CAMBRIA

SEVENTEEN

She sat at the table across from Mara absently stroking her cheek where Lawson had struck her earlier. Mara, as usual, was dressed elegantly, despite being at a dive bar. She sipped from her drink intermittingly as she spoke.

"Are you even listening to me?"
Cambria snapped out of whatever daze she was in. "What? Yes."
"What did I just say?"
Cambria paused. "I'm sorry."
"What's going on? You okay?"
Cambria faltered, and that was her tell.
Mara leaned forward. "What's going on?"
"It's nothing. Just a stupid fight I had with Lawson."
"What happened?"
"Nothing. He just..." Cambria paused. "He has a bit of a temper."
"Tell me."
"He goes from zero to a hundred, in a matter of seconds. I try to reason with him, but it's like he has tunnel vision, and nothing I do or say can bring him out of it."
"Does this happen often?"
"Not often. But... enough."
"Get him a punching bag," she took another sip of her drink. "My dad had one in our basement growing up. Said it helped him blow off steam after a long day." She sat back in her seat. "Men aren't like us. They have testosterone, and rage. They just want to destroy things. Wasn't it Freud who said man has two drives? Sex drive and kill drive?"
"Yes."
"Yeah, exactly. That's all they do, kill and fuck. That's just how they work and operate. But it's our job to bring them down, mellow them out. Women are nurturers. We seek out the wounded, and we help them."
"But that shouldn't be my job," Cambria said. "I wasn't put on this earth to save a man who can't even save himself."
Mara tilted her head, squinted her eyes. "I'm going to give you one piece of advice, kid. Learn to deal with his rage and help him get it under control, or it's going to be you he takes it out on."

Too late for that, Cambria thought to herself.

They spent the next hour going over Lawson's entire life, from childhood to adulthood, trying to pinpoint exactly where the rage stemmed from.

Right off the bat was his parent's divorce. It didn't take a psychology degree to understand that this had royally fucked him up. And a year prior to that was when Lawson walked in on his mother screwing another man.

His father had been away for the weekend. Lawson, who was nine at the time, ventured downstairs around midnight to get a glass of milk after having yet another nightmare. He'd been getting them ever since he was five, when his father started beating him.

He was sworn to secrecy by his mother, who told him that if his father ever found out, he'd come home and shoot her in the head. Then he would kill Lawson next, because he never really liked him in the first place. Then, he would light their house on fire, killing his sister in the fallout.

His mother didn't seem to care about either of her children, but her daughter she preferred over Lawson.

After the divorce, she took everything and then some. Then, she jetted off across the world with the man from the kitchen, who she married a year later, popping in and out of Lawson's life whenever she felt like it, which meant that he was left with his father.

His father could barely afford the meager farmhouse he was forced to move into after the divorce. He'd been fired for drinking at work, and therefore was constantly between jobs. Lawson had nowhere to go, forced to sit back and watch his father drink himself to sedation. Lawson would silently tiptoe across the room, turn off the television, and cover his father with a blanket before creeping up the stairs and finding solace in his bedroom, where he could finally be alone with his thoughts.

But even that wasn't much better.

He was bullied in school. Kids told him that he was ugly and poor, which he was. The irony was not lost on him that his mother was living a luxurious life in the south of France while her son was wearing the same clothes for the third day in a row, barely scraping by with enough food to survive. Plus, he was giving whatever leftover food he had to his sister. He did this with money, too. He began stealing money, first, from his father's pockets. He would go through his clothing and dump out the change, collecting it in his hands. Then he'd check the sofa. Then the bedrooms and under the bed. Next, he began doing it at school, going into other kid's desks, looking through the teacher's belongings.