Chapter Two

 

Every person has two faces, the one they show to the world around them and another they see in the mirror. 

 

 

 

Three months later

Violet

 

 

 

Everything has changed. 

 

Everything was different.

 

And yet I still felt like a prisoner in my own body.

 

I still felt like the monsters were out there to get me.

 

It had been three months, twelve whole weeks, since they freed me from my cage. The cage I had lived in since I was eight. And yet these lilac walls looked like black shadows coming closer and closer. 

 

I paced and paced. 

 

Twelve weeks should make me believe that I wasn’t going back to that hell hôle. Twelve weeks should be enough to make me calm, to accept my new life. To accept the good people that had managed to save me. They were a lot late but they finally fulfilled their promise.

 

The boy who had promised and given me hope when he was six himself had come like the devil himself with his three brothers and one best friend to save the woman he loved. And unknowingly he had saved me, fulfilled his promise made when we were children. 

 

And as if that wasn’t enough, now I lived with his family. The Carters. A family outside of norm. That had seen and went through every kind of shit the world threw at them and still managed to love each other and became a symbol of what family should be. They were resilient, humble and most importantly perfect. 

 

Now they have included me in their family. And imperfection. Making me feel like a part of them. Treating me like I wasn’t broken and shaped in darkness.

 

Maybe they thought we weren't much different from each other as every soul in this house has cried at some point. The only difference was they all have healed or were in the process of healing. For me, I didn’t know if my soul even had that option anymore. 

 

 

My eyes skittered toward the four poster bed. The white duvet. The soft mattress. But I couldn’t make myself to sit on it. Not that I haven’t sat on it, but right now in this moment when I felt so restless I couldn’t. It had happened before in the last months too. Where nothing seemed to comfort me, where everything felt like an anomaly. These bouts of sudden panic attacks had disappeared after living in that cage for years on end, I had adapted to do those monsters hurting me but since I have been freed it had resurfaced. It happens more regularly. And I had to hide in here from those kind people, making them think like I was ungrateful and didn't want their company.

 

 

 

And right now it was the room itself that felt foreign.

 

It felt like a cruel dream.

 

A figment of my imagination.

 

I looked at the bed and it felt like the moment I sat on it, the moment I felt those cool sheets beneath my palms, the doors would burst open and those monsters would come and grab me. Those monsters would throw me in the dark well all over again and then use me for their sick pleasure. 

 

My hands started to shake and my throat dried and before my legs could buckle underneath me I walked to the corner where lights barely reached and sat down on the cold floor.

 

Yes, this cold floor was familiar.

I pulled my knees toward my chest and wrapped my arms around them.

 

Apart from everything I liked most in this new, foreign life of mine was the clothes I got to wear here. I focused on the clothes. The soft material on my skin. Covering my skin. Hiding my body. Hiding the invisible scars on my skin.

 

I didn’t know for how long I stayed in that position. Shaking and reeling. But even as I sat there, as pain and fear tore through me I never cried. 

 

Tears don’t come so easily now.

 

I stopped crying a long time ago, when I realized that tears only gave those monsters pleasure and made them more cruel. Now my tears have dried and I didn’t hurt for them. One less thing to worry about. 

 

 

 I must have dozed off, which told me how tired I had been to sleep like that. I never slept when there was even a one percent chance of someone hurting me. But the fact that now I was waking up in the soft bed I was running away from, under the warm blankets, made me realize that I hadn’t just dozed off but I also slept through when someone came in and touched me. Picked me up and laid me down on the bed.

 

 

My throat closed up and my skin shrivelled. My toes curled and my whole body started to convulse as my mind conjured up images of someone touching my body when I was unconscious. It won’t be the first time. It had happened before. They drugged me and used me. Bound me and tortured me. They had used every—

 

 

“Stop.”

 

 

The cold voice had me jerking up.

 Eyes wide I stared in the dark from where I knew the voice came. My heart hammered inside my chest and my skin tightened waiting for the pain. The voice was hard and unforgiving. Almost angry. 

 

I froze. 

 

Another monster to hurt me.

 

And he was hurting me.

 

I could feel the pain in my arms. 

 

And then he stepped away from the wall and I saw him.

