The Damned

by Jennifer Snyder

  I wasn’t even close, but if she told my father about this, he would start to see it that way.

  “He’ll just be heartbroken over your behavior, Emory. As if what happened a few months ago wasn’t bad enough, now I’ll have to mention that you’ve been sneaking out in the middle of the night dressed like this.” She gestured to what I was wearing. It was a tank top and shorts—yes, both were tight and revealing, but from the way she was glaring at me, it made it seem as though I were dressed like a hooker. “And drinking.”

  My eyes widened. How could she tell? I wasn’t slurring my words or fumbling around bumping into things, I wasn’t even shouting at her in an irate manner like I’d witnessed Chelsea do a thousand times when she came home wasted.

  “Do you think he will be happy about all of this?” Her eyes continued to bore into me.

  I didn’t answer her, because I felt it was a rhetorical question. That, and if I were to open my mouth, she surely wouldn’t like what I had to say. At least in my inebriated form, I still had enough control over my mouth.

  “I had planned on letting what happened at the end of the school year slide if you behaved over the summer and changed your ways. Little by little I would have given you back some freedom and allowed you to do things with certain friends here and there to make sure you still had a memorable senior year. Now.” She made a scoffing sound. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. It might only add to the issue more, feed it. I made these mistakes with Chelsea, and I’m not about to make them with you.”

  Add to the issue more, feed it. Her words echoed through my mind. She sounded as though she were reading straight from one of her parenting books. If she hadn’t already written one about how to shape and mold your second child into a much better version than the first, I was positive I was giving her enough inspiration to do so.

  I could kiss the rest of my summer goodbye, because she would find something to fill every waking second. She might even cut down the tree outside my window or nail my window shut.

  Sighing, my mother pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and index finger while shaking her head. “I’m so disappointed in you, Emory. What has happened to you lately? Who do you think you are behaving this way?”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  Even though the words were true—more than I could ever persuade her to believe—they wouldn’t hold any weight with her, not right now. While it was what she wanted to hear, what she expected from me, it still wouldn’t be enough to defuse what she was feeling. She would still think of me the way that she had since April. She would still be watching my every move from here on out, waiting to see if I would one-up the level of disappointment that my last stunt had caused her. This was what she did with Chelsea. She was always waiting and watching for her to screw up again. That’s how it had always been. And I had no doubt that for as long as I lived in this house that was how it would always be with me from now on as well.

  I’m a good girl, I reminded myself, I’ll do better, I’ll be better, from here on out.

  “I just don’t understand.” Her eyes softened as a distraught look swept across her face. “How could you continue to disappoint me like this, as though the pregnancy wasn’t enough? Where did I go wrong with you?” She had whispered those two sentences as though she were afraid someone might hear her, even in the confines of our house.

  My stomach sloshed and cramped as the air in the room grew too hot and thick with her displeasure, ready to reject the sugary sweetness I had eaten along with every ounce of fruity alcohol I’d consumed right there on my bedroom floor. I swallowed hard to push it down. I hated throwing up; there was nothing in the world more disgusting.

  I didn’t have an answer for her. Besides, nothing I said would be good enough anyway.

  Leaving her heavy words lingering in the air between us, my mother walked out of my bedroom without so much as a glance my way. Burying my head into my thighs, I cried.

  I hated that my mother thought everything I did was in an effort to disappoint her now. All it had taken was one mistake. It had never been my intention. All I ever wanted to do was make her proud, to give her a break because I knew Chelsea was so messed up and put too much stress on her, but everything I did seemed to be the exact opposite lately.

  The pregnancy, though, had been an accident. It hadn’t been something I had strived for, even though there had been times when I would daydream about having a baby so I would have someone who loved me unconditionally without any judgment or expectations.

  My mother had thought of my pregnancy last April as the biggest parental failure imaginable, and forced me to dispose of it and never speak of it again, as though it hadn’t happened.

  My pregnancy became a secret in our household, a secret that had broken me on the inside more than anyone would ever know. One that made me hate my mother for taking away my ability to choose and for forcing me to do something I felt made me a horrible person.

  To me, an abortion was okay if the woman had been raped, but it was not okay to use as a form of birth control. This was something I thought my mother agreed with, considering I had once heard her say the exact words to my sister when she caught Chelsea’s boyfriend sneaking out her bedroom window, but apparently, my case had been the exception in her eyes.

  I buried my face deeper into my thighs as my tears picked up. Thinking about what I had been forced to do, about the innocent life Wade and I had accidently created and were never able to meet, always made me sink into a dark place. My mother hadn’t thought about my feelings, or me, when she made the decision. Wade hadn’t even been told about the pregnancy. No one had, really. Everything had happened so fast. One minute I was sitting on the toilet lid in the upstairs bathroom, chewing my nails, counting down from one hundred. The next, my mother was barging in, shouting about needing help carrying Chelsea up the stairs, because she was too smashed to stand on her own. I hadn’t even looked at the stick resting on the countertop to see the results, but from the look on my mother’s face, I didn’t need to. An instant later, she had made her decision to get rid of it.

