Cause I've got nothing left to lose:
You wake up in pain. Your jaw and fingers are throbbing and you whimper in pain when you try to sit up and realize that Scott's lying on top of you. You ease out from under him and stumble to the bathroom, grabbing your painkillers off his bedside table. You fumble with the cap and nearly spill the white pills into the sink in your desperation to get at them. After swallowing two with difficulty, you open your mouth carefully to look at your broken tooth. You didn't brush your teeth and you mouth tastes terrible as a result, but you're worried it will make your injuries worse.
The painkillers don't kick in right away of course, so you pace around Scott's small bathroom, nauseous and desperate for some sort of relief. The radio clock reads 2:28 and you stare at it desperately, as if that will make time go faster. You start to feel dizzy after a while and sit down on the toilet seat, rocking back and forth while you try to breathe shallowly to avoid irritating your ribs.
"Allison?" Scott says, turning on the bathroom light and rubbing his eyes tiredly. They widen when he takes in your pained state. "Jesus, you okay?"
He comes to kneel in front of you, looking into your face worriedly.
"Wore off," you grunt, continuing to rock back and forth. He grips your arms right under the hem of your sleeves and you sag in relief when the pain fades, black lines traveling quickly up his arms before fading.
"Ouch," Scott says, wincing, and then wipes off your sweaty brow with the back of his forearm. "What is it, your ribs?"
"Mouth," you mumble, trying to open your mouth as little as possible while you speak. "I need to make an appointment with that oral surgeon when the swelling goes down. Do you think...do you think they can glue my tooth back in? Cora has it."
"I think they fill in the broken part with something else," Scott says, still holding onto your shoulders. "Allison, is there anything you want me to get you? Water?"
You shake your head. "Talk," you tell him. "Just tell me something?"
"Uh, okay, what do you want me to talk about?" he asks, reaching back to shut the bathroom door behind him.
"Anything," you say. "I need a distraction." From the pain and from your head, which is an increasingly unsafe place to be. "I just keep thinking about it," you admit, shamefully.
"Okay...okay...um, did I ever tell you how I started working with Dr. Deaton?"
You shake your head, shutting your eyes and trying to concentrate on not moaning in pain.
"Well, I had this dog growing up, Roxie..." Scott says, and then trails off for a moment before continuing. "And this other dog attacked her when I was nine, and I had a really terrible asthma attack and ended up in the hospital, and Dr. Deaton tried to save her but she died."
You open your eyes to stare at him in horror.
"Yeah, it was pretty awful," Scott says quickly, looking like he very much regrets starting this story. "So anyway, after I got out of the hospital I went to see him, and, you know, thank him for...for trying. He was really nice about it and showed me around the clinic, and that's when I decided...I wanted to be a vet," Scott continues, looking very uncomfortable. He really does not like talking about himself and you have little doubt he would not be telling this story if you weren't severely injured. "So I volunteered at the animal shelter in middle school, and freshman year of high school he came by and offered me a job."
"You never got another dog?" you ask him hoarsely.
He shakes his head slowly. "No, I didn't...I didn't want to replace her, you know?" he says, swallowing at looking down at his hands on your arms instead of up at you. "And by the time I started thinking about it my dad was gone, and I didn't think it was fair to ask my mom to help take care of a dog with all the other stuff she has to do."
You nod and stop your rocking, trying to ascertain if the painkillers have kicked in yet. Nope, definitely not.
"You ever have any pets?" Scott asks, sucking more pain out of you.
"No, my parents don't like animals," you murmur, remembering begging them for a puppy in first grade.
"That...doesn't surprised me," Scott says, and then pauses. "Sorry."
"They think they're dirty," you continue, dully. "They bought me a stuffed dog that I used to carry everywhere, but it got lost when we moved."
You cried when you realized it was gone, and they got mad at you for overreacting. You were seven.
Scott says something, patting your shoulder, but you don't catch it, feeling a little numb.
