Page 499 of Lessons in Cruelty

The photo I’ve stared at a thousand times, used to fuel my rage and justify my cruelty, is so fake it’s ludicrous.

How could I have been so fucking blind?

Still, I can’t stop myself from trying to hold on to some sliver of my current reality. “It’s just the angle⁠—“

She jerks the phone out of my hand, and then tosses it across the room. We both flinch as it bounces off the desk and lands on the carpet.

I wish she’d thrown it out the window instead.

All these years…

“No, Kai. You wanted to believe it’s me.” She turns her back, letting out a frustrated sigh. “Now I’m going to sleep because I’m fucking exhausted.” Then, as if she just realized how unpredictable I am, she adds, “If you try to wake me up before that alarm, I’ll scream.”

But I don’t wake her up.

And I don’t go to sleep.

I just lie there as cracks spear through the foundation of my entire world, threatening to topple my reality on top of me. I just lie there and wait to be buried beneath the debris.

Yesterday morning, I woke up in a world where Ezra—psycho that he is—cared for me. At least, in his own fucked-up way, he did.

Before things in the Jordan household took a turn for the better, they got really, really bad. Living in that trailer park was torture. We never had money for anything. Dad kept losing his job, but it was never his fault. Just bad luck.

So, Mom got a job. Then two. Eventually three, just to feed two growing boys and a depressed husband who’d sleep most of the time. When she finally had enough of it, she began picking fights with him.

And he’d take it out on us.

First it was just snapping. Then yelling.

The first time he hit Ezra, I wasn’t even there. I’d been in the woods with Haven, trying to get away from all the yelling. When I got back home, Ezra had shut himself in our tiny room in the single-wide, refusing to open the door.

I thought he was just mad I went outside to play without him.

Until I saw the bruises the next day.

When I asked Ezra about them, he said he fell.

When Dad started yelling at us again a week later because we hadn’t woken him up when the phone rang—it could have been a job, are we both fucking idiots?—Ezra bundled me out of the house so fast I left without a shirt.

Dad called us back inside.

I’ll never forget the look on my brother’s face as we stood outside our shoddy mobile home, staring at each other, both knowing what would happen if either of us turned back. Because I knew he hadn’t fallen.

“Don’t,” I’d told him.

“He’ll be mad.”

“He’s already mad.”

“I’ll be fine. You go play with your friend.”

“Come play with us.”

“I’m too old for that crap.” And when I didn’t move, he pushed me so hard I fell on my ass. “Go!”

That was before he knew Haven was a girl. Before I started spending every afternoon out there with her in the woods. Before Ezra became withdrawn and sullen.

And selfish fuck I was, I never again asked him to come play with us. I never waited around, either. I came home from school, then fucked off to the woods while my brother stayed home and put up with the brunt of Dad’s abuse.