It's Terribly Perfect.

21. It's Terribly Perfect: Sticks and Stones.

Recap: Kasynne goes to Winter Formal and gets texts from her dad's phone to meet him in the alley next to the school. She goes to meet him but finds Calub instead, who reveals that he's her rapist and his father was Skarlette's, Russell helping Calub along the way. After admitting to everything, Kasynne asks him what his next plan is, to which he responds with, "I'm going to kill you." . . . . . . How rude.

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I used to think about death. What it would feel like and look like, if I would be afraid or not. Who would come to my funeral. Truthfully, just a few times, I thought about it in a much more serious way, in a purposeful way.

In a suicidal way.

When I was little, there was a time when I heard my mother crying and screaming mixed in with Marcus’s yelling in a dreadfully drunken state. I thought about it then. I didn’t know what it was, exactly, but I still considered it. I thought about a time where a small dog was just standing in the middle of the road on my street. I watched it, confused when it didn’t move, even after a car starting to drive directly at it. I picked up a handful of pebbles, shouting for it to move, to run, throwing the stones not at it, but near it so it would go. At the very last second, the puppy yipped and jumped away, running back to whatever home it came from.

I thought about doing what that pup did, when I was just a little girl, curled up with Tyler in the closet of the bedroom we shared. But that’s why I couldn’t do it, because of Tyler. Who would he cry to, when this happened? Who would tell him everything is going to be okay, even if it wasn’t certain that it would be okay.

I don’t think I understood precisely what it meant to die intentionally. I heard of car accidents and illnesses but I didn’t comprehend suicide and what it was through and through.

But later on, when I was thirteen, I went through that stage where you think the whole world is against you and black was apparently my new favorite color. Excluding Calub and Arin, everyone would push me around left and right, telling me to get a decent haircut and take off all the dark makeup. Then one day, an older, scraggly boy came up to me in the cafeteria and pulled up a chair to sit beside me. Looking straight into my black liner-rimmed eyes, he said, “So little Santiago has daddy issues, huh? I heard he left and never looked back. How long is it going to take you to turn into a slut or has it already begun?”

Calub broke his nose.

After that, everyone repeated his words over and over, finding new ways to word it together. One day while this taunting was continued, some girl a year ahead of us tripped me in the hall, proceeding to spout something off about not even my own father wanting me, and then told me to kill myself. “No one would care,” she said.

I went home that day, running to the bathroom and locking the door behind me. I stared at a bottle of prescription pills for nearly two hours before falling asleep on the tile floor by the tub.

I incessantly racked my brain for answers to the same questions coursing through it: Why do they like to hurt me?  What did I ever do to them?  I ran the phrase ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,’ through my head continuously, realizing how much of a lie it was. No, words may not break your bones, but they do break down your confidence and self-esteem.

Maybe that’s just as bad. Just as painful.

At the end of the day after hours of my pity party, I chose to not let what that girl or anyone else said get to me, to not care what anybody else thought. By then I knew – or thought I knew – Marcus was never coming back, and I recognized it wasn’t because of me or Tyler, or my mom. It was because he didn’t know how to be a father – at the time.