by Grace Reagal
Nate doesn’t reply.
Before I can ask him anything else, my phone rings.
Kitten’s name pops up on my screen. I’ve put a feral cat as her contact picture. Even now, I smile.
I put the guitar aside. “Nate, shut the fuck up for a moment.”
I hear him mutter, “I wasn’t even saying anything.”
I pick up the phone quickly. “Kitten?”
There’s no response.
Suddenly I hear whimpering. “No, no…please.”
My eyebrows furrow. “Kitten, what’s wrong?” There is a painful groan from her.
Is someone hurting her?
I get up quickly. Nick throws me a confused look, “Chto proiskhodit?”
I wave him off. Suddenly I hear her voice. “Help me, please. Help me.”
I talk calmly, but I feel fucking sick. “Help you with what, love? Are your parents there? Who is hurting you?”
I’m starting to get nervous.
You don’t fucking get nervous.
She’s rambling. “My parents don’t care. They don’t know. The boys, they’re—” She screams, “Stop!”
What boys?
Anger twists around my body and slips through my mind. What I think is happening better not fucking be happening.
“Stop what? Kitten, tell me so I can help. Do you want me to come to you?” I run a frustrated hand through my hair.
What the fuck have you offered?
It’s impossible to get to her house without getting killed, unless we carry out a carefully designed plan. But that would take months.
And yet I can’t find it in myself to take it back.
Not when she is hurting like this.
“You cannot fucking go there.” Nick’s voice is behind me.
I flip him off, and hiss, “We are not going to get what we want if she is dead, right?”
Before he can monitor the rest of the conversation, I walk to my room.
Kitten’s soft voice wavers in through the phone. I hear her gasps. “I think…I think I’m having one of my attacks. I’m fine, I’m fine, I promise. Don’t…I should not have called you. Bye. Bye.”
I think she’s trying to hit the END button but she fumbles and I hear her swear in the way that Kitten swears.
Softly, innocently, and not really saying any curse words.
I almost fall on my knees in relief.
She is not getting raped.
Where I come from, that happens so fucking often that it was the first thing that came to my mind. How fucked up is that?
I close my bedroom door behind me. “No, don’t hang up…please.” It does not hurt to say the word. Not with her.
“There’s a reason why I gave you that phone. It was for something like this, love.” It was not actually. It was so her father couldn’t track us.
A panic attack. All right, fuck, that’s better than her being hurt. She’s talking to herself. I can hear her berating herself. And for some reason all I want to do is comfort her. I pace across my bedroom.
“Kitten?”
“The phone is still on? Darn it! Darn it!”
I bite my lip, in dark amusement. “Don’t end the call, love.”
“It’s nothing. I’m fine now.” Her voice has gotten a little louder.
“Kitten, tell me what happened.”
“No, I—”
I make my voice firmer like Father has taught me my whole life, “Tell me.”
“It’s nothing…”
I cannot contain my anger. But it is not directed at her. I don’t know who, but there’s obviously a someone who got her in this state. “Fuck, obviously it is not nothing. You are not okay. Tell me, Kitten.”
A breath.
Then I hear a sob.
She is about to have another attack.
How can you distract her? Fuck, Valentin, think of something.
I rack my mind for anything that can get her mind off whatever memories she was drowning in.
I take a breath, looking out the window at the city. “Kitten, ask me absolutely anything and I will answer you honestly.”
There’s silence. I don’t know if I have her attention.
And then her fluttering voice, “Anything?”
She is so fucking breakable right now.
“Anything. I promise, love.”
And I know it’s fucking dumb to make promises like this, I know it is. It’s naïve and trusting the person not to fuck you up with the wrong question.
But it would be anyone’s pleasure to be fucked up by this angel.
I hear her breathing on the other side. I slide down against my door and look up at the picture of my mother on the wall. I should feel nothing but hatred for Kitten right now. I know. Every time I see that photograph, of a mother, my mother, smiling so beautifully…a mother I never got to have. I’ve damned all the Giovannis to their death sentence. But when Kitten takes her small, breathy, inhales, I can’t find it in myself to hate her. My father has always taught me to kick the puppy when it’s down to make sure that it never gets up again. And right now I have the ability to break Kitten a little bit more than usual. But I don’t want to. And so instead, I fucking hate myself for not wanting to. And more, for not being able to.
“Okay…my question is this: do you…do you have it out for me or does your…family have it out for me?”
Always so curious.
“Both.”
She chokes out a laugh. She doesn’t really seem surprised. “That’s not an answer,” she says.
My lips lift up at the corners. She is laughing. That’s a start. “That’s an answer, just not the answer you want.”
I can almost imagine her in my mind, biting those lips of hers, wondering how to proceed. After a moment she says, “Okay, okay. Can I please get another one, Valentin?”
My name on her lips and the word please does something to me.
Fuck.
But I hold my ground. I cannot allow her to move me like this. “No.”
