Page 32 of Broken Pieces
That busted recliner sagging into the floorboards, the armrest patched with gray tape that sticks to her skin when she shifts. The paperback will be clutched in one hand, her pink highlighter in the other, ready to drag neon lines across the filthiest parts. Always the sex scenes. Always those moments, as if the words could open a door into a life she never had.
Trashy romance novels with covers that scream cheap fantasy, more bare skin than story, men painted to look powerful enough to carry someone out of misery. She devours them, page after page, her lips pressed tight, eyes glazed over. Addicted to a world that was never hers.
She eats them up the way starved kids tear through candy, desperate, greedy. And when the book closes, when thehighlighter cap clicks shut, she sinks deeper into the chair, drunk on the fantasy, whispering to herself that she deserved better. That she could’ve had it. That the world robbed her.
And every time her eyes flick to one of the many kids in that house, I know she’s found her thief.
She’ll already know by now that I’m suspended again.
The school would have called the second the ink dried on that slip. The phone’s probably still warm from her hand, her fake sympathy voice still echoing through the receiver.
The lecture will be waiting, loaded like a bullet.
She’ll tell me I embarrassed her, that I dragged her name through the dirt, that every mistake of mine reflects on her. That she stuck her neck out for me. That she’s tired. As if I’m the weight breaking her back instead of the reason her bills get paid on time.
I don’t need to hear it again.
So I keep walking.
Past the front steps, past the peeling door daring me to come inside. Around the house and down the alley.
Down past the old buildings where someone tagged the back wall of a shed withdead kids don’t talkin red spray paint. It’s faded now, cracked from years of weather, but I still read it every time I pass.
I don’t know why it sticks.
The river waits ahead, if you can even call it that. More mud than water, slow and sluggish, a vein clogged with filth no one bothers to clean. A place bloated with the things everyone wants to ignore. It suits me.
I drop down near the bank.
Not too close.
The ground’s soft, the kind that swallows your shoes whole if you’re dumb enough to test it. I hunch forward, elbows digging into my knees, bury my face in my hands.
Three days off school. They think they’re punishing me. But school’s a shitty thing I don’t want to deal with anyway. They basically did me a favour. I don’t care about the classes, the teachers, the constant noise. None of it matters.
It’s the consequences that come with it.
The threat of a group home.
I’ve been there once before, for a short time when I was eleven, when they couldn’t find a placement and dumped me in with the rest of the kids nobody wanted. And ifDolores wants me out, I just gave her the perfect reason to hand me back.
Group homes don’t hand out second chances. Back to dorms that stink of sweat, back to shared bathrooms with locks that never worked. Metal beds that froze your bones. Cinderblock walls that pressed in until you couldn’t breathe. Boys who watched you too long, eyes crawling over your skin, waiting for weakness. Kids who tested your patience with every word, every look, just to see how far they could push before you snapped.
They wanted to see what you were made of.
And you either proved it, or you got crushed.
I learned quickly. Came out colder.
Because when you’re the angry kid, it doesn’t matter what pushed you. They don’t care about the match. Only the fire.
Chapter Five
Skylar
Thefinalbellrings,and the whole building exhales in one desperate rush. Desks screech against the floor as bodies shoot up, every kid convinced freedom belongs to whoever gets out first.
The noise doubles once they spill into the corridor.
