The October Malice ༄ (gxg)

eighteen, final straw

A scream escaped her throat, her entire body jolting awake.

She had jumped so hard upon awakening that she ended up rolling off her bed, hitting the carpeted ground with a hard thump. Disoriented, she let her cheek lay against the coarse carpet as she rubbed her groggy eyes and tried to remember going to sleep the previous night.

Anxiety and grief filled her all at once as she remembered being questioned by the police the night before, inciting the remembering of Claire's death which made her stomach reel. But what had happened after the police left?

She groaned slightly and rubbed her face harder as if it would massage the memory part of her frontal lobe and make her remember. Apparently it worked, because more anxiety seeped into her veins like poisonous ink as she remembered the feeling of Teardrop Bridge's railing underneath her hands, the feeling of her toes stepping up onto the railing. She remembered peering over and letting her body hang halfway over as she stared into the choppy waters.

But she did not remember coming back home and going to sleep. The very last thing she could rake her mind about the previous night was one single word she had considered: jump.

Had she jumped?

Fear filling her, she quickly scrambled to sit up, bringing both of her hands to her face and rubbing her cheeks violently. Was she dead? Was this the afterlife, just the four square walls of her room for eternity? She looked all around her room with three beige walls and one ominously wallpapered. Everything seemed to be normal...

Then she heard the door from the other side of her room swing open, followed by that so familiarly irritating voice spitting, "Get up."

It was her mother, and she knew then she was either alive or burning in hell because God would have never allowed that woman in her version of heaven.

Amanda could only see the top of the girl's blonde head as she sat on the floor on the other side of the bed, and she scoffed. "What in hell are you doing? You need to go to school."

School or anywhere outside her room would make her sick. She could still feel that extra heartbeat in her chest offbeat from her own, as if her grief had morphed into a living thing, a dark and ugly animal living in the hollows of her ribcage. She could feel nothing but its breath breathing into her and filling her with no other feeling than itself. And every time that beautiful redheaded angel crossed her mind, the animal would slash its claws against her heart and watch it bleed.

"I'm not going to school," she grumbled, rubbing her face again as if it would erase her confusion about the prior nights' events. Why couldn't she remember going home from the bridge, yet she could remember the cusp of jumping? Had she even gone to the bridge at all? Was that why she jolted awake so hard, because she only fell in her dream? But even if she had never gone to the bridge, she still could not remember going to bed.

Amanda only scoffed again, and Opal could feel her putting her hand on her hip even though she was behind her. "Really? You're gonna make yet another wrong decision? You think that professor loved you or something?"

Her mother's words felt like a slap against her cheek, one so stinging that it pulled tears from her eyes, ones that slipped silently down her face.

"Fine, do whatever you goddamn want," her mother continued, grabbing the doorknob to the girl's room but pausing before closing it to say one last thing. "But when you become trailer park trash, for the love of God don't let anyone know you're my daughter."

With that, she slammed the door closed, and Opal physically shook from the anger swelling up within her.

That had been her final straw.