xMimix
"I-I know," I answered defensively. "Just not … right now."
Roger rolled his eyes and said as if I were a child, "No, Mimi, not right now. That's right."
"You don't have to be like that, you know," I said, annoyed.
"Like what?" asked Roger.
"Like … rude. Like you're talking to a five-year-old. I donnou."
"Look, Mimi, I'm under a lot of stress right now, with the new puppy, and Angel dying, and Mark making this new documentary, and …"
He trailed off. Even he knew that was a weak argument for being such a jerk.
"Roger. That puppy behaves absolutely fine all on its own, Angel died a while ago, so that's not as stressful anymore, and, in case you haven't noticed, you're not Mark, so him making a documentary hardly gives you a reason to be so mean to your friends. All right? We're all going through the same things. And oh, sure. Mark making a documentary that has almost nothing to do with any of us is giving us all a lot of sleepless nights. Right."
I stared at him, trying to meet his eyes and tell what he was feeling, but he kept looking down and away from me. He didn't say a word, so I kept right on ranting.
"Roger, why … why can't you just ever tell me the straight truth? I don't know what's really bothering you, but I could help you if you told me. If you won't tell me, there's absolutely nothing I can do. That goes for everyone. We can't read your mind, Roger, so stop being angry at us for not knowing what you're thinking all the time! Quit expecting us to make you forget about it when we don't even know what it is! You've got to snap out of it!"
"Listen, Mimi … I know you're right. I'll tell you what's really bothering me," said Roger hesitantly, still not looking at me as we stepped out of the elevator and walked through the hospital's busy and extremely noisy lobby. "As soon as we get out of here," he added, taking my hand and pulling me briskly through the high-ceilinged room and out the main doors.
"Mimi ... the actual reason I've been so stressed out lately is that after Angel died, I kept seeing how hard it was for Collins, and then, after you almost died, and basically did, I kept thinking how easily it could have been me," he said.
I could tell it was killing him to share his emotions like this, but I needed to know these things if he wanted my help to get over them, so I let him continue.
"And then when you were having trouble a while ago after you stopped using it got really hard to tell the difference between the symptoms of that and the symptoms of going back to … that. And so I got really, really scared that next time it would be me, but I couldn't talk to you about it because … I'm not like that."
He had sat down on a big boulder in the garden outside of the hospital that they brought the patients out to when they needed some fresh air and exercise. He had his head down, his hair hiding his face. His hands were clasped and I knew that, right now, talking to me about this was torture.
"You know," I said, "I have some confessions of my own. I was tempted to go back to that."
"You were?" he asked, lifting his head slowly.
"For a while," I said, nodding. "Being under all this pressure and all this stress reminds me of when I was a kid and started in the first place. Haven't I ever told you how I grew up?"
Roger shook his head. I sat down with him and took a shaky breath before I began my story.
"When I was five, my parents were killed in a car crash. I was in the car. I remember a big truck hitting us. We were really close to a truck stop with a bar. He was drunk. I can picture this giant red truck just coming right at us … and the next thing I remember, I'm in the hospital with my grandmother in the chair next to my bed. I wasn't hurt much, so I went home that same day and lived with my grandmother until I was thirteen. Then my grandmother died. I had to go to the orphanage near where I lived in upstate New York." I swallowed and closed my eyes for a second before going on. I had never told anyone about this before.
"Day after day," I said, enunciating each syllable in my efforts to get the words out, "I watched the adorable little babies who weren't wanted be brought in and adopted right away. Sometimes a baby would go within twenty-four hours. Sometimes there would be a couple coming to meet all of us, and a woman would walk in with her week-old baby, and the baby wouldn't even have to stay overnight. Wouldn't even have to eat the gross orphanage food. Just got adopted right away. Most of the couples didn't give us older kids a chance. There was no possibility of me being adopted. No chance for anyone who wasn't either under the age of ten or really, really short and therefore looked under the age of ten. I had no reason to hope to be adopted or to hope for anything else." I paused. This was the hard part.
"I gave up on myself. I got in with the bad crowd. That's when I started. Then I was just waiting to be eighteen. Then I would finally get out of there. Nothing changed during those six years, and that didn't encourage me any. Everything was still the same. The same adorable little babies coming in with the same filthy teenage mothers, getting out within a week and leaving the rest of us stuck there just because we didn't have rosy cheeks and baby fat.
"And that's my life story."
A/N: hi, everyone, it's twilighthp95 again! this chapter has mimi's dark past, i hope you like the ideas i came up with! (please review!)
