...
❝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...
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march 2008 — age thirteen
I WALKED INTO school on the first day back after half-term a little late. My mother had her second chemotherapy appointment today and I'd insisted on going with her, not too worried about missing the first half of school. I took the stairs up to my period three lesson, expecting the usual from the day. A day with snickers floating behind me in every corner and scathing glances.
I should have realised that a day that began with an innocent facade would soon become my nightmare. I should have taken a closer look at the walls, covered in a lie that the town blindly believed.
I knocked on the closed door, glancing into the glass slit to see Faye rush up to open it. She hurriedly pulled it open and frantically grabbed my shoulders. "Ishwarya. You... you told me that you were fine. I was so worried that you'd done something."
"What?"
Her worry didn't ease. "What do you mean 'what'? You don't know?"
"What am I supposed to know, Faye?" It felt like every pair of eyes on me were pins prodding at my skin, aggravating me. It felt worse when River came out of nowhere and slid himself between the two of us.
"Oh, you can't keep lying to us, Ribbon. We know all about what you're going to do. We know all about your dark intentions," he said tauntingly. "We know all about how you want to kill yourself, unable to deal with your bruised ego and destroyed home."
My jaw dropped. No. There was no way he'd gotten his hands on the piece I'd written.
Faye pulled me outside, gesturing to the piece of paper glued right beside the door.
My eyes widened when I saw the familiar handwriting — my own — and my heart contracted faster as I read the words that I'd penned. The only addition was my name at the bottom, accusing me of wanting to commit suicide, in my own writing.
River. It had to be him.
When I came out of the shower that day, something had seemed amiss and I'd chalked it up to be nothing since everything was in its right place. River must have sneaked in and taken my story to photocopy and quickly put it back before I was out.
But he hadn't displayed the whole story. It was just the second half of the suicide letter. The letter that the butler had left behind after being unable to tell on his master's crimes.
But he'd made it seem like it was me who was on the verge of committing suicide, and how could I argue that the letter wasn't mine when I wrote it?