"I think they're working," you tell him, and feel very tired all of the sudden there isn't pain to keep you awake.
"Okay, drink a glass of water, okay?" Scott says, picking up the glass of water off his sink next to his razor and filling it.
You do, even though you're not really thirsty, and then he picks you up and carries you back to bed.
You insist that Scott and Isaac go to school the next day. They protest, but finals are soon, and you'd never forgive yourself if Scott did badly because he was too busy taking care of you. You spend most of the day in front of the TV on the McCalls' couch, drifting in and out of drugged sleep while Melissa feeds you canned soup and orange juice. It's kind of awkward-she has to be suspicious of what's going on between you three-but she doesn't bring it up and you're too depressed to worry about it too much.
Scott and Isaac call the home phone during lunch to check up on you, sounding very anxious, but you assure them you're doing fine. Around 1:30 Melissa goes to the grocery store to pick up more soft food for you to eat, apologizing profusely even though you're the one who ate everything. You take two pills when your jaw starts throbbing again, and then when they don't help in ten minutes, you take another one.
And then things get weird.
You feel very odd, like you're drunk except very floaty, and you walk around the McCalls' kitchen, fascinated by all the different pieces of clutter. Your mother keeps your house pristine, disdainful of unorganized papers or trinkets. She would probably have a heart attack if she saw Scott's bathroom, which has tiny hairs from shaving all over the sink. You giggle at the state of Scott's bathroom, and catching sight of the cordless phone by the microwave, you decide you need to call your parents.
You sit down on the floor in front of the fridge and dial your home number. It rings and rings, and you're not really surprised when it goes to voicemail. Your parents never answer the phone unless they recognize the number.
"Hi..." you say distantly, looking at the scratch in the wood floor under the oven. "I don't...I don't really know why I'm calling. I think I wanted to just get it over with. I don't want to see you, but I-"
"Allison!" your mother says frantically, and you hear her fumbling with the phone on the other end. "Allison, don't hang up!"
"Are you alright?" your father's comes from slightly farther away.
"I guess," you say, bemused by the urgency in their voices. "I broke a lot of bones. The doctor said I have to go to an oral surgeon. They might have to do surgery on my jaw."
"Where are you?" your father demands. "Are you still at that boy's house?"
"I'm not telling you that," you scowl. "You'll come and take me away and brainwash me to be evil."
A pause.
"What?" your mother says.
"I feel a lot like Sirius Black," you tell them, absentmindedly examining your hair, picking it up and combing it through your fingers. "He had an evil family too."
"Who?" your father says, sounding confused. "Allison, are you...are you high?"
"These painkillers make me feel weird," you admit. "But happy. I was sad a lot earlier."
"Who gave you them?" your mother asks angrily. "Was it the nurse? Don't take anything else she gives you!"
"Why are you always so angry?" you ask her, a sudden wave of sadness washing through you. "Normal people aren't so angry, you know."
"Allison, I need you to tell me-"
"Wait, Victoria, just-" your father says quickly, and then continues in a much calmer tone. "Allison, you're confused, alright? We're not evil."
Tears spring to your eyes. "You shoot people."
"Werewolves," your father clarifies. "Who kill people. We have a code that-"
You giggle, even though it's not particularly funny. "Oh, the code. I don't really care about that. You always talk about it, but you still try to kill my friends. And you tried to make me shoot people too!"
"Allison, what are-"
"Don't lie to me!" you say sharply, sitting up straight and clutching the phone bruisingly tightly. "I'm not stupid! I know why you took me to those shooting ranges and archery lessons. You wanted me to kill people too! And I didn't want to, so I quit, but..." You sag back against the fridge, misery weighing you down. "But then I had to."
They don't say anything for such a long time you think they might have hung up.
"Allison," your mother says finally, tone deathly serious. "Did you kill Gerard?"
"Yeah," you say, leaning your head back to look up at the ceiling idly.
There's a sharp inhale from the other end.
"Why?" your mother asks flatly.
