The Side Character ☑

Chapter 28 - Mistakes of the past.

FUCKING FINALLY! (I don't know if that's me or Allie sighing in relief)

My dad was abusive.

He had a tendency to overreact but when he got drunk, he took it to a whole different level.

Aaron and I could both hear it at night.

Sometimes our dad came home late, really late. Drunk of his ass and started to hit our mother. Sounds of wood splitting, blood curling scream and angry shouts would fill the air as the both of us hid underneath our bunk bed. It was times like this that I realized he was the older brother. He would wrap his arms around me and talk about random things to keep me occupied. Like how our kindergarten principal had a new pet dog or how our class teacher was the lady version of Hitler.

I would listen to him, ignoring the way tears fell out of his eyes and how his hands shook. I would listen to him ignoring the screams that were resonating downstairs.

The young ten year me hadn't faced reality that time. I thought sometimes at night, some monster would barge in our house. But in the morning he would be gone.

Well I wasn't half wrong.

He was a monster.

I never understood why my mom wouldn't leave the sick excuse of a man. Love? Compromise for our sake?

Whatever it was, it was a pretty pathetic excuse.

As I grew up, I began to understand what was happening, little by little. But Aaron had forbade me to do anything. Because apparently our father was more dangerous and disgusting than an abusive husband.

He was a gang member.

Aaron told me that mom was secretly planning to escape as soon as we graduated high school. We would have gone to different colleges and mom would have gone to a different state, out of his reach. I absolutely despised the idea of mom having to endure the same shit she had been enduring for the last who-the-fuck-knows-how-many years. But it seemed we had no choice. And I was already a sophomore and Aaron was a senior then. So it seemed everything would end soon enough. Grasping that one candle of hope desperately, we began to live. Day by day.

But one night I made a mistake. Well, three, to be exact.

It was a Sunday. I had been sleeping all afternoon to actually get some sleep at night. So after tossing and turning in my bed for three hours, I finally gave up on sleep and went out for some food.

Hey, grown boys need to eat even if its 3 am.

The house was eerily quiet. The wooden pavement squeaked slightly as I stepped on them. I peeked my head inside the living room and glanced around checking for my dad.

It was like a fucking survival mission every night.

Seeing no one, I quietly tip toed to our small kitchen. No passed out drunkard meant dad still hadn't come home. Rolling my eyes, I opened one cupboard after another, checking for something to eat while I binged on football shows.

Finding nothing, I sighed disappointedly. I was about to go back upstairs dejected when I heard it.

The sound of something shuffling at the back door.

Aaron wasn't supposed to be home that they, he had sneaked of to some party. And even if he had changed his mind he wouldn't have come through the back door. And my dad would have never used the back door. I doubted his drunken mind would remember where the back door was.

Narrowing my eyes in suspicion, I rounded the corner and swung open the back door.

Mistake number one.