 

Not only I saw him, I recognised him.

 

He wasn’t the monster but then how would I know. It wasn’t like he ever talked to me. It wasn’t like he ever looked at me, gave me that smile that everyone else in this family reserved for me. It wasn’t like he showed me sympathy or any other emotion. Not that I wanted it from him. But most of the time he looked at me like I was an unwanted bug under his observation.

 

And yet something about those sherry like eyes pulled me in. A thread that tugged at something unknown inside me. I didn’t have any idea what it was, because I was truly dead inside. I have nothing left. And also those sherry eyes promised that he wasn’t the monster I had been acquainted with. He was anything but a monster. But still he makes me afraid. He makes me feel things that I have no idea what they meant.

 

 

But he wasn't normal either. I knew it. I had saved his life and he never showed a bit of gratitude for that. Instead he stared at me like I had done some kind of crime, like I had personally offended him by doing something that I shouldn't have.

 

His jaw was tight, nostrils flaring and hair dark in the shadows and he looked scary. And yet I was frozen in place and I wasn't running away. When he took another step closer I noticed that those sherry eyes were fixed on my arms. And when I followed his gaze I found the deep scratches that were bleeding on my arms. 

 

Realization came slowly. And when it did I fisted my fingers and slipped them under the blankets, hiding my arms too. Hiding what I had done to myself, knowing that he wouldn't pity me for it like other normal people, no instead he would look at those marks in disgust.

 

I stared at him, a question in my eyes. What are you doing here? But I didn’t voice that. I wouldn’t.

 

He stared right back at me. He was the rude one. The cold one. The detached one. Unlike everyone in the house, he didn’t want anything to do with me. Unlike everyone in the house he doesn’t ask questions or bother to even guess what I wanted to say. It seemed like he just didn't care.

 

And proving me right, just like I expected, without saying a word, he turned around.

 

I closed my eyes in irritation, waiting for the bang of the door but my eyes snapped open as I heard the drag of the chair on the floor.

 

I watched transfixed as he dragged the chair from near the dresser and pulled it at the foot of the bed without uttering one single word. Then he sat down on it and met my eyes as he finally said, “Sleep.”

 

I wanted to scream at him, to let the whole house know what he was doing here. That he was here in my room. But I didn’t. Because I can’t. I won’t. I won’t give anyone that part of me, not ever. And it wasn’t like he was doing anything wrong. It wasn’t like it wasn’t his house. It was his as much as it was mine.

 

We were the abandoned, broken individuals that had been adopted by Mr and Mrs Carter and their whole family.  

 

So I settled on staring back at him just like he stared at me. And I prayed that someone would come and take him away, that someone would come and break this silence, that someone would hide me away from him. Because even as I met his eyes, I knew he was peeking deep inside me. Trying to understand how I wasn’t breaking apart. And it wasn’t the first time, he did it every other second we were close or in the same room. The problem was I studied him as much as he studied me. So I couldn’t even complain.

 

Maybe he just doesn’t know that I was broken long before now and now there was nothing left to break. It was all sprinkled and shattered. Unsalvageable. If he knew, he wouldn't be so interested in peeking inside at the mess that I was.

 

I was sure I wasn’t going to sleep again, especially not with him just a few feet away from me. But I did.

And the next time I woke up, he was gone and sun rays were filtering inside my room.

 

I laid there and stared at the chair that was now once again at its designated place, in front of the dresser. I closed my eyes for a moment, wondering if another day would be the same as the last one. If today would be the day when I would feel like I belonged here, with this beautiful family. If today I would feel like I wasn’t an imposter between these beautiful people with their perfect lives. If today he would say something to me. If today his eyes would soften a little bit and he would grace me with a smile.

 

Or maybe today would be the day when they would realize that I wasn’t someone to include in their family. That I was too broken to be kept. Or maybe today he would give up and decide that there was nothing to be found in my deep, dark and broken soul.

 

I started to push the covers back and slip out of the bed when my eyes fell on the paper on the nightstand. I picked it up and realized what it was. A flyer for sign language lessons.

 

Something fluttered in my chest. A butterfly stepping out of its cocoon.

 

 

@Gupta