10.

 

I lift one eyelid, then the other and inch my limbs ever so slightly. I feel like I have been run over by a train. My head is dully aching and throbbing, my eye sockets tired, if that is possible.  My head stops spinning momentarily, and I look up. What a crazy dream… I am lying in the middle of the living room, just sprawled out in an awkward angle. My mind is reeling. I am trying to recall the events that have taken me to this state. My head inches slowly as I try to get a view of the clock, and I see that it is seven in the morning. That is confusing. The thing I last remember was coming home after school on Monday, and having a fight with Dad, but I mean…I don’t remember him hurting me. A voice shakes the layer of haziness off of me.

            “Jill. Get up.”

I sigh, but it ends quickly as a sharp pain in my ribs cut it short. It’s just Bethany. I think she must have a house key or something. The room is spinning and wobbling, and I am trying to wrap my mind around it all.

“Come on.”

She gets up off my couch and pulls me up gently, as we silently assess the situation. I feel something in my eyebrow, and I itch it, and dark, dried blood flakes off. I inhale. My fingers creep up my forehead and find it. It feels like a large welt. When my fingers make contact with it a ping of pain throbs in my head, pulling my fingers away.

            She studies the lump on my head, and then her eyes scan down my thin body. There are traces of a coppery metallic taste in my mouth.

“Your lip is busted open.” She says softly, and then looks at my shoulder. The look of horror slapped across Bethany’s face isn’t a good indication, and when I put my fingers on my shoulder I soon realize why. It has to have made contact with something….very hard contact, that is. I peer down at my shoulder and see an oozing wound and a bluish bruise spreading down my arm like a spider web.
            “You usually don’t remember it, do you?” Bethany asks, looking at me with sympathy. Don’t remember what? She looks at me with an expression like Really, Jill. “But this time you did. You remember the fight. Something changed.” A pang of some emotion slipped across her face, as she mumbled “I’m not protecting you well enough…” under her breath. I don’t want to admit to myself what she and I both know is going on.

            My knees feel weak beneath me and I squeeze out a breath.

 “Come on, and sit down.” Her cold hands take the crook of my arm and pull me gently over to the couch, and gently set me down. I am really messed up, I can tell. She sits down by me, looking at me with serious concern.

“I don’t know where he is now, Jill. But this isn’t good. I’ve been trying to help out…and I don’t know…what happened….” She looks at me. “Jill, do you realize what happened?” I feel like deep down I probably know, but I can’t bring myself to say it. “Jill, it’s getting worse. I can’t protect you this time. What happened?” She repeats. I gulp.

“Dad.” I whisper, and my voice breaks as a hot tear rolls down my cheek. The saltiness of it stings as it slides over scratches and cuts on my face, and I wince. I wince that I know that my Dad has just hurt me, I wince from pain, and I wince just because I need to, for once.

            “At least something is real for you.” She says, and pulls me into my bathroom. She rummages through all my cabinets, presumably looking for bandages and things like that. She pulls out a bottle of rubbing alcohol, some cotton balls, band aids, gauze, and I watch the materials mount up on my dirty counter. Is it really that bad? Then I catch my own gaze in the dirty mirror, speckled with dried drops of water, and I am shocked. I have never seen anything like this before, except for movies. I look horrible; I’m Technicolor with bruises and blood.

            “It’s okay, it probably looks worse than it is, now sit down,” she says, motioning to the toilet seat, “and just try and forgot about this…” But how can I forget?

            “I can’t forget about this.” I whisper fiercely to Bethany. She frowns at looks at me.

“You have before.”

These words slap across my face like a rubber band. What!?! She looks at my shocked expression and just sighs, as she pours a little antibacterial liquid on a cotton ball. She gently scrubs off the dried blood from my body and it is clearer to see what the real damage is to my body. It’s still bad.

            Now time for the rubbing alcohol. I brace my body for the sting and I grimace.

“What, you don’t think it’s necessary? You know what happened what last time, when we didn’t use it…your cut got infected and you spiked a fever.” Not to my knowledge, I didn’t. But then again, my knowledge is pretty limited these days.

            The swab brushes over all the damaged areas, and they send needles of pain through my nerves. I gasp for breathe, and I’m surprised. Usually, I like pain…but today I don’t feel that good sensation I usually do, when I know what’s going on and I know I can control everything. But…all I feel is pain, today. I realize it’s because I don’t know what’s going on, and my wounds are raw, literally. I am not in control. And for once, Bethany couldn’t save me.

 

 

 

            After she finishes helping me dress everything, she quickly walks into the room and pulls out a piece of paper. She sits at my desk and very quickly writes things down. I look over at her shoulder:

            “One week recovery, (call in sick for today’s absence)

            Pack, and get money together (You have 500 in your savings account)

            Pick a place. Somewhere, anywhere.

