49. Poppy Wells

49

Poppy Wells

I knew something was wrong before I even stepped foot inside my broken home.

“You lied, Poppy.” My mother’s words greeted me like a slap to the face as soon as I opened the door. “You kept all of these from me!” She snarled, throwing a handful of dirtied envelopes and pieces of letters at me. “You kept him from me!”

I stared down at the letters kissing my ankles, but their sweet remarks only gave me paper cuts.

“You are a selfish young girl, Poppy Wells. I thought I raised you better than this!” She yelled at me, but her words had no effect on me. I was numb to her now.

Numb. Numb. Numb.

“You didn’t raise me at all!” I screamed back at her before slapping my hands across my mouth in shock.

No, no, no…

She reeled backwards as if I had slapped her clean across the face. Shock melted across her solemn, sharp features as her eyes widened. “What did you just say to me?”

I flinched. Shaking my head, my fingers pinched their favorite spot behind my neck.

“Nothing,” I whispered, “nothing. J-just f-forget about it…”

I tried to walk past her. I tried a lot of things, actually. I didn’t know why I expected them to work. They never did.

Just close your eyes, Poppy.

You’re back with Jasper.

Tangled in his bedsheets.

Watching Marvel movies.

Grabbing my wrist, she slammed my back against the door before dropping a bag at my feet. It was the same bag I used to have in middle school. Its once dark green colors were dirtied and faded, just like the memories I had of that place. Just like the little girl who used to walk down those halls.

I remembered every comment. Every fit of giggles that erupted every time I walked down the hallway. And Miya…I remembered every single thing she and her little minions did to me. Every clump of hair they butchered from my head when I wasn’t looking. Every piece of cafeteria food they threw at me across the dining hall. Every joke, every hit, every scratch and tear of their nails…

A shudder ran through me. I knew I didn’t deserve to be treated like that. I knew…I knew I should’ve told someone, anyone …but who would’ve believed me? The teachers saw what she did to me. The nurses saw every bruise, every scrape, every cut of skin and drop of blood. Yet…they stayed quiet.

They defended her .

Miya was by far the worst, physically, but Hanna and Milla…they were just as bad. They stood by her, watched her do every single thing and never once stepped between us. They witnessed her berate me, bully me, harass and humiliate and almost kill me…yet, they never said anything. They never tried to stop it. Stop her .

It was evident, every damned time, that they both didn’t want to be there, to take any part in the horrific things she did to me back then. It was them who carried my limp body down to the nurse’s office on multiple occasions, sometimes even dropping me home after Miya and whoever her current boyfriend at the time, along with his mates, decided to ambush me. Bruises, sprains, broken bones…I couldn’t get out of bed for a week straight after that night.

Didn’t return to school for the month that followed.

The only reason I returned was because child services came sniffing around, and god forbid somebody in this miserable town found out just how fucked up my life was.

Hanna and Milla…they never apologized. I could see those two little words drowning in their eyes every time they stood and watched in silence.

Part of me wanted to believe that they couldn’t speak up, for whatever reason that might’ve been, just so the reality wouldn’t hurt as much. The reality that they saw, they knew , what Miya did to me…and just did nothing .

They weren’t bad people. I knew from lazy hallway gossip that Milla worked part time as a play-pretend princess for the children on the cancer wards at Hawthorne Hills Hospital. Giving them hope. A reason to smile. And that Hanna hung out at the old skate park, helping the kids on my street with their homework because no one else was home who could help them with it.

I just wished that their kindness could’ve extended to me too.

What was so horrible about me?

The only reason I barely survived each day in high school was because they all went to Hawthorne Hills Elite Academy whilst I was thrown into the deep end of Hawthorne Hills High. It was then that I started learning to defend myself. On the waves, I was ruthless, but in those hallways…I knew that if I wanted to survive, I had to pretend to be that girl. If I didn’t, I’d get eaten alive. And I knew, I never wanted to be prey again.

Ruthless. Bitter. Insensitive.

Every synonym of those three words had been thrown at me ever since.

I’d become the Orca, both on and off the waves. I had to do what I needed to survive . Why was that such a horrible thing? I’d never hurt anyone, never done half of the things the world had bestowed on me…yet, somehow, I was the one to blame. I was vicious. I was cold. I was unlovable. I didn’t deserve to live. I didn’t deserve to breathe. The list, their words, went on and on and on .

