CHAPTER 1

It was a normal day for me, up at 5:30 am. My eyes were like two piss holes in a snowbank, as my adoptive father would often say. I worked my way to the washroom, keeping the lights off to avoid the intense pain of unadjusted eyes - a result of years of sleep deprivation. I slowly made the long morning grind up two flights of steps with a landing in the center, down the hall, and into the kitchen. New floorboards creaked and crackled with every step I took. I put on a pot of instant coffee - no name crap. Dark roasted aromas wafted, enough to make any sane person's mouth water savagely. I took out the large, stainless steel cooking pot from under the counter and placed it in the sink. When it was a quarter full, I gingerly lifted it, being careful not to make too much noise, and placed it silently on the modern gas stove element. The neon blue flames lit the semi-dark kitchen with a candlelight glow. I kept it on low, so I had enough time to ingest as much caffeine as possible before commencing the daily chore of making breakfast. As soon as there was enough coffee in the pot, I poured a mug topped with cream and inhaled the scalding liquid. I rinsed my cup and tucked it behind the others.

My two biological twin brothers were still asleep until at least seven am, blissfully looking forward to another day of carefree life in their senior high school careers - having the freedom to stay out late, visit friends, be up all night, sleep all day, with no chores or requirements, other than to stalk me daily during school break hours and report my every activity to my adoptive parents. It was a relatively simple task considering I did the same thing every day.

The water was boiling now, so I poured in the raw oatmeal and cooked it until it was a thick, viscous mess in the pot. With a tablespoon of brown sugar in three bowls, I added the cooked oats with a quick splash of cream. The sun was just peeking into our mountain top, private property. I was always surprised how quickly the world brightened from its deep black every time I looked up to the window. Birds were making a great deal of fuss as a gray, overcast, early fall day rolled across the sky. I opened the patio door and let the sharp, cool air hit my skin and run like a clean river over my toes. The smell and look of early morning was my favorite. I could imagine myself standing on the patio of a log cabin in the woods, drinking coffee and looking forward to everyday life. My mind started to wander into this fantasy, and it seemed that I could almost imagine what happiness felt like. Almost.

It was the time early morning occurred at that irritated me, and so I wished that it could just be like early morning from dawn to dusk. I chuckled to myself as this thought moved through my brain, as the thoughts of craving a cigarette brought me back to reality - a filthy habit, I knew, but it gave me a real sense of excitement to break the ever so rigid rules placed over my head. The longing for something different, something new and wrong. I was looking forward to having a smoke tonight.

I closed the door to avoid the rampant complaints of it being "too cold in the kitchen" from my family members when they decided to get up. I stirred the oatmeal, placed the protective mats on the table, and put out each of the bowls with a spoon. The idea of having oatmeal turned my stomach after making and eating it for so many years, so I poured a quick bowl of cereal and headed back to the basement. I had to tiptoe down the stairs as quietly as possible, with an ease that only came from practice.

Back in my room I fussed over clothing that I hoped would make me look less like a piece of shit that day. I tried to make myself look tougher than I was, to ward off bullying - to no avail of course. So I went for an unusual combination of a jet black muscle shirt and a pair of dark jeans. My arms were big and my stomach rock hard and fit, only my face was plain, neither attractive nor unattractive. There was just something people didn't seem to like. Maybe I gave off bad vibes. That would not have been the most unbelievable thing to cross into my reality. I pulled a black hoodie over top - one, I knew my parents would make me change if they saw. Having your clothing dictated for you could be a challenge at the best of times. And two, I had to cover my left shoulder at all times.

I quickly checked the mirror - my short, brown hair bent at odd angles from the limited time allocated to sleep. My head looked too big and my body too thin and wiry, I thought. I often critiqued myself in this manner, never liking what I saw, never proud or accepting. I did a quick rummage through my backpack to make sure I had everything important for the day: books, pencils, paper in binders, and not least forget a bottle of vodka. Sometimes I wondered now as an adult if a fourteen year old alcoholic was such a bad thing, considering it was the closest thing I had to help with the cutting. Nothing ever helped for long, but alcohol came close. Sometimes, if I drank enough, I got to let the massive soul crushing hole in me slip from my conscious thoughts, and suddenly the need to hurt myself was reduced drastically. I just wanted to feel something real, but it was becoming more and more unnecessary. It was funny how at such a late age I began my emotional development, the way a toddler would. I often felt nothing, merely a primal feeling of survival, something like anger, something like sadness, but where those "emotions" were, nothing resided - only instinct. Mostly just an emptiness similar to an emotional hunger.

I didn't know why I wore a muscle shirt that day. I didn't even recall where I got it. All the deep, long gashes on my left shoulder, that never bled for long enough, were for my eyes only. But I had predicted that it would be cool enough to wear the sweater all day, rendering the muscle shirt kind of pointless anyway. I had promised myself that no matter how badly I wanted to show somebody, no matter how badly I would need some kind of help with it, I would not show them off and never ask for attention. I did not want to be that kind of person.