"He was going to kill everyone; Scott, Isaac, me, you. He wanted to become a werewolf to cure his cancer. He put a bomb under my car."
"What?!" your father exclaims.
You scrunch your nose in concentration, and it doesn't hurt like it should. God, you love painkillers. "It was a box," you explain. "Under my car. Lydia said I would die if I drove it. She always knows when people are going to die."
"What does Lyd-"
"So I shot him," you finish boredly, not wanting to drag this out. "With Kate's gun. I stole them after she died. But I guess you probably already found them in my closet."
Neither of them deny it.
"You need to come home, Allison," your father says hoarsely. "We can...we can talk about this at home."
"No," you reply, recoiling at the idea. "I'm not coming home. I hate home. Scott said I didn't have to go home if I didn't want to."
Your father lets out an angry, cut off noise.
"Really?" your mother says tersely. "What else does Scott say?"
"Leave him alone," you tell them, a jolt of fear running through you. "Scott's nice. He doesn't hurt anyone, ever."
"Be that as it may, you need to come home," your mother says. "We need to make sure you're okay. We'll take you to the oral surgeon."
"I don't want to come home," you tell her numbly. "I hate being at home. I used to spend a lot of time wondering how long I could stay in the hospital if I threw myself off the roof. Or got into a car accident."
"Allison," your mother says after a long pause, and for a second you barely recognize her because it sounds like she's crying.
It makes you want to cry too. "You're not even sorry," you sob, bringing your knees up and pressing your forehead to them. "I saw you kill Emily, I saw you!"
"Who?" your father says.
You cry harder and hang up the phone, tossing it on the floor in front of you.
It's not fair. You hate everything, why does it have to be this way? Why couldn't you have good parents, who were nice and normal, like Scott's mom?
After a brief crying fit and ten minutes of feeling sorry for yourself, you pick yourself up off the floor and go back into the living room to collapse on the couch. You stay there until Scott's mom comes back and pretend you don't know how the phone got on the kitchen floor.
"What do you want to do?" Lydia asks you, sitting beside you on the couch with a perpetual hint of fear in her voice.
"Get drunk," you tell her, not really joking even a little bit. You've come down from your high, and are back to feeling horrible, as well as an idiot for calling your parents. That could have gone really badly-what if they'd come to get you while you were alone in the house? And what you said...you want to curl up in a little ball and die at the memory. You're so pathetic. You just want to forget. You want anything that will stop you from feeling like this.
"I don't think that's a good idea," Lydia says predictably, adjusting the McCall's woven blanket around your shoulders.
"You should go outside," Malia says, looking up at you critically from the photo of little Scott and Stiles she was studying. "You look terrible."
"Malia, what have we said about commenting on people's appearances?" Lydia turn to snap at her.
"Don't?" Malia frowns, unsure. "But you do it all the time."
"Because I actually understand the concept of tact," Lydia tells her untactfully. "Unlike you."
"Whatever," Malia says, rolling her eyes. "She's really pale, so she should go outside. Being inside so long isn't good."
Isaac is at work and Scott has his SAT prep class on Friday at the library, so he sent Lydia and Malia to babysit you. Which is fine, you guess, because you've been miserable and lonely, not wanting to disturb Scott's mom on her day off.
But you can't really do much in your current state, which only makes things worse when all you want to do is run away.
"How's your pain?" Lydia asks, for the third time since she's gotten here. "Have the pills kicked in yet?"
"It's fine," you mumble, even though your fingers and jaw still ache. You don't see much point in talking about it.
Malia puts down the picture frame on the mantle and crosses the living room abruptly to grab your arm from under the blanket.
You gasp at the sudden movement and try to pull away, but Malia is too strong.
"Huh," she says, wincing and staring down at the black lines crawling up her veins, heedless of your struggle. "That kinda hurts."
"Malia, let her go," Lydia snaps sharply.
Malia does immediately, and you jerk back into the couch, heart pounding rapidly in your chest.
