..::.. Chapter 32 - Bruise ..::..
Young, High school - Continued ...
Alice and her mother packed their bags, and now Edward helps them into a car.
It's been more than a week. I'm not talking to him. It's nothing but dead silence between us, but I watch from the kitchen when he kisses his mother goodbye leaning over the car window.
I knew they'd go live with her family out of state. Alice used to tell me about her aunts and grandparents still living. If the Cullen family couldn't take care of them, the Brandon's will.
Mom leans further into the counter watching, too. I know what she's thinking, and I really know she's hoping it's a fallout that'll stick. She's probably thanking the heavens she's seeing me around the house more and that Edward and I will finally call it quits. But she doesn't comment.
What she did comment on last week was the limp. I tried to hide it, but a hard tumble down stairs doesn't heal quickly. She'd watch me shuffle around the kitchen in the morning before school and again in the afternoon, until she couldn't take it anymore. She pulled me to the light and yanked on my pajama bottom. The bruise is maroon and blue taking my hip, to my thigh, and a bit of my back. She gave me one good look, and I realized what was running through her mind.
"It was Alice," I said quickly. I told her everything. I just left out why I was upstairs instead of downstairs like guests do. But she knows well I'm not a guest, I never was. And Alice has a temper like her father. "You know her," I said anxiously. "You have no idea what she does to girls he's dated before. It's just protocol."
She grabbed the keys to take me to the clinic. It was ridiculous. There wasn't a need for the tests, but whatever appeased her I went with. Later, her loving, forgiving, and understanding hands rubbed the prescribed, soothing balm all over my hip before bed. At least it got her in my room.
Her visits every night since our argument had stopped.
She hasn't been too friendly with me for a long time. She asks how school is, but never asks how I am. She tells me when dinner is ready, or asks if there's anything Dad needs from me; like covering for the receptionist at the shop. Even the communication between Dad and me have been snipped. He doesn't look at me straight in the eyes anymore.
I don't know how I feel about everything. Maybe time desensitized my level of caring. I was a mess in the beginning. I'd cry myself to sleep every night. Mom was distant. She even left for the city one weekend and left me behind.
Like she said; I'm a woman now, who should deal with her own mess.
I'm too busy to think beyond any of it now. It's keeping up with the Cullen's and keeping up with finals, scholarships, and college applications.
I spend my days in my room or in the kitchen working on school work. Other days I'm in the shop, answering phones and dealing with the mechanics. Other than that, we're barely a functioning family.
"If it was Alice who pushed you, then why aren't you two talking?" Mom asks, watching Edward shut the car door on Alice's side as she and her mother are driven away. Edward climbs up the stoop and through the yard. He looks up toward our house for just an instant.
My stomach knots.
I sigh. I didn't tell her that part. I hoped she wouldn't ask. But there's one thing I never hold back from, and that's telling her everything when she does ask.
"He hit Alice."
She looks back at me. She waits.
"She wasn't in the right mind. She hasn't been. I already forgave her for pushing me," I explain.
"Then what?" she insists.
"Then, I told him if he ever tried that on me, or anyone else, I'd kill him myself."
Mom doesn't react. She watches me for a while. She would know her own daughter enough to recognize the seriousness in those words.
She backs away from the window and squeezes my arm.
That's the first time, in a long time, I feel she has my back. Because the gesture alone tells me she would help me hide his body if I did kill him; with a smile on her face, a jovial heart, and with weightless shoulders.
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