Flawed (Flawed, #1)(38)

I don’t answer. I can’t answer. I wouldn’t anyway.

“Be home by ten thirty. They say eleven, but she’ll be waiting for you, and anything can happen. Allow for delays, mistakes, anything. They will probably even try to trip you up. They’re always testing you. I missed the curfew once. I won’t miss it again, I can assure you.” She thinks for a moment. “She’ll test you every evening to make sure you’re sticking to your basic meals, and a lie detector test to ensure you’re telling the truth about following all rules. They rely on these to work. They can’t keep their eyes on you all the time, but God knows they’ll create something soon enough in those laboratories. A camera sewn into our head or something, seeing everything we see, hearing everything we think. Because that’s what they want to know, you know. It’s like they want to crawl inside us, under our skin.”

She sniffs again and scratches at her arms. I look at her fingers and see that they’re trembling.

She sees me looking at them.

“They won’t stop. I can’t play anymore. It’s like they’re not mine anymore.”

She leaves a silence, and I try to prepare for the next onslaught, which inevitably comes. “It’s awful. A woman looked at me today as though I had murdered every one of her children. I would rather they had killed me instead of living like this.”

I’m glad my tongue is so damaged that I can’t speak. I wouldn’t know what to say.

“Good luck, Celestine.”

She stands and leaves the room.

Mom comes to my room later with a hopeful look on her face. “Did that help, sweetheart?”

I close my eyes and drift away.





DAY FIVE


I wake up. And just as I have done every day for the past three days since I’ve come home, I force myself to go back to sleep. I realize it was not all a nightmare. It is true. Sleep is my only friend these days, so I roll onto my side, for my back is in too much pain, move my head on the pillow so that my temple doesn’t brush the fabric, try not to crease the skin on my chest so that it doesn’t sting, and leave my right hand flat and open, the dressings preventing me from closing it anyway. This is the only way I can find respite, though for a girl of definitions, I use the term respite lightly.

I have not left my room for three days. I have left my bed only to go to the bathroom. Apart from Dr. Smith and Angelina Tinder, Mom, Dad, and Juniper have been the only others I’ve seen. They’re shielding Ewan from me, and I agree. Mom has tended to me night and day, cleaning my wounds, changing my dressings, putting whatever potions and lotions on them to take away the pain, to fight off infection. I have woken some nights to find Juniper sitting in the chair beside my bed staring into space; and then when I wake again, she is gone, so I wonder if it was merely a dream. We spoke briefly when I returned from the castle, but it was awkward, stilted. Though I know she did not plan for any of this to happen to me and it’s not her fault, something is bubbling beneath me, an anger over her part in it. She could have come to my aid on the bus, and she could have testified in court that I didn’t help the old man to a seat. Why couldn’t she have said it? I sensed her guilt as soon as I saw her when I came home, and it made me angry, it made me want to blame her. Anything so as not to blame myself.

I am plied with painkillers, and I like this. They give me a woozy, out-of-body experience that takes me away from reality, softens the blow. I am aware, at different stages, of a crowd outside our house, but I don’t watch them and we don’t talk about them. I know when Dad leaves and arrives home from work, not because of the sound of his car engine, but from the camera clicks, the jump to life by the pack, the shutter speeds, the shouted questions. Some are kind, some are disgusting, directed at him as he comes and goes. I never hear his responses, if there are any, but I, too, would like to know if he could still love the most Flawed person in the history of the state.

“Do you love your daughter, Mr. North?”

“How can you still love your daughter?” another shouts.

Still, I appreciate the latter’s assumption that there is still love for me at all, despite the fact that they find the very notion bewildering. It would never happen to them, not to someone they love. Impossible. I am poison to some of these people, but I am merely entertainment to others. I learned that from the way I hear some laugh when he drives away and they get back to whatever they were doing, having found the entire thing fun. My life is drama at its mightiest.

I recognize some of their voices. They are the gossip reporters, the news anchors, the familiar voices of my past. And now they’re talking about me. Only it doesn’t sound like me, not that person, just this revved-up version that I don’t recognize. They analyze and dissect my own behavior with more thought than I’ve ever given it myself. I’m too weak to care about it and too embarrassed to listen to it properly. It is wafting in my ears and mind, and quickly out again. I would rather sleep.

There is a television in my room, but I haven’t turned it on, nor have I turned my phone on. It’s for the part of me I lost, the invisible part of me that I never knew was essential. The part I gave away to become nothing.

So far, technically, being Flawed has not altered my life. I haven’t been anywhere, haven’t done anything. I have stayed in this bed, and yet I don’t feel the same at all. Not because of the physical scars and ache, either, but I feel different to the bone. Just what Crevan had intended.