Toxic (H.S.)

43

Harry

When I met Emily she was very loud and would call people out on their shit, it was my favorite thing about her.

She'd smile and flirt with me, leaning over her desk in our one class together in our last year of school.

When we would hang out, she would always want to come to my house and would stay until the mornings. My mum would get upset because she would stay in my room without permission.

One day I asked her if we could hang out at her place, she seemed scared, but after a few weeks of asking her, she finally agreed.

When I met her father, he didn't even want to shake my hand. Her mother said I wasn't allowed in the upstairs bedroom and after I left she came back to my house with a black eye. Her father was a raging alcoholic, and her mother was mentally abusive.

One night after she snuck out, we decided to go to a party where I lost her for a bit of time. At that time I was drinking a lot, problems with my own father caused me to smoke weed, drink and do the occasional line of coke. When I found Emily she was sitting in a bathtub, high off her mind on heroin.

This became a daily occurrence.

For months, almost a year, we would spend her parent's money on doing dumb shit. A few times I found her so high, close to overdosing. She'd lay there completely trashed with a needle beside her.

That was until she got pregnant.

I knew at that moment that we had to get our life in check and really had to learn that we didn't need our parents, all we needed was each other. In retrospect, we were just two kids, sick of listening to our parents.

The abuse continued with Emily, bruises, broken teeth, and even a few broken ribs. She told me when she was pregnant that she wanted to run away. We were on our way to my parent's house to tell them we'd be leaving. My dad would have been ecstatic I was going to be with Emily.

It was cold and had rained the day before, causing the ground to form black ice and cause our car to flip. The scare, along with the jolt pushing Emily against her seatbelt caused her to have a miscarriage.

That and the drugs still in her system.

We stayed in England for a while until after I graduated from college. She had already dropped out, saying that she would return eventually. After I graduated, I got a call from a few places in the states about a toy company that was looking for people like me for their shipping and sales department. I spoke to a man named Robert Edmunds who said that with the right guidance, I could be promoted in two years.

My mother told me to go and leave Emily behind, but I couldn't see her crying anymore. She had nowhere to go since her father kicked her out, so I told her to come with me to America. Something within that month before moving changed her into this brat. Nothing was right, and she kept bringing up any small thing she could.

Withdrawal made things so much worse.

The abuse got worse, and what makes my stomach sick is the fact that if it wasn't for Marlene, I would have stayed.

"Mr. Styles?" I looked up at the lawyer and noticed he had asked me another question.

Today was Emily's court date, no jury, just asking me a few questions about her mother and her growing up. She had just taken the plea deal of eight years and they wanted me to speak about her.

"Yes?" I said back to the lawyer.

"Do you believe miss Peterson is a bad person?" I looked at Emily who looked down at her hands. She hasn't looked at me once.