"She knew he loved her more than anything...More than anything, minus everything." Kaitlin is living a life of abuse, drugs and self-mutilation. Who does she have to trust when her friends back out, and will she ever be able to be a normal teenager?
Written and Copyright to Aisha Johnston (i.e. ME!)
Chapter 1: Introduction
She walked into the workplace, drunken men sitting around the cherry-wood, round tables as she strode into the back room where a large, plump man sat at the rusty old sink, washing a few dirty dishes. He looked back in sheer disbelief as his main worker walked into the restaurant late. "You'll wash dishes all night and spend an extra hour for the one you missed," he had said as she walked out of his small, square office. She looked to the aged, olden sink and the dirty dishes that lay beside it on the fine marble counter. Rolling her sleeves up and quickly dunking them in the soapy water to cover the new bruises on her arms, a middle-aged woman ambled towards her from behind. "Father again, love?" she inquired softly so the man wouldn't hear. The porcelain-skinned, delicate-boned girl nodded as a tear ran down her rosey cheeks, only to be wiped off by an elderly, wrinkled finger. She pulled her bruised, soapy arms out of the water and wrapped them around the parent that she never really had, pulling on her like she was about to fall into a state of woozy, unstable madness.
As the beefy man came back out onto the tiled kitchen floor, arms flew back into the water quicker than penguins dive below the surface. "How's that cleanin' coming, Kait?" he asked with a mischevious grin before smearing his dirty, grubby face onto one of the plates Kaitlin had cleaned. Passing it towards her once more, he chortled. "You missed a spot," he said, throwing it towards her, causing her to lunge onto the ground to catch the platter before it crashed into almost microscopic pieces on the floor. The blue and black blemishes on her arms appeared as the soapy water slid off her limbs and onto the yellow-gray floor. She looked up briefly to see rolls of flesh seeping off the man's belt line as she boosted herself up off the ground, soon aided by her shirt being balled up into his fist. "You been bein bad?" he asked, smirking at the wounds. Kaitlin shook her head violently as he began to raise her into the air, forcing her against the nail-embedded wall, the metal digging into her spine as she rested a foot above the ground. "I ought' to give ya a smack to match the ones on yer' arm," he stated with another evil grin before dropping her to the floor, her head taking a blow to the hard ground before she drifted out of conciousness.
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Kaitlin woke up to bellowing from the lower floor of her house. Sounds of drunken slurring of words echoed up the steps to the third floor of the shacky building that she had called home for the past 16 years. Her dog clawed at the door, protesting to the disturbing noises where she had been sleeping only 5 minutes before. Kaitlin slowly rose from her bed, tip-toeing towards the door so her parents wouldn't hear her up. Not like they would care, she thought to herself as she opened the door to Salsa, her 3 year old golden retriever. Kaitlin shuffled towards her bed again, wiping her reddened eyes with the palms of her hands after her nightmare.
Except that it wasn't a nightmare. The event had repeated itself over and over since she had started that job. Since she was fourteen she had been abused by her boss, sexually (though nobody knew) and physically (which her boss, Gordon, always bragged about). Since she was two, she had been abused in all possible ways by her own father, who had still stuck around, only because her mother hadn't believed that he would do such a thing. Although he came home every night from "the baseball game" drunk and almost unable to speak a word in the common tongue of English, her mother didn't seem to care, because "somewhere in her heart" (what heart?) she knew that he loved her more than anything.
More than anything,
minus everything.
Kaitlin had been fighitng for her chance at a better life since she realized exactly what was happening to her, what exactly had been happening since she was two years old, too young to understand anything in the world alone. She had gone to the police when her dad had pulled a gun on her and her mother, though he told them that he would kill them if they said anything to anyone. She had gone to numerous councelors in her high school when all the lights of her friendships had suddenly burnt out. She had, mistakingly, talked to her boss. Now all she had left was something she wasn't aware was there. Something that, in the end, would be the only thing that she'd have left.
The only thing that would matter.
Chapter 2: Busted!
