six : anatomy of the wallflower
• in which sometime traumatic has happened to Dianna's nieces and finding the similarities between her and Demi is shockingly sad
anatomy; a study of the structure or internal workings of something.
wallflower; a person who has no one to dance with or who feels shy, awkward, or excluded at a party.
You didn't know that at six, by the time you were nine your parents wouldn't live in the same small Texan house, just you and your father alone with three bedrooms and space filled with nostalgia. You didn't understand that the first time your mother punched your father it wasn't out of light-hearted fun like they both claimed it to be. You couldn't comprehend two years into it that sooner or later somebody would notice the purple patches on your arms, and that just maybe you should have hidden them a little better. How could you have understood? You were eight.
When you turned ten, you'd gotten over the momentary trauma of watching your mother get carted off in silver metal handcuffs. You'd grown accustomed to the visits from Social Services, and the therapy sessions, and the doctors appointments, and the constant smothering from worried family that felt as though they were drowning in your own overflowing pool. You'd gotten used to it, nobody said that you had gotten over it.
It wasn't a shocker that the loud, egotistical young girl with shining chocolate eyes was now a shell of herself. The small child who would climb up the torso of her father with pride, now huddled over herself careful not to brush her porcelain skin against another in fear of a violent irritation from the other party.
That girl; she's you.
You walk down the school hallway, nose towards the ground, eyes trained to the tiles you step in-always avoiding the cracks because although you're not fond of your mother, old wives-tales still haunt you.
You close your eyes at night in hopes of finally just getting some sleep, and his screaming plays over and over again in your mind like a broken record that loops with static scratches. He needed you out of that house, he needed you out, he could handle her and her violent insanity. You were the problem and from that day on; you would always feel like the problem.
You couldn't take a shower without shivers of momentary coldness rushing over your body, the scorching heat that left red on your arms turned ice and just like the nights before you spent your time crying, curled up on the shower floor with your knees to your chest because for the first time you were finally able to protect yourself.
It had been seven years since you watched her get carted away, hands behind her back chained together by silver metal handcuffs. It had been seven years, two-thousand-five-hundred-fifty-five days, sixty-one-thousand-three-hundred-twenty hours, it had been eighty-eight-million-three-hundred-thousand-eight-hundred minutes.
"Honey, you feeling okay?" The precious voice of your aunt asked, her hair tied up in a ponytail as she and her youngest daughter had spent the day in the kitchen slaving over cookies for her oldests birthday party in a few days time.
"Mmhm." You mumbled softly as you laid beside your cousin, both of your heads resting on the couches arm as your phones laid above your face.
It's gotten easier; the lying. If you lie enough in a day, the blinding pain of abandonment feels like a gentle tickle of childhood that vanished when contact ends.
"You girls haven't said two words since you got here." Dianna's words now pointed towards her middle child whose been under the attack of remedial social media bullies who had nothing better to do then ruin the one thing Demi was proud of; her sobriety. "It's over, Y/N. It's all over."
