“Why do you value yourself so little?” he shouted at me. “Don't you understand how astonishing you are?”
“No!” I wanted to hit him. “No, I fucking don't!”
His hands around my upper arms bit into the flesh there, hard and bruising. I set my teeth, trying to suppress the urge to smash my forehead into his nose.
“Your strength,” he said at last. “You are so strong. Your scars, your wounds. You cover them up, act like they are nothing. Don't you get it? I want that. I want to be like you, and I can't. You just forge ahead. How do you do it? How?”
Frustration balled my hands into fists. “You just do, okay? You just do because if you don't you might as well give up!”
“Well, why not give up?” His face was terrible to look at, lost and afraid, as though he had never known anything beautiful at all.
I stomped my foot. “Because it's not all terrible, dammit! Why can't you see that? You lost a friend? So fucking what? It happens to everyone. You made a mistake—a thousand mistakes—but so what? So fucking what? Who the fuck doesn't? Stop feeling sorry for yourself and do something.”
Abruptly he let go of me. “Who gave you your scars?” he said. “Tell me. I need to know.”
I clenched my teeth. I wanted to tell him it was none of his business, but I had been betrayed, too. I had been betrayed, too.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, reaching down inside me, searching, seeking out the threads of emotion and thought that connected me to that buried past, that life I had covered up with art and color and all things beautiful and fierce.
“It was my dad, okay?” I said at last. “He gave these to me.”
Malcolm was silent. “Your father?” He sounded slow and stupid, as if he'd never heard of child abuse or schizophrenia.
He made me so angry. Perfect, pretty Malcolm Ward. The best at everything, the king of the world. But one minor setback and he'd collapsed like a house of cards. I wanted to punch him. “He was crazy. Straight up bugfuck crazy. Not like you, I mean... he was fucking nuts. He thought everyone was out to get him, thought that our house was bugged, that my mom was an alien in human skin. He thought I had evil inside me and he had to let it out.”
I shoved my arm in his face. “See this tattoo? The lily? It covers the first one. I think it was the first one, anyway, because I was too young to remember. He'd slice me up and my mom would take me to the hospital, and then to the vet, and then to one of her old friends who was a nurse to get me patched up, and it was only when her friend told her she was going to call CPS that she kicked my dad out.”
“Why?” he said. “Why did it take so long?”
“Because she wanted to take care of him. To save him...” I trailed off, the blood draining from my face.
That was exactly what I'd been doing with Malcolm. I was just like my mother...
I'd always taken care of my mother, but until now I'd never realized it was because she had spent all her time pouring her efforts into my father instead of me. A beautiful, fine woman, and she had chosen the wrong vessel for her love.
Oh my god, I thought.
Malcolm's voice brought me back to the present. “Sadie?” he said. “Sadie, are you okay?”
I shook my head. “No. No, I don't think I am.”
Warmth enveloped my hand, and I looked down to see his palm covering mine. “Sadie...” he said.
“No,” I told him. “No, I've told plenty of people. So she kicked him out and got a boyfriend and then... then one night he came back.”
I lifted my head, exposing the tattooed scar on my throat, the one covered with the final line of Dorothy Parker's poem Resume. Suicide is too much trouble, she said. Might as well live. “Right there,” I said. “That's where he tried to kill me. And he got my mom. Fucking slaughtered her like a pig. And then he killed himself.”
To my shock, there were tears in my eyes. Angrily I swiped my arm over my face. All that was a long time ago. It was pointless to cry about it...
“Sadie...”
“You asked me why I'm always looking for a bedside table even when I'm asleep? What I'm always reaching for when I wake up? That's my gun. I've kept one by my bedside for years. He's dead, and I still keep it with me, because what if he comes back?”
And then I started to cry.
I hate to cry. But I couldn't help it.
For a long moment, interminably long, I sobbed, harsh and ugly and loud. Hideously loud. So loud that I almost didn't notice the sound of a plane passing over us and helicopters in the far distance. When I did realize what I was hearing, I cried harder. The time for choosing was here, and I couldn't stand it. If Malcolm decided to be a complete idiot, there was nothing I could do to stop him. I'd put everything I had into convincing him I was worth sticking around for, and if there was one thing then there must be other things, but now I thought that maybe I had no business telling him what to do. I was a mess. We were a mess.