Abandonment

{Two} Feel Like Giving Up

                  

"The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief – But the pain of grief is only a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love."

–Hilary Stanton Zunin

   I was finally eighteen. For most teenagers, it meant they were officially adults. It meant they could move out of their parents' homes and finally live on their own. It meant they would finally be taken seriously by society.

  For me, it meant I could have wibbly wobbly timey wimey powers.

  Once I had been so curious to see if I would, in fact, have these powers I'd only recently discovered. My brother received it, after all, on his eighteenth birthday. It was totally plausible that I should have it too.

  But it'd been a week since my birthday and, oh look, I was still here in 2014. Truthfully, I hadn't even tried to use them anyway. I'd already time traveled and lost everything; even messed it up. It took a while, but eventually I did look up online to see if the Hatfield and McCoy history had changed since Russ's and mine's last attempt to save it. It hadn't. Cap still died in a bar, shot by Tolbert McCoy.

  I guess Cap hadn't killed him in the woods after all.

  Thinking this, I had researched who had died in the woods. Before, I had only thought to look up Cap's fate; no one else's. But with the incident in the woods, I now had some more research to do. I doubted severely my name would be mentioned or that details other than who died and who lived would surface.

  My suspicions were correct. I was not mentioned in any form. The McCoy's rape attempt was erased from all history. While I was glad I wasn't mentioned so as to ruin myself in my own present time, I was beyond pissed that something so vile and traumatic had just disappeared from existence. It made me wonder how many other women's traumas were simply overlooked.

  With trepidation, I looked up the fate of the three McCoy brothers and their wretched father, Rand'l. As I'd already known, Tolbert got out alive. Honestly I had been surprised to know he lived. It sure looked like Cap had killed him dead. But apparently the weasel disappeared before Cap could finish him. The same couldn't be said for Randolph Jr and Pharmer. Both boys received fatal blows by the hands of a pissed off young Hatfield. Pharmer was beaten almost to death and Jr got a shot right between his eyes with his own gun. Rand'l got away. That was all to be said on that matter.

  The reasoning behind all this was just a random assault that was planned in the woods. Cap trespassed on their property, supposedly to infiltrate their camp, and they pounced on them. Cap was once again painted out to be the merciless villain. No one knew he killed those boys saving my life.

  A life I was pretty sure he regretted saving by now.

  That was all I was allowed to look up before they'd taken all that away from me. They saw what it did to me after I obsessively buried myself in research without rest.

  Now everyone was playing the 'let's-just-not-talk-about-it' game. Honestly, not talking about it only made it worse, because it made me think about it more. I wasn't allowed to get anything out. Everyone always had an uncomfortable—constipated, if you will—look on their face any time I brought it up. What really hurt, though, was Russ.

  Really, I knew he was trying to protect me. But it just...hurt. He could barely look at me, let alone talk. He was the one I wanted and needed to confide in the most, but he just wouldn't engage. I wasn't sure if it was because he was mad at my pathetic state or felt guilty. Maybe I'd never know. At this rate I definitely wouldn't.