to people.

  As sick as I knew it to be, I was happy that he would have some other way of remembering me for the rest of his life other than just the stuttering kid he picked on in school. Now I would be the first thing he thought of when some college girl asked him about his stupid, crooked nose. I would be the thought in his head when his healed jaw ached in the winter, and I would be the one he’d think of when in fifteen years he couldn’t hear his wife and kids out of his left ear.

  It was satisfying.

  “W-what is there to ssssay?”

  “Do you feel bad about what happened?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me what it felt like to release that much emotion.”

  I knew what she was trying to do, and that I could either sit there in silence, which would only postpone the inevitable, or I could just answer her questions and be done for the night.

  “It w-was numbing.”

  “What did you think about at the time?”

  “N-nothing.”

  My mind had been pleasantly and uncharacteristically blank. All I remembered thinking about was how much I hated Chris. Hate wasn’t a word I threw around lightly. I usually worked very hard to have compassion for people, even those who were less than deserving.

  “Do you feel justified in doing what you did?”

  “Hhhhe hhhhurt SSSSophie.”

  “From what I understand, he’s hurt you in the past, but you haven’t done anything to defend yourself.”

  “Hhhe hhurt her,” I said again. Chris could punch me in the gut five times a day, every day of my life, but he hurt Sophie, and that was a different story.

  “So you felt numb?”

  Actually, that state of emotionless calm had come as a result of an intense expression of anger.

  It was anger I had felt.

  I wasn’t sure that I had ever had that kind of release before in my life.

  “Y-yes.”

  “And before the numb, you felt…?”

  Robin needed validation that she was correct in her assessment. She needed me to say it because she wanted me to understand how I felt. I had known Robin since moving to Damascus many years ago, and our time together had always been about her pushing me to recognize certain things.

  Like the fact that I was apparently too reserved in my emotions.

  She was right. I’ve always known that the first time I met Robin, she’d been onto something. There were very few emotions that I let myself feel, and the violent anger I’d displayed with Anderson was case in point. It had taken seventeen years for me to be angry enough with another person to express it.

  Robin would have wanted me to discuss it. She would have wanted me to process it. Perhaps that might have been a better way, but at the time I could do nothing but propel my fists at him. Speaking would never be something that was comfortable for me. I would never be able to have an easy conversation with anyone, let alone someone whose life’s mission was to mess with me.

  “Angry,” I finally answered her. To be truthful, I still felt a small bit of residual anger. It wasn’t fair that I was stuck with all of these feelings that needed to be expressed, but without an adequate avenue to express them.

  Processing and discussing went out of the window whenever I opened up my mouth. No one wanted to sit quietly and listen to me stumble around. No one wanted to listen to a five letter word take a full thirty seconds to flow from my mouth. The frustration I normally felt seemed to have morphed into gentle anger.

  “That’s a new emotion for you, isn’t it?” It was, but I said nothing. “Do you remember a couple of years ago when David came into your room without knocking?”

  My chest tightened just from thinking about it. Of course I remembered.

  “It took you three days to be able to verbalize anything. You couldn’t even speak to Jane. But when you did start talking again, you never once said that you were angry that he hadn’t respected your boundaries. You apologized to him for making him upset when you panicked.”

  For as much emotional turmoil as I’d been going through at the time, I had realized exactly how much my seemingly illogical reaction had affected David. He hadn’t done it on purpose. He’d forgotten because he wanted to tell me what Rebecca had gotten him for his birthday. At the time, David was still in the habit of trying to engage me in long conversations. It was before he fully realized that I wasn’t capable of being around him all that much.

  I hadn’t wanted him as a brother, and had even been uncomfortable with him as a friend. It had nothing to do with David. He was about as perfect a human being as there could be. My aversion to him was due to my own problems.

  He’d been so upset I’d reacted like that to his simple error, a mistake that to another person might have merely been annoying but had nearly debilitated me. David wanted so desperately to be everything everyone needed him to be, and he took my reaction as a sign that he had failed. Last year Jane told me that David had cried and asked Stephen if I hated him.