"Don't just grab people!" Lydia says angrily, wrapping her arms around your shoulders protectively.
"Sorry," Malia says, looking at you in confusion. "Scott said I could take people's pain away."
"Ask first," Lydia insists.
"Okay," Malia says dubiously. "What's wrong with you?"
"Nothing. I'm fine," you say, even though you're not. You think you're going to throw up. You feel trapped and terrified, like your insides are going to vibrate out of you, and God, this can't go on. You can't keep feeling like this for the rest of your life. You'll go insane. You have to get over it. You have to forget what it felt like, tied to that chair, being beaten with no hope of escape. No way of fighting back. If Scott hadn't called you, hadn't known you always keep your phone on you, even in the bathroom, and realized that you not answering was a warning sign...who knows what could have happened to you? You could be dead right now.
"Sorry," Malia offers, still looking confused. "I didn't mean to scare you."
You shake her apology off, hiding your arm under the blanket. Before anyone else can say anything there's a knock on the door, and you stiffen in fear.
"Who is it?" Lydia calls, already pulling out her phone.
"It's Braeden," Malia tells you, observing your guarded body language with a frown.
"Did someone knock?" Melissa says, coming halfway down the stairs with a duster in one hand and a rag in the other.
"It's Braeden, apparently," Lydia says, approaching the door with caution.
"Oh, finally," Melissa says, and finishes coming down the stairs to pull the door open. "Are you going to come in now?" she asks in exasperation.
"Just have to use the bathroom," Braeden says with a professional nod, stepping inside.
"I really don't see why you have to sit out there the entire time," Melissa says, looking a little disappointed. "It has to be cold in that car."
"I need to be able to see the road," Braeden says, smiling at her gently. "And don't worry, I'm used to stake-outs."
"You're sitting outside?" you ask her, confused by their familiarity.
"Just making sure no one bothers you," Braeden says, tactfully not mentioning that in all likelihood it'd be your parents again. You feel like you should have realized this earlier. Of course Melissa wouldn't leave you completely unprotected while she went out to buy groceries. She may have even said something about it, but you were too high on painkillers to notice.
"At least let me make you some coffee before you go out again," Melissa says, and goes into the kitchen.
You stare after Braeden as she heads for the downstairs bathroom. You don't understand why she's involving herself. Melissa either. They don't have to be a part of this, and yet they're protecting you from your parents even though it could cause them trouble. Will cause them trouble, knowing how vengeful your parents are.
Braeden stays a bit to have coffee and explains how her position outside the house is perfect for seeing someone from the road or someone trying to sneak into the backyard. She seems very confident and laidback, like she's done this a million times before and doesn't think it's at all a big deal, though she seems slightly suspicious of Malia, giving her assessing looks over her cup of coffee.
"Don't worry about anything, just get a lot of rest, alright?" she tells you on her way out, and you watch her walk across the street to her car out the window.
You feel even worse now, and wonder if you could sneak another painkiller.
It's probably a bad sign how often you've been thinking about getting drunk or getting high lately, but you're too miserable to care. The only time you don't feel like your insides are being crushed with fear and self-hatred is when you're high, and you find yourself wondering what you'll do when your painkillers run out.
You'll have to find another way to get more pills. Weed is popular, but you really have no idea where to get it, and it smells gross. Also, isn't it supposed to make you paranoid? That's the last thing you need. Harder drugs are probably more effective (you hear heroin's great for escaping reality) but there's the addiction factor, and you don't need to be any crazier than you already are. No, prescription drugs are your best bet. In a town like this there has to be someone with a prescription pad for sale.
"Didn't you just take two of those an hour ago?" Scott asks, when you get up off the couch after dinner, slipping the orange bottle out of a pair of his black sweatpants.
"No," you lie without thinking, and wince when you realize your mistake.
Scott looks dismayed and disappointed, and he sits up straight, jostling Isaac off his shoulder, but reaching out to steady him on instinct.
"How many of those have you taken today?" he asks, looking between you and the pill bottle warily.
