Page 76 of Soul of a Psycho

Are you sure you want to eat all that?

I don’t think your figure needs dessert.

Maybe you should just stick to a salad tonight.

I brought it up. I was fourteen, but I wasn’t stupid. She agreed that maybe his remarks ‘weren’t the kindest’ but that hemeant well. I didn’t give a fuck what he meant, but after that she went back to loading her plate up. I was happy enough.

Until the bathroom excuses started coming after dinner. The odd way she would return smelling like mouthwash. The way that regardless of how much food I watched her eat, she was still losing weight.

I will never forget what it looked like to walk in on my mother, frail and bent over a toilet, with a finger down her throat, throwing up the stacks of snickerdoodle cookies we had only just inhaled while watchingGone With The Wind.

That’s why the disgust that rolls in my stomach causes me to narrow my eyes in disdain as I take in the hollows under the headmistress’s eyes. The sallow gray of her cheeks. The way the tendons in her neck are too severe, and how the points of her shoulders protrude gauntly under her jacket. The tentative smile she sports is too thin, her hands too bony as she gestures between me and Sky.

It makes me sick to look at her. To see what she’s become. And I snap a response that cuts me just as deeply as it cuts her.

“None of your business,” I spit at my mother.

Her eyes lose a bit of the light they had gleaned just a second before, and her lip falls as she stuffs her hands in her pockets. And as if that alone doesn’t scrape against my insides like a sharpened spoon, Sky elbows me in my side.

She extracts herself from me, smiling politely up at my mother as if she didn’t do anything, and piously clasps her hands. “We’re friends,” she says.

I snort. Friends don’t let friends rub their blood on their clit. As far as I’m concerned, we’re eternally entwined. My soul fused to hers like a fucking parasite, the tendrils of blight tightly coiled, waiting to consume. I couldn’t be her friend if I tried. And I’d rather die than try.

I yank her back against me. “We’re notfriends,” I growl.

Sky turns scarlet and tries to wriggle free, her scowl as threatening as a bomb, but this time I have her locked in. She’s not going anywhere.

Ever.

Especially with this skull fuck closing in. The guts of this guy to be in her room. I don’t even go in her room at night, and god knows I dream about it. The twilight state of the sleeping pills causes vivid fantasies of being a shadow in her dark corners. If he touched her, I will kill him. I will find a way to bury his body in the woods and still keep my plans.

“Well,” my mother titters nervously. “You two are obviously friend-ly.”

The attempt at a joke makes me roll my eyes.

“Is…” Sky twists to face her in my grasp. “Is that a problem?”

A problem? What the fuck?

“Oh, no! No, of course not.” My mother steps forward. “It’s wonderful. I’m so…” She reaches a hand out for my cheek, but I flinch away from her touch. It’s abrupt, harsh, and guilt rears its familiar head as a look of hurt passes over her features. I don’twantto hurt her, but I can’t lean into her embrace. Her hands are too cold now, too skeletal.

She quickly recovers, tucking her hand back into her pocket. “I’m so…” She tries for a smile, but it’s forced now, weak with wounding. “Happy for you two.”

The wound comes from a double-edged sword, and my chest aches with a remorse that threatens to take me to my knees. Every time I push her away, the severing of how we used to be grows more jagged and irreparable. That’s never what I wanted, but that’s what we’ve become. And I hate myself for it.

I hang my head, either from the lack of sleep or the guilt finally eating through me, and surrender.

“Thanks, mom.”

Chapter Fifty-One

Sky

“You knew?!” I gape at Ruby.

She’s rummaging through a pile of clothes, desperately trying to hide the fact that her eyes are swollen and red.

“How did younotknow? What rock are you living under?”

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