The Devil - Rewritten

Chapter Nine

CHAPTER NINE: THIRTEEN

We have never heard the devil's side of the story, God wrote all the book.
-Anatole France

Calum's

For so very long, Xavier Wolf was nothing short of a beating bag. 

His father's own little piece of the scenery—the scenery being a two star broken down apartment where a drug addict and a pimp lived on either side of him, where the only view was a trailer park, the scenery being a beaten down wife, a half-dead son and a baby girl they're both struggling to protect—that he could control, he would have stand in a certain way or curl in a ball, flinch when he raise his hand, shut his mouth when he talked. 

Look scared.

Xavier was his father's infinite source of entertainment in what he himself saw as a bland and monochromatic world.

For yellow, Xavier's arm would be gripped tight and his night would be spent with him being able to be seen from the corner of his father's eyes. It would be the slips his teachers gave him when he acted out, not knowing why.

Then when it came time for blue, he walked through the woods in the middle of winter in nothing more than shorts and flip flops because  while Xavier claimed to like to watch the snow fall, he just rushed out of the house after a shower because he'd rather be cold than get beat. 

And for red his father beat him, and beat him, and beat him until he was nothing but a submissive puppet in the sick show his father seemed to have on repeat. It was something that happened every night, a play like no other, but Xavier can't quite remember what his lines were and he's too scared to ask.

For purple, he stayed up enough nights listening to the footsteps downstairs as his father drank countless bottles of liquor that it caused the skin under his eyes to blossom out in shades of flowers. It's the color those same bottles look when hit by the sunrise's light just right, and it would be the first picture Xavier ever took.

But shouldn't he be grateful? Xavier's the one that likes photography so much.

He's the one that, for Christmas the first year at the Hilton house, was given a new camera after Calum told his mom—that his best friend refused to ask for anything—how much he wanted one. He's the one that saved up his money just to buy everything he needed to print out his pictures, to save them permanently in his room.

At twelve, for the first time in his life, Xavier Wolf had his own room. And he felt unbelievably guilty about it.

Xavier hated it.

And of course, he'd been raised to think kindness and normalcy was wrong, it has been ingrained into his bones in the way of heels and fists, into his mind by screaming and threats that when anyone is nice, if anyone gives him anything they're only doing it so when they're mean later or take something anyway they can say it's your fault—

I did what's right—I've treated you good—I've given you what you need but it's your fault that now things are different—you've lost the privilege to have nice things—you messed up and that's why I'm mad.

It was part of him and you could tell.

You could go five years knowing Xavier Wolf without seeing him cry. This was a fact that Calum Hilton knew because he had. He had met tiny eight year old Xavier on the play ground picking at the soles of his shoes instead of playing tag with everyone else and decided to start a new game by shoving him over.