The Beautiful Trap

Chapter Two

Monday. Up and at em!

My alarm went off on my dresser, which was all the way on the other side of the bed. Meaning I had to get up. My mom had taught me to put it there so that I had to fully wake up to turn it off, rather than just leaning over, flopping my hand over the snooze button, and rolling back into the cocoon of blankets and comforter I'd become in my sleep.

I dragged my feet to turn the damned thing off, yawning louder than the alarm itself, and arching my back. I walked to my closet, pulling out my school blazer, a white collared shirt, a navy blue tie, and a pleated skirt of the same color. After yanking all that on, I dug in my dresser for the mandatory white knee socks (for girls) and put them on, too. This is my favorite part.

Have you ever slid around on hardwood floor in socks for fun? This is how I wake myself up every morning. I skid from my room to the kitchen—scrounging for food like a breakfast bar and a banana and a juice box—and from the kitchen to the hallway bathroom. And when I'm done freshening up, I get to skid to the door, where my backpack and shoes are. We're a "no shoes in the house" household.

And this was my usual morning routine, Monday through Friday, every week. It's about a week before October, meaning I've repeated this for four weeks. I'm a quick learner; I have to be.

Following this routine, donning my flat, black Mary Janes and shouldering my bag, I locked the door behind me and grabbed my bike. It would take me fifteen minutes to travel the two miles to school. No way in heck that I would take a bus to school. That would mean all the uppity kids on it would see where I live and it's bad enough that I'm known as one of the scholarship kids. And there's maybe two or three of us.

My mother, when she was around like a parent should be, used to pay the discounted tuition—thanks to the scholarship's deduction—every month on the dot so that I could remain at the "fancy-schmancy school," as Miss Lindsay calls it. She wanted me to grow up to not be like her, to get a college education, and become whatever I wanted to be, as long as it was lucrative enough to support myself. And then, wham! A divorce came out of nowhere. My then-step dad (who is now a non-step step dad) said that their marriage was...what was the word? Boring.

We moved to Acron nearly a year and a half ago, and after that last half a year—freshman year—at a public school, mom was determined to get me into Acron Heights for my sophomore year. With my grades, a mind-numbing essay, and letters of recommendation from previous schools, Acron Heights decided that they'd take me in, giving a generous discount to my mother.

Like I said earlier, she was on the ball when it came to taking care of finance. Rent was good, school was good, life was overall good. As good as a freshly divorced mother and daughter could be, anyway. And, gradually over time, she changed. It started with the sudden materializations of wine bottles. I saw one and asked my mom where it came from. She said it had come out of nowhere; hence, "materialization." One bottle became two, and on especially hard weeks, there'd be three. She'd gotten a new job when we moved to town at a popular, small-owned coffee shop two miles opposite from my route to school. She got a nice paycheck each week and came home at least once a week with a nice tip and a smile on her face. My mother is a nice person and is nice looking, in my opinion. Her personality and, um, physical attributes may have something to do with those tips. And then, one unlucky day, I walked into the house to see my mom being given the tip on the living room couch by a guy I'd never seen, met, or even heard my mom talk of before. I think I stood there with my mouth open in disgust and shock—I mean, who wants to see their mom getting it on with someone on the couch. The fucking couch!—before my brain turned back on and told me to lock the front door, shake my shoes off, and go straight to my room without looking up again.

I don't know why I was so mad about my mother being lascivious all of the sudden. I mean, a woman her age needs a little something something sometimes, right? And since she's not married anymore, I guess that's how she was going to receive it (pun intended). Maybe I was angry because it wasn't my non-step step dad that she was getting it on with, even though I have never had the horror of walking in on them.

Hallelujah.

But then, it became more frequent. I saw him around for a while, at our place, and when he stopped coming, other men did. Not all at once, but one at a time. And my mother would just love it. I mean, she's the one who invited them, right? I think that's when I lost a lot of respect for her. Her wine and sex addiction got her fired from her job, leaving us often without anything to pay the bills or even feed ourselves. Miss Lindsay was nice to us, paying the rent for us sometimes, but she gave us a date when she couldn't help us anymore. A week before my monthly school tuition was due.

That was when my mother disappeared. I remember the day as if it were yesterday—the pain recycled as if it were brand-new each time the memory resurfaces. I'd been sitting at the kitchen table, cursing the existence of differential calculus, when I looked up and noticed that it was ten o'clock at night. She wasn't home. No, I thought to myself. She's always home by nine. Nine-fifteen at the latest because she knows how much I panic.

Ten-fifteen. Ten-thirty. Eleven o'clock.

I'd called my mother multiple times. It'd ring a bit before sending me to voicemail. She sent me to voicemail. Her phone was on. I went to her Instagram, asking her where she was and begging her to come home. She blocked me. I felt like my world was ending and I could barely breathe. What was she doing? What was going on? And then I got a nice little voicemail. I still have no idea how she sent me a voicemail without calling me first; therefore, evading my answering. I kept the voicemail for some reason—maybe to remember her voice or to remind myself of the pain.

"Miriam, I need you to stop contacting me. Stop calling me, stop messaging me on my social media. Instagram, really, Miriam? You're smarter than that."  Well, how else was I supposed to get to her? "I can't do parenting right now. I know you're smart. I believe in you. Take care of yourself and I'll come home when I come home. You know what to do to keep yourself alive. Get a job or something. I promise things will be different when I come back. Love you."

Things will be different for sure. I'll be different. I am different. She might see me if and when she comes back, but she won't recognize me. And I refuse to recognize her for the negligent monster she is, either.

Just look at me. Look what I've done to make the money to stay in the school she wants me to go to, for her to be proud of me even though I know that she wouldn't care and that there's a small chance that she'd come back. I haven't let go of her in a way, and now I'm killing innocent people to pay for the dream she wanted.

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