You shrug and avoid his gaze. "I dunno. I haven't kept track."
Scott raises his eyebrows in alarm and Isaac glances uncertainty between you two before reaching out for the remote and turning down the volume on the TV.
"I think you should give me those," Scott says slowly, reaching out his hand for the bottle.
"It's fine," you say, trying to inject as much certainty into your voice as possible.
"You can't just take as many as you want," Scott says seriously. "Those are really strong. Why don't you give them to me and I'll keep track of them for you?"
His voice is clear of judgment, but is too light and casual for you to buy. On his other side, Isaac has slumped deeper into the couch, avoiding your eyes like the coward he is.
They're already thinking of you as a drug addict and you haven't even started yet, you think furiously.
"I'm fine!" you snap, and turn on your heel go upstairs before he can argue.
Still, you don't try to take another one because you know he'll hear you. When you wake up the next morning the bottle is gone, two white pills on a small plate and a glass of water left in its wake.
Predictably, Saturday is terrible. Scott, Isaac, and Melissa keep an eye on you at all times, and cut off from your painkillers, even sitting up is agony. Eating is similarly excruciating, and you begin to refuse as much food as possible, because you're so nauseous you're worried you might throw up again. That can't be good for your jaw. You spend most of the day curled up on the couch with your eye on the clock, making your way slowly to Melissa for your pills every four hours on the dot, but by the afternoon you're in so much pain that you've sweated through Melissa's light pink t-shirt, and with two hours left until your next dose, you stumble upstairs and lock yourself in the bathroom so you can sit on the floor and rock back in forth in peace.
Peace for five minutes at least. It could have been longer, though. You don't have the most reliable sense of time right now.
"Allison?" Scott says, sounding worried on the other side of the door. "You okay?"
"Mmhm," you say, not wanting to open your mouth for fear of whimpering.
There is a pause and then the door knob jingles. It's locked, but Scott doesn't seem deterred and eventually gets it open, with a claw maybe.
"Allison, you look terrible!" he says, crouching down beside you immediately. "What's wrong? What hurts?"
Everything, you think miserably. Your ribs, your jaw, your nose. Your fingers have gone numb, though. So there's that.
"Why didn't you say anything?" he says in a tight voice as he sucks pain away from you, and you sag in relief, sweat dripping down your back.
You took away my pain medication, you think angrily. What did you think was going to happen?
"Mom!" Scott gets up and sticks his head out the door to yell. "Mom, can you come up here, something's wrong!"
Melissa ascertains that you need a stronger dose of painkiller, and goes to the hospital to switch them out. By the time Isaac comes home from work you've progressed to sobbing quietly into Scott's shoulder while he tries to take as much pain from you as possible, steadily turning whiter and whiter.
"What's wrong with her?" Isaac asks, sounding terrified, and sits down on your other side.
"Painkillers aren't strong enough," Scott says shakily. "Mom's going to get new ones. Here, can you-"
Isaac takes over-gasping a little at the intensity of the pain- and Scott sags back into the couch, exhaling deeply.
"Next time say something," he says, reaching forward to cup your face, sounding dismayed. "You should have said they weren't working."
You don't answer, just focus on not screaming. The truth is you didn't realize they weren't strong enough, since you'd pretty much been taking them on as needed basis. You don't think telling them this would help.
Fortunately, Melissa comes back with your new pills a couple minutes later, and within fifteen minutes the horrible throbbing has faded. You become very tired very fast, the chief side effect of these pills being drowsiness, and you miss the floaty feeling. But it's acceptable, you guess. You can't feel anything if you're not conscious.
You spend most of Sunday drifting in and out of sleep. The swelling on your nose goes down, but your jaw and stomach remain puffy and heavily bruised. Washing with the cast is annoying, and you pretty much give up on shampooing your hair and stick to rinsing yourself down with some of Scott's neutral-smelling body wash.