“Oh. Okay.” She sounds down, like she isn’t going to fight me.
Like she doesn’t have any more energy left to fight me.
I can feel her deflation.
Instead of hanging up, I say, “Let me ask you one question, and you get to ask me another.”
Her excitement is contagious.
“Anything?” she asks nervously.
I grin. “Yeah.”
I can feel her smile through the phone. “Fine.”
I don’t have to think about it. “Do you know a woman named Charly?”
“Hm…” She seems to think about it. She seems to really think about it.
Finally, she says, “No. Who is she?”
“Someone I know,” I say.
“All right, time for my question!”
But now the anger has come back. “You already asked yours. You are done.”
And I am done with her.
Her confusion is apparent in her voice. “Wait, what? I did not—”
“You asked who she was.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“Next time don’t be fucking stupid then, Kitten.”
I click END.
I throw my phone across the room where it clings to the wall and falls on my bed. “Fuck!” I yell.
Fuck my father for making me befriend the enemy. She is getting under my skin.
Fuck her. Fuck her family.
***
Caterina
Mom wakes me up on Saturday afternoon like always. I don’t complain or say anything. I simply get up and walk to the bathroom. I’m blank. I slip into the shower, discarding my PJs on the ground. When the water cascades down my body, I don’t cry with it. I cried enough yesterday. I brush my teeth and put my hair in a ponytail although it’s short. The water makes it longer. I hope it will dry by itself. And if not, who cares? I’m not going to school and even if I was…so what? I can’t bring myself to care about anything.
Mom tries to talk to
me as she comes out of her room. “Hey, sweetie. Do you want to go out today?”
She isn’t going to work today. Dad has forced her to take the weekends off because she’s getting further into her pregnancy. I can see him behind her in their room, which is across the hallway from mine. I guess he is skipping work today. He watches me silently, his laptop on his lap. I hope he can hear what I told him yesterday.
I hate you.
His eyes turn stormy gray as I stare at him defiantly. I scoff, turning away. I brush my mother off and walk away. She doesn’t call me disrespectful. She knows they’re in the wrong this time. The maids have started their early morning routines. On the weekdays, they did it after I went to school. A couple of them pass me by and smile at me sympathetically.
I don’t want your pity, I want to say.
As I go down the grand staircase, which twists up to four floors, I suddenly hate the house. No matter how big or grand the house, if you’re forced into it, it becomes suffocating. It becomes your prison. With everyone always watching you, they become your guards. I have lived here all my life.
Such a beautiful home, they coo. The biggest mansion in New York magazines and newspaper write. Such a perfect family lives here, people say.
And I had thought so too.
Until yesterday.
As I eat breakfast silently, my mother and father come down together. My mother has a wary look when she watches me, and my father is wearing a face even I can’t decipher. And at that moment I realize, that right now, no matter how hard I try, I can’t forgive them.
They were supposed to be there for me.
Instead, at the time that I needed them most, they left me to turn to the boy who hated me.
Mom was supposed to have known. She always knew when the attacks came. And instead, they locked me in my room like a child.
I take a deep breath and look out the window to our running track.
I want to run. And run and run and never come back.
I feel like if I open my mouth right now, I will forever regret what would come out of it.
***
The weekend goes on longer than I would have liked.
My mother’s ultrasound gets moved to Thursday, so that is a relief. I won’t have to come in contact with her until then. I was going to go; I want to see how the babies are doing.
I know she had trouble in this stage of her pregnancy years before. She lost a child at five months.
I lock myself in my room those forty-eight hours and obsessively do my homework for all my classes, double check it all, and then start studying for midterms which are months away.
I clean my room.
I organize my clothes that Nana left outside my door Friday night.
She is gone for the weekend so one of the maids is doing the cooking.
I don’t know her name.
The group of ones I had known, Anna, Christine, Laura, Betty, Drew, Travis, Carl, Carlotta, Harrison, had been let go a little more than a month ago for “reasons.”
My mother hadn’t argued so I assume the reasons are actually legit this time, not because my father felt like it.
I don’t ask for her name as she serves me lunch both days.
I don’t want to make friends if they are going to be kicked out anyway.
The old group had been with us for years. But most of them hadn’t even said goodbye to me, so who knows?
Maybe they had hated me all along and only pretended to like me.
Holed up in my room, Sunday night, I try to watch Game of Thrones like I had promised Tom.
But not surprisingly, it is blocked on my laptop. Awesome.
One of the many things that my parents did that suffocated me. I don’t know why they wanted to keep me this way, this naïve and prude of the whole world. How could any of that hurt me? They had bodyguards on me whenever I went outside, no one knew me in school. So why?
They call me down at dinner. I pretended to be asleep both days. I can’t wait to go back to school.
Yes, it’s partly because I am a weird breed, but this time, a major reason is that I want Valentin to take me away again.
This time I want to go somewhere very far away.
And I don’t give a darn if I never come back.
