...
❝He was the poison I was dying to taste on my lips.❞
...
I was a coward.
The coward who wanted to leave behind the wreckage of her life for the man who had tormented her for as long as she could remember. The boy who had spit venom at me gro...
⚠️ TRIGGER WARNINGS: body shaming and physical abuse. Please read with caution.
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february 2008 — age thirteen
WHEN RIVER SAID that he would ruin my life that day almost two years ago, I should've known to take it literally. Everything only got sickeningly worse from that day — both life at home and life at school. Something had happened to my parents that night, and whatever the mistake my dad said he'd made, it caused a huge rift between the two of them. Our home wasn't the peaceful environment it had always been and instead, tension was looming around our heads constantly, making me want to retch all over the laminate flooring that was growing older day by day.
I had basically every single subject with him — excluding P.E — both last year and this year. He'd never gotten tired of finding a seat behind me every time and found something new to mutter about each day. It had started off as mundane things; my status, my looks, my test scores which he always sabotaged, my clothes and he used the fact that my parents had no money to humiliate me. But then it had descended into more crude things; that I must have been adopted because my mother was apparently very fuckable and I was not.
It disgusted me more than it was supposed to hurt me; my mother didn't deserve to be looked at or talked about that way when she was the best person I knew. No one deserved to be talked about like that, for the matter. It had the whole school talking about it and it had taken the 'your mum' jokes to another level.
At first, I'd found used pieced of gum in my locker or my homework had been ripped out of my books, getting me in trouble. Then as everyone became older, they had more torture tricks which meant that I now daily found either dead rodents or small animals, bags of literal shit, and I'd ruined more uniforms than I could possibly count. I'd given up hiding it from my parents and they'd started to believe that I really was clumsy, and I hated the disappointment on their faces whenever they had to get me something new.
A couple of times, I'd even found bloody tampons and pads in my locker — in my bag — and that was the first time I'd had a breakdown. They were taking it too far, but I couldn't do anything about it and it was torture. And River was never going to get caught because even though he was the mastermind behind it all, he had other students carry out these pranks and tricks.
Each day, my hatred for Glésford only grew more and more and it was suffocating me in silence.
My parents were hiding things from me too and I'd never felt more alone. Yes, I had Faye and she was the only thing keeping me sane, but every person had limits and I was terrified that I'd reached mine.
"Amma, I'm leaving!" I called to my mother from the door. I waited for her usual footsteps as she would jog over to bid me goodbye but I didn't hear either today. "Amma?"
