Your Fault

Chapter 31 Noah

It wasn’t going to be a good day. I knew as soon as I opened my eyes that morning. Not just because of the hangover, the headache, the profound desire to vomit, but also because it had now been a year since my father had died, and it was my fault.
I got out of bed, feeling my stomach screaming at me for all the alcohol I’d drunk the night before, and staggered my way to the bathroom to shower. I didn’t even know how I’d gotten to my room. I’d drunk so much tequila, I felt like it was coursing through my veins. I remembered seeing Nick…and Lion.
I needed to call Jenna and find out how the night had ended, but not today… Today I wasn’t going to talk to anyone. I was going to shut myself in my room with my inner demons and cry for a father who had never loved me, cry for a person who had tried to kill me and for a little girl who could never make her father care about her.
I knew I was an idiot for thinking about him still, but his words and the guilt that lived within me since his death would never go away. My nightmares were part of my existence when I went to bed, and sometimes, they even chased me throughout the day.
I’d loved him. Did that make me a monster? Was I a monster for loving the man who had hit my mother and hurt her every single day? Was I crazy because I went on thinking that if I’d just acted differently, my father would still be alive?
I closed my eyes, let the water fall over me, passed a sponge over my body. I felt dirty inside… I hated those thoughts. There were times when it was like another person was inside me, forcing me to be a masochist, to act in a way that did not honor me or my deceased father. He didn’t deserve my tears. He didn’t deserve the grief I felt for him… It didn’t matter how many times he’d taken me to the park or fishing… It didn’t matter that he’d taught me to drive when I couldn’t even reach the pedals. It didn’t matter that I’d used to love watching him race and win.
He had been my father, and my little girl’s mind, my twisted little girl’s mind, had forced me to look away every time he mistreated my mother. I didn’t understand my thoughts or how I’d acted. I tried to analyze myself from another perspective, but none of it made any sense.
During the months I’d spent in the foster home, I had missed my mother, of course, but I had missed him, too… I had missed how he treated me better than he did her. In a horrible way, I had liked being different, knowing my father wouldn’t hurt me, that he loved me the most, that I was special to him… Of course, everything fell apart in the end, because he did wind up hurting me…and badly.
The memories, the conversations, came back to me, and there was nothing I could do to change that.

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“You suck!” one of the girls at the foster home shouted. There were five of us girls and one little boy in that horrible house with fake parents who didn’t love us and didn’t take care of us.
“You took away my doll!” I shouted, trying to make myself heard over the sobs of the blond girl next to us. “And when you act bad, you get punished. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that?”
“Don’t hit her again!” The brown-haired girl with the pretty braids went on pointing at me with her dirty finger and hugging her four-year-old sister, whose cheek was red where I’d hit her.
The other two girls, who were seven and six, got behind Alexia, the dark-haired girl with the braids. I hated how they liked her and not me. All I’d done was take back what was mine—she had stolen my doll; I had a right to hit her, didn’t I?
That was how it went when a person was bad.
“You’re nasty, Noah. No one likes you,” Alexia said. She was almost as tall as I was, we were the oldest girls in the house, but she had a cruel face that I couldn’t imitate. Maybe I had hit her, but all I really wanted was for us to be friends. I had tried to tell her that when I was done playing, she could have my doll, that we should share it, but she had taken it away, torn it out of my hands. “No one talk to her,” she ordered the others. “From now on, you can stay all alone because meanies like you don’t deserve for anyone to like them. You’re nasty and you’re ugly, too!”
I felt the tears roll down my face, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to cry. My father had made that very clear. Only weak people cried. My mother was weak because she cried; I wasn’t.
“Nasty! Nasty! Nasty! Nasty! Nasty!”
They chanted along with her, even the little one who had been crying started smiling and joined in. I grabbed my doll and ran off.