            Leave around 3:30 am sometime next week while Dad is asleep.

           (Don’t leave a note)”

            I stare at this odd to-do list…and I realize what Bethany wants me to do…she thinks I should run away. I have thought about it a few times, of course….but not seriously. Until this morning, I didn’t know that my Dad has been hurting me, and when I think that sentence in my head, my mind reels. How many times has this happened? What did I do to Dad? Why can’t I remember these things? I don’t know if I could run away, I just…I can’t handle this.

            I lie down gingerly on my bed, and survey the room. There are dirty clothes everywhere, I haven’t done laundry in months…and I don’t care. My eyes scan over all the crap in my room and I spot them, I’m relived. I reach to the floor and pick up a stray application, and I’m back in my own rhythm. Just breathe. Ignore all this. As I fill out my address, I try and clear my mind. There is no way I can leave. No.

            “You really don’t have a choice. I’ll make you go.” Bethany interrupts my intricate writing. I block out her voice and make sure my letters fit within the boxes, and I make sure that they are staying in the lines. I can just drown her out, like I drown out my Dad when he’s mad at me.

            “Jill. Are you listening? You are going.” The edge in Bethany’s voice clears my head and I instinctively pull my pen from the page. Something hard and cold is in her voice…it sounds angry, forceful. A threat. I pull my eyes slowly towards Bethany, spinning on my desk chair, painting her toenail that was haphazardly propped within her nail polish brush’s reach.

            I don’t know why I don’t just go, really. The basic point is to get away from whatever is making me sad…I just need to extract the things in my life that are making things so complicated…and, apparently, Dad is one of them. I should probably go. But go where? You have nowhere to go.

            I think of my grandmother, but this just makes me think of the other when I was skipping history by hiding out in the bathroom. Like I said, nobody cares about me. Or at least not that I can tell. Bethany cares for me, but that’s about it. She always will…but sometimes I feel her care fraying on the edge of not enough. Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me again. It does that a lot, although I don’t find it particularly amusing.

            “Not a choice…” Bethany reminds me, her voice hanging in the silence of my contemplation.

            I guess it’s not a choice. The bruises are a reminder of that. I don’t want this to be so dramatic, like a made for TV movie. I don’t want to be running away from the abusive dad, trying to rely on friends and myself for help…but what can I do? This is not a Hallmark movie…this is my life, and I need to save it myself. Stop! Dad is not endangering your life! My mind screams at me, contradicting it over and over. Yeah, he kind of is… I argue back, my face in a grimace.

            “Okay…so what do I need to do?” My tone of voice is flat, uninterested.

            “Well, for the most part, you need to get better first…and you need to call school and fake someone, and tell them that you were sick. Just make it sound convincing.”

            I look at her, skepticism playing across my face.

            Bethany sighs and grumbles, “Fine. I’ll do it.” She picks up my phone, calls the school, clears her voice, and switches into a completely different person.

            “Why, hello? Yes, this is Clara Haven, Jill Haven’s mother. Yes, I am terribly sorry….yes, about forgetting to call…..completely slipped my mind! Oh, yes…oh you are new? Ah, that’s nice……yes, she’s sick….I know! The weather….a fever, yes. Alright….oh and yes, today as well…Hopefully she will be better….we’ll see! Oh, thank you. You too, okay, buh-bye.”

            And she clicked off the phone with a satisfied grin.

“Takes a new person to see through that lie. I mean, your mother? Come on.”

            Where is my mother? I still can’t ask Dad, especially not now…come to think of it, I don’t know where Dad is right now….and that can’t be good. Part of me wants the truth, and part of me wants to hide in the darkness. I know I had a mom, but she is faceless, nameless. I don’t know…I just…don’t. Ask Bethany. Why would Bethany know, and not I? ….Stupid question; Bethany knows a lot more about me lately than I do.

            “Where’s my mom?” I ask softly, absentmindedly pushing the application and pen to the end of my bed.

            Bethany is scrawling something on the list of instructions, but she stops immediately at this, and looks up, her eyes crackling with something I can’t describe. She looks at me, straightens her posture.

“You don’t need to know right now. That’s my job, girl. I don’t think you should know…I already failed at something.”

            I have no idea what she is talking about. So…I have...or had a mother, obviously…but where is she? Who is she? Could she be shopping through the mall right now, or lying in a coffin in the cold February dirt?

            This is all too confusing, and tiring. My eyelids feel like they weigh a million pounds…like they are just melting away…and that makes me think of those melting clocks. Who painted that…oh, right. Dali. My heart is racing. Dali, like Dali Lama? Who is that again? That will annoy me. Every time I think about the Dali Lama I think of a llama. That probably isn’t good. I don’t pay attention in class, how would I know? And I don’t know the different between Hungary and Germany, I hate history. Especially for Molly and Staci, those girls in my class.

