Page 36 of Did They Break You

I have my mother’s eyes.

Sometimes I feel the ten years of memories I had with her are slipping away, no matter how tightly I try to hold onto them. Funny, because those chained-up memories in the basement of my mind have no problem rattling around when I don’t want them to. But Mom, she fades without my consent.

I still remember her eyes though. If I close mine, I can see hers. I can see them when she was high, too. The pinched look of her face as her addiction got worse.

The fighting.

Silas and I never got along, even though Mom married him when I was three. But when she spiralled, lost her job as a teacher and her grip on that slippery slope of addiction, my relationship with Silas deteriorated.

After she passed, I made myself small. Holed up in my room, staying with Sloane, or visiting the graveyard.

Most of the time I spent with my mom was at the cemetery where she’s buried in Aben. Heroin laced with Fentanyl put her in that grave. That was after the years of pills. First they were prescribed to her, then they were stolen or bought.

I shift in my seat as Dr. Ravi’s eyes stay on mine. “Really,” I say, but my voice is hoarse. I know she knows I’m a liar.

She pushes her glasses down the bridge of her nose, sets them on the desk between us and rubs her temples, like she’stired or frustrated or just sick of my mess. “Remi,” she says kindly, but I hear the exhaustion in that one word as she drops her hand. “If you’re not sleeping well, you know there are medications we can temporarily?—”

“I’m not taking pills,” I interrupt, sitting up straighter and crossing my arms over my chest. I glance at my backpack at my feet, wanting to get up and walk out. But I like Dr. Ravi. I know she wants to help.

She holds up a hand as if to calm me, and I glance at the window behind her back and see the sun sinking behind the mountain range that edges campus.

I’m not in a hurry to get back to the dorm. Sloane has a night class, and the way those scissors have been beckoning, well, my arm itches just thinking about it. I’ve got four fresh cuts from yesterday morning as I pretended to oversleep, and Sloane had to leave before me to get to class.

Dr. Ravi has asked if I’ve “engaged in self-harm.”

But this is my little secret. Like those memories in the basement.

“It could be for a few weeks,” she insists, folding her arms and fixing me with a look. I know there are shadows beneath my eyes. I know I never really sleep that well because of the nightmares, but I don’t want to take medicine. It’s not that I’m against pharmaceuticals in general.

It’s that I’m worried about the numbness I felt in the aftermath of that night. For months.

It was like throwing a rock into a well and it just never hits the bottom.

I felt nothing. Heard nothing.I was nothing.

“Just until you get on a better schedule and?—”

“My schedule is fine.” I’m in bed at a reasonable hour every night. I don’t consume caffeine four hours before I lie down. I turn off my electronics. I do everything right.

But when I close my eyes, those memories burst free and I’m right back there.

At their mercy.

And Chase…

He doesn’t go here.He came to intimidate me.That’s all.I know. I checked his social media. Still at ECU with Brinklin.

I bite my tongue, refusing to let Chase out of the basement. He can haunt me at night, but he’s not getting my daylight hours, too.

Dr. Ravi nods, and I see in the way she shrugs her shoulders she’s giving in, despite the fact that she definitely doesn’t want to. “Okay,” she finally says. Then she stares at me for a second, an unreadable expression on her face.

I feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and I wonder if she knows he’s back, the way she asked me about having her number. But I don’t dare ask.

I don’t want to talk about him. Think about him. I want to pretend he doesn’t exist.

I glance at the clock adjacent the window and see our session is coming to a close. We discussed my creative writing assignment this semester. A memoir on a pivotal moment, and I told her I was definitely not writing aboutthatmoment.

We went over Sloane and casually discussed Asa. Sloane made out with him last Friday.While I was cornered against a wall in the bathroom.

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