Complicated Matters

Clare Edwards knew what people thought when they looked at her family. Respectable. Conservative. Kind. Loving. Those were all words that she'd heard before, all words that she mentally scoffed at. If only people knew the reality of the Edwards family and not just the facade. Perhaps then they would realise just how untrue those words were. Perhaps they'd pass judgement. After all, who would be able to resist if they knew her family's secrets?

Her sister was gone and had been gone for over a year. Darcy had told everyone just last year, that she would be gone for only four months. A lie if she ever heard one. Of course, her sister was doing good work in Kenya. There was no denying that. But the other reality was that she wasn't just there to help build a school. She was there to forget. Over two years ago, she was raped by a stranger, during a weekend at a ski resort. Some guy-some monster, had put roofies in her drink. Darcy hadn't really been the same since. After it had happened, she had tried to kill herself more than once, at least twice that Clare knew of. She'd grown a really odd attachment to Mr. Simpson, who'd been the Media Immersion teacher back, then and had even lied about him. Darcy had confided in Clare that she couldn't walk around the school without wondering and worrying that her rapist was there.

It was after Darcy left that her parents really began to have problems. Until, this year though, she'd shrugged it off. After all, parents fought, didn't they? Put her mother and father seemed to fight all the time. It was like Darcy leaving and not wanting to come back, had broken the thread that had held them together for so long.

Last summer, Clare had had to deal with her father being out of the house for long periods of time. She'd had to deal with hearing her mother cry all alone, up in her room everytime that she passed by the door. And then came the fighting. The screaming.

Clare knew that she'd covered up her pain well. No one had ever expected a thing. She'd paste that smile on her face and no one could tell that it was broken. She'd laugh and joke and help out Alli, all the while masking her own pain. She knew that her writing had suffered greatly because of it. She hadn't wanted people to know what was going on, so she shut off her emotions while she was writing.

Until Eli, of course. Their English teacher, Ms. Dawes had made them English partners. At first, they hadn't gotten along, but when they'd skipped school, he'd gotten her to admit that her parents fighting pissed her off. He'd told her to write about it. Convinced her that her parents needed to hear it.

When she'd showed her mother the letter, she'd naively thought that her parents' fighting would stop. After all, they would have to feel bad and try to work it out if they new it was hurting their daughter, right?

Wrong. They'd talked about it, but the fighting had continued. It kept getting worse and worse until Clare finally realised what it was all leading to. A divorce. That had caused her to act out. She had just wanted to stop the fighting. She wanted her parents to team up and agree about something. So she'd ended up hurting the one person who'd been there for her, throughout it all. Luckily Eli had forgiven her, but her actions hadn't stopped her parents from going through with the divorce. It certainly hadn't stopped their argueing.

Those were the moments when Clare had resented her sister. Resented the fact that Darcy was all the way in Kenya and didn't have to deal with all of this. Resented the fact that her older sister wasn't there for her, or that her letters were becoming few and far in between. It must be easy to ignore the truth when you pretended that something never existed in the first place.

So what it came down to was, the Edwards family was broken. The mother and father had fallen out of love, or perhaps they'd never been in love in the first place. The older sister would rather pretend that her family had never even existed, and the youngest member of the family? She was left to pick up all the shattered pieces.

The End