The Lost Girls || Bbangsaz

VI

≪•◦ ❈ ◦•≫

     "You just couldn't stay away, could you?" Elton circled me, forcing me to turn to keep him at my front and throwing me off balance. He always moved with more elegance than most.

     "I could say the same for you." I put my hands on my hips. "Of course, a cold-blooded bastard would feel at home in the frozen north."

     He tsked and prowled closer, like a slick panther that knew it outmatched the field mouse. "You say that like you're not happy to be here."

     "I'm not." Great. Now I sounded like a two year old.

     "You look good, Minji." His gaze roamed over me, like I was a sheep he both wanted to shear naked and drag to the slaughterhouse.

     A lock of my crimped hair had come loose from my braid, and he tucked it back.

     "But I'm disappointed in you, you know?"

     Ugh. Even with self-righteousness and distain dripping from every syllable, the hard place in my heart where I stored all my ugly feelings softened. My fingers itched to run through the sweep of hair that hung over his forehead, like I used to when he'd been mine. I shook my head. He had such an impossible hold over me. I should've had more time before this meeting, more time to prepare myself against my natural instincts to curl against his body until that part of him living within me felt at peace.

     "I don't care if you're disappointed." Lies. I cared, but I didn't want to care, which was as good as I could do when faced with the full force of Elton. "You have no right to be here." I glanced to where Hanni eyed us with interest and lowered my voice. "Not even time wants you here. Don't you feel it every time you go inside the school?"

     He flashed his teeth. "Speaking of time, have you been to see your mother?"

     The sharp twist of pain took me by surprise. I'd begged him to come home for years, and he ignored my every request. At the time he told me it was because it wasn't good for me, he was protecting me from her toxicity, and I'd been so in love, I just accepted it. I hadn't even missed her, not really, bur I'd wanted to check on her, if only to satisfy my own curiosity about what her life looked like without me in it. Not that it would've changed anything. Still. It should've been my choice to know.

     "I haven't seen her since I've been back." I choked on the shame of those last words. I should've gone to see her, but I didn't want to feel sorry. I'd moved past that, comfortable in my righteous anger. A much more soothing balm than guilt.

     The first night I arrived back in Michigan, I'd felt compelled to check in on her, in what I assumed was a lingering sense of obligation. I climbed my old tree. Its gnarled limbs stretched toward my bedroom, canopied by thick leaves. When I first started dating Elton, that tree made it easier for me to sneak out and join him in what he called "really living." Spray-painting the school, egging the homes of people who had been mean to me, running through honey-scented apple fields in the moonlight, making out under the stars. Never knowing I was actively embracing my own death. I sat on the thickest branch, sticky with maple sap, and stared into the place I'd called home, and let the weight of my regrets press down on me.

     I waited to catch a glimpse of her, wondering how it would feel to see her hunched over, with candy-floss hair and sagging skin. If I'd even recognize her. If she was alone.

     It took me until morning to realize that she didn't live there anymore. Through the Facebook posts of relatives I rarely saw, I discovered she'd been moved to a local nursing home and had a strong case of dementia. She didn't remember she'd ever had a daughter.