I Am No Prey

3- Caught

Sometime after that, I finished my homework, which took thirty minutes flat. I sighed, emphasizing the fact that nothing in life was challenging anymore. Life was positively tedious, so I figured I might as well as fix the car.

So that was how I ended up under my fifteen-year-old car, choking on the smell of metal and worn-out batteries, peacefully fixing it, until I heard the unmistakable sound of heels snapping on the concrete.

I would recognize that noise anywhere, and the owner of told heels knew it. But when she stopped by the car, I didn't care to budge.

"Good evening, Cerise. Well, I'd prefer you get out from underneath that thing so we can talk face to face, you know."

My stepmom was nothing if not formal and curt. With a sigh, I pulled myself out from under the car and stood up to face her. Even in heels, she was shorter than me. Or rather, I would say I was the tall one. At the age of eighteen, I already reached six feet one. Well, at least I wasn't lanky with spindly limbs.

Her smile switched to a grimace when she saw what I wore was stained overalls and a black shirt. When Dad came home ten years ago and told me he proposed to Miss Elizabeth Smith, at the outset, I was ecstatic for him, thinking it would be a good change and one he needed. That mutually changed as soon as I saw her. She was absolutely nothing like Maman, or at least what I had heard of her. She was too stiff and offensively courtly- a disciplinarian to say at best and a military sergeant at worst. And she always made me wonder just what my father saw in her.

"It's not a thing," I told her by way of greeting. "It is a car. A convenient mode of transportation."

"I know what a car is, Cerise."

"Sylvia."

"What?"

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes; we must've had this conversation a hundred times before: she consistently calling me Cerise, and me telling her to call me using my middle name since it didn't sound like a nickname.

"Sylvia, call me Sylvia."

"But you only use that name with strangers or at your appointments."

How she knew that was not what I wanted to find out.

"Exactly."

To my surprise, she didn't turn red with fury but instead, her eyes veered to my hand.

"Pretty ring, darling."

I refrained from snapping at her for calling me that. And she definitely knew to whom it belonged.

"Why are you here?" I cut to the point anyway.

She glared at me and then sighed. "I heard what happened with you and Brandon."

"There is no me and Brandon."

She scowled. "I thought you liked him, didn't you? If anything, you seem completely normal after breaking up with someone you were with for a year."

I shrugged because, honestly, what was I supposed to say? Even if he had been going behind my back with that person, and I wouldn't be surprised if he did out of my stepmother's orders, another cheap tactic to get that country in her pockets. She might've threatened him or something else, but he still did it.

"Honey, if you want to talk about-"

"If I wanted to talk about it, you would be one of the last people I'd go to."

She glared. "I honestly don't know what your problem with me is."

At that, I laughed. "Really? In all the eight years that you've known me and you still haven't figured it out. Maybe it has to do with what you did that day."