Troubled

1

11/3/20
chapter one
percy

"Are you alright?"

My head throbbed as the car took a sharp turn, causing me to groan, my whole body aching with pain.

I wasn't alright. I hadn't been alright for quite some time. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been alright.

"Yeah, mom, I'm okay," I lied, the words barely able to escape my lips as I was shaking.

My mom readjusted the mirror in her car so she could see me. She looked pained but tried to smile at me as if that would bring me hope.

She took a wrong turn like she always did whenever she picked me up from a fight. It was so we could talk, calm down, and, in many cases, so I could stop bleeding.

Today I was gushing blood out of my nose. My hand was full of blood as I was desperately trying to prevent from getting it all over the back seat of my mother's already worn and stained car.

My knuckles ached as memories flooded through my brain. Their taunts, punches being thrown, the sneers on their faces....

I tried to be a good kid. I know, it doesn't sound true, but I did. I didn't want to get in fights with kids I barely knew. I didn't want to go home dripping blood.

But I did.

The main reason I wanted to be a good kid was my mother. It was the look on her face every time she came to pick me up that killed me.

She tried to smile, reassure me, but the initial shock of seeing me broken and covered in blood never failed to cause her to gasp.

My mother was always smiling. She smiled through pain, through anger, through everything. Her face was full of worry lines I'm sure were from me and her eyes were a comforting blue. Her hair was dark brown streaked with gray, but I would never consider her old.

She never said a bad thing about anyone, which sometimes could lead to harm. I wasn't the same. I hadn't inherited her 'good' nature or her warm smile. At least I didn't think so.

"Dinner's ready," she told me, her voice strained. As if dinner will fix everything. "I'm sure there's some left..."

Not if Smelly Gabe's home.

Gabe was my deadbeat stepfather who reeked of failure and cigarettes. He owned a hardware store, but always played poker at home and bet all our spare cash on sports games.

I called Gabe smelly as I met him when I was a toddler and he reeked. The name pissed him off so much it stuck.

He didn't deserve my mother, that was clear. She was too tolerant of his bullshit. She was too kind to remind him where his shoes went or to pick up his mess. So she acted like his slave.

And it infuriated me.

Gabe hated me. He married my mom when I was a toddler, and had hated me ever since. He hates my bad grades, my sloppy appearance, and the fact I always got into fights.

He was going to kill me when I got home.

When my mom parked our car outside of our apartment building, she seemed close to tears. We met on the side of the curb where she pulled my head down, I was at least a foot taller than her, and tried to wipe the blood off my face.

"You're so handsome," my mother assured me as she tried to fix my messy hair with no success. "You look just like your father."

That comment made me want to scream. I wanted nothing to do with the guy, much less to look like him. But she was right. In the limited pictures I'd seen of him, we were nearly identical.