She grabs for her water bottle and drinks some of it. “Real convenient, Love.”
“I’m serious!” I say. “What happened?”
“You fucking attacked me. Like a crazy person. And I don’t care if you don’t want me to call you crazy, because you were.”
“I’m not a violent person,” I say, shaking my head. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Well you might want to think again, because you did.” She gets out of bed and stands up, like she can’t stand to be near me.
I move to go to her.
“Don’t!” she says. “Don’t come near me.”
I stop where I am, still sitting up in the middle of the bed, still looking at the empty spot where she just was. I see blood on my white comforter and I shake my head, trying to remember.
There’s a difference between hope and delusion.
But there’s also a difference between being vicious and being a victim.
“Is that your blood?” I ask her, trying to make sense of this.
“It’s certainly not yours! Because unlike you, I don’t attack my friends. I don’t get drunk and fucking hurt them!” She’s putting her stuff in her bag. The almost-empty vodka bottle. Her makeup bag. Her phone. “Where’s my charger?”
“I don’t know. Look, I’m sorry! Please just talk to me! Don’t leave!”
She stops putting her stuff away and shakes her head. She goes to look in the mirror and lets out a sarcastic laugh. “Unbelievable. This is going to take days to heal. You’re lucky it’s only my lip and not my whole face like the last time.”
“Okay, the last time was a misunderstanding,” I say. I can’t believe she’s bringing that up. She’s so unfair. Putting everything on me, once again. Just like she always does.
“And what was it this time, Love? I get it, you’re fucking sad. You’re tortured. It’s cool until it isn’t. And it doesn’t give you the right to go around giving your only friend black eyes and fat lips. I don’t know why I forgive you. Every fucking time.”
I stand up now. “Oh it was only twice in the last four years. You act like I’m this insufferable violent person who abuses you or something.”
“You do! And it’s been more times than that. Maybe if you do this when you drink you shouldn’t drink. Have you ever thought about that?”
“Well if you feel that way maybe you should stop bringing over vodka and pouring me shots.”
“So it’s my fault again? God, maybe you are abusive, and I’m just the asshole who keeps forgiving you and thinking you’ll change,” she says. “Where the hell is my charger?”
“I don’t know! Maybe it’s on the dresser, where you put everything else!” I yell. “Your lip gloss is probably still there from two years ago!”
She stops searching for the charger, and stares at me. Really glares. She wants to say something but it’s on the tip of her tongue.
“What?” I ask. “You’re looking at me like you hate me.”
“I sorta do.”
My voice softens. “Whatever I did, I’m sorry. Will you please just tell me what happened?”
“I realized that I need to stop forgiving you, that’s what happened,” she says, walking over to the bed and sitting down.
“I’m so sorry. I really am. I would never want to hurt you.”
“But you do,” she says. “And if you don’t want to or mean to or whatever, that almost makes it worse. Last night I said something that just set you off, apparently.”
There’s a difference between hope and delusion.
There’s a difference between hope and delusion.
There’s a difference between…
“And then you just lunged at me. Punched me in the face. Started choking me. You were screaming like a crazy person,” she says.
I shoot her a glance. I feel the twinge in my brain and I shake it off. She doesn’t mean that.
“Sorry, like a violent person. You just become this person that isn’t you, sometimes. It’s scary. I think you might need help.”
I look down. “I’ve had help before, and it never helped.”
“Maybe you need to try again. With someone else. Your aunt freaked out about it.”
“My aunt knows?” I ask.
“She heard you! You woke her up at almost two in the morning screaming like a banshee! When she came down you wouldn’t get off me. She had to pull you off and you tried to attack her, too. She called the police.”
“The police were here!?” Not again. Not this again.
“Don’t worry,” she says in a snarky tone. “I didn’t press charges. They took a police report and left.”
“Great,” I say, burying my face into the pillow for a moment before looking back at Niki. “I need to go talk to my aunt. I need to see if she’s okay. Can I call you later?”
“She’s fine. Don’t you want to know if I’m okay? God, Love, you don’t even care about what you did to me.”
“I do,” I say. I grab her hand. “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.” I feel the tears building and I try to stop them, try to shake them off.
“I’m sorry, too. I think maybe we should take a break from hanging out for a little while. I think you need to get your head straight or something. Go talk to your aunt. You can call me later, but I’m not coming over for a while. And I think you should stop drinking.” She stands up and grabs her bag and heads for the door. “I really love you, you know. And I worry about you.”
And she closes the door behind her before I have a chance to respond.
Before I can tell her I worry about me sometimes, too.
Twenty-Eight
I look in the mirror and fix my yesterday’s-makeup, wipe the mascara from under my eyes, procrastinate from having to go upstairs to face my aunt. Another day, another disappointment. How often does she regret taking me in? I ask myself this question too often, leading me to think she thinks about it just as frequently, and maybe more.
The police are probably sick of hearing from her, sick of hearing about me. Tired of hearing my name and what I’ve done this time. I could imagine what their faces looked like on the scene. Maybe it’s better I don’t remember that. I find those things difficult to erase from my mind anymore.