Yet, all along, I was just a child trying to survive.

Except, now, we were all still here, yet Milla was gone .

Disappeared one day and never returned the next.

I’d lost track of how many years she’d been missing for now. Most people believed she was dead, for there was no way she could’ve survived this long held captive. I should’ve felt good about it, a sense of justice after all those years she stood by doing nothing. Yet, I didn’t feel like that at all. I hoped, deep down, she was okay. Whether that was here or in a better place. I wouldn’t wish anything like that on anyone.

Hanna had spiraled after the news broke.

Miya, however, cried for the camera’s and then reapplied her mascara afterwards. It took her a day, one day , to find a replacement for Milla. Part of me wondered if she even cared about the little red head at all. If she did, she could’ve fooled me.

The whole case gave me shivers. This feeling of something else prickled my skin every time I thought about what happened. There were too many unanswered questions, too many loose ends…

I shook my head, clearing it of those thoughts. I wasn’t a detective. I knew shit.

“Pack your bags, Poppy, we’re leaving.”

“What?” I questioned, silently begging for my breathing to settle down before she caught onto it. My lips hung open.

“Your father, he wants us to try again, Poppy! He wants us to be a family again, like we were before…”

“Before your son died? Before he abused us both? Before he broke this family the second he took off without even casting a single glance back at us?”

She slapped me and I took it. Again. And again. And again.

“Stop being so ungrateful! Your father is making an effort to reunite us all together again, so stop acting like a childish brat and be grateful that he’s chosen to come back to us.”

I exhaled, shaking my head in disbelief. “Grateful? You want me to be grateful that the man who ruined my life decided that his new family isn’t good enough punching bait so he’s decided to come back home to his usual meat? You are fucking messed up in the head, mom. ”

Picking up the letters, I began to rip them up into tiny little pieces. One by one. I ripped and I ripped and I ripped. I tore apart the words of a liar, who still, to this day, had an iron fist around my mom’s throat. I saw through his promises. His bullshit.

“Stop it! Stop it!” she gasped, throwing herself at me in an attempt to salvage any of his words that she had cared more for in the last five minutes than she ever had my entire life. “Poppy, stop it!”

“He is lying mom! How can you not see that?” I gaped as she crumbled to the floor, trying to salvage all the broken pieces in her lap. “How can you not see that all those words are lies that mean absolutely bullshit to him!”

“He is your father!” she sobbed, “he loves us. He does. I know he does.”

“No, he doesn’t !” I yelled, trying to get her to see sense. “He doesn’t even know what that word means yet alone how to feel it!”

“He does love us,” she whispered, chanting the words over and over again as she rocked herself back and forth, the pieces of his words falling through her fingertips. “He does love us.”

“You make me sick, mom. This, ” I gestured to where she sat, “is unhealthy. He isn’t even in the room with us, and he still has you wrapped around his finger! That isn’t love, mom, that’s abuse . You do know that, right?”

“He does love us,” she repeated, eyes glassy and distant. She was gone. My mother was gone . “He does love us.”

Wiping my hands across my face, I sighed deeply into my palms before slipping my arms under hers and hauling her to her feet. Slowly, I guided her across the room, carrying the weight of his lies and her grief. I nudged her bedroom door open with my foot, walking us both inside the small room. Her chanting didn’t stop. I didn’t know why I expected it to. It was like she was possessed by him, a puppet stuck on his strings.

Part of me, deep down, felt bad for her. So many nights I’d found myself wondering about the type of life my mother could’ve lived if only she hadn’t met my father. And so many times, I came up empty because in my head, it was hard to imagine her as anything but the skeleton of the woman I hauled to bed each night and cleaned up after each morning .

Maybe, in another life, she could’ve been my mother, instead of me being hers.

I finally helped lower her into bed, turned off the little bedside light and stood back as she shivered and sobbed.

“One day, mom, you’re going to have to choose between him and me,” I stated, gritting down on my teeth in an attempt to hold myself together.

All she replied with was, “he does love us,” and that was when I knew I would never be her first choice.

She would always choose him.

She would always choose him.

Shutting her door, I picked up my old, tattered backpack and stuffed it with the very few belongings I did own, and without a second glance, I stepped down those too familiar porch stairs and began walking down the road he once drove down.

Maybe I wasn’t so different from my father after all.