Chapter Four

Fabian Lupei

There’s two fundamental truths I've has always known about myself and the world.

The first is, I'm not normal. From what I can tell, the things I can do aren’t average. I'm still not sure if the blanks in my memory have to do with the visions or the strange abilities But I've mostly given up caring.

I ignores the visions now, they’re rather uneventful anyway. I don't like to dwell on all the s**t that I can take out from them, it’s not normal to know what’s going to happen. I don't want to know.

I've spent far too long trying to be normal for my father’s sake, who still looks at me as though he doesn’t know who I am, who he raised, even as he dies in a disgusting hospital bed smelling like rot and disease. I refuse to give up on the act now, at 17. God knows I've already dealt with enough teasing for my accent when my father and I moved to the middle of f*****g nowhere Canada. I craves normalcy, even if it isn’t who I really am.

Dad had tried to raise me alone in Romania for 15 years. Pretending as though he wasn’t ashamed to have me as a son, someone as fucked up and deranged as I am. But the disgust in his eyes every time I did something not right, something that didn’t fit into the role of a normal son, had haunted me my whole life. The only time I had ever enjoyed being around my father was when he’d taught me how to shoot, how to handle weapons and how to protect myself. It had been a release for the slow burning anger that had always been in side of me, something I do even now when I can't get myself under control.

I’ve had visions with my mother in them, strange red eyed demons that followed him. Footsteps that echoed, an earth-shattering laugh. I have no idea what she looks like, I don't even really look like my father if I'm being honest, hair too blond, eyes too sharp. Or why she’d left him with an incompetent father. Just another thing that made me odd. Different from other kids who looked at me strangely, making sharp remarks about me behind my back about his empty family. 

Which leads to my second fundamental truth. No one likes me.  

The phone rang, loud and cutting through the silence I sat in; alone. I often found myself alone, wandering in strange places of my mind.

I regained control of my numb hands, I’d forgotten to turn on the heat again, and grabbed the obnoxious telephone. The caller I.D said S. Lupei. I stared at it for a while, listening to its unbearable ringing, I stared until it eventually gave up and stopped. My step-mother. Though I despise clichés, Selina Lupei fit perfectly into the role of evil step-mother, it was as though she’d walked straight from hell and into my father’s arms. Not that I care much, it seems as though they truly belong together.

The both of us had been planning to visit my father today in the hospital. I plan on going eventually, I just want to get there on my own time, my own way. Going to the hospital meant seeing my father's pallid face and listening to my step mother's yelling at an unfortunate nurse. Another day spend withering in the background, a wallflower, yes. But a wallflower with a scowl permanently etched into it's face, hoping that this visit would be another blank spot in it's memory - something I can't remember when the next day comes. The worker's there had learned to ignore me, doctors never update me on my father condition anymore. I don't need them to, it was obvious to anyone who walked in the room that he was going to die. Spending his last days as a vegetable listening to the endless beeping of his heart stabilizer.

I sighed, leaning back into the chair I’d probably been in for hours. Or minutes. I don't know. I have difficulty with time. Always have. I'm not even quite sure where I've been for the few hours before now, I don't remember. I'm not sure if I want to.

I had actually gone to class yesterday. I talked to people, sometimes. I just found that I'd never actually taken a liking to anyone before. I could only name two people from school at the top of my head that I talked to more than a few times a month. I liked Phoenix enough, sometimes. I like lots of things sometimes, never permanently.

I got up from the dusty brown chair, hoping that today, my father might even have the grace to die.