Page 28 of Ramsay

Although I inadvertently had a relapse, I’m proud of the strides I’ve made in walking away. I don’t want to go down that road again—ever.

I was ten years old the first time I realized Carmen had a problem. Five years my senior, she began to stay out later and later, buck the rules, and fight incessantly with my parents. One day she came home with a big burly dude who she proclaimed to be her boyfriend and after sending me to my room, proceeded to snort lines off the pristine coffee table.

After that, her behavior became more and more erratic until she stopped coming home altogether and my parents had no clue what to do. They never did, and to be fair, they weren’t bad people. Carmen had no excuse in terms of her home life to make the decisions she did.

You’d think I would have learned from her mistakes, but by the time high school rolled around, I felt so very alone. My mom was obsessed with Carmen's disappearance, as though she were the victim of a horrendous crime, instead of the reality that her daughter ran away willingly.

Mom slowly devolved into a shell of herself, brittle and old past her years, and I gradually became a footnote as she continued her quest to find my sister, now gone for over five years. I think for Mom, she couldn't accept what my dad, with his grim finality, had. Carmen was dead. But in his efforts to help Mom cope, to get her through the pain, he forgot about me too.

I’m not trying to be the asshole kid, but I was there, I stayed behind. I got good grades, played sports, told them I loved them, and begged for whatever scraps of emotion they had left to give until they had no more.

And at some point, I started to feel as though I didn’t exist because where Carmen consumed their thoughts, I was erased.

The first time I tried drugs, it wasn't so dramatic as snorting a line of coke or even the sweet sensation of marijuana. No, I snuck into my mom’s medicine cabinet and stole her anti-anxiety meds, riding the floaty feeling only it could give me.

But after a while, even that couldn't numb the pain, and I stepped up to opiates, taking handfuls all day and night, and walking through life in a haze that felt so much more lovely than the alternative.

Eventually, I couldn't support my habit by raiding my mom’s meds. No, I had to search them out, which meant I fell into the same ugly, wrong crowd as Carmen before me.

When I ended up around those same people, three years after she disappeared, they took me in and thought they would care for me out of a misplaced sense of duty to my long-gone sister. At first, it was fun, a constant party. We would gather and get high, party, dance, and fuck like bunnies.

I lost my virginity to a nameless, faceless dude while flying high. I'll never have that memory to cherish as less than stellar or amazing because I don't remember much about it. I allowed myself to be used while completely out of it because I just didn’t fucking care. I took drugs from people I neither knew nor trusted.

And after just a year, I was the same shell as Carmen, staring at myself and not recognizing the person looking back at me.

It's where I learned for the first time that Carmen, before she disappeared, had resorted to prostitution to support her habit, confirmed by those people whom she knew on the streets. And while I did things, I'm not proud of, to escape my life, I can say with clarity, I never stood on a corner and got into a stranger’s car.

I’ve never told my parents, for I think this would break them, but I saw Carmen before they pulled me out. She looked terrible, nothing left of her but bones and when I approached her, she didn’t recognize me. Her boyfriend, the same guy who came to our house that long ago day, had her on a leash, and I don’t mean that figuratively.

After that, when he pulled her away and I wasn’t allowed to speak to her, she supposedly got into a car with a john and never returned.

In that world, women disappear all the time, either to newer, fresher areas to hook or because they meet someone, they can’t escape.

This is why, I know in my heart, she’s dead. The question is, did she overdose or meet such a menacing evil? I can't contemplate it for long because the thought of her death at the hands of violence creates havoc in my chest as though my heart is being squeezed through a vice.

But in my darkest moments I suspect she’s gone and it’s at the hands of her keeper, a scary dude who went by the name Crush.

My parents, the only time in their lives they paid attention, pulled me out of that hell, sent me to a high-end rehab center, and moved me while I was away.

It's cute how they thought, if I had wanted, I couldn’t get high here just the same as there. But as I sat in front of a counselor that first day and faced the harsh truth of my life, I realized I was tired. I could punish myself for my parent's shortcomings. I could punish myself for Carmen’s mistakes. I could punish myself because it’s easier, or I could face it all down and reinvent myself.

So, I did, and I’ve been hiding behind the thin veneer of that persona for a year and a half. I pretended I enjoyed cheer because being a cheerleader must mean I wasn’t a drug addict. I allowed Sabrina to walk all over me because surely if I was friends with the most popular girl in school, I must be doing okay.

I ignored my conscience. I ignored my soul, and I slowly shriveled under my lies. I can never escape who I am and pretending to be someone else was like putting a band-aid on a severed fucking finger. I’m a drug addict, a recovering one at that. I’ve seen and done things that would make Sabrina cry. I crawled out of that mess by the skin of my teeth, and that skin is still dangling for the taking.

I’m not the girl who woke up on a couch in a strange home with a needle sticking out of her skin. I’m not the girl with the pretty ponytail and cheerleading outfit. I’m neither of those things. I’m a fucking nightmare of darkness masquerading as an angel. The devil hidden in the masses. I’m dead inside.

What the Sinners fail to see is I am them. I’m Oliver with the broken soul. I’m Diem with the seething rage. I’m Ramsay with the calculating eyes. I am all of them and none of them.

∞∞∞

After a hot shower that does nothing to soothe the beast writhing inside of me, I pull up my computer and open the search engine. Diem McCafferty yields nothing but a few petty charges by the local PD. When I search Paddy McCafferty I hit the mother lode of information, which to my dismay reminds me that I have more to fear than Ramsay and his cruel pranks.

Diem’s affiliated with the Irish mob. Although I know of him in a peripheral sense, it’s no surprise to read that Paddy McCafferty is a made man who runs a criminal organization and has been in prison twice for racketeering and drug related charges. The question is, just how deep is Diem in this world? And do I really want to use this as my revenge?

No, I definitely don’t because it would put me on the radar of the big fish and that’s hardly a road I need to go down. Setting aside Diem for now, I go to click out of the results but pause on a name farther down the page.

Frank McCafferty. Although I never met the man, he was one of the contacts mentioned over the time I spent on the streets. Does Diem know Frank? How could he not?

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