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I laid in bed; staring at the ceiling, as Em slept peacefully.
Tears slid down my cheeks from the corner of my eyes, drenching the pillow beneath me. I could hear them shouting downstairs but it was hard to make out the words. It had been a week since my dad came home and every night I woke up to them shouting. I was hardly getting any sleep. And I doubt my parents were getting any either.
The past week had been a nightmare and I was afraid of what was going to come next.
'Fights like these always end up in a divorce,' my mind kept saying.
But I refused to believe it.
Not my parents, no.
Divorces happened only in movies, rarely in real life and that was the only place I was going to see them.
There was a slight knock on my door; Tyler. Every night he came to my room, trying to talk to me. To ease some of his burden and some of mine. But I couldn't. I didn't. I kept pushing him away. I did not talk to anyone about what had been going on in the past week.
I tried to face it myself; crying myself to sleep every night, thinking about what could happen and torturing myself. I let myself be alone, it was the only thing I could do.
The knocking stopped after some time, surrendering to my stubbornness. I wiped my tears with the back of my hand and rolled on my side.
'5:00 am,' the clock read.
Heaving a deep sigh, I got off the bed and went to the washroom. I willed myself to look in the mirror. Indeed, my eyes were swollen red and puffy, my nose dripping. Tears came out again at the sight but I wiped them away aggressively.
"You don't cry," I told the girl in the mirror. "You stay strong and you fucking deal with it. You don't shed one more tear."
When I came back in the room, it has finally quietened down. Grateful, I started getting ready for school.
I was different there. I smiled, I laughed and pretended everything was okay.
But it was far from being okay. I didn't even knew if it would ever be again.
No one noticed, how I quietly slipped out of conversations or some times zoned out staring at thin air. And even if they did, they didn't say anything. I was glad for that, I didn't think I would be able to deal with it face on right now.
I did tell Evan though. I felt like he should know. He read my texts about what had been going on patiently, and then told me I should talk to my parents about it.
I didn't. Tyler didn't.
None of us did.
We just kept pretending like we were a normal family. That every night we would not hear them fight or we didn't see when our dad got mad and threw things around, and that it didn't scare the shit out of us. We pretended as if we don't care. That we both are oblivious to what was happening around us.
