Page 21 of Body Tox

“Hey, oh mighty protector?” I said sweetly, holding the desk at my chest level.

He turned around to stare at me again through the crack, and I put all my pain and anger into my throw as I spun around and screamed, “Fuck you!”

The metal desk impaled the splintered wood, knocking through the damaged area and into my new ‘bodyguard.’ I pushed my arm out and unlocked the deadbolt from the other side, ignoring the scratches coating my arm from my war and shoving his thick, stupid body out of the way.

He lay there on the ground. The vanity was on the other side of the hallway, having smashed some dumbass picture off the wall and leaving this ass-weed in a storm of broken glass and wood splinters.

I smiled down at his unconscious body.

“Maybe I do belong there, sweetheart,” I said, tapping his still form with the top of my heel. “But I’d like to see you try to put me there, bitch.”

Icoughed, pushing away the debris of splintered wood and shattered glass from me.

That fucking woman…

Oddly smiling when I looked at the tornado that my Little Wraith left in her wake gave me with a feeling of…pride? The door was completely destroyed. The crater-size hole in its center bent it forward, giving it a warped appearance of an eerie smile.

“Where, oh where, did you go after your tantrum?” I said, dusting myself off and following the trail left behind of tiny blood droplets and dust from the wood.

A booming voice sounded from some unknown location in the damn labyrinth of a house, and I ducked into the corner near a plant that seemed to have its own damn room.

Rich people gave a single plant a room bigger than my house growing up…good to know.

I thought about the different foster houses I had shuffled through. I didn’t think a single one of them even owned plants because that required them ‘to give a shit about keeping something alive.’

For many, there was no check fat enough for that special breed of human to pretend the living things they ‘cared for’ were thriving.

I rubbed the scar on my wrist. The long-forgotten pink line was still there, but the memory burned as much as the day it happened. The first foster house I had been put in was as wonderful as if I were a sheep being sent to slaughter.

But I’d realized it was a bad situation too late because I’d been ‘picked.’It meant something to be chosen by someone when not a fucking soul in your life gave a damn about you. To feel like I finally mattered overrode any obvious and not-so-obvious red flags.

That feeling was short-lived. As soon as I got there, I realized why I had been chosen over the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed girls with me. I may have been eight, but I could use my scrawny arms to get shit done better than a girl.

These people had a farm, and they needed to get someone to shovel shit, dump feed into cages, and scrub animal pens for hours on my fucking knees. I had basically lived in the barn to keep moose, bears, and foxes from stealing their precious livestock. Thinking back, it was absurd that I’d survived because Alaskan winters were cold as fuck.

However, I learned how to stay alive in the frigid, snow-filled weather really fast. In the summers, I used to soak my clothes inthe water troughs to keep cool, and in the winter, I snuck into the house to sleep in the warm laundry room.

During one of those winters, I’d been caught sleeping on the damn floor, which was how I got my scar.

The foster mother screamed when she tripped over me for her husband.

“You’re filthy body is making my floor disgusting,” she said.

The next thing I knew, her husband had thrown me into a china cabinet filled with antique porcelain and crystal glassware. The dishes busted under my body, and the white and blue jagged edges of one of the plates sliced my wrist. That mark had blemished their perfect workhorse, and I had been ripped away from my only friends—the animals in the barn.

I started to learn that the more I ruined my skin and damaged the “property,” the less these assholes wanted to use me.

I had grown up in the orphanage until I was finally booted out at sixteen. Crude tattoos of each of the rejections colored my skin. Some of the images were of a porcelain china bowl, a piece of jagged fence that had surrounded the home, and sharp edges from the other fosters’ little memorabilia littered about the house. It was all there, my story written on my body.

Leaving these marks and freeing myself with the blood spilled was maybe how I ended up becoming downright addicted to the high it gave me.

I had killed for the first time not out of interest but survival. You couldn’t be a teenager trying to break into businesses to escape the brutal end of Alaska weather. A few people were kind enough to pretend I didn’t exist, but others weren’t satisfied until I’d become a human popsicle on the street or beat up by bears attempting to make me into their meal.

It was my third winter on the street when I’d snuck into the house that looked abandoned. I was nineteen and starving. Themass hunting occurring in Alaska was drying up the woods of any viable stock. I had to cull pigs from farms and take the scraps of downed moose left by wolves.

But this place looked safe and dark.

The old lady who found me had scared me so badly that I reacted in pure survival mode. Thinking a bear or wolf got through my entrance in the backboards, I raised my knives and threw them to kill.

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