Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 82651 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 413(@200wpm)___ 331(@250wpm)___ 276(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82651 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 413(@200wpm)___ 331(@250wpm)___ 276(@300wpm)
I want to say no because I don’t think I can handle her empathy right now, but instead I find my head bobbing up and down.
She leans over and places her beer on the floor. She pushes forward and crawls across the couch to me. In any other scenario, it would be sexy as fuck, but that look in her eyes tells me she’s not coming to me to give me an orgasm.
She’s coming to tell me something so important to her she wants to do it looking straight into my eyes.
When she reaches me, she turns and puts herself in my lap. I rest a hand on her thigh while her arms curve over my shoulders. Her face is inches from mine and I’m staring into her sweet, tender gaze.
“I understand your worries,” she says softly. “But dig deep, Van. I don’t think it’s really why you close yourself off.”
My eyelids drop, closing her from my sight for a moment so I can think. I conjure up my father, as he smirked at me from the other side of the Plexiglas, wanting me to believe we had more in common than not. I try to recall how I truly felt as I pushed up out of the chair and left him behind yelling obscenities.
And I remember…I felt done. The information he provided me didn’t really add to my fears. If anything, my instinct said he was just getting his kicks from trying to inflict pain on someone in the only way his limited, dying body was able to.
Yes, I knew that deep down. I’m in no danger of being like him. The only danger to me is staying in the mold I put myself in.
My eyes open slowly and Simone is filling my vision, waiting patiently.
“Kids can be vicious,” I start by saying, and she tilts her head slightly as she listens. “When I went back to school in the fall after he was convicted, the other kids had already labeled me. ‘Little Arco,’ ‘killer,’ ‘rapist’…those were some of the more popular ones. I was horrified they’d think that about me. I tried to defend myself, but it’s a weak claim that you’re not like your father when you sat every day behind him at trial. My mom wanting to support my dad labeled me as a sympathizer to him, merely because she made me sit beside her.”
“You heard things that no eight-year-old should ever hear,” she murmurs.
“Yeah, I’m not even sure those kids really even know what it all meant,” I tell her. “They were probably listening to their parents discuss it, or saw it on the news, and they found a way to bully me with it. I came home with a new bruise or split lip almost every day from the fights I’d get in just trying to defend my own name. But that wasn’t the worst, because only a handful of kids did that. They were just assholes. The worst was being ignored or shunned because people didn’t know what to say to me. I lost all my friends. No one wanted their kid to play with the boy whose dad was a killer and whose mom committed suicide. Etta tried to have a birthday party for me and not one child showed up. Teachers treated me with kid gloves. I was rarely called on in class because maybe they thought I didn’t want to be in the spotlight. No one asked me how I was feeling outside of Etta, so I didn’t know it was appropriate to be angry. I wasn’t even blaming my parents at that point for my troubles. It was very confusing.”
“And Etta decided to just let you start over again,” Simone says.
“New name, new city, new school,” I say with quiet reflection. “It was supposed to be a fresh start, but I kept hiding. I never shared with one person in my life who I was or what I went through. I think Etta and I got so caught up in running from the notoriety of it that I wasn’t allowed to really confront it.”
“But counseling?”
“Yeah…it was good. Fine. I was able to talk about some things, but maybe it wasn’t enough. Or maybe I didn’t talk about the right things with the right people. What if I’d just confided in a friend, and that friend validated that I was nothing like my father? I was so afraid of being labeled again, it just became easier to stay withdrawn.”
“It lessened your risk of further pain,” she concludes.
I nod, giving her thigh a squeeze. “Yes, I had some fears about the type of person I was, but my lack of connection to people isn’t like Arco’s on a cellular level. It’s from the fallout of what he did.”
Simone smiles at me, bringing her palms to my face. “There you go. What happened to you was a travesty, but you and Etta did the best you could.”