  Maybe I wanted my baby. Maybe I would have been a good mother. Maybe having someone to love me unconditionally would have saved the pieces of me that died little by little in this suffocating house.

  The thing about maybes is that they only get you so far. My mother had made sure of that three days later.

  CHAPTER NINE

  COLE

  I couldn’t sleep. The house I grew up in felt foreign to me. It was too quiet and vacant feeling. The energy was off. It was weird though, because there were times when I would stay here alone for days without my mother’s shitty presence. Sometimes she would go on vacations with the men she screwed and be gone for an entire weekend or longer. Never once did the house feel strange to me during those times.

  When sunlight streamed through the mangled mini-blinds covering my bedroom window, I glanced around, wondering if I’d forgotten to pack anything important. Last night, I rummaged through the house for something to cram the bulk of my stuff into and managed to find a couple trash bags under the kitchen sink. I had a duffle bag, but it was only big enough for the few things I planned to take with me from the bathroom and inside my nightstand.

  I sat on my bed, taking in my room for the last time, wishing there had been something left in the house to ease my mind. Then I laughed, because my luck couldn’t have been any better. For whatever reason, my mom had come into my room while I was selling to Steven and snatched up my box containing all my paraphernalia. Because of this, there had been absolutely nothing inside my room for the cops to find. Everything had been in my mother’s bedroom when the cops came, everything. I shook my head. That was fucking insane to me.

  Standing, I went to her room and filtered through the ransacked space, searching for anything they might have dropped in their raid. A roach. A pill. A glistening crystal of meth. There was nothing of course. Those fuckers were thorough, if nothing else.
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  Making my way downstairs, I headed toward the kitchen. My mother enjoyed a vodka and cranberry every now and then. Me, I didn’t enjoy drinking. I would rather smoke weed or snort something when I felt like escaping for a bit and enjoying myself, at least then I wouldn’t have a hangover from hell and puke my guts out.

  In this case though, I’d take anything I could get. Today had been a crap day.

  When I opened the freezer, there was a frosted glass bottle of vodka resting inside. My pulse quickened and a wide grin stretched across my face. Thank God. This sense of excitement deflated quickly when I pulled the bottle out and realized there wasn’t enough to be considered a tease. Why the hell had my dumb ass mother decided to save this?

  Cramming it back into the freezer, I slammed the door shut and ran my hands through my hair. The walls of the kitchen were closing in on me. I needed something that would dull this crazed sensation coursing through me, something that would calm my racing mind and block out the feelings of hopelessness suffocating me. I needed something now. A chuckle escaped as I wondered if this was how idiots like Steven felt when their stash ran out, or how my mother felt when she couldn’t find the dope she had hidden from herself while she was high as a kite.

  No. I wasn’t a druggie. This wasn’t how I chose to deal with my problems.

  Inhaling deeply, I crossed the tiny kitchen and headed for the junk drawer. Opening it, I rifled through until I found what I was looking for. The razor Mom sometimes used to cut up her coke across the smooth glass of the stovetop. Rinsing it with soap and hot water, I clenched my jaw as I thought of how I would be using it today. With a pounding heart, I pulled up the edge of my shirt and swiped the blade across my hip without any sense of hesitation. Not too deep, but just enough to see blood after a few heartbeats. As I watched the droplets bead across the cut, the sensation of being alive hit me. Truly alive. I was no longer drowning, suffocating, in a sea of turmoil and uncontrollable emotions. I was in control, happy, confident, and proud that I held such power over myself.

  I was free.

  Leaning against the counter, I created another mark, relishing the burn and sting of the physical pain. It felt better than emotional pain. This pain I knew. I understood it, and I could handle it.

  Physical pain lasted but a second; it was manageable and easier to handle. The emotional pain was never-ending. I couldn’t turn it off no matter how hard I tried. It would just grow and fester inside me, the way a cancer does inside some people, slowly taking over from the inside out.

  Cutting had long ago become the only way to dull all the emotional garbage I didn’t want to feel.

  Exhaling slowly, I ran water over the blade and tucked it back in the little plastic holder that came with the thing. I crammed it into my front pocket and then lifted my shirt to see the damage I’d done. Pink raised lines stared back at me, ugly and already beginning to itch. Instead of making me smile, the sight of them made me feel guilty as I saw them blend with the others.

  My eyes roamed over the old emotions I had attempted to block out since first using this form of self-inflicted mutilation as a coping method—all the tiny, thin, white scars that had been left behind in their wake. They were slashed in different directions across my torso, but I knew I had marks in more places than this. My upper arms. My palms. Even a few on my ankles.

  Forgetting the horribleness that was my life was worth each and every delicate-looking scar. Each was a memory of something I had survived.

  The scars along my soul were reflected across my skin for all to see.

  A car door slamming shut came from the driveway, followed quickly by another. I dropped the edge of my shirt and grabbed a cup from a cabinet. Turning on the tap, I filled the glass with water. The knob to the front door opened. Julie and Nick were here.