I heard footsteps on the floor above me, jolting me out of my spiraling thought patterns. My room was located just below the kitchen, so I heard most of what was going on, whether I wanted to or not. This noise was my cue to head upstairs before I had to hear them yelling to get my "lazy ass up the stairs".

I came into the kitchen, grabbed the lunch that I had made the night before, reaching around the ones I had prepared for my brothers. My two brothers were sitting at the table, discussing nothing in particular, while my father stood on the patio smoking. My mother was not up yet, which was common. She often liked to sleep in. I started to head for the door to the garage, out to the long walk down the mountain road to the bus stop, but along the way down the hall, I heard creaking - my mother approaching from her bedroom towards the kitchen.

Great. I quickly ducked into the upstairs hallway bathroom, past the second guest living room that only got used once a year for Christmas, and the closed off dining room, used for the same purpose, once a year. What a ridiculous waste of space. I got a feeling, almost more of a warning in my gut, my nerves on end. I could tell it was one of those mornings - bag check. I removed the bottle of alcohol from my bag and tucked it into my belt, then thanked God for the long, baggy sweater. I flushed the toilet for good measure, ran my hands under water, and stepped out of the bathroom, though no bathroom business had really gone on. But I figured it would be strange if I went into a bathroom, didn't flush or wash my hands, and had done nothing other than stand there.

She was waiting by the door, ready like a hawk, or as hawk-like as an overweight diabetic woman close to sixty could be, to snatch my backpack right off my back and dump it on the ground. She looked through the contents with a morbid, diabetic toe, pushing her feet through the items, looking for anything incriminating. As far as I was aware, there was only paper, pencils, books, and binders.

"What's this?" she snapped, scooping down to pick up a doodle on the back of a math worksheet. She shoved it inches from my face. It was a rather morbid picture of a dog's head growing out of a tree stump, crying blood, and a short poem beside it. "Why are you drawing in school? You should be paying attention!" she barked.

I mumbled something about drawing it during my lunch hour, but it didn't matter what I said, she was just looking to pick a fight with me. It was funny how much enjoyment somebody could get from ruining your day, every day, for the rest of your life.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"No more of this garbage," she said, as if there was something vile in her hand. Maybe a slug. Following the crumpling up of the worksheet and squeezing it in her hand, a surge of anger welled in my veins. Mistake number one: with the bravery and stupidity of a person with no control over their anger, I opened my big mouth and sarcastically asked, "So, you're just going to crumple up my homework because there is a drawing on the back?"

She took a long look at the ball of paper in her hand, smirked, and put it in her pocket. Then while looking down her nose at me with those cold, angry eyes, she told me, "Quit wasting your time with garbage like art, and I wouldn't have to. I'm trying to make you a respectable person, not this weird little emo creep who draws stupid little pictures."

And with that, she turned and lumbered toward the kitchen, laminate floorboards creaking underfoot, dogs yapping for their breakfast, brothers talking about ridiculous first person shooting video games, my father whistling while the percolator bubbled. It was too much - the noise, the only emotion, the only one that ever surged my veins. Too much. Too much. The word kept repeating in my head. I let my anger overtake me.

Mistake number two: again in that stupid way angry people often lash out when losing control, I turned in her direction, "Well, that makes you kind of a bitch then, doesn't it?" I sneered at her, waiting for the only reaction she was ever creative enough to come up with. Watching her face turn darker and darker, I thought to myself, it might turn purple if it gets any redder.

I counted in my head: One... Two... Three... Now! She screamed to my father, "Rick! Get in here and deal with this piece of shit before I do, because if I do he won't walk for a week!" Her usual reaction to any situation that she herself could not deal with. My father sighed and started to shuffle over, coffee in hand, thick with cream and sugar.

Mistake number three: Feeling bold. That right there was the worst thing you could feel when in an argument with a compulsive liar who worked daily to make you miserable. I laughed at her, "That's what you always say; I'd pay good money to see you try."

For an overweight diabetic nearing sixty, she sure could move fast, striking my face as hard as she could. Not very hard but enough to make my eyes sting. I kept my face straight, cocked my eyebrow, and laughed out the words, "Looks like I'm still walking, I'll let you know how I'm doing in a week from now." At this point, I was just pushing the boundaries further than I ever had, digging myself a hole as they say. And I wasn't too sure I would get out of it. I wasn't really sure what mistake number I was on anymore - getting up at all that morning, not keeping my cool, being born. It was hard to keep track.

She hit me again. Now, let's go ahead and say this is mistake number four of the day, and maybe the worst one. But then again, who knows. I spit "fucking bitch" at her. I was surprised I had gotten away with calling her a bitch the first time. At this point, my calm, emotionless state had returned, in a sadistic manner. Maybe I just felt like being argumentative and rebellious against the people I felt were my captors. Most of the time, I was very cautious around these people, being so similarly related to bully breed stray dogs - you never knew quite when they were going to snap at you, how hard, or even for what reason.

Fear of emotional abuse, for me, was much worse than any beating. A good whooping, another term coined regularly by my adoptive father, referred to when I got a beat down for being too loud, too quiet, too clean, too messy, acting like a "faggot", "emo", "creep", or my biological father, while I had no more than toddler dream-like memories of short faded moments that had no consequence. I didn't normally push buttons, as a personality trait, reacting just because I felt like it.

