Page 56 of Locke

Fuck to the yeah.

Or so I thought.

Day dot and I realized why it was too good to be true and why no one lasted and why I probably had been scraped from the bottom of a barrel.

These kids were cooked in Satan’s cauldron. They had designer names, too. Little Donatella was a three-year-old girl that had the face of an angel but a set of legs that had me catching her an impossible feat. Her older brother Hilfiger was five years old, and I was positive Satan slit his wrist and added his blood into the cauldron for this little shithead. First day had me taking a pram with the devil children to the local park, which was actually ten streets away going uphill with Hilfiger standing on a makeshift stand between the wheels and Donatella throwing her hat off under the blazing sun every minute, screaming bloody murder when her older brother clawed at her face and stole her fish crackers. On top of that, their father Ryan, who was working from home, had decided to load the pram up with two giant hockey sticks because I guessed he thought I could clone myself into two people and take Donatella down the slide while playing hockey with Hilfiger.

It was the worst day of my life.

And I had my share of fucked up days.

The kids ran amuck with Hilfiger attempting to ram Donatella down the slide headfirst. She had screeched for him to stop, and when I tried to detach him from her, he had swiftly kicked me in the stomach multiple times.

I remembered wanting to hide in a hole. There were other parents at the park, and the way they looked at me—like I was so clearly the help—made me feel claustrophobic and judged. Looking after kids was underappreciated and sorely an underpaid profession. The work was intense. The stress and anxiety made me want to vomit, and when they refused to leave with me—when Hilfiger went full scorched earth on me, refusing to obey or go home—I felt like I’d barely been hanging onto the last thread of sanity.

Did I quit?

As Hilfiger screamed he hated me, hated his sister, demanding I play hockey with him when I so clearly couldn’t, I was tempted to walk off the job right there and then.

But I needed money.

And taking spoiled children to the park was a nay-nay in my books.

So, every time Ryan hinted I needed to take his kids to the park, I steered the day away from that hellfire. I played pretend camp with the kids, read books and built Lego castles, and made smoothies with frozen bananas out of their overstuffed fridge. I did what I could, all the while feeling a sense of bitterness that these kids had the whole world in front of them. That they had a castle of a house, and my apartment could fit into one of their damn bedrooms. That they demanded more and more and never once—never in the six months I worked there so far—had they uttered my name.

Did I blame them? Absolutely not. I grew fond of Donatella because she called me Mama sometimes when I held her. And my relationship with Hilfiger was up and down, but he was a brilliant boy who shined when he built things.

So no, I didn’t dislike them as little people. But I absolutely wholeheartedly felt they would not even blink if I was gone. And it’s not that I wanted to make a noticeable mark in their lives, it was that I felt utterly replaceable, which did little to help my self-value.

I thought looking after them would destroy me emotionally, but it strengthened me and made me covet the memories I had with my little sister. I supposed that was where my true bitterness stemmed from. It was a confronting truth I often shirked from. I wished she would have had this life instead. She might have still been here. She would have had a chance. I could see her little shadow hanging around, running rings up and down their house, her infectious giggling the only sign she was nearby.

Imagine if she had lived like this.

When the going got tough, when it seemed the day could not get bleaker, I pretended I was playing with her, and the stress ebbed away.

My third job was looking after a disabled man at his apartment from 11am-4pm. His qualified carer didn’t work Sundays, and he didn’t seem to mind that I had no credentials. So long as I was cheap. He was given an allowance to hire carers, and I wasn’t sure it was much. Derek was lonely, I surmised after speaking to him on the very site Clare Bellamy reached out to me on. He needed someone to heat his food and change his sheets. It would have been an easy gig except he told me the catch.

Because there’s always a catch, isn’t there?

His room was in an addiction treatment centre, and it temporarily housed recovering addicts. I mean, it didn’t sound that bad, except he had seemed stressed about it, which made me stressed. But I was a Hawthorne girl, and Hawthorne was the most dangerous part of Blackwater. Nothing should have unnerved me.

I was wrong.

As I stepped off the bus, I walked half the block down to the building he was in. Coming here was always a cautious adventure. I made sure not to pack a bag. I had slipped my cash and ID card in my right shoe, and right now it was getting uncomfortable with some loose change pressed against my toes. Such was the way though—nobody stole worn shoes, did they? And you certainly couldn’t pickpocket them, either.

Immediately the street started to look scummy and desperate with a couple abandoned storefronts, and a pawn shop that had hardboard sheets for a window because it had been freshly smashed. Oh, boy.

As I kept to myself, I made sure to look straight ahead. This street always gave me the shivers. It was unpredictable, and I was becoming a regular. The people were starting to look at me with quiet familiarity. Never a good sign.

Glancing over my shoulder, I felt a strange feeling come over me today. It had been like this lately, but not as strongly as today. I felt like I was being watched. Paranoia grew tenfold when I noticed a black Mercedes Benz every now and then with tinted windows I couldn’t look into. Sometimes it was there, other times I glimpsed where it was, and it was gone.

Either I was going crazy, or Max Locke was tailing me.

A warm feeling tugged at my centre at the name, and I immediately shook the feeling away, determined not to dwell.

It had been a month of chest pains and sleepless nights.

I felt…altered.

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