  “That was an unhealthy reaction. You apologized for making him upset, while he should have apologized to you for making you uncomfortable. Your reaction to Chris was probably not a healthy one either. You allowed yourself to bottle up all of your feelings and emotions until the pressure was too much. You need to find something in-between that is both therapeutic and helpful. You can’t keep forcing calm upon yourself, and you can’t beat up the people who anger you.”

  “I-I d-don’t…”

  When I didn’t continue, she did. “It’s good that you’re experiencing anger. It is a normal, healthy emotion. What you say Chris did to Sophie is inexcusable. It’s upsetting and worthy of a strong emotion such as anger, but it’s new to you and you need to figure out healthy ways of dealing with it.” I didn’t want to deal with my anger. I didn’t have a history of it, and it wouldn’t happen again now that Sophie was safe with me. “There are repercussions to everything we do in life, and what you did to Chris brought about more issues that need to be handled.”

  “W-w-what?”

  “Stephen not only has to cover Chris’s medical expenses, but he also has to ensure his future safety. Do you understand?”

  I shook my head.

  “The Andersons are concerned for their son’s safety around you. You aren’t to talk to him.”

  That wouldn’t be a problem. Talking wasn’t something I did well, and talking to Chris in the past consisted of nothing more than his taunts and punches. There was nothing I needed to say to him.

  “Beyond the class you have with him, you aren’t to go near him. If it happens again, they have assured Stephen they will press charges. You’re close enough to eighteen that you’d receive some pretty severe consequences.”

  I had no intention of talking to, or going near Chris ever again. “O-o-okay.”

  “You will need to start dealing with your anger appropriately. Mrs. Anderson seems to understand that her son was not the nicest person to you, but Mr. Anderson is quite upset. Don’t go in their store. If you’re out and you see them, it might be best to leave.”

  “O-okay.”

  “We’ll need to focus on anger management. I want you to know how hard Stephen and Mr. Young worked with the sheriff to keep the Andersons from pressing charges.” Robin leaned forward, looking me straight in the eye. “You’re very, very lucky to have them on your side.”

  I nodded, hoping we could move onto something else.

  “You have anxiety about being around other people. You have anxiety about being pushed outside your comfort zone. You
need to understand that if this happens again, not just with Chris but with anyone, you’ll be removed from this house and placed in a rehabilitative center. I won’t be able to stop it.”

  I swallowed hard and my chest tightened. I wouldn’t be able to play music or be around people who were kind to me. It would hurt to be in a place like that.

  Robin’s tone was intense when she said, “This is your warning, Elliott. Do not put yourself in a position where no one can help you.”

  Sophie worked until three p.m. on Saturday, and I had been more than happy to pick her up and bring her back to my house afterward. She still wasn’t speaking much, but her eyes were clear. She just looked tired. We had spent the first forty-five minutes of our time together just sitting on my couch listening to music.

  Just as before, I didn’t mind the silence, especially since she was pressed close to me. She was letting me hold her hand while she rested her head against my shoulder. I thought maybe she had drifted off to sleep and was trying to figure out a calm way to react should she wake like she did last time.

  Suddenly she spoke, and even though it startled me, it was more music to my ears than any song from my speakers, and what she said made me smile. “I still can’t believe you listen to country.”

  I repeated what I’d said all those weeks ago. “C-C-Cash isn’t country.” I squeezed her hand just because I wanted to. “And jjjjjust so you know, anything with a b-b-banjo or a fffffiddle isn’t country either, it’s b-b-bluegrass.”

  Out of the blue, she sucked on my earlobe. I was rendered speechless and frozen as sensation attacked me. It was saturating and consuming. It was intense and frightening. It felt like I had lost control of my body.

  Then she started sucking on the tight cord in my neck, licking at my flesh. She put her hands on my collarbone as she got on top of me, and a groan escaped before I could stop it.

  She made delicious noises that I tried not to hear for the sole reason that I was already over-stimulated.

  Eventually she slipped her hands under my shirt. It wasn’t the first time she’d touched my bare stomach, but this time it wasn’t quick. The need with which she stroked and touched my body scared me the way it usually did.