Sunday Morning (Damaged #7.5)
Bijou Hunter
1 - Jodi
He had no business loving me. I had no idea what I was getting into by loving him. We didn’t make sense to many people, but none of them mattered in the long run. Life was only about him and me.
Before him, I dreamed of nothing more than turning out better than my mother. Considering she was a complete f*cking loser, my goal seemed attainable.
I lived in a cramped one-bedroom trailer with my mom, Robin Sears. Our trailer park was a classic white trash horror. My neighbors were druggies and thugs. No one watched their kids. People argued day and night. Gunshots went off all the time. I often slept with a pillow over my head to block out the noise.
The trailer park rested on the outside of a rundown town where too few people paid taxes, and too few services were available. Half of the roads in Chesterfield were gravel. The paved roads were riddled with potholes.
Years ago, our library burned down, and no one ever raised the money to rebuild it. My high school smelled like mold, and I dodged fights every day. Most of the kids in my grade couldn’t read the front page of a newspaper. Our sports team never once won anything. In fact, we frequently forfeited when not enough players showed up.
I couldn’t pretend to be too good to live in the shithole. I’d seen pictures of Robin from when she was my age, and she was beautiful. Long blonde hair and big blue eyes, she reminded me of supermodel Christie Brinkley. The world was at Robin’s fingertips, but she was raised by a loser mom and became a loser herself. The pattern was set generations ago. It was in our blood to f*ck up our lives without anyone else to blame. My mother was no different than our neighbors, each one embracing the lazy lifestyle
The lane I lived on at the Princess Farms Trailer Park led straight down to a stripper bar frequented by a biker club. While Chesterfield had no “right” side of the tracks, this gravel road was paved with trouble. Day and night, motorcycles roared past our trailer. I grew to hate the sound of Harleys and the men riding them.
I hated a lot of things back then. A world filled with sharp edges didn’t leave me with much to like. My mother drank all day and smoked pot all night. She claimed to self-medicate to deal with her depression and physical ailments. I figured sitting on her fat ass all day would make anyone sore. Fortunately for me, she was a step up from many of the losers in our trailer park. She didn’t beat her kid on the front porch or f*ck men in public while on a bender. Compared to several mothers in Princess Farms, mine was a picture of maternal instincts.
By twelve, I was the adult in the relationship. I paid the bills, did the grocery shopping, walked to the laundry mat, and kept the trailer as clean as possible. Childhood never interested me. My goal was to get old fast and gain the power that came with age.
Mom said my father was either a serial rapist or a murderer. The brothers who double teamed her were in prison by the time I was old enough to care they existed.
“I’ve always had a soft spot for bad boys,” Robin said more than once when someone mentioned my paternity. “They were both so handsome and so very f*cking bad.”
Since they were brothers, either my uncle or father liked to rape and beat women while they were sleeping. The other one got off on knifing people in alleys.
There was no shaking how awful my bloodline was, so my life goals were small. I wanted to live in an apartment rather than a trailer. I wanted to have a real job. I wanted to spend my money on books rather than booze and pot. Small dreams were attainable, and I planned to make them happen.
The day I met him wasn’t so different than any other day. I woke up early and made sure Mom hadn’t burned herself up on the couch overnight. Making coffee, I noticed a putrid smell coming from outside. The park always stunk from people dumping their trash everywhere and not cleaning up after their pets. This was stronger, and the cause was closer. I looked out of the front window to the dumpy porch where an * laid sprawled out in his puke.
The f*cking bikers called themselves the Chesterfield Vandals, and they acted as if they owned the park. They f*cked women on their bikes only yards away from where kids slept. They dumped beer bottles everywhere. One of our elderly neighbors tripped over a bottle weeks earlier and took a tumble into broken glass. Did they care? Nope. Never. Not even a f*cking little.
That was how Chesterfield worked. Big, strong *s did whatever the hell they wanted. The young, the old, the weak, the stupid, the addicted - basically everyone else - got screwed and lived in fear.
I was sixteen and hormonal in the way only sixteen-year-olds get. I hated the world and its rules. I hated everything and everyone at that moment. Most of all, I hated f*cking bikers.
Peering out at the wasted guy on my porch, I noticed a few used condoms on the ground near him. The f*cker came to MY house and f*cked someone on MY porch. Then he barfed all over, leaving ME to clean it up. Fucker!
We couldn’t afford a gun to protect ourselves, so I used knives and bats. That day with that big lump of an * on my porch, I decided to play baseball with his face.
Never once did I consider what might happen afterward. This guy was patched in. He was a big shit in a violent club, and I was taking a bat to him. Right then and there, I just didn’t give a shit about anything.
The guy didn’t even react to the first three strikes of the bat against his legs. Only when I nailed him on the upper back did he holler. Waking groggily, he reached for my bat. I hit his grasping hand. He hollered again. His voice was so damn loud the entire world probably heard him bitching.