Chapter Three
“Hi,” I sigh and slump into the kitchen chair across the formica table from my father. Everything is a sigh. Everything is a slump. Every look my father gives me is the same, and today is no different. We sit in the kitchen because neither of us can set foot into the living room. I still avert my eyes when I pass Alice’s bedroom door on the way to my own, and he still averts his eyes when he talks to me.
“Hi, baby girl. How was school?” He asks this with a furrow between his brows and that deep heavy thing beneath his skin that darkens his eyes and deepens his wrinkles. He glances at me and then looks away, like he’s trying really hard not to remember something super shitty about me.
I slump further and shrug.
“Fine,” I say, even though I mean terrible. Fucking horrible. Intolerable, even though I still tolerate it. I don’t have much choice.
“I put some pork in the crock pot this morning.” He drops the subject because he knows exactly what school is like for me. I don’t know why he won’t just let me homeschool. Something about him not being around enough to supervise me, but I think it’s because the last time he left me alone and responsible in this house, the unthinkable happened.
“Smells good,” I mumble and study the table top. I have it memorized. Every fleck of silver. Every smidge of gold. Three years of afternoons spent studying it means that I could replicate every spot from memory, and there are a million of them.
We sit in silence for half an hour. This is typical.
He finally breaks. “I’m following a lead out of Seattle. A real scumbag with a rap sheet ten miles long. He was in the area that… day.” He chokes on the end of his sentence like a hard candy cracked suddenly in half and lodged wrong in his windpipe. His face reddens and the newspaper shakes.
“Oh, yeah? That’s good.” I try to sound interested, involved, hopeful, but everything is a sigh and a slump, and I can’t muster up much beyond basic apathy. He can tell, but he doesn’t let on.
“If I can just get a warrant for a DNA test, I may be able to prove something.”
My gaze drops even further to the cheap linoleum he plastered over the beautiful hardwood floor. It’s white and patterned with ugly square blocks, but it might as well not even be there. I can still see it, the brown and blonde and amber of the wood. The glistening ruby red stain, right there in the middle. It wasn’t Alice’s blood though, or Rose’s. The blood in the kitchen, that was someone else’s. It didn’t match the girls. Didn’t match me.
It’s the only thing that kept me out of jail, or juvie, or worse.
Between the black eye Alice gave me that morning and the blood in the bathtub from my misadventures in shaving, I looked suspicious. The fact that I didn’t remember anything between falling asleep at this exact spot at the table and waking up somewhere else entirely, I looked like a red-handed homage to guilt. I might as well have marched myself into the cop shop and ‘fessed up to something I didn’t do. Might as well have lynched myself from the flagpole in the town square for all to see, because they’d basically all decided I was guilty anyway.
I was a murderer. Even though I wasn’t.
“Seems like you’ve been sleeping better lately.” Dad breaks the silence like the sledgehammer that he is, no grace, no subtlety. He’s always been a wrecking ball. I roll my eyes before I look back at him and try to smile, but it hurts, and I can’t keep it up long enough to be convincing.
“Yeah. Sort of.” That’s a lie. He thinks I’m sleeping better because I haven’t been walking, but that’s not the truth. I’m not walking because I’m not sleeping. Between a rock and a hard place, between the walking and the sleeping, there is only the slim, unbearable middle.
Insomnia.
It’s harder than it looks.
The first few nights were easy, losing myself in a book, then a movie, then Tumblr and Pinterest, and some site dedicated to asshole cats being assholes. The next few nights were a little harder, pinching my arms and thighs and cheeks to stay awake. By now, I’m in tunnel vision mode. Zombieland. Everything outside the small circle right in front of me is meaningless and fuzzy. Out of focus. A blur.
Everything outside is fucked.
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