Page 17 of Fall Into Me

I hadn’t been a very big kid. Scrawny at first, then long and gangly. My body had filled out without me noticing, withoutanyone noticing. Especially when I started to go to the gym purely so that I didn’t have to go home. I would run for miles and miles, hoping that whatever road I was on would lead me far away from the life I had and the people in it.

I’d been sitting at the dining room table doing my homework, and he walked in, didn’t even say a single word before he swung an open palm at my mother’s face.

The roar of fury just erupted from me, born of every single moment that had come before that I’d shoved deep down.

It was fucked up.

It had all been festering and rotting and changing that part of your soul that is born pure and light into something dark and heavy. I didn’t think about anything other than my want for my father to endure every ounce of pain he had dished out.

At seventeen, I remembered standing over him, knuckles split and heart hammering, while my mother held tight to one of my arms, trying to pull me away while also keeping herself close. Sobbing and broken and fucking terrified.

“You will never touch her again,” I spat at him. His face was covered in blood. His eyes wide with shock. “You will leave this fucking house, and you will never touch her again.” My throat burned from the way I screamed those words at him. “Or so help me God, I will kill you. I will fucking kill you. Do you understand me?”

He stared at me for a long time before he gave a single nod.

“Get your shit and leave.” I pulled back, one hand on my mom’s shoulder, steering her back toward the dining table where I just sat back down after getting her an ice pack wrapped in a dishcloth, and kept doing my homework. She sat with me, and I could feel her eyes on my face the whole time. Like she’d never seen me before. Like she was deciding if I would become someone that scared her too.

When I turned eighteen, that was when he reached out for me to come work for him. He probably thought it was some way to atone for what he’d done. I didn’t really know, and I didn’t fucking care.

“Are you coming in or not?” Cali’s voice sliced through the stillness, breaking the grip of my past like it always did.

I stayed at the end of the pathway, staring up at the home she’d built without me. She’d been watching me for a while. I could see it in the softness creeping into her face, a softness I didn’t deserve.

I reminded myself I was pissed at her too—for leaving in the dead of night with nothing but her key on the kitchen counter.

I schooled my face into the glare I’d made my trademark. She just rolled her eyes and unlocked the door.

“Now,” she said, with her hand on the door handle the other clutching her leftovers, “Jerry’s pretty docile at night, so you don’t have to worry, but you’ll see him in the morning, and he’s never had anyone over, so—”

Cali didn’t get to say anything else, because the moment she opened the front door, the galloping steps of what looked like a fuckingbearwas heading straight for me.

The next thing I knew I was airborne, then the wind was knocked out of me so violently I was half sure I’d cracked a rib.

It wasn’t what I was expecting to look up into, but low and behold, the exceptionally moist jowls that were hanging very close to my open mouth belonged to what had to be an almost two-hundred-pound dog.

“Jerry!” Calista yelled in the sort of way you might imagine a mother would when fretting about the welfare of their baby.

Jerry—clearlyneverthe size of a baby—loomed over me, unmoving despite my coughs and Cali’s vain attempts at dislodging him.

“What are you doing? You’ve never run out that door in your whole life!”

All I knew at that moment, aside from the fact that she was clearly not speaking to me, was that I was looking up into the face of the sort of dog that I had dedicated a whole fucking Pinterest board to that Calista helped me put together.

I haddreamedof this dog.

I had dreamed of this exact dog, and I’d been determined to call him Jerry.

“Is that a dog?Mydog?” I croaked out while she continued to tug back a dog that had a good fifty pounds on her. “Jerry?”

“No, he’s a rare breed of guinea pig,” she grunted out, trying her best to get him inside. “And Jerry is not your dog. He’smydog.”

The best way to describe it was like watching someone pushing against a wall and expecting it to move.

“So glad you found another of your own species,” I grunted back, getting to my feet. “I’m fine, by the way.”

“Of course you’re fine,” she snapped. “Jerry couldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Oh sure,” I groaned. “He’d just squish it to death.”

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