Unless provoked beyond capable rational thought, where I began to spew hateful words, thick like tar gushing between my teeth, I often pushed buttons for the purpose of manipulation. I was very good at getting just the response I wanted from controlling my vocal tone, facial expression, amount of eye contact, posture, hand gestures, and of course the most powerful of all - the words I used, and the order I used them in.

This time, I was so tired of being pushed around, I just couldn't be bothered to care about the consequences. That day, my lack of patience was an extremely short fuse already lit into a volatile keg of nitroglycerin, bouncing down a rocky slope. In layman's terms: a ticking time bomb. So, because of this reason, I let my guard down around a bully breed.

I thought back to that time now, and wondered if it was my fault, and should I really have been cursing them, while standing in front of a staircase - probably not. That was just stupid on my part. My bleeding shoulder had soaked into the black sweater, invisible to the naked eye, but as I sailed down the staircase, and my shoulder hit the stud behind the drywall on the landing, like a stamp, smearing long, dark, red lines of blood down the white surface. Now, as I slid backwards down the rest of the stairs from the landing, I left a long slug-like trail of blood along the hardwood steps.

Each step, edged with metal trimming, like a baseball bat, playing my ribs like a xylophone. My shoulder hit the thin, carpet covered, concrete floor first, with such force, it came right out of the socket with an almost comical popping. I didn't get to laugh about the sound until later though, because all I could do was scream when the lightning seared into my brain as my head followed into the floor with a deep thud milliseconds later.

I rolled onto my back, struggling for consciousness, still in fight mode, my head spinning, one hand in a fist, legs ready to kick. It took me a second to focus. I looked at my father, his hand still out in a pushing position, staring down the stairs at me. He looked at his spilled cup of coffee in an exasperated kind of way, dropped his hands and walked away. No look of worry or care on his face, other than for his coffee of course.

I started to crawl up the stairs on my stomach. My head hurt, I couldn't move my arm. The bone ground and crackled with every movement. My mother gave me a fleeting look, merely pity, and too turned and walked away. I struggled to do the one-handed crawl up the stairs - my knee wouldn't bend all the way, and my ribs creaked as I breathed deeply, gasping for air through the pain. My arm flopped like loose spaghetti at my side. The hard metal trim on the wooden edge of each step was now slowly trying to play their painful tune against my ribs again as I pushed myself up one at a time.

I had to get out of there. I cursed whoever thought wooden stairs was a good idea. "Carpet was fine, you fucking dick," I thought. As I struggled to my knees at the top of the stairs, I swept what things I could into my backpack. I had trouble lifting it normally, but now it was like a brick house on my back, with the math, science, English, and social studies textbooks, a big binder, my lunch, and sometimes a big bottle of white rum if I could get my hands on it.

My cuts were bleeding badly, the ones that were healing now torn open by the impact of the wall, and sliding down the stairs. Blood running down my arm, dripping off my fingers, leaving a trail of crimson spots along the floor. I made my way out the door through the garage, the crisp air sharper on my lungs than I would have liked as I headed up to the gate at the top of the main driveway of the three acre yard.

I started to limp badly down the private drive, trying to walk as quickly as I could manage, in hopes that I didn't miss the bus already. I knew I would get no other ride, and the very thought of staying home made my pace quicken despite the pain. It was a few miles walk to school. I doubted I would make the trip in this condition anyway.

I got to the bottom of the mountain drive, four and a half kilometers away. It was quiet and calm out in the back of my hometown - forests and mountains surrounding me. My brothers were waiting by the stop sign where the bus rolled in, already refusing to make eye contact. They must have slipped out while I was having my conflict. I tried to hide my hand, covered in almost black, dried blood, but it was too hard to move behind my back. And they refused to look at me anyway, So hiding is pointless, and I give up. It's not as if they cared anyway. The pain is intense, and I feel like I won't make it through the day with it hanging loose. I am also concerned with somebody seeing my injured arm, and wanting me to take my sweater off, so I did the only thing I could think of. With no medical experience whatsoever, and no way of knowing if it will work, or if I'm just going to hurt myself, I grit my teeth and use my right hand to lift up my bad left one. I grabbed onto the stop sign at the roadside with what little strength my fingers could muster, and held my arm straight out parallel with my shoulder. When I slam my body into my stiff arm resting on the pole, I can't help but cry out, as my shoulder pops back into place. One of my twin brothers watches me from the corner of his eye, but says nothing. I drop down to one knee, shaking hands. I gingerly wipe the blood off my fingers and palms in the dirt and grass. The old bus roars up and swings its doors wide, a monster here to take me away in its thunderous belly, take me from this strange scene. I lift myself up, wipe my good hand on my half bloody sweater sleeve, which has gone a soft crusty texture, climb the stairs past the bus driver, who gives me a look of concern at my filthy sticky hand, says nothing, and watches in the mirror as we find our seats. "Just another day in paradise", I always say.