Ellie held the picture of her father in his uniform, the cheap gold frame doing nothing to lessen the impact of this picture. There was desert sand behind him, a foreign blue sky. He was gone, playing war, soldiers and generals and all of that shit. It was shit. Her throat felt tight, and her eyes blurred for just a second but then she blinked the tears back. She could hear her mother's drunken snores from the living room, and she could see the empty bottles of vodka in the dim light.
Alex laid in bed but wasn't asleep as she listened to the rising voices, drunk voices, the slurred speech making her scared and angry at the same time, the two emotions mixing in her and making her nauseas. Her mother's slurred and drunken high pitched voice, and her boyfriend's deeper slurred voice. She could hear them falling into things, knocking things over, pushing each other and hitting each other, throwing things. Each crash made her jump. Each crash made her wish for them to stop. Then a scream, her mother, she knew that scream well. Quiet now. All she could hear was her own breathing. Then the creak of her bedroom door as it opened, and the boyfriend's hand holding onto the door.
Craig felt the cold stone of his mother's grave beneath his hand, and he felt the pull in his side from where his father had kicked him. Her name was etched into the stone, along with the dates of her life, those two all important years. Beginning and end, alpha and omega. He bit his lip, feeling the searing pain with each deep breath. He wished he could have gone with her.
He didn't run away that day, but ran up the stairs and locked the locks to his bedroom door, shoved his clothes into a bag and listened to the pounds on his door. Golf club. Weapon. He fumbled with the window as his father crashed through the door and ran at him, grabbed the back of his shirt and yanked him into the room. Craig cowered against the wall and looked at the golf club, the way its metal shined, the way his father's hands curled around it, ready to swing it like a baseball bat.
Something, some last sense of reason made Albert throw the golf club at the wall and it bit into it, a burst of powder dust dropping to the floor, dusting the rug like flour. Craig stared, no time to breath relief as his father's punches and kicks rained down on him.
Ellie brought her mother plates of food that were pushed away, left uneaten on the coffee table. She covered her up in blankets like a baby, and she listened to her mewling cries for her father, she listened to her harsh drunk yells that meant Ellie should go to her room, do her homework, clean the house because her mother wasn't drunk and lost, swimming in the bottom of a vodka bottle. She was right here and in control.
It was possible, sometimes, to fight drunks off of you. It was possible, sometimes, to stop fighting, to be overpowered by them, and to submit. Sometimes Alex won and sometimes she lost. Her mother was passed out in the living room, breathing harshly so that she knew she was still alive. And she'd lost her fight, pinned against the rough denim thigh of this current boyfriend and the wall, and she could smell his sour whiskey breath with every exhale.
How many mornings had he stared at bruises in the mirror? Craig couldn't count. In the morning the bruises looked stark on his pale skin, like paint. Unreal. He knew enough of bruises to know that when they were a deep and frightening black, that meant the bone had bled. He touched those bruises now that covered both upper arms, and winced.
They all chose their defenses at school. Craig covered the bruises with long sleeved shirts. Ellie covered the slash marks in her arms with her black gothic T-shirts. Alex did whatever she wanted to do, skipping class, smoking pot in the ravine with Jay, kissing Jay, kissing whoever. Not doing homework. Not caring. Craig and Ellie did homework, trying to be normal, not wanting the teachers to have any reason to question them. 'Why are you not functioning like everybody else?'
Craig smiled and laughed easily, joking, self-deprecatory. Ellie was sullen and stared with narrowed eyes at people like Paige and Hazel, pretty people who were concerned with make-up and clothes and some dream of popularity. Craig could hang out with people like that, blending into that dream seamlessly. Paige and Hazel were surface people, and it was nice to stay on the surface.
But there were cracks in the veneer. Craig would fall asleep in class, especially after particularly bad beatings. When that would happen he couldn't get to sleep, shifting his weight uncomfortably in his soft bed, everything hurting. The sound of the heaters, the white noise, the soft monotonous voices of his teachers would put him to sleep. Ellie would retreat to the bathroom after a low quiz score or a mean snobby look from Paige or one of her minions, retreat to the bathroom with her razor blade and drag it across her white skin, watching as the blood appeared like magic. Alex would sometimes be offended and scared by Jay's advances despite having invited them, and she'd yell at him, her eyes burning with deep resentment, and he'd recoil from that look and the tone in her voice, wondering what he had done wrong.
They all dreaded going home. Home was the enemy. Home was where people hurt them. Alex would flip her shiny black hair and pretend not to care. Ellie would walk slowly to the bus stop, touch the pockets where she held her razor blades and little knives, taking comfort in their presence. Craig would fidget and breath shallow breaths, his fingers lightly touching the case of his camera.