Page 11 of Rage & Paradise
Not the way a stepbrother would look at his stepsister, but the way a man looks at a woman.
It’s heated.
I don’t hate it.Maybe that’s the worst part.
“You want the job, fine, I’ll give you a chance. But I’m warning you now, you’re going to work for it. You’re going to do exactly what you just said, anything I want.”
My heart stutters in my chest at his words.
Anything he wants?
I’m starting to think I need to worry about Oro and what he has planned for me.
SIX
Oro
Talk about a hidden opportunity.
I will say, when I first saw Estrella walk in the door, I thought I was having a stroke or something. There should be no way that she would be walking back into my life.
But now that she’s here, and destitute to boot, it seems like this might just be the chance for me to get a little retribution.
The relationship I had with her was short. I only officially lived with her for three years, from the ages of eleven to fourteen. But it was some of the most traumatic times of my life. I went from living a simple, hard lifestyle with my mother to having Estrella and her dad come in to give us what my mother said was a better life.
It seemed like Estrella did everything in her power to keep me from reaping any of the benefits of having a new father.
Father-and-son baseball games were canceled because Estrella decided to throw a fit and demand that she go instead.
Fishing trips, canceled because Estrella somehow convinced her father that I was disrespectful and only going to cause trouble.
Dinner-time conversations all revolved around Estrella and how good she was doing in school, and her extracurricular activities made it clear that I was nothing more than the bad kid.
I still remember the night they told me I couldn’t go fishing. I sat on the porch and listened to her laugh in the truck as they drove away. My mother told me not to pout, said I should be happy they were bonding. I wasn’t. I wanted to disappear. I tried everything I could to find my place in this new family. To get my step father to accept me as a son, but it seemed like everytime there was even a chance of him and I getting closer Estrella would show up and shut that shit down.
Everything that went wrong in the short time we lived together always seemed to get blamed on me. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that she just wanted her father to hate me. Instead of getting a better life, I got shafted.
It all came to a pus-filled head when Estrella managed to convince both my mother and her father that I’d burned down our storage shed and had plans to kill them in their sleep.
She cried and told her father that she was scared of me. That she didn’t feel safe. That I was a danger to everyone.
All of it, bullshit.
The fucked-up part of all of it was the fact that not even my mother believed me when I told her she was lying. She was too busy trying to make sure she kept her man to recognize what was going on with me. She had her new family, and I wasn’t part of it.
I wasn’t even surprised when my stepfather demanded that I either go to a behavioral training camp or leave his house.
I only knew of one behavioral camp.
El Refugio del Cordero.
The Lamb’s Refuge. This so-called camp was all boys and set deep in the sticks. From what I’d heard from my classmates, there wasn’t even any running water. We’d be expected to spend hours farming and gardening. The base of their program wassupposed to rehabilitate bad-seed children. Even at that young age, I knew exactly what kind of place that was.
It was nothing more than a concentration camp merged with a cultist retreat.
The rumors were that boys went in and came out as ghosts. They said the counselors wore white robes and prayed over your bruises. That they beat the devil out of you with shovels and scripture.
I knew one boy who had spent a summer there. Just one fucking summer. He came back with three unset broken bones. He cried all the time. He had whip marks on his back and his fingernails all cracked off. There was no rehabilitation. It was torture.
