Page 8 of Heart Sick Hate

He’s sweet. He cares. He’s a good friend. He holds up his end of our arrangement.

Arrangement.

I should probably start thinking of it as a relationship when that’s what it's supposed to be. After all, Rhett Kingsley will be my husband someday soon. A title thousands of women at the church would die for.

Preacher at Eternal Light, my father’s church. Leader in the trendiest way to practice Christianity in Los Angeles. Blinding smile, golden boy presence. He’s everything I’d want if I wasn’t permanently broken.

I look down at my phone, buzzing once more in my hand.

Rhett:Sorry I had to rush off the phone earlier, babe. Hope your day gets better.

He probably means it, even if he’s clearly forgotten where I am right now, or that he promised he’d be here with me.

Echo:All good. I know you’re busy.

Guilt is pointless when it won’t get us anywhere.

Rhett is sweet, honest. We know we stand in this together and are both willing to make the sacrifices necessary.

Rhett is my future, as promised.

And it’s the one promise I can’t break.

2

Echo

The needle drags acrossskin, and it’s the only time I’m calm. Focused. At peace.

Nothing clouds my mind when I’m inking. Not my past, not my future. Not even punching Crew in the face last night.

All that matters is the burst of color painting Claudia’s flesh. A wild rose blooming from the cracks in the skull. Beauty in an ugly world.

Growing up, art was the one thing that was mine. The one thing from my past life I held onto.

Pencil on paper stopped me from drawing with razorblades on skin when all I wanted to do was crawl out of my body.

My mom was a druggie with no money, and my dad didn’t know I existed. Half the time I was either alone or crashing on random people’s couches. Besides my onestuffed bear with a missing eye and a hole in his leg, I didn’t have many things I considered mine.

Art was it.

I could leave my mark. Create pretty things in chaos.

Something I almost lost when they locked me up. Until Dad found out he had a daughter and came for me.

Saved me—some would say.

It sounds like a second coming. Religious when I don’t have much faith left. But in technical terms, it’s what he did, and I’ll forever be in his debt because of it.

He pulled me from that place with white walls and pills so big they hurt to swallow. He saved me from the system when mom overdosed and extinguished any hope she’d someday try to be a parent. And he gave me art again. He helped me find a purpose.

I’m not religious like him. Faith is wasted on pointless things most of the time, so I don’t understand it. But I do believe him finding out I existed in that dark moment was fate.

My mom and dad met when they were young. She was in school and he was already on his path to becoming a pastor. From what dad has told me, she had dreams of being a teacher and enjoyed helping people. They got married at twenty-one and were already talking about babies. But then mom got into a car accident. And what started as a pill addiction quickly spiraled. Dad watched her slowly disintegrate, and when he tried to get her help, she disappeared.

It wasn’t until she left him that she found out she was pregnant. And she was too deep in her own mess to reachback out. If she hadn’t overdosed, and if I hadn’t been taken away, he might have never known about me.

He wouldn’t have found me.

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