The Deep Stuff - Markle - GMW Fanfic

Prologue

Maya's POV

        Sitting at my desk, I can’t focus. I’m supposed to be doing my homework, finishing the work sheet for Mr.Matthews class and my half of the algebra poster that Riley and I were partners on. But I just can’t. This bedroom is too small; I feel like the walls are closing in, just waiting to swallow me up. And I would almost welcome it. I glance over to the desk drawer where I had carefully hidden the thing. I start to move my hand toward the knob, but as I am about to pull the drawer open and retrieve it, I pull back. ‘No,’ I tell myself. ‘Don’t.’ The urge subsides for now.I stand up and run my hands up over my face and hold them behind my head, elbows outstretched, pacing back and forth across the small span of my hell hole of a bedroom. I walk the few feet to the battered white door and jiggle the handle a bit. It doesn’t budge. He’s still keeping me locked up. And for what? All I did was drop one of his empty beer bottles. And it wasn’t even on purpose. He had screamed at me to take out the garbage, and when an empty bottle fell out and shattered across the kitchen floor, I had frozen. The brown glass lay in bits at my feet and I stood there, terrified of what this man would do to me. He screamed even louder then before calling me things that no one should ever be called, and forced me to bend and pick up each bit of glass with my bare hands. He stared down at me as I did so, fuming. I wince with each piece, feeling the sharp edges against my smooth palm. I rose to place the shards in the dustpan, but he stopped me with his hand.His grip was tight on my arm, too tight and it hurt. “Uh uh,” he said in a mocking tone, “Take them out to the dumpster. Then come back and take rest of the trash you left here.” I looked at him in horror. “GO!” he roared into my face, his alcoholic breath bombarding my lungs and causing me to cough. Silently I walked out of the apartment, a tear rolling gently down my face. I walked down the stairs noiselessly sobbing and hoping with all my heart that I wouldn’t drop a single shard. As I descended the staircase, I began to feel more depressed then I had ever been. there was hope. Riley couldn’t help with what she couldn’t see, and with the whole Lucas thing, she definitely did not see the hurt I was feeling. No one cared. My own mother married some guy one weekend in Vegas, and brought him back saying it was love at first sight. That was a year and a half ago. The beginning of sixth grade. And that’s when my real hell began. My stepfather, Mike, hit me one night and threw me in a closet. He dragged me out in the morning, calling me horrible things, and sent me to school. And mother dearest was too drunk to care. Pulling myself out of the nightmarish flashback, I walked down final few steps and stumbled on a stone right in front of the dumpster. I sucked in a breath and squeezed my eyes shut waiting for the clinking of the glass shards hitting the ground again. But I only heard one. I was the largest piece of the broken bottle, and four uneven sides before coming to a razor sharp edge. I slowly emptied my hands of the remaining pieces, before bending down to pick it up. I stood slowly holding the fragment in my hand. I stared down at it, thinking about what I’d heard people could do with things like this. I quickly stuck it in my pocket and ran back upstairs. He barked at me as soon as I came in to take out the broken trash bag so I shimmied the broken one into a new trash bag and ran back down the stairs throwing it into the trash can and rushing quietly back up and into the apartment. I tried as hard as I could to slip in without him seeing me, but he caught me about halfway across the kitchen. He grabbed my arm and dragged my down the hall and into my room. He threw me down saying, “Don’t you have some homework to do?” Then he walked out and slammed the door. I heard the clicking of his key locking the door, confining me to this small space. And that’s where I’ve been for the past two hours. Now I sit on my bed letting myself sink deeper into the hell that my life has become. I may put on a smile and sarcastic tough girl shell when I’m at school or with Riley, but its all pretend. This is who I am now. A depressed girl with no one who truly cares about her. I’d heard Mike’s hurtful words so many times that I now believed them to be true. Nobody loves me. Everything right now is so out of my control. I need something to happen that I can control. The walls are still closing in on me. I have to get out of here. I need to get away. Suddenly I stand up and walk to the drawer. I pull out my shard, my new best friend and the only thing in the world that understands me and I take it into the tiny bathroom that is connected to my hell hole and lock the door behind me. I stand staring into the small square mirror above the rusty sink. I take a deep breath and roll up my sleeve. I put the sharpest edge of the glass up to my wrist and move it downwards. The crimson blood drips down my forearm and I watch. It hurts at first, but I start to realize something about this physical pain: I am in control. When people hurt emotionally degrade me I can’t do anything. I have no idea how they are going to react or whether he’s going to hit me or not. But this pain I can control. And it covers, if only for a second, how worthless I am. Feeling this controlled pain is better than feeling nothing at all. Better than being an empty shell of an unloved teenager. I slice two more times before stopping. I felt as if a small part of the weight on my shoulders had been lifted, even for only a second, and it was better than having all of it all the time dragging me down. I slowly and carefully cleaned off my wrist. I took the small towel from the rusted rack to my right and wrapped it carefully around my left wrist, then I rinsed off my shard. I felt… something. I felt a better I guess. When I stepped back into hell, I placed the glass back in its drawer and suddenly the good feeling of release was gone.. The walls were closing in, the dark windows obscuring any reassurance of a space outside this room. I was trapped and I couldn’t escape. My breathing started to get heavier and uneven but right before the full on panic set in I violently switched off my desk lamp, which was the only light source in my tiny room. I curled up on the ground and began to even out my breathing pattern. Complete darkness always helped when I was about to freak out. My extreme claustrophobia would sometimes cause panic attacks. But as long as nobody touched me, which nobody ever did because nobody was ever there, and I could sit in darkness and calm down. I took deep breaths and began to calm down. After a few minutes, I climbed in bed and placed the bloody towel on my nightstand. The bleeding had stopped. I ran my cold fingers over the cuts gently, before falling slowly into sleep filled with nightmares almost as bad as my actual life.