I use a cleansing wipe to get rid of the rest of the makeup I had put on while Nikki was here. She wanted to take pictures and that meant I had to look at least a little decent, on the off chance that Charlie might come across them. Plus, it’s an unwritten rule. You can’t take ugly pictures with your girlfriends if they look cute. You would only downgrade their photo by doing so. It’s all bullshit, honestly. Sometimes I get so sick of all the superficial crap. I stop and toss the wipe in the garbage can. I catch my reflection in the mirror and look at myself.
Have you ever looked into your own eyes before?
For how long?
I can’t seem to do it for longer than a minute, at most. There’s something in there that scares me and I haven’t been able to figure out what it is, but that almost makes it scarier. Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m looking into or at by the time I have to look away. And right now is no different. I look at myself and try to see if I look like someone who would punch her best friend, someone who would choke the only girl who has been there for her for the last few years. I try to determine if I am crazy. Delusional, like Nikki said. Obsessive, like the therapists have insisted. Dangerous, like the nurses told my aunt. Possibly a form of schizophrenic, like the one shrink suggested.
You have a tendency to disassociate with reality. Are you aware of that, Love?
I close my eyes and put my hands on my dresser to steady myself from shaking.
Do you hear voices?
Do you believe your trauma has affected you?
Do you think your obsessions are healthy?
How far would you go to obtain the object you are desiring?
Do you consider people objects?
Do you think about hurting yourself or others?
; Do you know what intermittent explosive disorder is?
How often do you have “rage blackouts”, so to speak?
Have you ever heard of E.M.D.R. Therapy? We believe this method of therapy could help you.
I close my eyes and count. One…two…three…
I never thought of myself as the kind of person who would hurt anyone else, but I have. And I just did it again. I choked my best friend, hit her. Harmed her. I saw it in her eyes, today; she was afraid of me. What would have happened if my aunt didn’t come down? I laugh a little to myself and shake my head. No. I would have stopped. I know I wouldn’t have really hurt her. I know it. It’s just girls fighting. It’s not that serious.
I’m fumbling with my hands, cracking my knuckles, picking at my shirt. I have to go upstairs. I try to think of the most sincere way to apologize but I fall short of anything good enough so I just start moving my feet toward the stairs. I count them as I go. One…two…three…four…
“Love, is that you?” my aunt calls. There is worry in her voice, hurried footsteps in the kitchen. She opens the basement door just before I reach it and I look up at her. Pain in her eyes, there it is again, because of me.
“Yeah, it’s me. The greatest niece ever, right?” I make a bad joke knowing it’s not the time.
“Get up here,” she says, holding the door open and moving aside. She points to the kitchen table. “Sit.”
I do as I’m told and brace myself for a lecture. Anytime something like this happens, that’s what I get. At first, she tried to talk to me about what was going on with me, tried to get in there and see if she could help me in any way. I think eventually she realized it was a lost cause. No amount of talking could help, considering I didn’t really want to engage in the conversation or talk back.
“You were drinking last night, weren’t you?” she asks.
I sit there, quietly. She already knows that we were. If she somehow missed the vodka bottle, she must have smelled it on us. Because my aunt isn’t dumb. I don’t need to answer.
“Lovina,” she demands.
“Fine! Yes, we were, okay. You already know that.”
“How many times do I have to tell you not to drink in my house? Not to drink at all, for that matter? How many times do we have to go through this?” she begs.
I don’t have an answer. So I remain silent again even though I know better. She wants to hear something. A reason, an excuse, an apology. And I don’t know what to say. I am embarrassed, mortified, one cannot express how it feels to black out. The lack of knowing what you did, what you said. In this case, who you hurt. “I know. I’m sorry.” It’s lame, but it’s what I can manage.
“You should be sorry. Not to me, but to your friend, and to yourself. You know drinking gets you in trouble and leads to things like this, so why do you still do it?” she asks. She sits down at the table now. Stands up, scoots the chair closer to me, grabs my hand. “Why do you do it?”
I look at her and feel the urge to cry. I fight back the tears. “What, drink?” I ask.
“Yes.”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Because it’s fun? Aunt V, all kids my age drink.”
“No, I refuse to believe that. You’re seventeen. And what do I tell you, huh? Never say all people do anything, because it’s usually not true. And you’re not a liar, are you?” She doesn’t ask it like it’s a question. She asks it like it’s a statement, a demand for me to not be a liar.
“No, I’m not.”
“But it’s fun, is it? Is this fun? Is hurting your best friend fun?”
She knows it isn’t but she wants to hear me say it. She wants to be right. So I let her be, because she is.
“No, it isn’t,” I say.
“Do you think you need rehab? Because we can get you into one. I’ll do anything I can to help you, you know that.”
“No,” I say firmly. “I don’t need rehab. Aunt V, I’m seventeen, like you said. I don’t need rehab. Trust me. I don’t drink every day.”
She listens hard to my answer, studies my face to decipher whether or not I’m telling the truth. I hold her gaze.