  “Cole?” Julie’s voice rang out. “Are you home?”

  Home. This place wasn’t my home. Not anymore.

  “Yeah, in the kitchen.”

  She rounded the corner, and it was like I was seeing a ghost. It had been so long since I laid eyes on my sister that the girl standing before me wasn’t one I recognized. Her long hair was wrapped in a loose bun on top of her head, her eyes were lined in black shit I’d only ever seen her use once or twice, and she was dressed in a pair of shorts and a flowing tank top instead of a hoodie and jeans. My sister always covered herself up when she lived here; never did I remember seeing her in a pair of shorts and a tank top. Not even in the middle of the hottest summer day.

  Julie’s lips twisted into a smile. In that moment, all the strangeness floating through me from seeing her dressed the way she was with makeup on evaporated into nothing, because none of it mattered. All that mattered was that she was smiling. No matter how long it had been since I’d seen her line her eyes with black crap or wear something besides a baggy sweater, it had been even longer since I had seen her smile.

  Baycrest must be doing exactly what she had intended it to—healing her soul.

  A little piece of hope shined inside of me. If leaving this shithole of a town and forgetting all about our mother and the bullshit we had to endure while living under her care could be forgotten and replaced by happiness, then maybe Baycrest would be the best place for me too.

  One could hope anyway.

  “Hey.” Julie stopped short in the kitchen. “Are you okay? Did you stay at Luke’s place last night, or were you here?”

  I took a swig of water before answering her. “Here. I hung out with Luke for a while to let him know what was going on, but then I came back.”

  Nick walked around the corner and leaned against the wall that separated the living room from the kitchen. He looked just as good as Julie—tan, healthy, happy. Until his eyes lifted to meet mine—that was when I could see the haunting sadness eating away at his insides from having to come back to this God-awful place. I knew it must be hard for him to glance across the street at the house he grew up in, the house harboring so many painful memories. I hated that he was here because of me.

  Swallowing hard, I pressed my hand against the area I chose to alleviate the pain eating away at my insides, and felt the sting of relief once more. It dulled the emotions sweeping through me, created by this whole fucked-up situation, and calmed my racing mind—temporarily anyway.

  “So he knows about Mom and stuff now?” A look of panic crept across her face; one that let me know she would have rather me kept it all a secret.

  “Yeah. He already suspected as much anyway.” I shrugged. “And truthfully, there’s no point in denying it anymore. You know as well as I do that the rumor mill has already been spinning full-force since the first cop car pulled into our driveway. Besides, it will probably make front page news anyway.”

  Julie let out a sigh. “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “Did you get your stuff packed?” Nick asked. A hard-set look of determination crossed his features. It was as though he’d suddenly become a man on a mission and was ready to knock it out. “Do we need to go get boxes or anything?”

  I shook my head. “No, everything I’m taking with me fit in trash bags.”

  “Okay.” He clamped his jaw tight, like he hated having to say whatever was about to come out of his mouth next. “Is there anything you want to get, Jules?”

  She turned to face him, her eyes narrowed. “Anything I want to get? What could I possibly want?”

  Nick shrugged. “I don’t know. Anything. Your mom rented this place, so chances are, next month when the rent is due, she won’t be here to pay—however it was she did that,” he trailed off. We all knew my mother most likely didn’t pay for the place with cash. “The landlord will probably sell everything or junk it. If there was something you wanted, then you should get it now while we’re here. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Julie placed her hands on her hips and walked out of the kitchen. Nick and I followed behind her into the living room. Her big green eyes darted around, taking in the small space crammed with our faded green couch a
nd an old ripped and torn black recliner. The carpet was grungy and sticky in some places from spilled drinks that were never cleaned up over the years. The walls were nicotine yellow with nothing hung on them.

  Everything had to have been exactly as she remembered it.

  Julie took in a deep breath, her chest rising and falling, and then she turned to face Nick. “No, there’s nothing here that I want. Not a single thing. Let’s just help Cole get his stuff, okay?”

  “Okay,” Nick muttered.

  I watched my sister fly up the stairs, heading straight for my room. A sudden onslaught of anger made me freeze in place, rendering me unable to start up the stairs after her. Nick seemed to notice. His eyes were trained on me.

  “She didn’t even truthfully ask me to come get you, you know,” he said in a low voice. “She told me what happened and said I needed to call in to work today, because she was coming to get you and didn’t want to go alone.”

  I blinked, not knowing what to say, but still feeling the anger directed toward her coursing through my body all the same.

  “She felt so guilty for so long about leaving you here,” he added.

  I swallowed hard. “Yeah, but she still did it. She never came back.”

  Clearing my throat, I dropped my eyes to the ugly ass carpet beneath my shoes. Julie never came back. Even now, while she was here for me, she couldn’t wait to get out of this fucking house. That was why she dashed up those stairs and was grabbing as much of my shit as she could carry. If it was so bad for her, then why the hell had she left me behind? That’s what I wanted to know. Didn’t she think it was just as bad for me?