Flawed (Flawed, #1)(48)

I open my mouth to protest, but as if sensing it, she holds up her gloved hand to silence me. She turns the page. Finally, she snaps the journal shut and looks at me up and down as if seeing right through to my soul.

“Rules state you are to expect random searches of your private possessions. If you’re going to continue writing this journal, for example, further thoughts on whether your thighs are fat and if you’ll be any good at sex”—she sneers, and I feel my whole face heat up with embarrassment—“I expect you to hand it over to me every Friday so that I can read it for myself. Is that clear?”

I swallow. And nod.

“What did I say about verbal communication?”

“Yes,” I say, and it comes out as a whisper. I clear my throat and repeat it, but she’s pleased by the effect she’s had on me.

She picks up the Highland Castle snow globe that she’s found in my bedside table and gives it a shake.

“Always good to have a reminder, isn’t it?” she says, dropping it into my hands as she passes, the red sparkling glitter falling down and coating the bottom like drops of blood. It feels like a warning.

I rush to the bed and throw the snow globe back into the drawer. I never want to see it again. I pick up the journal and start to rip the pages out, first one by one, then frantically as I start to sob. When I’ve torn all the pages out, they lie scattered on the floor.

Mom comes to the door and watches me, concerned.

“She was reading my journal,” I splutter.

Mom joins me on the floor and looks around at the pages. Then she picks them up and starts to rip them into little pieces, her face not as cool as usual, her eyes filling up. This gesture means more to me than anything she could have said. I join her, and we rip the pages of my handwriting, excited exclamation marks, stars and hearts around Art’s name, doodles and words that came from my heart, concerns I ached over, stories I giggled over, private thoughts that were once only mine. I watch the hearts be ripped to pieces.

Angelina Tinder was right. They want to be in our heads. I will never let them in my head again.





THIRTY-FOUR

JUNIPER AND I barely speak.

She feels guilty and left out. I feel angry and bitter, and I must admit I have found an odd sort of joy at taking my pain out on her. With too much time on my hands to think, analyze, and dissect, my mind always drifts back to the moment on the bus. I try to live it out differently in my head, as if doing so would change the outcome. But every time I relive the moment on the bus, I can’t help but relive Juniper’s silence. Juniper, who could never usually keep her trap shut, couldn’t find one single word to leap to my side on the bus or to defend me in court, but most of all, watching her live her life as I want to live mine is hurting me the most.

I can tell she is maddened by my silence with her. I can sense her shouting at me that this wasn’t her fault. She’s telling me that she feels guilty enough without my having to make her feel any worse. And I respond to all that with silence. I was the one who would have done exactly what I was told, not her. For her to suddenly become me and for me to become her is the most bizarre twist of all. I am wearing her clothes, I am feeling her insecurities, and she is suddenly silent, biting her tongue that she could never silence before, sneaking out at night to meet who knows at a time I am no longer permitted to step foot outside my house. It is my fault that we are behaving like this with each other, but I can’t stop feeling as I do.

Most of all, I miss Art. My heart is broken and I need him. I can’t understand why he hasn’t written to me, why he hasn’t called me, why he hasn’t reached out to me. If it’s true that he has run away from home, then not being under the thumb of his dad gives him even more freedom to contact me. This is beginning to feel more like Art’s decision to stay away from me and less his dad’s. That hurts more than any branding.

After what happened with Colleen, I give up on the school cafeteria. Instead, I read books in the library, huddling on a beanbag in a corner and getting lost in somebody else’s victories and troubles. I never had much time for fiction before. I preferred real life. Mathematics. Solutions. Things that actually have a bearing on my life. But I can understand now why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else’s life. Sometimes I’ll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they’re not alone, that I’m not alone, that it’s okay to feel like this. And then the lunch bell rings, the book closes, and I’m plunged back into reality.

Today I’m too tired to read. I haven’t been sleeping well. I’ve been forcing myself to stay awake because my dreams keep turning into nightmares of the Branding Chamber. Lately they’ve focused on Carrick, and instead of it being me in the Branding Chamber, it’s him and I’m watching him being seared. Where is he? He told me he’d find me. When? Has he decided not to, or does he need my help? I have thought of him often, so often that he has started to appear in my nightmares. Internet searches of Carrick Flawed do nothing to help me learn anything about him. I don’t know his surname. I don’t know anything about him. Where he’s from, what he even did. I don’t know if he was found to be Flawed, but a wild guess tells me that he was. I wonder about his punishment for being there for me in the Branding Chamber, and I hope someone was there for him, that someone offered him peace as he did for me. I have written his name on my notepad, gone back over the letters in red ink over and over. It starts to break through the page. It helps me think.