Blame Me

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Jace

　　Such a wonderful girl.

　　If I heard that sentence again today I’m going to explode. I will lose any last sanity I have inside of myself and will most likely turn, for the lack of better words, bat shit crazy. 

　　Hours had passed since the school award ceremony had ended and still my mother was gushing about how “amazing, “wonderful”, and “charming” Elise was. She said somethings about Dani too, but I didn’t hear them. I was too pissed off about the amount of liking my parents took to her in the minutes that they had met her. 

　　My mother had a full blow smile stretched across her lips, a sight that I hadn’t seen in a long time. She looked years younger than she was, almost like the teenage pictures I had seen of her. It was amazing what a smile could do to someone’s face. The look on her face seemed so foreign to me after years of not seeing her so happy. And that only made me angrier, how the hell did she get so happy by just talking to Elise?

　　To add to that, my father was smiling as well. Maybe not to the same extent as Mom, but the corners of his mouth were plastered upwards, like he found some treasure and knew that the rest of his life was going to be good from here on out. Now, my Mother’s smile I hadn’t seen in years but I couldn’t recall the last time I saw my Father smile for so long, or really at all. There would only be a brief twitch of his mouth and then it went back to the flat line of seriousness that he always projected. But not tonight, tonight he too seemed happy. Which was another foreign concept to me. 

　　“Hey, you okay?” Milly asked me, her voice filled with a light concern. 

　　I was currently sitting in my room, surrounded by all of my notebooks filled with music lyrics and notes. I spent most of my time in my room either trying to improve my instrument playing skills or improving my vocal cords, or to just vent. The room was my safe haven, filled with every musical instrument possible, courtesy to the years that my dad tried to mend our relationship. 

　　“Yeah, I’m fine,” I told her without looking up from the blank notebook in front of me, “Just trying to get the songs done for my album,”

　　I wasn’t completely lying to her. I was trying to get as many songs as possible done for my album to have a wide variety to choose from, but lately I couldn’t come up with anything good. Just empty words with an empty tune, nothing that I was proud of. And it was all because of a certain someone who happen to show up everywhere in my life when I didn’t want her to.  

　　“Okay,” Milly accepted before walking out of the room. 

　　I sighed, the past few days were tiring and the constant presence of Elise had worn me out. It was tiring to hate someone so much, but I just couldn’t make myself like her. Like all the other people in the high class, she would most likely think herself as the queen of everything. How my parents came to like her, I would never know. Well, I could get why my father did but not my mother. She was smarter than that. 

　　After spending another half hour staring at a blank page with a blank mind, idly strumming away on my guitar, I decided to call quits for the night. It wasn’t like I was making progress anyways. 

　　As I walked down the narrow halls of the house that my twin siblings, mom, and I  lived in, I couldn’t help but feel that the emptiness that had erupted years before in our family still contaminated the house. It was weird because we never lived in this house as a whole family but I guess some things can’t go away just by placing yourself in a different environment.