“Okay,” she says, throwing her hands up for a moment. “No rehab. I just want you to be healthy, happy. And I want you to promise me you’ll stop drinking. For some people, it just isn’t fun. It’s bad. I wish you would realize that on your own. One day, you won’t be in this house with me. You’ll be out there, on your own. With no one telling you not to drink, not to do destructive things. And no one to remind you that they go hand in hand.”
“Fine. I’ll stop drinking. And I’ll be eighteen soon so you won’t have to deal with me anymore.” I go to stand up but she puts her hand on my arm and stops me, pushing me gently in a way that tells me we’re not done here. I sit back down.
“Is that what you think? That I don’t want to deal with you anymore?” she asks.
“Well, I mean, I was never your problem to begin with. I just became one.”
“Your father never forced me to take you in. I did that because I wanted to, because I love you. And I always will. Your father gave me the greatest gift when he gave me you. I’ve never considered you a problem, do you hear me?”
I nod. The words are nice. I know she means them to some extent. I know, deep inside, that she genuinely does love me and care about me. And I know that because I feel the same way about her. We may not be as close as we once were, but she’s my aunt. She’s the only family I really have left.
And the words were nice to hear. They were meant to be comforting, convincing. They were meant to be healing, meant to make me feel better, safer. Loved.
But the reality here is that I am a problem she has to deal with, a bad girl who gets a little reckless sometimes when she drinks and does things that some would perceive as violent.
Twenty-Nine
I am cleaning up my room from the disaster that was last night, sipping on a mixed drink from the Jack that Nikki had left here. And I know, I told my aunt I would stop drinking. But I didn’t mean today. I swirl my glass around and watch the sweat forming around it. The ice is melting. The phone beeps. The room is melting. I stop the timer. Eleven minutes and eleven seconds. Make a wish. I close my eyes.
I want him to be mine.
“Can you talk for a little bit or are you busy?” he asks.
“Sure.” He doesn’t know by now that I’m never too busy for him, that I will make room for him whenever he needs me. That I welcome it, the rearranging of my life to fit him in.
I stop the timer.
Reset.
Sometimes his “little bit” is five minutes. Sometimes it’s two hours. Sometimes I go down that dark hole and wait for him there to find me. He knows it, too. That thing that keeps you up at night. It’s in him, too. It keeps him awake too long. Sometimes he doesn’t sleep at all, and I stay up with him so he isn’t alone. Isn’t that what love is?
During our time getting to know each other, he told me some things, grabbed a flashlight and invited me into his past. Charlie grew up with a father who was too hard on him. Beating him, almost nightly. The scars never healed. His mother left when he was two. And he still feels that his father never wanted him at all. When he was nine, he was placed into foster care after his dad was arrested. The neighbors called the police after hearing the sounds of Charlie’s screams.
He still hates them for it.
As much as he hated the beatings, at least he had one of his parents. Even if that one left terrorized him.
Charlie says foster care can really fuck you up if you let it. Moving from home to home, the shit you experience with the other kids, with the “parents” sometimes even. He told me once that there are all different kinds of abuse. Some are under the surface. But you feel them there, in the way they change you. In the way they shift your reality. In the way they make you hate yourself.
My phone rings and it’s the ringer that belongs to him. I look at the timer, stop it. Twelve minutes and seventeen seconds.
The butterflies swarm in my stomach. “Hi, Charlie,” I say, answering the phone.
“Hey. Sorry it’s so late tonight,” he says.
“Don’t apologize. It’s okay,” I say. It’s 1:13am and really, it’s not that late. Not for him, anyway. He’s called later, and I’ve answered. “Was today a good day or a bad day?”
“It was pretty good. I talked to Tracy about her coworker. I feel like she finally told me the truth about it. At least a little of it anyway.”
“What did she say?”
“She finally admitted that she was attracted to him. That there’s a mutual attraction, and it’s obvious, but that she would never let it go any further than just friendship. Not only because of me, but because they work together. She said even if I wasn’t in the picture, it wouldn’t happen between them.”
“Well that’s good. Do you feel better about the situation?” I ask, getting comfortable on my bed.
“I do, but I don’t think he feels the same way. He’s a man. I’m sure he would cross the line if he had the chance. No guy likes to be friend-zoned, especially when you like the girl.”
“Does this demon have a name?” I ask, because he never mentions it.
“Don’t they all?”
“Not all of them,” I say. Some demons don’t even have faces. He knows that.
“His name is Troy. God, I even hate his name.”
“Are you threatened by him?” I ask. And no one ever likes this question. The root of it they have to get to, the digging.
“Of course I am. I’m a guy, I know how guys operate. I know how their brains work. Right now he has one goal in mind and that’s to get her, however he can and in whatever way possible.”
“But if her heart is with you, no one can take her from you.”
“Steal,” he says. And he says it firmly, like it’s important to state that would be the case here.
“Okay. No one can steal her from you if what she says is the truth.”
“Anyone can steal someone from you, even if you’re married to them,” he says. “People don’t come with promises. There’s no official lifetime guarantee on any relationship. Everyone has free will. And people cheat. It’s not very rare.”
The Gorgeous Slaughter Page 11
