Grey (Now Published!)

Chapter 2 [edited]

Sometime later--an hour?--I hear my mother crawling up the stairs as though her spine has been carved into pieces. She opens my bedroom door, as expected, and then closes it. My father follows a few minutes later, and as soon as I hear his bedroom door shut I reach underneath my pillow case for my phone.

I send Nathan a text to inform him that the coast is clear for him to begin driving, and he texts me back barely twenty seconds later, like he's been staring at his phone for the entire hour to be given that news. 

The party is at least ten minutes away, and that'll be enough time for my parents to drift into a soundless, deep dream where they're probably just sat on chairs, reading and sewing. 

Ten minutes goes by like seconds, and soon enough, I hear Nathan's car pull up on the street outside my house. Excitement courses through my veins and I fly the covers from my body as I wander through the darkness of my bedroom to the window. I open it wide before climbing out, testing my right foot first which goes over the ledge easily, and I dig my foot into a gap between the bricks as I twirl my left foot to follow it. I grip the edge of the window like my life depends on it. I drop my body softly downwards as I make the exchange from the window to the ledge, but then my foot slides against useless brick and I'm left hanging in mid-air.

Blood drains from my face as I clench my teeth in agony, I stretch my arm outwards to try and grip the pipe that I usually climb down, but something is different tonight. I can't regain my footing, I can't find the hole in the brick to support my weight. My foot scrapes at the brick desperately, my body paralyzing with weakness as memories of their pain against me lights up my mind. I see my father's belt hitting my body, I see my mother's grin as she holds the wet flannel over my face. I hear their justification again and again.

You must be cleansed.

You are riddled with sin.

We must clean you.

My eyes fall on to the scar that's imprinted into my left palm, and then I remember the agony of when they poured boiling water over it. The pain was surreal. 

Whenever I'm in a situation when I have to be strong, I always go back to the thousand and one ways that they took it away from me. And I can never get past it.

I fall to the floor, which greets me quick and sudden, and I try to hold in a noise of pain as my backside smacks into the concrete. I observe my legs first, making sure there's no visible marks, but there doesn't seem to be any, however, my arm aches like someone has punched it. 

I rise to my feet, wiping off gravel from my clothes, before turning to meet Nathan's panicked face as he abandons his car across the street to charge over. 

"Are you okay?" he says as he jogs towards the end of my lawn. 

"Yeah," I say, still wiping myself down. I turn my attention to my hands which are plastered in small cuts where my skin has broken, leaving patches of dry blood. "Dammit. How am I going to explain that?"

Nathan stares down at my hands, and confusion mounts on his face. "Just say you got up early and went for a run and fell in the forest."

I glare at him.

"What?" he says with a shrug. "It happens."

"Not to people like me," I mumble.

"Huh?"

"Nothing," I say, and then I smile. "Hi."

"Hi," he says, leaning in to kiss me. I wrap my arms around his shoulders as our lips meet, and then I have to retract them as my arm begins to sting. 

"Ouch," I wince. "I think I've done some damage to my arm."

Nathan rolls his eyes and takes my hand, dragging me to his car. "Come on, wuss, you'll be fine once you get some alcohol in you."

I agree with him silently, and I slip into the passenger seat of his car while he drops into the driver's seat and turns the engine on. He might think I'm just over-reacting, but he doesn't realize the consequences that something like this will have on me at home. How am I supposed to explain that I developed a bruised arm and cut hands from having eight hours' sleep? 

Nathan doesn't know about it. He doesn't know about anything. He knows little things, like how religious my parents are, and that they've got strict views on the world, like rejecting the idea of technology or allowing me to date. But he's oblivious to the other things, the things that will scar my mind until the day I die. To the physical and mental abuse that I've been subjected with since I was a child. I know that how my parents treat me is wrong, I've always known that, I've just never had the courage to challenge them. They've got the church behind them, they've got an army of religious, brainwashed allies to back them up if it ever got serious. 

When I break their rules, I feel like I'm secretly getting revenge on them, and that's enough. 

As Nathan's car begins rolling off the side walk and into the road, I glance towards my house aimlessly, feeling that satisfactory victory creep into my bloodstream.

But as I attempt to grin, as I attempt to enjoy the moment where I can defy them--a tug of dread courses through me as I swear, just for one moment, I see a face in my bedroom window.