Angel's Mafia (gxg) ✓

XIX | A Monster With Pearl Teeth

I was nine when my mother became an addict.

In hindsight, she was on morphine for much longer than I knew. But to me, it seemed sudden. A sharp edge. A sudden tower. For her, it was a slow fall from grace.

It must have started a few years earlier than that. If I pinpoint it now, it would have happened after my father died in the car crash two years earlier. My mother survived, but with injuries that left her at home for a year. They gave her a slow, steady drip of morphine, and it eased her pain. It made her feel alive again.

And so the doctor became the patient. For 21 years, my mother had been a general surgeon. She must have administered morphine countless times. But her first time experiencing was that night my father died. And she was hooked.

For five years, until I was 14, I cared for myself. I cooked, I cleaned. I kept my mother a secret. She was high most of the time. I did the most I could for her, trying to hide her stash. I even reported her, once. It wasn't enough. Because my mother had been a doctor for so long, she knew the loopholes.

But when I was 14, my mother married her drug dealer. A real romance, I tell you. He beat her, he threw her around. But he gave her those drugs, and she kept coming back.

The thing is, Ted―the drug dealer―had a son. His name was Nathan, and he was four years older than me. Eighteen.

At first . . . he was so sweet. He was a good stepbrother. He went to my parent-teacher interviews. He helped me study late at night. When I got to high school, he taught me chemistry when I had a shit teacher.

But one night, he came into my room late at night. We'd just finished studying for one of my tests tomorrow. It must have 3 a.m, and he said I owed him something.

And then he pulled it out. He unbuckled his pants, and that night, I sucked him until he came three times. I went to sleep tasting him.

I thought that would be it. But he didn't stop. It was like . . . once he'd started, he couldn't stop. Sometimes, there would be weeks between when he would ask me for something. It was the night before my 15th when he finally went all the way.

He said I needed to be a woman. To learn what it felt like, being a woman.

After that, he couldn't stop. I knew I needed to tell someone, to get away, but . . . it was so humiliating. What he would do to me. And he said no one would ever believe me.

The truth is, who would even care? I didn't have many friends. None I could talk to. Since my mom's addiction, I closed myself off from the world. I stopped talking at school. My grades slipped for a while.

No, what hurt most was the fact that he was right. Not even my mother would care. She was so high she saw bird men and swirling vortexes.

I kept it in. But I had a plan. Once I went to university, I figured he would stop. Since I was advanced in high school, I went straight to med school. One year, and that was all I could take. I was still living at home, still under his grasp.

Between him and medical school, it was all I could take. I realized I didn't want to be a doctor, not the way my mom was. Not the way she had turned out. Once I got in, I figured she'd be proud of me.

But she didn't even care.

Last year, I got a scholarship to an art school in Sicily. The Accademia. It was halfway across the world―how could he reach me from there? It meant leaving my mother, but she wouldn't notice. I know how that makes me sound, but it's the truth. She needed to see her own problem.

So, in September, a few weeks ago, I moved here. I didn't call home, not once, until yesterday night. I just wanted to let my mom know . . . know that I would be away for a little.

Except she passed the phone to Nathan. And even from all the way Los Angeles, it wasn't his words that scared me. It was the fact that he could scare me. That I was scared. From so far away, he has so much power over me.

It's been months since he last touched me, but I can't shake the fear that he will again. That, when I come home, he'll want me again.

So, when you saw me in the shower, it was me . . . cleaning myself. A cleanse, really. I just needed to erase the touch of him. The feel of him on my body.

Thanks for that, by the way. And . . . I'm sorry I kissed you.

I know it must have made you uncomfortable. I wish I hadn't.