Total pages in book: 169
Estimated words: 162138 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 811(@200wpm)___ 649(@250wpm)___ 540(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 162138 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 811(@200wpm)___ 649(@250wpm)___ 540(@300wpm)
I already didn’t want to be here, but tonight of all nights, I wished I could disappear. I hated my father and hated him even more for hosting it tonight. I hated Marie for agreeing with everything he said and did. When I begged them to move it to another night, she’d said, “We need to create good memories to replace the bad ones.” As if anything could ever let me forget this day. I didn’t like Marie much, to begin with. She’d always been kind to me, but my mother passed away a couple of years ago, and Marie was already moved into the house my parents shared just two months after the funeral. My mother never liked her, and the reason was obvious. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that Marie, who’d been my father’s secretary for the last six years, was fucking him. Such a cliché. Before she moved in, I'd been living in the guest house, where I'd tried to stay afterward — not for my father's sake, but for my own. The guest house made me feel closer to my mom, and no one bothered me. I never set foot in the main house anyway, so her presence shouldn’t bother me as much as it did. I’d order take-out or drive to get food instead of walking over there. I’m not even sure my father noticed. He only liked playing the role of father, not actually being one. That was before Mom died in the accident. Afterward, I guess he tried a little harder to be there for me — if you counted the therapist and the money he kept depositing into my bank account each month as helping. Dad didn’t put a Band-Aid on things; he threw piles of money at them until they were no longer something he had to deal with.
Tonight, my guilt and sadness weren’t because of Mom, though. Tonight was the anniversary of Luke’s death. Luke, who Dad had treated like a son. Who he’d encouraged me to date. When he’d found out I was going to prom with someone else, he’d called Luke and apologized to him personally, as if he had anything to do with our lives. I loved Luke so fucking much, but I was never going to marry him, no matter how often he boasted about that — and he’d boasted plenty. I wish he hadn’t. I wish he’d never announced that he’d bought me an engagement ring and that he’d never stood up during Friendsgiving with our parents’ friends to talk about things like that and joke that we might elope. I blinked quickly to evade tears. I hated crying, and if I started, I wouldn’t stop. I hadn’t cried in so long, I didn’t even think my tear ducts worked anymore, but tonight they would. Tonight, all the emotions I normally buried would be exposed.
No one would bring up Luke’s death tonight. They knew better, but even a squeeze of my arm telling me they were sorry would set me off. Usually, I found ways to distract myself from feeling anything at all. It was quite possibly the best and worst skill my mind had acquired throughout all of this. Best, because only a handful of brave souls tried to get me to open up again. Worst, because once you learned how to numb yourself from pain, you took the risk of it happening to all of your emotions. That was the case for me, for the most part. Until recently, I didn’t think I could feel anything besides guilt and sadness. My phone buzzed on the bed, snapping me out of my thoughts, and I saw a text from Banks.
Banks: I’m here. Table 10. Where are you?
Me: omw
I put on my heels, rechecked my makeup, and left the room, shutting and locking the door. I took deep, calming breaths on my way to the tent and hoped no one stopped me for small talk. Of course, they did anyway. Whenever I dressed up for these godforsaken events, people saw it as the perfect opportunity to get me to open up again. It was as if a little bit of makeup and doing something with my hair meant I was no longer this fucked up, broken version of myself. I was just starting to breathe a little easier as I walked away from the latest cordial conversation when I felt a hand on my elbow. The smells hit me first — they were always wearing the same colognes, one with a spicier scent than the other. Since they both always hit the spray one too many times to cover up the smell of cigarettes, it was overpowering when they were next to you. I froze as a million dark emotions instantly coursed through me. I settled on boredom.