Are You Afraid of Musicals?

Chapter 5.4: Lucky

Dani's pov:

~You should leave me... please just leave...~

The moment those words pop up on my mind once again, I stop walking and I close my eyes for a second, taking a deep breath before walking towards the table to take some guy's order.

Those words, that moment... it's been haunting me the whole week.

That day I woke up in the middle of the night, the nightmare I had just had still very present as I shakily got up, being as careful as I could to not wake Gabby up and making my way to the hall bathroom.

Every step I took was harder than the last. I was feeling dizzier by the second and I barely made it to the toilet in time before throwing up, the food I had at the cafeteria leaving my body and making me feel some kind of messed up relief.

I've been having nightmares for... forever. I don't even remember when they started, but since my parents left they got incredibly worse.

When I was little things at my house were bad, I'm not even going to put it lightly cause my parents relationship was straight up hell, and it was my fault.

My father tried to hide it from me, pretend that everything was ok and send me to my room so I would not be present, but I could hear the screams.

I remember vividly the way they would fight every night, the empty bottles on the kitchen counter, the pills, the broken pieces of whatever they had broken during one of their fights on the floor and the way mother looked at me the next morning, with hatred in her eyes, disappointment, disgust.

My father always tried to be there for me, we used to do a lot of things together like watching movies while eating ice cream until our bellies hurt, writing and producing silly songs or simply having a family game afternoon, the two of us against everything, even mother.

Cause I know that if not all, a lot of the fights were about me. I could overhear mother arguing with my dad about how much of a disappointment I was, about how if he kept giving me ice cream I would get fat and gross, about how I was the worst dancer of my classes and lots and lots of things more.

So I tried to be better, I ate better, I started getting A's at school, I worked my ass off at the dance classes... and it was never enough. She always looked at me with the same disappointed and disgusted look, making me feel like the waste of oxygen she always told dad I was.

The worst part is that I kept trying, my God... I keep trying even though back then I knew that they were going to leave and now I know that they're not going to come back.

When I was little I used to have nightmares about my parents leaving, about waking up one day and being completely alone in an empty house and dreams never come true, but nightmares do.

Dad started spending more time at work and I was stuck at the house with mother. I tried to make it work, to be an excellent daughter and show her that I could make her proud, but I always managed to somehow mess it up every time, the situation started getting worse until one day...

After that day they decided to leave and everything went to shit for a while, I had my first... panic attack (or at least I think that's how it's called), the nightmares got crazy and they forced me to transfer schools, luckily ending up going to the same school as my best friend from dancing classes, Gina.

She's been my friend since forever, she's been there for me countless times and yet, I was not able to open up to her, just as I was not able to open up to Gabby last Friday after my "nightmare".

I dreamt about one day that my dad took me to the beach and taught me how to fly a comet, then we went to get some ice cream and then we watched the sunset on the beach.