Total pages in book: 159
Estimated words: 155775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 779(@200wpm)___ 623(@250wpm)___ 519(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 155775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 779(@200wpm)___ 623(@250wpm)___ 519(@300wpm)
“Did you talk a lot as a kid?” he asked
She frowned. “I think I did when I was younger. My mom had some issues. She could either be overprotective, telling me about all the dangers in the world and how I had to stay inside to keep myself safe; or she’d completely lose it on me, yelling and screaming, and telling me how I’d been unwanted and how she wished I’d never been born. I guess I learned to be quiet so she didn’t notice me as much.
“Jesus, fuck. Your own mother said that to you?”
She nodded.
“What about your sisters? Did she do the same to them?” he asked.
“Oh, we don’t have the same mother. We’re all half sisters, each of us had different moms. And our dad was never really around. He left us when I was young.”
“So the three of you didn’t grow up together?”
“Well, we kind of did, sort of. It’s hard to explain, but you see, we all grew up in the same town. I met my sisters at school. I didn’t know I even had sisters until then.”
“Jesus, your mother never told you about them?” he asked incredulously.
“My mother wanted to pretend they didn’t exist. She didn’t send me to school until I was seven. And that’s only because Child Services paid us a visit to tell her that she had to enrol me, or start teaching me at home. I was really happy to go to school, even though my mother refused to help me with anything. Up until then she’d kept me fed and in clean clothes. After that, she seemed to give up. She got sick and took to her bed.”
“That fucking bitch. No matter what she had going on, she should have looked after you. So you went to school?”
“Yep. And that’s when I met my sisters which was the best thing that ever happened to me. The three of us immediately bonded. They looked out for me. Brought me food from home, gave me clothes that they’d grown out of. Dotty and Monroe tried to get their moms to let me live with them, but they refused and I get it.”
“Do you?” he said. “Not sure I do.”
“Dotty’s mom was actually married to our dad, and he cheated on her with our moms in our own hometown. So, I totally understood why she didn’t want me in her house. Monroe’s mom cheated on her husband and got pregnant with Monroe. They had other children, and Monroe always got left out. Her mom wanted to forget she existed. There was no way they wanted to take in another child that would be a reminder of the affair that her mother had had with our dad.”
“Jesus,” he muttered.
“The worst thing is that everybody knew. Everyone in our town knew that our dad had been sleeping around. Dotty’s mother was always humiliated, and Monroe’s mother always had to live with the fact of what she’d done. And my mother, well, she never went anywhere, so I’m not sure how that affected her. But she had her own demons.”
“Christ, baby. I’m so sorry.”
“Mom was so paranoid about everything. She would go on and on about how I was going to come to a bad end by going to school. That someone would kidnap me. That they’d follow me home and hurt her. That I’d bring germs home from school that would kill her. I never had very many friends. I was always the weird kid, the one with dirty clothes and unkempt hair. But then I made this one friend. I snuck out of my bedroom to go to her house. It was the first time I’d been invited to a friend’s house. But I slipped as I was climbing back into my bedroom window and broke my arm. My mom decided that I had fallen in with bad influences and pulled me out of school. I was utterly miserable and couldn’t go anywhere. I thought I was going to die in that house until my father actually stepped in and insisted that she send me to school. I think Dotty put pressure on him because he’d never cared before or since.”
“Fucking bastard should have done more.”
She nodded.
“In high school most of the kids left me alone because of my sisters. Everyone was scared of Dotty or they loved Monroe. But when Dotty went to college, I only had Monroe. She was away at a cheerleading competition when I got paired up with the most popular boy in school.”
She paused for a moment, thinking back. Did she want to tell him this? Not really. But she probably should so he knew part of the reason why she was the way she was.
“This boy was really nice. He talked to me. He made me smile. But he was just my partner in the project, nothing more. Some of the girls didn’t see it that way. His girlfriend thought I was flirting with him. They followed me as I walked home from my part-time job one evening and surrounded me. Taunted me. There was a large group of them that even included some boys. They started shoving me. I fell and they threw things at me, kicked me.”