Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 70445 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70445 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
“I want you to listen,” I say without looking at War. “Can you do that?”
“I can,” he says.
“And don’t say anything until I’m done.”
“I won’t.”
I take a shuddering breath and let the firefly go. It takes off and flutters away, flashing as it rises. “Rosie liked to play a game with me. I was maybe ten or eleven, this was right after her dad left and her mom fell apart. She was older than me by a couple years, and I looked up to her even though she was always kind of mean. We weren’t really close, but the cousins all played together so we were friends the way young kids are friends, basically because of proximity. But things changed one night when she lured me into her room and told me we should play doctor.” I squeeze my eyes shut against the tears and feel disgusting all over again.
“I was old enough to know that it was wrong,” I say and try to control the tremble in my voice. “I knew I shouldn’t let my cousin touch me like that, but she said it was fine, we were just playing a game. She said we were exploring and fooling around, and it was no big deal. Looking back, the way it happened right after her dad left, I think something was going on with him. She never said it, nobody ever did, but I think her dad was doing something like that to her, and she acted out once he was gone. She did it to me, maybe thinking that’s what you were supposed to do. I don’t know. I’ve obsessed over it for years, trying to make sense of why she picked me and why she touched me like that and why I let her, but I still don’t understand it. We were stupid kids.”
“Melody,” War says quietly and I hold a hand up.
“Please,” I say. “Just let me get it all out. The doctor stuff, that lasted for a few months. It never went past touching. It was inappropriate touching, and it still makes me feel wrong, but eventually it stopped. But I wonder if that’s all it was, just some weird stupid crap with my cousin, maybe I could’ve put it behind me and moved on. But that’s when the bullying started.” I take a deep breath and slowly let it out. “She was brutal. I mean, absolutely brutal. It was always couched in jokes and pranks but she was relentless, calling me fat, calling me stupid and worthless, basically going out of her way to make me as miserable as possible. One time she held me under water in the pool for over a minute until Daisy started crying and made Rosie let me go. I’m pretty sure Rosie would’ve drowned me, then and there. She turned my life into a living hell, and I still wonder why the sudden change, from the just-exploring doctor stuff to suddenly hating me so much it was like it ate up her entire world. Before her dad left, Rosie was pretty normal. A little harsh, a little mean, but not like she was after he was gone. It’s like something changed in her, and she turned all that rage and hate and dumped it on me, and the doctor stuff was only the beginning.
“When she died, I didn’t know how to feel. I was angry, and sad, and some sick part of me was relieved because the bullying would finally stop. Rosie made my life terrible, she made me think about killing myself when I was fifteen. She was always chewing that gum, always coming around to mock me and hit me and hurt me. And when she died, I was just so mad that everyone was sad, because Rosie as a monster. She was a monster, War. That’s what I told Renee back then.
“I told her about the bullying, about the pain and the torment, but I also told her about the earlier stuff. About the doctor stuff. I just, I couldn’t handle the way everyone acted like Rosie was a saint, when she was a fucking psychopath to me. I couldn’t stand everyone saying such nice things about poor dead Rosie, when Rosie had touched me in ways a cousin should never touch another cousin, and she’d tormented me to the point that I couldn’t leave the tower anymore without being terrified she’d find me. That’s why I was always locked up there. It was my only safe space.”
I lapse into silence. An odd weight feels like it lifts from my chest, like I can finally breathe now that I told someone about what happened to me back then. I haven’t gone into it all with anyone, not since I let it all out to Renee and that backfired on me so horribly, but I’m suddenly tingling and buzzing with the release of saying it all out loud. Those memories, what Rosie did to me, they’ve haunted me all my life, and when it all came out, I was called a liar, a faker, an attention whore. They mocked me, tore into me, and I couldn’t take it.