Reticent (h.s fanfic, punk Harry)

Chapter 4

HARRY/ PAST

When the sins of my father weigh down in my soul, And the pain of my mother will not let me go....

I'd never fancied the idea of booze. I wasn't properly introduced to the deathly drink. I'd noticed it on billboards. It was a terrible irony that they would put it as an advertisement on those huge signs then go out of their way to make billboards that warned drivers about drinking and driving. And then there were those in bars. The small papers behind the bathroom stall that most people read because they had forgotten their phone somewhere, it would warn about drinking and making decisions that would soon be regretted.

I just never saw the point in drinking. Louis hated the idea of drinking. He hated the smell, the looks even. His father worshipped the drink. He had cases of it saved in the basement. He would do anything to get it. I could remember the night he sent Jay out in a blizzard to fetch him some. And then she had gotten frost bite on her fingers, but she came home only when she had the booze. She was afraid of Ray. His temper stood just at the tip of his nose.

It was so easy to scrape it. So easy to touch that spot that made him angry, there was a lot, wherever they touched it ticked him off. He didn't like Louis sitting too close to him, he didn't like Louis talking too much, he didn't like Louis laughing too much, too loudly. He didn't like Louis.

That's another reason he didn't like them. Ray never wanted family. He only wanted some distraction. Jay was a poor girl with no family, and he'd taken advantage of that, and promised her so much. Then all he gave her was a rundown house, no money, stale sex and brutal beatings. She'd been pregnant before Louis, but that baby turned out stillborn from Ray's beating. She'd tried to hide her second pregnancy, tried to runaway, but Ray wasn't giving up on his distraction that owed him money. So he'd carried her back and demanded payback. Louis somehow survived and came into the world hated by Ray.

There were countless times Jay had wanted to give him away but her own selfish needs kept him to her. She was just too attached to the one piece of her that wasn't so broken. She kept him and soon as he grew up Ray didn't let him live without a crack. Louis was more than broken. He knew he was hated and he questioned it everyday, and then soon he just stopped when he got no answers.

Louis didn't talk, didn't laugh, he didn't do much but work and buy food for himself and his mother. But somewhere in between Ray had done something. And Louis just walked around like a corpse. He never talked about it. Jay would ask and Louis would just shrug. All talking was gone from Louis then. And he couldn't-wouldn't talk to anyone. He went by his day carefully and avoided sleep.

It astounded me that the first person I would see staggering in drunk at midnight would be Louis.

He'd staggered inside. Jay looked, angry. I'd never seen an angry Jay before. And I'd never seen a talking Louis before. And for the first time that night I saw Louis yelling at his mother asking her why she didn't just give him up, didn't kill him. Jay looked horrified. And she'd hit Louis.

That night Jay cried in front of Anne and Louis cried in front of the moon.

He didn't drink again. But he came home later. He started smelling different. It was later when Louis invited me somewhere that I understood what was making him so different.

Lights were flashing everywhere and sweaty bodies were touching each other. I followed him a little hesitant, and watched him start talking to a girl.

We walked upstairs with her and a friend. He laughed with the girl and talked with the girl. And I saw that none was real because Louis looked like he was about to break down, and the girl looked just too broken. The girl in front of me looked no different.

Louis walked to another room with the other girl and I could hear them having sex. The girl in front of me started to touch me. I went with it because it seemed like something I was supposed to do.

I had sex that night for the first time.

The girl beside me stayed awake and took out a cigarette and handed me one too. And I realized that this was it. This is what broken people like Louis and I did.

OPHELIA/PRESENT

Sometimes I wished I could be Connie. She was so confident. About everything. She would look in the mirror and twirl in her new dress with a silly smile and call herself beautiful. She would talk back to her mother with no consequences or worries at all. She didn't care about what people said about her.

I didn't like looking at mirrors. They somehow just reminded me of the image everyone had of me. I had love handles. My stomach sort of hung over my pants. There was a little space between my breasts and my armpit where extra skin hung.

Connie fanned over how people are so beautiful and how the world is just so great. But I looked at everything. Some people had big noses, some of them had really small eyes. Some had super high cheekbones. There are just too many things wrongs with people that are hard to miss. My mother would tell me that the world was filled with imperfections but I had to find something that made me perfect. There is always something that makes you perfect.

I sometimes allowed myself to look at the mirror just to see if I was perfect yet. But alas I always had the same small grey eyes. The same chubby red cheeks. The same upturned nose. The same blonde hair. It was all the same and sometimes I just felt like doing something to just go against my looks. Sometimes I wanted to chop off my hair, maybe get coloured contacts. I wanted to do a lot of things to make myself look different because then I would catch others' attention. But sometimes change didn't come in a beatific facade. Sometimes it was just too wrapped up in imperfections.

Connie looked at herself once more at the mirror before we headed off to watch a movie. As she walked off sashaying her hip from one side to the other, I watched with a small frown. I just wished I had that confidence.

Once we were in the car Liam gave her a quick hug and held her hand during the drive telling her about his day. It sounded boring but Connie looked at him as if he was telling the most interesting tale ever made. George gave me a timid smile, pushed my bangs away from my face and told me to tie up my hair. He didn't say much through the drive. He didn't tell me about his day, he didn't tell me that I looked pretty, and he didn't attempt to hug me.

I wish I could just switch bodies with Connie. Maybe then everything would turn upside. Maybe then I'd have a reason to smile.