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Chapter One

Clementine

            I was thirty seconds away from parking in front of my house. As usual, I grabbed my bag from the passenger seat and placed it in my lap. I wanted to get inside as fast as possible.

            It wasn’t cold or raining. We were living in Southern California, so I wasn’t hiding from a bad weather. It was already dark but not particularly late, not that anyone was keeping tabs on me, and we lived in one of the most pretentious rich neighborhoods in the state, so I wasn’t afraid of being mugged.

            I was scared of a pair of ocean blue eyes that belonged to my neighbor. It was ridiculous and childish of me to consider Lucas Cole would try to ambush me here. Or anywhere else for that matter. Me avoiding him was more of a habit than a necessity. But I wasn’t ready to test that theory.

            I popped out of the car with the speed of a cartoon character, not a normal human being, and, another ten seconds and approximately one thousand heart attacks later, I was inside the house. Lucas Cole was successfully avoided once again.

            I was trying to take deep calming breaths by the front door when a smell I thought was in my past for good hit my nostrils.

            Not the fucking candles again.

            I went to the living room and found the boxes filled with these bio weapons my mother made two years ago. It was another one of her post-divorce hobbies.

           An empty bottle of wine was standing next to the speaker. Ed Sheeran’s voice was deafening every sound around the house. I laughed at the irony. My mother was always so concerned with her image, and yet she was harassing the neighbors with loud music like a fifteen-year-old. 

            I had no desire whatsoever to see her and, presuming she was in the kitchen, I went upstairs to my room.

            And there she was. Standing by my desk looking through my drawings with a judgmental look on her face. Her glass of wine had made a spot on one of them and I wanted to scream. There were at least twenty candles burning in different corners of the room. The stench was beyond repulsive. The smells got so mixed together that the aroma could make you vomit faster than two fingers in the throat after drinking half a bottle of tequila. I presumed. I wasn’t into drinking unlike my mother.

            But first things first. I had to close my curtains as I did every night for years. It was like a ritual for me. Not that I thought Lucas would look at me. He never did. I was dead to him. And yet every time he passed me by in the hallway in school with a new girl clinging to his neck, as if I wasn’t there, the hurt and humiliation echoed in every bone of my body.

            I saw the lights in his room were on but he wasn’t there or at least I couldn’t see him. When we were little, our curtains were always open. He used to come up with funny faces just to make me laugh. I needed those laughs back then.

            After I made sure I was protected by the thick black curtains, I turned to face my mother. I wanted to kick her out of my room, but I preferred to piss her off first.

            “Are you trying to get high?” I asked as I walked around blowing out candles. “’Cause it’s only been a minute since I got home, and I already have a headache, and you look like you are about to pass out.”

            Not that it would be a surprise. Every night for some time now she did pass out on her favorite expensive white sofa she had bullied my father into buying just months before he left her.

            A chuckle. That’s all I got from her. I was about to sleep in that stench, and she just chuckled at me.

            “Is wine not enough for you anymore?”

            A burning memory of me spending my early childhood wishing she would stop criticizing me, that she would stop yelling at me for everything she hated about me, flashed before my eyes for a moment. These days I was going out of my way to make her scream again.

             Pretty pathetic, huh?

             “Watch it, Clementine!”, she hissed still looking at my drawings.

             Clementine…

            Everybody knew I hated my name. Not only because it was completely inadequate and so rare I had never met anyone named Clementine, but because she was the one who gave it to me.

            My siblings had normal names. But then again Tyler and Madison were the wanted children as we were all reminded of by my mother when we were still a pretending-to-be-functional family before the divorce.

            “Don’t get me wrong,” I started again crossing my arms over my chest. “I’m glad you got bored with the gourmet cooking because you were definitely not good at it. This, however, suits you perfectly, but it’s still a cliché you know? A drunk middle-aged divorcee burning handmade candles. You’re not working. You’re just sucking cash from your ex-husband’s pocket”, I paused for a moment and cocked my head sideways. “Does dad know how much money you spend on booze?”

            She laughed.

            “If you think your father cares about what we’re doing, you’re more stupid than I thought,” she slurred.

            I couldn’t say she was wrong about dad. His approach to everything even before the divorce was to put some cash on top of the problem and run in the opposite direction.

            That’s how I got my car. I was constantly bitching about my mother. So, for my sixteenth birthday, he decided to buy me a fiftythousanddollar ride I had never wanted. It was completely inappropriate for a high school student. It took me three months to summon the courage to take it for a spin.

            “I heard about your little hobby,” she said and her gaze fell on the drawing under her glass. “Oops. That one’s ruined”, she picked up the wine, then the piece of paper and I snatched it from her hand. She was right. It was ruined. I squeezed it in my fist.

            She was a nasty person. Not that I didn’t poke her every time I got the chance, but telling dad about her alcohol abuse was an empty threat and she knew it. I wouldn’t tell him. It would benefit her. She would get help. Sympathy. Eventually she would get better.

             I wanted her to get worse.

            I wanted her to suffer. To feel lonely, deserted, rejected, and weak. Like she made me feel every single day of my life.

            Sylvia tried to walk towards me but those stilettos she always wore weren’t the best option if you want to get hammered. She lost balance, leaned over my bed, spilled her drink on my blanket, and laughed like a maniac.

            “It’s barely ten, Sylvia,” I growled and rubbed my forehead. Sometimes I wanted to do violent things to my mother.

            She ignored the fact that I called her by her name. When I started doing that few years ago, she threw tantrums like a toddler. It pissed her off so much, she lost control over herself, and the perfect facade she maintained her whole life cracked each time.

            These days it didn’t even make her roll her eyes at me. I had to up my game.

