Theo didn’t pass the initiation, but he was still part of the organization. Why the fuck would our parents put us up for this shit? I hoped, and hoped, and hoped my father would change his mind. Maybe I wasn’t good enough, maybe I wasn’t strong enough.
But with each passing day, with every glance at him, I knew he wasn’t going to let me go. God fucking dammit, I just needed somebody to talk to. Someone who would understand what I was going through.
I really hoped Kieran would have answers to some of my questions.
Like, why the fuck he never told me what our families were involved in? Not that we were best friends or anything, but they all knew, and not one of them said anything to me. I was pissed at my parents, I was pissed at myself, and I was pissed at all of them for keeping this from me. My chest hurt. My mind felt like a distorted picture, and I didn’t know who I was anymore. Two months ago, I was a daughter, a friend, a sister, but now… Now I was what the darkest nightmares were made of.
“Are you even listening to me?” Ava’s voice pulled me from the fog enveloping my mind, an impatient expression visible on her face. “Or are you just ignoring me? Again?”
I shouldn’t have come here today. My mind was already a mess, my attention span even worse, and she didn’t deserve it. “I’m sorry. I guess I got distracted.”
“You know what,” she stood up abruptly, knocking the milkshake cup in the process, “screw this. You don’t want to tell me what’s wrong? That’s fine. But I think I at least deserve you to be fucking present here—”
“I am present.”
“No, you’re not. Your body’s here, but your mind is somewhere else. You know where to find me once you decide I am worthy of your time and attention.”
“Ava!” She started walking away, and I pulled myself up, catching up with her. “What the fuck, dude?”
“You’re asking me what the fuck? Are you for real right now?” She turned to me, her angry eyes slicing through me. “First,” she lifted her finger, “you ghost me for two weeks. No texts, no calls, it was like you disappeared. Second,” another finger added, “your whole behavior is very much doom and gloom, which I would understand if I fucking knew what was wrong. And third, you’re completely distracted, when I could really use a friend right now.”
“Ava—”
“No, I’m done. Find me when you start being you again.”
I had nothing to say to her because I knew she was right. I was distracted, I was somewhere else. But as I said, if being a bitch meant she gets to stay safe and ignorant of all this bullshit, then so be it.
“So, that’s it? You’re just gonna stand there and say nothing?”
My eyes were burning from the tears wanting to spill over my cheeks, but this was one sacrifice I would gladly make.
“You’re unbelievable.”
I could see the slight quiver in her chin, but just like me, she swallowed her emotions, and with one last look at me, she left the field. We attracted quite the attention from the teenagers milling around, enjoying the summer day. I wished I was one of them—gushing after boys, deciding what to wear, even gossiping about other people, but I wasn’t.
I was me.
And tonight, I had to survive dinner at Nightingale Hill without killing one of the people I shared blood with.
“Ekaterina!”
Sitting in front of the mirror and applying makeup, I almost stabbed myself in the eye with the brush, flinching at the sound of my father’s voice. I wasn’t Ophelia to him anymore; I was Ekaterina because, “I had to embrace my true Russian heritage”. I was already stabbing people left and right, what more could he want from me? Should I start chugging vodka morning, afternoon and evening to completely accept my heritage?
Oh, I know. I should probably follow in my mother’s footsteps. A little bit of lithium, a couple of shots, and I would be good to go. Even she stopped calling me Ophelia, using Ekaterina every step of the way.
Couldn’t they let me have at least a small semblance of who I used to be?
A year ago, I read The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, and I was so captivated by it that I kept rereading it over and over again. The way he described his beloved city, the decadence of what was once beautiful, but was now like rotting flesh, destroyed from the inside out, it reminded me of me, of my family, of this world I thought I knew. I thought was beautiful, but was nothing but rotten.
The place I once called home was unrecognizable to me. Even the people I loved were practically strangers. My dreams and hopes disappeared with one single act that night. With the blade of my knife slicing through that man’s throat, it sliced through everything that was me. We all kill pieces of ourselves.
One piece at the time.
One dream per day.
One hope per second.
All of them shattered, lying on the pile of what we once used to be.
“Ekaterina!” His voice sounded angry now, and I didn’t want him to come in here.
“Da, Papa?” Was that a quiver I heard in my voice? Of course, it was. Even a monster had another monster it feared, and I feared him.
“We have to go. The boys have already arrived.”
Boys.
Kieran and Cillian.
He refused to call them by their names. For him, they were just that, boys. I guess I should’ve felt happy because he called me by my name, even if it wasn’t the one I wanted him to use.
But happiness wasn’t what I felt every time he called for me.
It only meant that he owned me, body and soul. After the tenth person he brought to me, I stopped counting the number of people I killed in his name. I stopped counting the number of people on which I imagined my father’s face instead of theirs.
“I’m coming, Papa.”
I dreaded seeing anybody tonight, but I needed answers. I pulled a small dagger Father gave me and put it inside the small black bag I decided to take with me tonight. I tried to cover the dark circles around my eyes, but it was futile trying to cover the despair I was feeling. You could see it in my eyes. You could hear it in my voice.
My chestnut brown hair cascaded below my shoulders in waves, and with the tight black dress enveloping my body and boots of the same color, I would fit in better at a funeral, than at a family dinner.
Though, knowing what I knew now, our family dinners might just turn into one.
I walked down the staircase leading to the foyer and saw my mother sitting with her legs crossed on one of the sofa chairs, a faraway look on her face. I didn’t know how I never noticed it, or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, but my beloved mother was an addict. All those times when I thought she was in a bad mood, she was just coming down from her latest high. Even now I could see she was on something.
It didn’t matter if it was drugs or alcohol, or maybe even both, she was too far gone for me to help her. Besides, how could I help somebody who didn’t want my help. How could I stop her from destroying herself when my father was the one supplying her with everything? I guess it made her more compliant, quiet and invisible.
I honestly couldn’t even blame her.
We all had our ways of coping with reality, and if this was hers, who was I to stop her. After all, this whole circus we called life, was enough to drive me to the brink of insanity. How did she feel being in all of this for most of her life?