Lockjaw (Joshler)

36. Fault

***Trigger warnings for mentions of suicidal thoughts and brief mentions of past suicide attempts, mentions of emotional abuse, mentions of child neglect, survivor's guilt, PTSD, and mentions of attempted sexual assault.***

Start the song. It's Hangman Hands by Flower Face.

Josh read Tyler's letter several times, trying to commit as much of it as he could to memory before Frangipane returned. There was so much to take in at once, but Josh wanted to wrap his hands around the things that had hurt Tyler in the past so he could crush them into tiny innocuous pieces. He studied every line of the letter bit by bit, hating the bad things and relishing in the good.

Dear Josh,

Chapter one of my Tragic Backstory: I hate orange too. The more I think about it, the more I realize that orange always seems to cling to the bad moments in my life. That sounds dumb, but hear me out.

My mom and dad are both lawyers, but they're not the kind that works a case and then comes home to do family stuff. They'd take on huge cases that made them fly around the country for months at a time, and they always told us we'd have to do the same thing when we grew up-us being me, my two brothers, and my sister. Anyone who isn't a lawyer isn't doing anything in their opinion. I have one brother who's only fifteen, but apart from him, I'm the only non-lawyer in our family. My parents pretend it doesn't bother them, but it does.

Since my parents weren't around very much, we had this nanny who was always around. She cared more than my parents, but it still kind of sucked to never spend time with them. She made freshly squeezed orange juice every morning though, and to this day I can't drink the store bought stuff because it sucks in comparison. When I was fifteen, my parents fired her and had me take care of my siblings instead. It sounds weird, but it kind of felt like losing a parent. She was the only consistent parent we'd ever had, and then she was just gone. We all dealt with that in really different ways.

My youngest brother was only five, so it wasn't a big deal for him. He just leaned on me more. My other brother got really distant. He still is. It's hard to tell how he's feeling, and he never talks about things that bother him. My sister is like that too. They don't touch people, they don't talk about personal things, and spending time with them always feels like a business meeting.

I was different though, and I don't know why. I took it really hard. I started to get really depressed and anxious about everything. I was pretty much raising three kids while trying to be a kid, and it went really poorly. I didn't really know how to tell anyone what was going on or how I was feeling because my family didn't talk about things like that. I hid it for as long as I possibly could before I just fell apart.

You probably don't want all the gory details, but I wound up in the hospital a few weeks before I was supposed to turn sixteen because I genuinely had no clue how to tell my parents I needed help apart from putting myself in that position. Since my parents are like my siblings though, they just let the hospital staff do whatever they had to do, brought me home, and never talked about it again. Then they just left for work again like it was nothing. By the time I turned eighteen and could just get out of there, I'd put myself in the hospital three more times, one of which I almost didn't walk away from. I can distinctly remember eating orange jello in the hospital while my mom and dad took turns leaving my hospital room to answer work calls.

Josh could understand that. He could understand repeatedly being hospitalized while his family pretended everything was okay. He could understand not knowing how to tell anyone what was going on in his head until it was too late. He'd been there too.