I'm being shaken repeatedly. I hear someone calling my name. My eyes open slowly and with great difficulty as they were encrusted with sleeping tears.
"Darcy! Wake up!" My bleary eyes try to focus on Carl, the cause of the constant shaking. Zack is next to him, wiping the sleep from his own eyes and glancing at me with worry. I sat up quickly and rubbed my eyes.
"What time is it?" Carl looked at his watch, because he wears one for some odd reason.
"One in the morning."
"WHAT?"
"Hey, I was writing a paper, no one told me I was supposed to babysit you."
"Where's your dad?"
"He's not back yet, I think he got lucky." Carl said matter-of-factly. Zack looks traumatized.
"Zack is a little hung over and I'd pretty sure your mom hates him; so how about I drive you home. Parents love me."
"You're a drug dealer."
"Yeah, you keep mentioning that." Carl offers a hand and lifts me off the floor. "Your hair looks like a natural disaster." I glare at him, retie it, grab my backpack, and rush to his car. It's locked. Motherfucker.
I wait a while for Carl to come outside, fearing retribution from my parentals. But after a while he comes running outside. Carl unlocked the doors and hopped in. I got in next to him, he turned the key in the ignition and looked behind him to back out of the driveway.
"Sorry you had to wait a while, I needed to make Zack soup." The car turned around the bend and made its way to my neighborhood.
"Soup?"
"Yep, hangover soup."
"You make soup when people are hungover?"
"Yeah, I used to make it for my dad all the time." I was quiet for the rest of the drive. Carl kept looking at me to see if I was okay. I wasn't. I was far too busy remembering the most painful chapters of the Livingston story. The car stops, and my flashbacks stop with it. I am yet again faced with the terrifying portal that is my front door. Carl turned towards me.
"Do you want to stay the night at our house?"
"No, things will just be worse that way." Carl shrugged.
"If things get too bad, call me."
"Why would I call you and not Zack?"
"Because if things got bad enough, you could live with me." Hmm. Leaving school. Leaving home. Leaving all of that shit to live in the apartment of a drug-dealing collegiate seems like a fantasy, and that's exactly what it is.
"Thanks for the ride, Carl." I sprinted to my front door and gingerly unlocked it. The door let out a painful creek as it opened. I cringed when I stepped through the threshold, and cringed even more when I noticed that the kitchen light was still on. The basement stairs can be seen from the kitchen doorway, along with my mother, typing away on her laptop at the kitchen table.
I've often thought the only reason my mother gave me a room in the basement is so I'd have to go through the entire house to get there. There's not much I can do about room placement now, so I take a deep breath and walk into the kitchen. The typing ceases, and my mother looks up at me blankly, though I could see the anger forming on her face.
"WHERE THE FUCK HAVE YOU BEEN?"
"Z-zack's. Time got away from us."
"YOU REALLY THINK SO? ARE YOU SO FUCKING STUPID YOU THINK THIS IS OKAY?
"No, mom. I would've gotten home earlier, but I got really distracted."
"So I get Scott for a son and a slutty piece of shit for a daughter? Why do you think it's okay to do this to me?"
"N-no mom, it's not like that. He's my best friend."
"Oh, a friend," she cried, throwing her hands up in the air "he's the only person you spend time with now, Olivia. Why aren't you ever home anymore?"
"Would you want to be here?"
"It doesn't matter what I want, Olivia. I'm doing what's best for Scott."
"That little piece of shit tried to kill your baby... I don't think he's the one you should be trying to help." Although at the time it didn't really register, I realized my mother had slapped me in the face in an attempt to restore the honor of her murderous child.
"DON'T YOU TALK ABOUT HIM LIKE THAT, HE'S PERFECT."
"You know, you've been fucking up that kid from day one. He's always gonna be your perfect, innocent baby boy. So fucking innocent, it doesn't seem to matter that he tried to strangle an actual baby in his crib." A glass flies past my head and shatters on the wall behind me.
"I told you not to talk about him like that!" She shrieked. I know I shouldn't say anything else. I really, really do, but both my honesty and the look on my mother's face when she hears the truth keep me from seeing the obvious outcome of my words.
"You're not separating them because you want to save Jamie; you just want to keep your precious boy from getting stuck with a murder charge." Describing what happened next is rather difficult, because I closed my eyes as soon as it began. The only things I can remember are the things I felt.
I felt hands clamped around my neck. I heard my head banging against the wall. I could feel my back hitting the wall until the skin felt like nothing more than liquid pain. The sounds of my mother's shrieks piercing my eardrums.
Then I am saved by the sound of Scott's door alarm going off upstairs, My mother drops me to the floor and scurries up the stairs to save her poor baby from murdering her poor baby. I heard him talking to mom on the stairs.
"What was all that yelling about?"
"Your damn sister decided to waltz in just now and... we got into a little fight." This is disgusting. My mother is disgusting. Although my shoulders hurt, I pulled myself off the floor and ran down to the basement to my bedroom.
I locked the door behind me and laid down on my mattress. With the covers pulled over my head, I force my eyes closed and imagine Zack is still next to me.
~
Mama-My Chemical Romance