Eating remains unpleasant, even more so now as another side effect of your new pills is apparently loss of appetite, but you force mouthfuls of canned soup warmed in the McCall's microwave and applesauce down your throat without complaint.
Your balance is off, which isn't new really, but Scott seems determined to carry you whenever you want to move rooms, as if trying to make up for not realizing how bad your condition was yesterday. Isaac is very quiet, and spends an uncomfortable amount of time watching you closely.
Mostly, though, you doze on Scott's bed while he and Isaac do homework, speaking in hushed voices about sine and cosine functions, Beowolf, and the Reconstruction.
The house is completely empty the next morning. You eat breakfast, take a shower, walk around aimlessly, watch a bit of TV, clean Scott's bathroom, but by noon you don't even know what to do with yourself. There is nothing here that can distract you from your dark thoughts, from remembering every single detail of your torture, of hating yourself for being so weak you couldn't save yourself. Telling yourself to stop thinking about it, to focus on the future, does not help. Neither does angrily berating yourself for being pathetic, to get over it already. Knowledge that it could have been so much worse (What if Scott hadn't come when he did? Would they have killed you and your parents? What if threatening to rape you hadn't been a bluff?) only causes you obsess over it more. How are you supposed to move on from this? You can't, there's no way, not after what they did to you. But that's pathetic, people get the shit beaten out of them everyday and they get over it, why can't you? The world is full of abuse and rape and no justice for any of it, and people who've suffered far worse than you have picked themselves up and moved on with their lives. You have to do that. You have to be strong and move on. You can't. How do they do it? Or do they really? Are they all just pretending, and are just as miserable as you are right now? Every single day for the rest of your life? You can't do it. You can't just feel like this forever, broken beyond repair. You wish you could just disappear into nothing so you wouldn't have to feel like this anymore, so you wouldn't have to think about it constantly, much less deal with your parents and being a burden on everyone around you.
You cry helplessly into the couch cushions, but it doesn't make you feel better. There is no relief coming, you realize. Maybe time will help, but that seems so far away right now. You can't do this forever. You can't stay here forever.
You see tomorrow and the day after that, stretched out in front of you exactly the same, with no end it sight.
It's easy to decide what to do after that. You can't fix yourself right now. But you can do something to make things easier going forward.
You slip on your light blue Toms and head out the front door for the first time in days, feeling slightly guilty as you close the door behind you with no way to lock it. You walk down the McCall's lawn and across the street to Derek's Toyota. Thankfully, Derek is not in the Toyota, just Braeden, who stares at you as you walk up to the window.
"Hey," you say, knocking on the window.
She unlocks the car and you open the door.
"Can I sit?" you asks, gesturing at the passenger seat, which is covered in fast food containers and bags of chips.
"Yeah, sure," Braeden says, and quickly pushes them onto the floor. She tosses the book she was holding into the backseat and looks at you carefully. "Anything wrong?"
"No," you say, shaking your head, and wrap your arms around yourself because the car's pretty cold. "I need to you take me to my parents' house."
Braeden raises both eyebrows. "That sounds like a terrible idea," she tells you candidly.
"I'll have to talk to them sooner or later," you tell her, swallowing down a tremor of fear at the thought of it. "It might as well be sooner. I can't just...sit here."
Your life is enough of a mess. You need to end this. Put to rest one of your problems. It's all you can do right now.
"Look," Braeden says, looking deeply uncomfortable. "Have you talked to Scott about this? Or Melissa? Because I don't think this is something you should do lightly. This is clearly a very emotional situation, and to be honest, I really don't know what your parents are going to do if you go over there."
"They won't hurt me," you tell her dully, and then sigh, looking down at your hands in your lap. "At least not on purpose. I just can't...I can't make Melissa take care of me anymore. This isn't her problem. I need to figure something else out. And I can't do that unless I deal with them first."
"What do you mean, figure something else out?" Braeden asks, confused. She starts the car and turns the heat all the way up, but makes no attempt to shift gear into drive. "You're still in high school."
