Chapter 38: Pieces

A/N: Hi, everyone :3 Here's a new chapter. I'm so happy that so many of you enjoy this story and connect with Hiccup and it helps you! It's my dream to help someone with my writing, so :3 Also I feel like it's the mark of a good writer to affect someone, and I seem to affect a lot of people with this story so I have my fingers crossed that that means I actually am a good writer. I know that the book series for HTTYD and Harry Potter both affected me a great deal, and Cressida Cowell and J.K. Rowling are two of the best writers I've ever read, so...

Also, speaking of books that affect me, have any of you ever read Last Night I Sang to the Monster by Benjamin Alire Seanz? Great book! :D It's my favorite, right up there with Saint Iggy by K.L. Going and I Funny by James Patterson :3 Also I really like 'Fire' but I forget who it's by. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this chapter.

I remember when I was younger, I used to love puzzles.

Maybe not so much when I was younger, but right around ten and eleven, I started getting really into them. The pieces just fit so perfectly together, and it was so satisfying to watch them click into place, so easily and suddenly. My favorites were the huge ones, the two thousand piece ones that took up my whole bedroom floor. I would take it out of the box, start assembling it late at night, when Dad was gone to find some alcohol wherever he could, and then, when I started getting tired, I'd just abandon it to sleep. Dad was never around to set me a bedtime, so I just stayed up until I got tired. It was as simple as that.

I would come home from school every day and, if my dad wasn't there, I'd go upstairs and start working on the puzzle again, pulling out piece after tiny piece and struggling to find its place in the great big equation. After a little while, though, puzzles started bothering me. I know it was stupid and childish, but I just didn't like them anymore. All those pieces belonged somewhere. And I was the odd piece, the square peg in the round hole that couldn't fit in anywhere, but tried its hardest.

The puzzles made me feel lonelier than ever, so I stopped them. I dismantled the one I'd currently been trying to put together and I shoved it back in the closet and I forgot about them. I didn't want to feel any worse than I already did, with the kids at school bullying me worse than ever and my dad coming home drunk sometimes and hitting me, and what with spending most nights crying about my mom. I stopped working on the puzzles, and that was about the time that it occurred to me that maybe my dad didn't love me because my grades weren't good enough, so I replaced puzzles with schoolwork. I needed some way to escape all the tormenting thoughts in my head, and reading complicated algebraic equations or English verse helped.

I hadn't thought about the puzzles in years but now, sitting here, in this hospital bed, I remembered them. Because when Ms. Lydia sat down and smiled at me, I knew what she was here for. She was here to put together the puzzle. She wanted to find the piece that represented me, probably a poor, lost, wandering soul in her mind, and she wanted to find the place where the piece fit, and stick it in there. But of course, there's no place for a mistake as unfixable as me, so I knew she wouldn't find a place for me, even if she searched. I could feel my walls going up, my hands clenching into fists the moment she offered me that sickening smile.

She was trying to find a place for me, and I didn't want it. I wanted to stay on the outskirts. Maybe when I first realized where I was, I wanted to find a way inside, make a friend, maybe, but I'd become comfortable with my quiet, friendless solitude. Friends asked questions about bruises, but walls and Xs did not.

I didn't smile for her. I just stared at her, waiting for her to speak. She seemed a little awkward about the fact that I didn't say anything, like she actually expected me to say something. But what was there for me to say? If she was determined to find a place for me, then she wouldn't listen, whatever I told her.

"Now, the doctors have said you're very underweight," she repeated softly, tapping her clipboard with a finger like saying it again would make me open up and spill the floodgates or something. I tightened my lips. Not going to happen.

"So, the first question I need to ask you is do you get enough to eat? At home, at school? Does your father provide you with food, and does he provide you money for the cafeteria food?"

"Yes." I nodded once, but the question wasn't so bad. I'd lied about my weight and skinniness a million times over the years – I could do it without even flinching now.

"Do you…" The social worker seemed a little wrong-footed now, like she hadn't expected my response to be so plain, like she wanted me to say more. "Do you deny yourself food…often?"

Only when I've done something wrong. I swallowed, struggling with my response. My lips did not want to form the word no. "I don't know what you mean," I said instead. I could feel everything slipping out of my hands, my control. My dad kept me mostly under his control with his fists and his threats, but I had control of a lot more than most of the kids in my school. If I wanted to stay up until four o' clock in the morning, my dad didn't care. He'd wander in an hour later and wake me up by smashing things around and slurring his words. He just didn't care, so I had control over my life. There were only certain things I had no control over, like the food and whether I deserved it, and school and whether I felt like going the next day. I could have been so sick I could barely move, and I would still have no choice but to go.

The social worker pulled me out of my thoughts by leaning forward in her chair, clasping her hands together. I expected her to tell me something stupid like, 'I think you do know' but she surprised me. She took me literally, and actually began explaining what she meant. "Do you deny yourself food or continue to go hungry even when you're starving?"

I wanted to be angry with her. I wanted to force her out of the room, out the door, and out of my life and leave me alone with my empty space and the world that I used to live in, before this happened. The world where only the walls knew my secrets, or cared that I was thin enough to count my own ribs.

I bit my lip and I shook my head. Dr. Montgomery had tried to get me to confess to an eating disorder, and now this woman was, too? It wasn't going to happen. I did not have an eating disorder.

Ms. Lydia pursed her lips, like she'd been expecting me to say something different. What else could I say? I couldn't tell her the truth, because then she'd probably think that I was messed up, and she'd think that she'd found my place in the puzzle, and that my place was therapy and try to stick me in that, only therapy wasn't my place in this puzzle. I did not have a place. I simply existed, drifting aimlessly by everyone else, already half-dead.

As the silence stretched on, I saw something in Ms. Lydia's face – a kind of firming of the mouth, a hardness coming into her gaze. She was trying a new tack. Okay. I could live with that. I could lie my way out of a lot of situations. Denial was the only thing I was really good at.

"Has your father ever mistreated you?" Her voice was unexpectedly soft, and I glanced up at her in surprise. She was just staring at me, like she wasn't sure what she was seeing, and needed a few seconds to figure it out.

My eyes narrowed, and I opened my mouth to deny it, to ask who she thought she was, but just as I readied myself, a memory crept into my mind. Astrid, standing across from me by the counter in the cafeteria, demanding answers to the Xs. Me, petrified and stammering, going instantly on the defensive because I was too scared to do anything else.

I took a breath to calm myself. Lying worked, but only when you stayed calm about it. You couldn't get worked up or upset. That was my mistake with Astrid. "I…I don't know what you mean," I repeated, because it was the first thing that entered my head, and any more hesitation and she would start to get suspicious.

"Has he ever hit you, or threatened you? Does he hurt you on purpose?"

It was stupid. I had lived with it happening for years. My father, the only piece of family I had left, all I had in the cruel world that had ripped my family so cruelly, leaving my mother to drift into death, my father to drift into alcohol, and leaving me to just drift…he was all I'd had, and he'd beat me. I'd kept silent. I didn't cry. I knew better than to cry after awhile, because crying made him mad. Everything about me made him mad, but crying was the worst. I learned to take it mostly in silence, and this, above all, just a simple question, was enough to push me over the edge. I wanted to cry then.

But I didn't. I told her the truth, the reason I was here in the first place. Because in the end, it wasn't my father's fault, and it had never had been. It was mine. "No."