Midnight Toxicity

1.

What happens when you turn left instead of right and later regret the decision? Do you bitch and moan or say to yourself, "Yeah, I turned left, so what? C'est la vie!" But what if someone forced you down a path when all you wanted with every beat of your heart and breath in your lungs was to travel back in time to choose a different course?

If the choice was not your call, then what would you tell yourself? How accountable are you for what takes place next?

My dad knocked my mom up at eighteen, but they were both thrilled at the news. When my father died in a hit-and-run accident in the streets of Tucker City, I had just turned two, and it left my clueless mom to make decisions no twenty-year-old should.

My grandparents hated my mother. Charlie, my dad, had been a star athlete, straight-A student before Aria Codona came along and derailed his future. At least, that's how they saw it because she partied a lot, showing up sloppy drunk in the middle of the night one too many times, and let's not forget the marijuana they caught her smoking once while on vacation. They were bitter people and after he passed; they moved far away, pretending we didn't exist. Harsh, but I was too little to remember them when their visits stopped. Her folks wrote her off the second she became pregnant, and just like that — we were on our own.

Alone in a three-story, one-room apartment with a toddler, Aria was at a loss about how to move forward. She had no education or job prospects. My father worked for the city, maintaining the highways and such, and although it paid well, the funds ran dry. She quickly discovered she didn't have what it took to survive with no income and a child to support.

My parents named me Charlize, a spin-off of my father's name. I would learn the hard way how my resemblance and surname caused her never to recover from his death. Without Charlie, she lost hope of living happily ever after with her soulmate. With me, she only experienced failure and disappointment.

But wait... there's more!

After I entered kindergarten, doctors figured out I had colorblindness. Only partially, though. Reds and greens were difficult to differentiate, but I didn't allow my disability to hinder my childhood. Even as a kid, I realized how broken Aria had become and tried my best not to burden her. We moved six times — all of them involving men's homes. We never stayed too long because my presence couldn't stay unchecked, and they did not intend on playing stepdaddy.

Aria turned heads when she walked into a room. Tall, with a lithe figure, she also carried gypsy genes she passed down to me. Men drooled over her, not taking into account the dark shadows behind her eyes. She eventually buckled to her assets and began working at a strip joint and the manager, Derry, persuaded her to marry him when I was eight.

Derry owned a small two-bedroom house in a bleak neighborhood downtown, and they never allowed me to play outside because of the gangs warring for territory nobody cared for. Aria continued to shake her ass for cash, and Derry lorded over his new family with an iron fist.

I despised him. I couldn't understand why she married the brute. His attitude towards me was pretty shitty from the start. Barking idiotic orders, demeaning me when she wasn't around until he quit caring if she witnessed his cruelty. Before long, mom joined in, tag-teaming me into submission when they assumed I had done something wrong.

I was too young to grasp what he expected, and I regularly hid in my room, afraid he'd hurt Aria or me if I fought back. Within six months, my fear evolved into terror when he started hitting her. They often drank too much, and at night, I would hide under a blanket in the tiny closet. Hearing her beg for him to spare her face while he wailed on her became the norm. We lived in toxicity, like every other household on our street.