Chapter 39
Caterina
“The game is tomorrow.” Mell slams her locker shut after she shoves her books and binders she doesn’t need for today in there.
“The football game?” I don’t look up from my book. I had been lost in The Fault in Our Stars all of Sunday. Today is my seventh time rereading it. It gives me a good cry each time.
“Yeah, are we still on for tomorrow?” She grabs my elbow and pulls me. “Watch out, there’s a pole.”
“I know. I saw it.”
That is a talent of mine. I can read and walk.
Most of the time.
She laughs, “Right, okay. Next time, I’ll let you smash into it. It would be funny. I just didn’t want you to embarrass yourself in front of Chase.”
I look up. “What? Chase? Where?”
Mell grins and leans against a random locker. I follow suit. “Three o’clock.”
I clutch the book to my chest, my index finger on the page where Isaac and his girlfriend are in a passionate make-out session.
Darn it, is three o’clock to the left or right?
I sigh.
I can do trigonometry without any issues but I still have no idea about directions.
I turn slightly to the right, trying to cover my face with my hair. Chase is leaning against a locker and talking to his friend. He laughs as the guy makes some sort of joke, and his dimples—god those dimples—appear full on. He brushes his blond hair back.
The guy hands him two papers and Chase pats him on the back.
Mell scoffs. “All these rich kids paying people to do their homework.”
“Chase doesn’t seem like the type to do that.”
“Yea, because pretty boys are snakes with charm.”
“Why are you so pessimistic?”
“You’re the gloomy one today.” She raises her hands. “I get it though. Family issues.”
I ignore her words. I’ve been doing a good job of forgetting my home situation for now.
Chase looks up and I instantly turn away from him and face Mell. I open my book and start reading it. “Are you sure you’re talking about him or someone else?”
I can see her scowl from the corner of my eyes. “That’s not funny.”
“Yea.” I grin. “Sure.”
For some reason, even though I’ve had a sucky weekend, being around Mell makes the feeling go away a little. And she doesn’t mind that I’m reading half the time and not looking at her. I guess this is what it feels like to have a best friend.
When I’m sad, I read, and she seems to get it.
Obviously, it seems very cliché, but books truly take me away. They let me think about something else and immerse myself in another life for a little while.
The life of a girl with cancer. How very fun.
“Can you hear me roll my eyes? Because I’m that annoyed. That fucker has been trying to invite me to his party all weekend. It’s a thing: if I don’t reply to one text, it’s not because I didn’t see it. It’s because I don’t want to.”
“Wait up. Mell, they’re having a party?”
I remember how well the last one went.
“Yup. And before you ask, Kitty, of course I’m not going. I don’t make the same mistake twice.” She cocks her head, thinks about it. “In one year, at least.”
“Okay, but you have to admit. Nate is much, much nicer than his brother.”
“Like I said, the nicest guys are the meanest. And he dyes his hair blond.” She scrunches her forehead. “Ew.”
“Errr…for some reason, I’m pretty sure that’s not the most logical concept. And you dyed your hair purple so…”
She tucks her dark purple curls behind her ears. It looks awesome. “I had
a reason. He doesn’t.”
I don’t ask for the reason. I tried when we made up but she’d said she didn’t want to talk about it. Case closed.
I was going to get it out of her soon, especially since I had told her my secret. But I wanted the time to be right.
“How do you know?”
“I know everything, Kitty.”
“Right. But have you asked him? Or talked to him at all?”
She’s silent. I start reading again.
But then she says, “Have you?”
“Have I what?”
“Talked to Chase? He’s been looking at you for, like, five minutes. Or Valentin for that matter?”
I refuse to turn around. “Well, I’ve only had him storm into a locker room and put me in a chokehold naked…yeah, it’s a total wonder why I don’t talk to him.”
But maybe you should. It’s in the past.
You forget way too easily.
Mom’s voice repeats in my mind. “You don’t have to forget to forgive. It lightens a load to let go, Kitten.”
Shut up, Mom. We’re not talking right now.
Mell bursts out laughing. “That was pretty funny.”
“Yeah, not really funny when you’re on the end of that though, hm?” I raise my eyebrows.
She scowls. “I would never let him put me in a chokehold.”
A dirty thought comes across my mind. “Unless you wanted him to.” I wink.
This was our way now. Laughing about the most horrific moments so we didn’t have to cry over it.
I remember how terrified I was when Valentin and Nate cornered me in the locker room.
“What the…?” Mell pretends to look shocked. She looks up at me, her brown eyes widening. “What has happened to innocent little Kitten?”
I narrow my eyes at her. “If I have been tainted, it’s because of you.”
She smiles and it’s so adorable that I can’t help but tap her nose with my index finger, “Aw, your face is so cute, did I ever tell you—”
She smacks my hand away. “Don’t you dare call me cute. Ugh. That’s what Tom says when we’re fighting.”
“Tom’s cute too,” I say laughing.
She raises an eyebrow. “Well don’t tell him that.”