            “How long have you been doing these?” she asked pointing at my desk.

            “Let’s not pretend you care.”

            “I don’t. But I don’t want to be embarrassed either. Do you have any idea how it looks to people when they talk about stuff like that, and they find out I don’t know what you’re doing?”

            “Probably it looks exactly like it is”, I murmured.

            “Are you suggesting something?” she was half-sitting half-lying on my bed.

            “Only that you stopped being a mother the moment your son left this house, even though you had a fourteen-year-old to look after?”

            “Cry me a river”, Sylvia dragged. “Your constant whining is so annoying. I can’t even look at you.”

            “Soon you won’t have to,” I smiled. The school year started the next day.

            “Yes, finally. I’ll get rid of you after graduation. Like I always wanted to.”

            “Well, not exactly like you wanted to,” I reminded her.

            She didn’t deny it. I always knew I was the unexpected child. Not a surprise, but  bad news. She joked about my dad convincing her to keep me ever since I was a little girl.

            “Obviously,” she finally said. “I could have had a few good years but no. You had to happen.”

            “Get out of my room,” I said through clenched teeth.

            “With pleasure.”

            I could probably go wash my hair for the time she spent taking her shoes off and getting out, but I waited silently. When she was finally out the door, I cracked a window behind the curtains just to get some fresh air. Then I collected all the candles and dumped them in her room.

            I kneeled down next to my bed and pulled out the shoe box. I wanted to make sure she hadn’t found it. I started counting. Everything was as I left it. I could still pull it off. Not now because the amount I had wasn’t enough. But I could do it by graduation.

            And it was going to crush my mother. I wanted to say that it would break her heart, but a long time ago I found out she didn’t have one.

            The next morning, I woke up in total darkness. The left side of my face was numb since I probably spent the last few hours sleeping on my book instead of my pillow.

            It was the first day of my senior year. Even though it was the beginning of the year, it felt like some kind of an ending. I sat up in my bed, facing my thick curtains, thinking about Lucas.

            Soon we won’t be living across from each other.

            The thought ripped something inside my chest, and, in a moment of weakness, I went to the window. I drew the curtains open. The sun blinded me for a second.

            Lucas’s curtains were wide open. He wasn’t scared that I might watch him. He loved being watched. It was a part of his personality.

            The whole thing was ridiculous. Me, playing hide and seek with a guy that I hadn’t spoken to for four years. Sprinting from my car to my front door like a criminal every time I got home. But I just couldn’t bring myself to stop. It felt like everything would fall apart if I stopped doing that.

            I quit my stalking the moment I saw a movement in Lucas’s room. I went to the hallway to go to the bathroom, and the smell of the fucking candles reminded me of the sight I was about to see on my way out to school this morning. I was breathing through my mouth only, but I could still somehow sense the stink on my tongue.

            By the time I got out of the shower and back in my room, I got three texts and one missed phone call.

            Hannah: You should get your ass in school like NOW. You won’t believe who’s here.

            Tyler: Hey, sis. Call dad back. He’s acting like a dumped chick again.

            Dad: Clem, are you mad at me?

            I rolled my eyes mostly at my father and I typed back replies.

            Clem: Do I care?

            Clem: You should know. You’ve dumped a significant number of chicks yourself.

            Clem: No, dad. I’ll call you back.

            I got dressed as my phone vibrated with messages from Hannah and, possibly, Tyler if he hadn’t already lost interest in our exchange, which wouldn’t be a surprise. He hated our family drama to the point that he couldn’t spend more than two consecutive days in California with us. And he had the perfect excuse not to come. He lived in Boston now and the travel just wasn’t worth it, as he repeatedly reminded us during his short and rare visits.

            I grabbed my shoe box from under the bed, and I emptied it. I didn’t trust my mother. She could come snoop around again. I didn’t want to have to explain those two thousand dollars I had hidden. But I didn’t want to walk around with that amount of cash in my pocket either.

            I got downstairs and walked past Sylvia, who as I thought, was sleeping on the sofa. Apparently, she finished another bottle of wine last night because there were now two empty ones by the speaker. The disturbing thing was that the whole living room was covered in candles. She arranged all of them all over the place. No wonder the house smelled so much worse than last night.

            She’s losing it.

            The phone started ringing in my hand. I looked at the screen.

            Dad.

            I took the pillow of the armchair and unzipped it. I figured anything I was hiding right in front of her eyes would be better protected than if it was in my room. I put the money inside, zipped back the pillow, and I glanced at my mother again. She was snoring.

            My phone was still vibrating in my hand. I knew I had to tell dad about her. It was the right thing to do.

            I got out marching quickly to my car as I answered my father’s call.

            “Hey, dad,” I murmured.

            “Hey, honey. Is everything OK?” he asked. I paused hyper aware that the woman I just left inside was getting worse and that this was the perfect timing to come clean and share that beauty with the family.

            And then he started talking.

            “Are you mad at me? You didn’t like your present, did you? I knew you wouldn’t like it, but Adina kept repeating it was awesome.”

            Adina was his new twenty-two-year-old girlfriend. My sister Madison was twenty-five, not that he was interested in that fact. And the present was a cashmere sweater that I didn’t need because… duh… Southern California. Also it was something I would never wear.

            “I loved it,” I lied and took a deep breath. “Listen, dad…”

            “Great!”, he shouted in my ear with a relief. “Sorry, honey, I just wanted to clear the air. I have an early meeting. I’ll call you later this week, okay?”

            The decision was made in my mind that split second. I wasn’t going to parent them, since they hadn’t really ever parented me.

            “Sure, dad. Don’t worry about it”.

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