Secret Lucidity(46)

“Six months,” he reminds before we kiss goodbye.

The moment I drive away is the moment I want to turn my car around. Even though I’ll see him at school tomorrow, it isn’t the same. I hate him as Mr. Andrews, hate that his title forces us to pretend we’re not what we clearly are. It makes me feel like what we have is wrong and dirty. But outside of school, when we escape the blanket of stigma, I know what we share is anything but dirty.

I park along the curb when I see a strange car in the driveway. I haven’t even walked through my front door, and I’m already stained in discontent. But at least the worry of being caught doesn’t plague me anymore.

My mother has never questioned my whereabouts a single time, and I guess, for that reason, I appreciate her lack of attention toward me.

When I turn the lock and step inside, all that appreciation is syphoned right out of me. A man, who is much younger than my mother, comes down the stairs with his T-shirt in hand and the button to his pants still unfastened. He walks right past me with an indifferent, “Hi.”

I watch in disbelief as he shrugs on his shirt and strides out the front door. In just a few short seconds, everything good that has come from this break rots in front of me. I brace myself as I make my way to her room, praying with every step that this isn’t what I think it is. But prayers in my world are nothing more than tarnished pennies at the bottom of wishing wells.

In a sea of mussed up sheets, my mother lays face down and naked—a disgrace beyond the boundaries of words. Blood boils in vehemence, singeing my veins on the path to nowhere because my heart is far past broken—it’s burnt ash.

Fury flames my palms, begging me to slam them into her makeup-smeared face. Instead, from her nightstand, I grab hold of what she values the most, and send it flying across the room. Glass shattering against the wall wakes the beast.

“What on God’s earth are you—”

“How could you?” I scream through the sea of red now coloring my vision. “You had sex with that man in this bed? His bed?”

She grabs her silk robe from the floor and shouts right back at me, “What the hell has gotten into you?” as she ties the sash.

“I hate you!” Tears fly down my face, and I grab the first thing I can find. Her hands go up, and the book strikes them.

“Get out!”

“You’re trash! That’s all you are. How can you cry over Dad and then have sex with another man in his bed?”

“Shut your fucking mouth,” she lashes, storming over to me.

I back up a step. “Don’t come near me. I swear to God, I’ll kill you.”

But she does. Quicker than I can get away, she slaps the salt right off my cheeks, but she’s hungover, and when I push her away she falls to the floor.

“You think you can hurt me any more than what you already have?” My vocal cords sear in fiery pain as I yell at her. “Look at you? You can’t even stand up because all you do is drink. You don’t care about me at all. You can’t even pretend to care about me.”

She stumbles to her feet, but I push her back down.

“Can you even see me?”

“You think I don’t see you?” she seethes, and this time, when she gets up, I don’t touch her. “I see you all the time. You haunt me in my dreams, reminding me over and over that you’re the one I’m left with and not him!”

“Is that what you want? You want me gone?”

“I want my goddamn life back!” she screams with balled fists, as if it might just come true if she shatters glass with her words.

“You never deserved the life Dad gave you. You might as well have pissed on his grave!”

“How dare you? I loved him with my entire soul.”

Slinging my arm out toward the bed, I shriek in putrid hate, “This isn’t love!”

“You don’t know what love is, missy.”

“Don’t talk to me like a child.”

“But that’s what you are. You and Kroy are kids playing around with the idea of love when all you have is petty infatuation.”

She’s so out of touch, not even knowing that I haven’t been with Kroy since the summer.

“I know love,” I defend.

“You know nothing. You kids live in fantasyland. Well, guess what? Life isn’t a fantasy, so wake up!”

“I am awake. I’m the one paying the bills and taking care of this house while watching our money disappear because you’re too damn drunk to go get a job. You want to talk to me about living in a fantasyland? I’m not the one drinking myself into oblivion and whoring around!”

“Cam!” Kroy shouts, but the second I see him walking into the room, my mother takes another swing at me.

She checks me off balance, and I fall into the nightstand, clipping the side of my face on the way down. My cheekbone flares in pulsing heat as the blow jars me, blurring my focus. Before I can get my bearings, Kroy’s hands are on me.

“Get her out of here,” my mother yells at him.

“I hate you,” I lash back, and the tears resurface. “I hate you so much!”

I kick and scream as Kroy drags me down the hall to my bedroom. Once inside, he kicks the door shut and locks us in. When I jerk myself out of his hold, I continue my hysterics. “She’s crazy. I can’t stand her anymore.”