            My mind is fluttering like it usually does, and I feel my gaze shifting to nothing dreadfully important.

            Important? What’s important? All I have right now is the instinct to run. Just run, keep running, and you’ll know when you get there. But when you’re running you have to reach the end at some point. What do you do then?

            “Jill.” Bethany woke me from my conscious dreaming.

            I sigh deeply and allow myself to fall back onto my pillow on my bed. My head lands on something a little more solid and warm than my pillow, and I smile a small slice of happiness.

            “Charlie!” I pull him over by my side and feel his chest expanding and contracting, always constant and sure.

            I remember when I was little, I was sure Dad was accidentally going to shoot Charlie someday. Dad loves hunting, and he goes all the time, and I was always so cautious to hold Charlie so tight when Dad went to the woods down the road from our piece of suburbia. What if Dad shot Charlie instead of a rabbit?          

            Dad always assured me that wouldn’t happen, and that he knew what he was doing. When I was five I got to try out my first gun. That seems ridiculously early to me, but Dad tells me that it wasn’t a big, powerful gun.

            I remember that day very clearly, or at least most of it. I put an eccentric tie-dye bandana over my braided, black hair and then on top of that the helmet that had the protective ear gear inside. It was summer camp for Brownies…Dad came to teach the Girl Scouts how to shoot a BB gun.

            He was different then, I can see him now. He was leaning against a big rock in the thickly wooded camp, his voice deep and sure.

            “If the Boy Scouts can do it, then you can too!” He said, and then to appeal to the Girl Scouts,

            “Boys have cooties, anyway.” He added with a grin.

            The girls giggled at his silliness, and I remember thinking my dad was the coolest Dad ever. I wonder what changed that.

             When it was my time at the BB gun, I knew what to do. I had seen Dad do it all the time with the neighbor boys, probably to fill the void of not having any sons. I cocked it surely to my shoulder, and aimed precisely straight to the tin can…dramatically squinting one of my eyes for a better target, and squeezed the trigger.

            ZING!  A perfect hit. I remember my smug personality when all my friends were awed by my perfection at the art of shooting a BB gun.

            I remember Dad looking over to one of the other dads that were there and saying, “Yep, that’s Jill. She’s a natural.”

            Words of affirmation can be rare from Dad sometimes, so I like this memory.

            Unfortunately, memories do not fix the present situation. Don’t live in dreams.  I repeat to myself, almost embarrassed that I would let myself think back into the old times. Don’t live in dreams.

            “Okay, so here’s what you need to do, Jill.” Bethany breaks me away from my thoughts, vocalizing the list she made.

            “You need to be figuring out where you are going…soon. And a good place, Jill. Somewhere that is going to be safe and good. And I mean, it doesn’t have to be far away…necessarily, but it needs to be far enough away that you’re safe. If you can’t do this for yourself, I will.”

            A prick of fear shivers down my spine.

            “Try and act normal…and you need to keep away from all the crappy people at school, you don’t want more stuff…and what is with that lady, that doctor? Yeah, don’t see her again. She’s crazy. She has no idea what she’s talking about, and if she has a diagnosis or anything like that, just ignore it. She’s worthless… Just get through the week, okay? Or do I need to walk you through it like usual?” No response. “Alright. That’s what I thought.”

            My heart slows its beating from frantic to a sluggish rhythm like that of lazy members of a marching band. I feel my body react to the sudden change of my heart beat, and my eyes flutter shut.

            Blink. Bethany’s gone. I hate when she does that.

            A shiver is coming over me, so I grab an afghan and wrap it around myself. My ribs really ache, and I notice that while I sit down at my desk and stare at the ominous to-do list. I study the handwriting, oddly homogenous to mine.

            “One week recovery, (call in sick for today’s absence)

            Pack, and get money together (You have 500 in your savings account)

            Pick a place. Somewhere, anywhere.

            Leave around 3:30 am sometime next week while Dad is asleep.

           (Don’t leave a note)”

            How can she be so sure that this is a good idea? Don’t question it. Just do it. I don’t know…sometimes I feel so hallow inside I think it won’t matter what decisions I make. I guess I do agree with her that I should stay away from those girls at school and everything, but it’s kind of…easier said than done. I know things are going to be kind of weird with Ms. Poplar, and I really, really don’t want to see Dr. Sandburg again.  But I probably will.

            Ah. The pain in my ribs is pulsing again, a constant reminder of what has happened. The more I feel, the more I remember. So…where’s the Tylenol?