Trophy Child (On Hold)

Chapter 21

I didn't sleep much the next night. I tried, but my thoughts raged through my head too loudly to let me. Everything from worrying about how the competition would go to the math test I was pretty sure I'd flunked.

I think that's what I hated the most about nighttime. The way the silence seemed to amplify whatever inner turmoil I was experiencing. The way things that normally felt small became so much harder to deal with.

I snapped back to reality at the sound of my parents' bedroom door creaking open, followed by  light footsteps in the hallway. I knew what was coming, so I closed my eyes and waited.

Mom stopped when she reached my room and stood in the doorway for only a couple of minutes before she left without a word.

I'd asked her about it one time, when I'd caught her sneaking out of Andy's room a few years ago. I only remember pieces of the explanation, but she told me that she wanted to make sure he was still there and breathing.

'I care about you both so much, Casey, ' she'd said when I asked her why, 'sometimes that makes me do things that might seem a little silly.'

She still checked on him sometimes, although less frequently. I don't think she realized that I knew she did it to me too, because I never confronted her about the habit. Mostly I thought she might stop if I did. It was kind of nice knowing that she loved me, even if it was in her own destructive way. Even if it didn't change the things she'd done.

Phil's words came back to me then.

'Try telling your mom... You have the video for proof, she can hardly deny it anymore.'

For a minute, I thought that maybe I should. I just was so tired of holding myself together.

'I think you should tell somebody'

Andy had told me almost the same thing as Phil. But everything was easy for a ten year old, and Phil didn't know our family. They didn't understand the way my chest tightened at the thought of opening up. 

'You don't need to be afraid.'

But I was.

I kept telling myself that I'd already been hurt too much, that nothing could damage me any worse than I already had been, but I was still so afraid of everything. Josh, his friends, my mom. Failure. 

The future.

Before the year started, I'd been so confident and so sure of where I wanted to go and who I wanted to be. I wanted to be famous. I wanted my mom to be proud of me. I'd known that I could get there if I just played a little harder, reached a little further.

But so many things had changed.

"What happened to me?" I whispered. "How do I fix all of this?"

My ceiling didn't give me an answer that night. Which meant that I'd need to find one for myself.

***

I think that I managed to fall asleep eventually, but it didn't really feel like I had when I woke up.

I stumbled out of my room and into the bathroom, still out of it, and studied the redness of my eyes in the mirror. I looked like I needed at least ten more years of sleep. It was funny, being so tired and at the same time feeling too antsy to go back to bed.

I didn't know what I was going to say, but I was going to talk to her. Somehow, I was going to spill my guts out to her that morning. I was going to lay everything on the table. Josh, school, the talent show. All of it.