Still Point ✓

01 | begin

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i will be really grateful if you take the time to add this story to your reading lists as well as vote, comment, and share, as that would be really cool. follow me if it feels right too. reaching out to show support in any way you can will go a long way in encouraging me to write more on here.

also, do not skip the misc chapters of this book as they contain vital information. thank you, and enjoy.

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DEPENDING ON WHERE you began the story, it started with Hillary Cecelia Baylor.

It wasn't like she'd had a hard life growing up. Her father was a respectable Baptist pastor, her mother a school teacher. She left Ohio with a small duffle bag, twenty dollars, and a heart full of dreams, then came to Vegas to find she wouldn't always be the second or even third prettiest girl in any room she walked into.

By then it was already too late, and leaving the City of Angels for the idle town she'd grown up in was as unthinkable as you would expect. So she danced to pay the rent, shot a couple of pornos under a stage name she couldn't be bothered to remember, tapped out at the first stirrings of the AIDS crises. A move to New York followed shortly after.

She didn't trust condoms, which was her worst mistake (she'd made this clear to Wesley.) A close second was finding out about her pregnancy five months in, too late to have an abortion (another thing she was always very vocal about.)

Hillary had always been beautiful. The kind that meant her boyfriends were married men with lots of money who didn't mind her Las Vegas past, and found her practiced LA crass endearing.

She could've had her pick of them and lived a comfortable, if not happy life. But Hillary was beautiful, the kind that meant she was never satisfied with whatever life had to offer, always on a search for her next thrill. So she partied, sweet talking her way past bouncers who would only let her in after she agreed to let them get her a drink, falling in love with every man she ever slept with, but leaving them still. Some she remembered, others she didn't.

For the entire duration of her pregnancy her son's father fell under the former category, though not for lack of trying: bow-shaped lips and the feel of skin against skin―she understood that sometimes the mind was an entity to its own self, playing tricks on its owner. And then it came to her as soon as the nurses handed over her new born. It was surprising, how she'd never quizzed well, but took one look at her infant child and remembered, William Chao.

She didn't make a habit of sleeping with Asian men (who she ignorantly grouped as Chinese) and it was just her luck that she'd gotten knocked up in one of her encounters with one.

So Hillary named him Wesley, after her long dead father, and kept the surname, to remind herself of where the other half of him had come from. Giving birth at thirty, a combination of age and laziness meant that her figure never went back to being what it was. But that was OK, because she had her face going for her. Or at least she'd thought so.

The problem with forty-five was that even if you managed to look a decade younger on good days, there were subtle things you had to deal with, like crow's feet, unattractive laugh lines, and suddenly finding that you did not recognize your body, with its aches, softened reflexes, and on, and on―a side effect of these summing up a significant drop in the attention she was accustomed to receiving.

A life time of living fast should've meant that she was ready to settle down, and she did. Truly she did, but now she did the chasing: bikers, drug dealers, and college boys half her age with long standing MILF fantasies. There was the reverend at the Catholic Church she'd tried going to during her brief stint at religion, because, Father forgive me for I have sinned; and she had sinned, quite a lot of times in fact.

She just didn't regret anything.

Anyway, it didn't matter. They never worked out.

In moments of deep reflection, which were few and far in between, she thought about her actions and how they might affect her son. This lanky boy who, seemingly overnight, had grown from a chattering toddler to the sullen teenager she now lived with. There were no warm embers of motherly affection in her heart for him, that she was sure of. At best they felt like roommates who happened to be related.

He loved her with a devotion she'd never been able to understand but nevertheless enjoyed, and though she blew money on alcohol and drugs, but made sure to pay his school fees and restocked groceries whenever she remembered. She at least owed him that.

Besides she'd made sure to keep an eye on his father, and by all indications he was her retirement plan.

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There were a great many things that Wesley Chao could say to his mother when she got into one of her moods and began to spiral, which meant smoking on good days and drinking on bad ones.

For example, when she said that he looked like his bastard good for nothing Chinese father, he could say that he hadn't been the one to sleep with him, and that letting him have his last name didn't help matters.

Then, when she said they were white trash and would probably never amount to much else save the cramped trailer park he'd spent the whole of his childhood because he'd stolen any shot she had at stardom, he could retort by saying that technically, he was only half white. That she'd conceived him at thirty, giving her more than enough time to be the next Marilyn Monroe. That he was going to be a world famous writer one day.

He had the back story for it, give or take a few years, and time. Lots of it, for when he finally mustered up enough nerve to stop overthinking the first words he reached for whenever he sat in front of the blank white screen of the third hand Toshiba laptop he'd gotten for a steal from the friend of a friend of a friend of a waitress he was friendly with at Dream & Beans.

But the problem with having life come at you from a very young age was that you learnt to keep your opinions to yourself, even when they mattered.

This was how it worked: say in one of her drunken stupors she said something―after whatever guy she'd convinced herself that she was in love with at the time had excused himself from their apartment―and he got mouthy, everything from there became predictable. There would be scratches on his face from her acrylics, sometimes bruises, when she got carried away.

It didn't matter that he towered over her petite five-four frame by more than a few inches, Wesley refused to hit his mother and she knew it, which was why she took things too far, and the world ended.