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I pressed my hands to my head, trying to block it out, block them out. I didn’t care about what they were saying.
I didn’t.
They were no one to me. Nothing.
Liar. It hurts and you know it.
My heart was a wild beating thing in my chest, making my palms sweat and my head pound. Slipping a hand down my body, I dipped it under my skirt and pinched the fleshy part of my thigh, digging my nails in until the pain blotted out everything else. Hand closed over my mouth, I smothered the yelp as I drew blood. Some of the tension seeped away like a balloon popping, and I sagged against the wall, desperately trying to remain silent.
The girls continued talking, waiting on their friend to pee. But I was too spaced out to focus on the details of their conversation.
When they left, the gentle click of the door behind them echoing through me, I grabbed a wad of tissue paper and wiped the blood away. It wasn’t much. Just a few droplets. But they quickly absorbed into a fading smudge on the tissue. Funny how something so small could spread into something so gruesome.
I balled up the paper and shoved it in the small trash can down the side of the toilet. Slipping out of the stall, I washed my hands and inspected my appearance in the mirror. My lashes were damp, the color drained from my cheeks, my eyes shadowed and haunted. I barely recognized the girl staring back at me.
And it was only the first day.
The first of many.
I inhaled a thin breath. I could do this. I didn’t have any other choice.
I wasn’t my mother. She was weak. She let my father’s betrayal destroy her. Her pain, her heartbreak drove to her breaking point and nothing—not even the daughter she’d sacrificed everything for—could save her.
I wouldn’t become her.
Even on the hardest days, when it felt like my heart was breaking apart all over again, I wouldn’t lose myself to the darkness again. I would live in it, bathe in it, and become one with it.
But I would never succumb to it.
Not again.
That was my promise to myself and Celeste and my therapist at Albany Hills.
People had the power to break you, to hurt and betray you. But in the end, nobody put a gun to your head and told you how to react.
We had to own our response mechanisms and we wouldn’t always get it right.
God knows, I hadn’t.
But I was still here. I was still fighting every day to do better.
To be better.
And I was determined to walk out of here—the town that had chewed me up and spat me out—with my head held high one day.
One day.