“So, does anyone want to tell me the plot of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde?” The teacher walked about the classroom, tapping his pointer stick in his hand as the class sat almost silently, except for the sound of scribbles against paper. Immediately he turned his head toward a girl with blonde hair, a black layer underneath, and purple streaks. As he walked towards her desk, people began to whisper and giggle before he struck his stick on her desk, no more than an inch away from her non-dominant hand, covered in a glove of fishnets. “Miss LaLaine,” he said sternly, “perhaps you would like to tell me the plot of the book we’re in the middle of discussing, that you were prompted to finish last week, but generously given an extension.” The girl looked up past her purple bangs and slowly moved her notebook back into her desk. “I’m sorry Mr…” she began before being abruptly interrupted. “It is not ‘I’m sorry’, Kaitlin,” the teacher said forcefully, “those words are only for the important things, the things you will never do again. But for some reason, I feel that you will. So it is…” he began with the next part of his sentence, when Kailtin felt that it was her turn to interrupt. “I apologize, Mr. Orford,” she said blankly before looking up at him with chocolate-brown eyes. As he walked away, the people behind Kaitlin began to giggle and whisper, she supposed about her, different words. “Freak” was the first word Kaitlin heard, and the last word she wanted to hear.
Walking towards the washroom, sketchbook in hand, Kaitlin tried desperately to hold tears from spilling over her cheeks. Looking down at the converse on her feet, she didn’t even notice the pair of boots in front of her until she was practically kissing them as she lay on the floor. “What are you doing? Shining my boots?” a familiar voice asked as a hand reached out to take hers. Kaitlin was pulled up to face a pale, black-haired boy, his eyes barely visible compared to the eyeliner on his face. She didn’t know what to say, and he knew it, so he spoke instead. “You wanna come and hang out? Skip class, watch me have a hit?” he asked with a small but friendly grin on his face. Kaitlin simply nodded and walked behind the boy to a “secret” place where all the stoners hung out. But today was different. Cheerleader Kim Sanders was sitting on one of the stairs today, and her football-jock boyfriend Kevin wasn’t there. I guess this place isn’t so “private”, Kaitlin thought before sitting herself down against a frantically graffitied wall.
Her eyes widened when the boy she had bumped into in the hall invited her to sit down beside him and Kim. He passed a joint around with a few other cheerleaders there, and Kaitlin could hardly believe it when Kim passed it to her. “Come on, Kait,” the boy said and she shook her head. “You know I don’t do drugs,” she began before Kim bumped in. “C’mon Charm, give her a break, she’s probably nervous,” she said with a smile before putting the rolled up paper right into Kaitlin’s hand.
I don’t know what came over me then. For some reason I needed to look cool, for some stupid reason I didn’t want to be myself. I’d heard all about marijuana, how it helps you escape from the life you were living. So I tried it. I was tired of being hit, I was tired of keeping up with school, working, everything. I was tired of life.
All the colour drained out of Kaitlin’s face as she inhaled. Smoke began to seep out of her mouth before she went into a completely uncontrollable coughing fit. But the nice part, if there was such thing as a nice part in a coughing fit, was that everyone seemed to understand. Like they had all been there before, they had all gone through the same thing and now they were here to pass their knowledge on to her. By the third try, Kaitlin started to feel herself being lifted. She looked to Charm as he pulled a bottle of orange-ish liquid out of his pocket, listening to all the girls beginning to clap when he pulled out a tiny spoon, that could probably be used in a doll house.
“Crack open the coke!” an excited voice beckoned before Kaitlin could think to realize that this was going to be offered around. She might have had an alright time trying marijuana, but there was no way yet that she was ready to try cocaine. She didn’t want to try it at all, let alone wait for the “right time” to do so. And besides, it was beginning to rain and…
SHIT!
Kaitlin hurried into the school again, panicking at her locker when the late bell rang. The second it did, the principal began to patrol the halls for late students. He saw her and Kaitlin immediately began to run. Surprisingly, the principal ran after her and caught up right when she was about to turn into her next class. “Into my office, now,” he had said when he walked her down to the secretary’s office. Following her inside his own, he closed the door and invited her to sit down as he did as well. Leaning back in his chair, he sighed. “So, where were you?” he asked with a curious gaze. “I don’t ever see you in here,” he added.
Kaitlin’s heart began to pump. What was she going to tell him? That she was searching for homework? No, although he probably would be believe it. But something deep inside her told Kaitlin to tell him the truth. To tell this guy that she wasn’t so perfect anymore. That her arms were covered up for a reason, and she wasn’t cold when she wore long sleeve shirts during the summer. She wanted to tell him everything that she couldn’t tell herself, but just stuck to the one thing for now.