"I don't..." you say, your chest tightening up painfully. "I have less than two months until I turn eighteen. I think I can stay with Lydia until then, maybe until I finish high school- it's not like her mother's around much. Her house is huge and she's pretty rich, so I wouldn't be that much of a burden."
"What if your parents want you to stay with them?"
That is what they want. You just don't see them being able to accept who are you. What you've done. Who you're with. And you cannot stand by and let them continue to hurt people. You just don't see cohabitation as a possibility now that's it's all out there.
"I doubt they're going to want me to once they have all the facts," you say as calmly as possible. "I was going to ask if you could wait outside. If I'm not out in half an hour..."
"I could come in with you," Braeden says, still looking skeptical.
You shake your head. "No, that'll just make things messier. That's why I didn't tell anyone else either. They'd want to come with me, and...I just want to get this over with."
"Okay," Braeden says after a pause. "I still don't think this is a good idea, but I get it."
She changes gear to drive and eases out to the center of the road towards your house. You watch as Scott's house disappears in the mirror and stick your hand in your pocket for the small plastic bag of painkillers Melissa left you for the day, just to make sure they're still there.
"Your cheek looks better," Braeden observes while you're waiting at a stop light. "You feeling any better?"
"Yeah," you say quietly. "My ribs don't hurt as much."
"Yeah, broken ribs are no joke," Braeden says, turning away from the road to look over you with a wince. "What about everything else? You doing okay all by yourself?"
You shrug. "It's not for that long. Scott will be back at 3:30 and Lydia's coming over too, I think."
"What about that other girl?" Braeden asks in a too casual voice as she turns left at the green arrow. "Malia."
You glance at her in askance. "No, I don't think so. I don't really know her that well...Why do you ask?"
"She was there Friday, wasn't she?" Braeden says lightly, not taking her eyes off the road.
"Yeah..." you say suspiciously. "Do you know her?"
"No, I-" she says, and sighs, turning to give you a rueful look. "Not her. I think I might know who her parents are."
"Her parents?"
"Her biological parents," she corrects. "It's not...it's not a problem, but it could potentially be in the future. What do you think of her?"
"She's...alright, given the circumstances," you say, remembering the way Malia tried to apologize to you for grabbing your arm by grooming your hair with her fingers. ...Which was actually kind of nice? You were kind of disappointed when Lydia made her stop. "She's trying to be, you know, normal."
Braeden nods shortly.
"What do you mean her parents could be a problem?" you ask worriedly.
"It's nothing, don't worry about that now, okay?" Braeden tells you as she turns onto your street. "Marin and I have it under control."
She stops in front of your house, wiping the inquiry from your mind. You take a deep breath, trying not to panic and look over at the front door, trying not to think about what happened the last time you were here.
"Allison?" Braeden says gently. "I can come in with you."
You shake your head and straighten, reaching out for the door handle. "No, I'm good," you say bracingly, stepping out of the car. "Just...if I don't come out-"
"Half an hour, I got it," she says firmly. "Good luck."
You nod and turn towards your house, walking up the driveway next to your car to get to the front door. You reach out to ring the doorbell with a shaking hand before you can think about how much you don't want to do this.
Alright, alright, alright, you think as the chime rings inside the house. You are here to end this. To lay it all out. No matter what they say, what excuses they offer, you have to remain strong. You did what you had to, and you're not sorry. You've always known it was going to come to this. Maybe not so soon, but you knew. There was always going one day when you wouldn't have a family anymore.
There's footsteps from inside approaching the door and you inhale sharply, closing your eyes for a brief second. You turn around and look back at Braeden, who waves at you slowly from the road. You hear fumbling with the door knob, and turn back around just in time to see the front door thrown open, your mother on the other side with a wide-eyed expression on her face, your father two steps behind her.
"Hi," you say, forcing yourself to look at them head on, and you're proud your voice doesn't shake. "We need to talk."
A/N: Poor Allison. This chapter was so sad to write because she's in such a terrible position. Please leave a review!