Despising you

Chapter 6

J e n n i e

Two weeks. I have spent the past two weeks wrecking pure havoc on Lisa Manobal. I'm not referring to our usual game of insults or the cattiness that I've become so accustomed to parading around her.

No, this is different. This is unadulterated and cold. It's vicious and it's been prodding at me since that day.

The day that my mother blurted out my family's secret. The same secret that she had ingrained into me as a child to keep quiet, mostly because of high society and its judgment, but a small part had to have been because of fear—fear of my father.

She was terrified that day. I remember it so vividly. I had just come home from cheerleading practice. My mother had found out that my father was sleeping with his boss and was planning to leave us. Instead of apologizing for his adultery, he threatened and berated her.

He was on top of her, pummelling her face and screaming at her to keep his gay affair a secret. Seeing this, I ran as fast as I could to stop him.

I was foolish to think that scrawny, twelve-year-old me could pull my father off my mother, but I tried so very hard. So hard that he pushed me backwards. I got hurt as a result, so in a way, it stopped him from continuing to beat my mother.

I would have taken as many pushes, punches, and kicks as I could if it meant that he would stop hurting her.

He walked out that day and sent divorce papers the next week, turning my mother from an ally to an enemy.

It's as if I had absorbed her pain from that day. I could feel it inside me; it covered every inch of me, rattled me and changed me in unimaginable ways.

Now, I was just like her. I had to be.

Since my father walked out, my mother has been a shell of her past self. She went from loving and bubbly to stoic and unkind to most people, but never to me.

Her mask was so well placed and didn't budge all these years, until that day, when Lisa provoked her. I spent the whole night consoling my mother who was bawling in her bedroom.

It teleported me back to the night I spend cleaning my mother's wounds and wiping away her tears.

The minuscule, rational part of me knows that Lisa couldn't have possibly known what happened to my mother and I. While she was particularly vicious that day, it wasn't without reason.

After all, I can't blame her for wanting to understand why I hate her so much. Yet, I still can't help but want her to hurt for what she did, because she hurt my mother and she... hurt me.

Yes, I've hurt her, but never like this. I've never spoken about her parents. Not that I could, as I don't know much about them.

I assume her mother died when she was a child, I'd never heard anything about her. I do know that her father hung himself before she came to YG academy.

Have I ever spoken about that or thrown it in her face? No, I haven't.

You've spoken about her brother, so get off your high horse.

I have been vicious toward Lisa these past two weeks; I've spray painted dyke on her locker, burned half of her precious textbooks, and ordered my minions to keep harassing her. I expected her to shout, fight back, and hurt—the same way I'm hurting— but she hasn't.

She just endures it; every insult and shitty thing I spit at her, she takes it. I haven't even spoken to her since that day at my house. I haven't been able to face her because she makes me lose control and if I lose control, I won't be as cruel as I can be. So, I've avoided her and gotten others to do my dirty work for me.