“I was out having a smoke,” she stated simply, inwardly smirking as she watched his eyes shoot wide open.
Chapter 3: Hidden
“You were WHAT?” the principal asked in a voice that kids down the hall could probably hear. Kaitlin just sat back in her chair, enjoying the effect her recent action had made on the oh-so-perfect reputation she had thrown out the window like an old toy. “I was out having a smoke,” she repeated to the man’s dropped jaw. His teeth were yellow from the eighteen cups of coffee he drank every day to stay awake, of which his shallow breaths were also scented. “And how long have you been doing such things?” he asked, the act of trying to calm himself obvious in his cracking voice.
I hate the way they call you “miss” or “mister”. They talk to us like we’re so grown up. Like we’re their age. But at the same time, they scold for making the same mistakes they probably made when they were our age. For God’s sake, we’re only sixteen!
“We’re supposed to make mistakes.”
“What did you say, Miss LaLaine?” the principal asked, leaning in on his desk smoothly, as if he had done it so many times before. Kaitlin was shocked. She had just said what she was thinking out loud, and the principal had heard her. Searching desperately through her mind for something to say, she spit out the first thing that relatively rhymed with “mistakes”. More confident that she now had something to say, Kaitlin too leaned forward and smirked. “I said, I’ve been doing it since I was eight,” she lied to his face before leaning back again to her first position.
“So what did Pratchett say?” Charm asked as they walked out of the school after a phone call home and to a counselor. Kaitlin couldn’t manage to lift her head up from looking at her shoes until Charm’s hand helped. “Come on, Kait, it was just a little joint, it’s not like you’re addicted now,” he said in a reassuring tone. But what he didn’t know, and what Kaitlin was afraid to tell him, was that she had lied about the length of time she’d been doing it.
As she walked in the door of the house, Kaitlin could hear shoes pounding down the stairs and got herself braced for her punishment. As she looked up to the second floor stairwell, she noticed that it was her younger brother sounding like a herd of elephants in their house. “Shh,” she calmed him, “I thought you were dad,” she added with a relieved sigh as she led him to the dinner table, past the living room where her mom was calmly sleeping. Noticing the familiar bottle of Valium beside her mom on the coffee table, Kaitlin sighed and took a 20 dollar bill out her pocket, scanned over it, then picked up the phone to order pizza.
“I got a phone call from the principal this morning,” Kaitlin heard her mom’s voice say downstairs. Her father had obviously gotten home from “the football game”, as she also heard his voice cursing about how horrible a daughter she was and how much better her kid-brother was compared to her. She could almost hear the everyday tears running down her mother’s cheeks as her father blasted away at what a horrible mother she, too, was.
Kaitlin couldn’t stand it for long, and soon ran into her brother’s room to see how he was. He was affected by the fights a lot more than Kaitlin was at the age of 6. She looked around and couldn’t see him anywhere. “Dylan?” she whispered harshly before hearing a small whimper coming from the closet in Dylan’s room. Slowly and quietly, she opened the closet and hugged him close to her so he could cry into her shoulder. When she heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and nasty grumbling, she quickly closed the closet door and told him to keep quiet. Still hugging him close, they managed to throw their father off before he could show them his rage.
Later that morning, Kaitlin tucked Dylan back into bed and made her way to her own room. She suddenly felt a hand on her back, and began to kiss the wall as she was shoved up against it by familiar muscles. “So what shit did you get into now princess?” her father whispered, not wanting her mom to know that he was doing this to her. Kaitlin fell to the ground when her father let go of her and quickly began to crawl towards the door of her room. She felt herself being stepped on by two hundred and fifty solid pounds and she heard her spine crack. Being forcefully turned around on her stomach wasn’t exactly what she was hoping for as she feared cracked ribs when her father leaned down to breathe in her face with liquor-scented breath. Kaitlin screamed and bit her dad on the leg to avoid the pressure of his weight on her stomach and quickly crawled to her room, her entire body bruised and hurting from her fight. Locking the door as quickly as she could, Kaitlin backed up when her father began pounding on the door. “You fuckin’ bitch, get out here and fight like a real person, I’ll pound you down in minutes for smokin’ that pot, get your filthy ass out here!” she heard through the door as she limped into bed and pulled her pillow over her head.
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