Page 17 of Necessary Cruelty

Six

I don’t want your forgiveness, just your silence.

That’s a lie, of course. Maybe not the first part. I have no doubts that the last thing on Vin’s mind is reconciling even the smallest piece of our past. But he doesn’t really want my silence. There is something very specific that he wants to spill from my lips, and I have spent the last ten years refusing to give it to him.

Which is why he decided I don’t get to speak at all.

But secrets are like a cancer, eating away at you. In more fanciful moments, I tell myself that all the things I refuse to say have settled like acid on my vocal cords, burning them into dust.

At this point, I don’t know what I would say if given the chance to speak freely.

It’s easy to slip into melancholy, spend way too much time thinking about how things might have been. Who would I be if I’d been given the chance to grow up in the before, instead of the after. My family would still be poor, and I’d still live in the Gulch, but maybe I wouldn’t exist in perpetual isolation. Maybe I’d go out at night like other girls, even have a boyfriend.

The Milbournes have been here longer than the town limits. By rights, Zion and I should be running with the Vice Lords, not set up on the other side of this battle.

Like always, I wake up early in the morning to help get Grandpa situated. I don’t remember the name of the disease that does it, but the same thing that messes with his memory makes his hands shake so he can’t feed himself properly or stand too long on his own. His doctor wants him in a wheelchair full time, but that isn’t something we can afford. Instead, he leans on me when he needs to get from one place to the other, and he doesn’t get up at all when no one is around to help him.

Grandpa spends most of his days and all of his nights posted up in the old armchair by the window in our living room. He only leaves that spot when I take him on short walks around the house to keep his blood flowing and prevent bedsores.

I help him eat breakfast before I go to school. Meals on Wheels comes twice a week with a handful of trays I can stick in the freezer and then reheat for him, so at least he isn’t in danger of starving to death.

As I spoon watery cream of wheat into his toothless mouth, I want to ask him for the dozenth time what happened to bring us here: to the Gulch, to the bottom of society, to a place where nobody cares what happens to us. But his memories of the past aren’t much more than ramblings at this point, and I’ve never been able to get a straight answer out of him.

My mother always said that Grandpa’s father made a business deal that went bad, but she didn’t know much more than that. Although, everything she has ever said should be taken with a grain of salt the size of a sugar cube.

In contrast to our sorry state of affairs, Vin’s family is one of the richest in the central valley. The Cortlands own more land than all the other founding families combined. He sits on a throne made of his family’s legacy like an over-indulged prince.

It must be nice to have a future drenched in gold.

But there are some things in his past that vaguely resemble the tragedy of mine, not that anybody would figure that out by looking at him.

His real mother died in childbirth, and his father remarried so quickly that a whole year might not have passed before he had a stepmother. Giselle Cortland can’t trace her lineage back to our town’s founding, but she always seems happy to play like the queen of everything the light touches.

Vin should have thought of her as his mother — babies latch on to whatever maternal figure is available. But it never seemed to work out that way. As a kid, I could never figure out if the lack of bonding was his fault or hers. It didn’t take long for me to understand that a darkness creeps over the majestic grounds of Cortland Manor.

A darkness that infects everything it touches.

Before I go to school, I take the money that Vin left on my desk and put it in the shoebox under my bed. I have several hundred dollars here, with no idea what to do with it. Even when there isn’t any food in the house and my stomach aches from hunger, I still don’t touch this cash.

I’m being paid for services rendered, just like mother was. That’s all the Milbournes have ever been good for.

Vin is like a drug dealer who offers a first taste for free because he wants to get you hooked.

With the first dollar of this money I spend, he will own me.

Sometimes I dream about running away, escaping Deception and this broken existence. But five hundred dollars isn’t enough for a new life, and I can’t leave Grandpa to fend for himself. Zion would probably let him starve to death before remembering the man is stuck in his armchair.

Just like everything else in Deception, this money is tainted with the past, so dirty I still feel it on my skin even once I’ve put it away. There was one time that I tried giving it back to Vin, throwing it in his face. He just laughed and pinned me on the bed until I stopped struggling. When I woke up the next morning, the shoebox was back where it belonged and filled to the brim with cash.

Someday, I’ll have enough strength to burn it.

And imagining what it might be like to douse Vin Cortland in gasoline and light a match is the happy thought that lets me fly away like Peter Pan into a dreamless sleep.

* * *

I marchinto Deception High with a new purpose. With the help of the recycled Hello Kitty calendar on my bedroom wall, I’ve calculated the exact number of days left until graduation when I can put this place and all the people here in my rearview mirror.

72 days and counting.

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