Abused {ACM}

Chapter 21

Austin's POV

I don't know how long I've been sitting there. The police officer told me I couldn't know where they were taking her for 'safety purposes'. Sticky tears poured down my cheeks - I haven't cried this much since...since never.

"God!" I shouted, knocking everything off my cabinets. The picture frames and text books clattered to the floor, echoing through the empty house. I rested my arms on the now-empty table and leaned heavily on it, sobbing, my shoulders hunched.

I spotted Sir Squiggles on the floor.

The stupid little stuffed koala that had made Abby so, so happy. I pushed off from the table, shoving it against the wall, and picked Squigs up.

"Let's go on a date today." I exclaimed.

Abby blinked and looked up from her sandwich.

"A date? What kind?"

"Oh, you know!" I threw my hands up in the air, thinking. "The cliché dates where we have walks on the beach holding hands, and have picnics, and go to a carnival and I win you a teddy bear. Stuff like that."

"...I want a stuffed koala." She said seriously.

I broke into a grin.

"Then a stuffed koala you must have!" I announced in a British accent, wiggling my eyebrows.

We were so happy that day. Cotton candy, ferris wheels, roller coasters...

"She loved you so much, Squigs." I clutched at the stupid little koala, dwarfed in my large hands. Abby couldn't even wrap her hands around its fat belly, but I could, my fingers even overlapping each other. I looked at the thing in disgust and threw it as hard as I could across the dark room. "Why the hell didn't you help her? Why didn't you know that her dad was...? Why the hell didn't I help her? I could've tried harder..."

I heard the plastic nose hitting the shutters with a hard clack. I sank to the floor and stared at the broken glass around me, pictures of Abby thrown from their frames. Smiling pictures of me and her, of Alex and Robert, Macey and Zach, Jake and Zoey, my mom...everybody, back then, before everything became complicated.

I stared at my bed, and the sheets were still wrinkled from her small body next to mine. To think we just laid there, thinking the worst was almost over.

Oh, how wrong we were.

"How fucking wrong we were, Squigs." I whispered, shuffling over and picking him up. I clutched him to my chest and ducked my head against the side of the bed.

I wonder if this is what Abby did every single night.

Consumed by fear, rage, desperation...

My heart was pounding so hard that it was making my neck pulse, and I had to take deep gasps of air. Leaning forward on the bed like that, on the side of my legs, my face pushed into the damp mattress, and clutching Sir Squiggles in my arms, I fell asleep.

Knowing that tomorrow, I would get up and clean up my room and shower and get dressed and pretend everything was perfectly fine.

Everything was perfectly fine.

I would be strong, like she was for five years.

Because that's what Abby and I were both so good at.

We were so good at pretending, at faking - everything was so freaking fine, with our plastered smiles and forced laughs and crinkled eyes.

Surely if we could pretend to be happy around our friends with each other, we could pretend without each other.

Our game of pretend.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!! ENJOY YOUR HOLIDAY AND BE SAFE!!