"What the hell happened to you?" my mother demanded when she picked me up that afternoon. "Have you been fighting again?"
I gingerly touched the black eye I'd gained earlier in the day following Mr Gladstone's smack-down of my tormentors, and thanked my lucky stars I'd had the privacy I needed to heal it in the girls' toilets afterwards. My mother, of course, wasn't going to know I'd had a fractured eye-socket after getting decked almost halfway across the quadrangle, and no way would I tell her I'd almost gotten worse had several teachers not intervened. "I had a disagreement with the door," I said.
My mother sighed as she escorted me by the elbow through the press of students coming and going. None of my bullies would look me in the eye, but I already knew they'd be out for blood on the morrow. "You're a disgrace," she said, as she all but shoved me into the passenger seat of the car. I managed to get my feet inside as she slammed the door, wincing as she slammed her door before starting the car up. "Stop that," she said. "You got into a fight again, and since you've lied about it, you can forget going to the library this afternoon."
The library was the one place where my parents couldn't go, after my mother had shown up and almost dragged me out by my hair. The library staff had called the police on her, and Dad about broke every bone in my body when I got home later that day. Since then, the staff had flat out told my parents they weren't welcome; my parents had retaliated by cancelling my library card, but the staff had gotten around that by giving me a card on the sly, and having that, plus the secure sanctuary the library provided, gave me the one ray of hope I might otherwise have missed out on had my parents not acted like tools. That didn't stop my mother from regularly withholding permission to go for slights real or imagined, and I hid my disappointment as best I could. "I'm sorry," I said meekly.
"You're not sorry," my mother told me as she navigated her way through the press of school traffic. "You're only saying that to get out of your punishment. I have a good mind to pull you out of school - you're sixteeen now, and you don't need to continue your education."
I managed to contain my delight at this. I hated school, and my teachers could only do so much to protect me. If my mother withdrew me at the end of the year, I'd be free of the constant torment visited on me by the rest of the students. I didn't let her know this, of course - there was no sense giving her ammunition to use against me further down the line. "Can I get a job?" I asked. "That gets me out of your hair for a few hours a week."77Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡy19XfTOS7o
My mother snorted as she turned the corner into our street. "No," she said. "You don't have the skills to make it in the real world, and I won't have you making friends. You're not worth anyone's time, and if I'd had my way, I would have had your aborted when I found out about your freak nature."
I winced despite myself. Knowing I'd get a walloping either way, I threw caution to the wind. "Why do you and Father hate me so much?" I demanded. "It's not my fault I was born a werewolf. And instead of teaching me how to control my abilities, you've put so many rules around me I'm afraid to breathe lest I break some obsure rule that I don't know about!"
My mother slammed on the brakes and thumped the steering wheel in anger as she turned to me. "You have no right to demand an answer from me!" she snapped, glaring at me. "You're an abomination! That is all you need to know! Now get the hell out of this car and out of my sight! You're not having any dinner, and you can stay in your room for the rest of the day!"
Knowing it was in my best interests to do as I was told, I scampered out of the car and ran inside, hoping to gain the safety of my room before my mother changed her mind and beat me until I couldn't stand. I heard her yelling as I slammed the door shut, and winced as I sank onto the bed, knowing she'd be telling my father all about today's fracas. Ten minutes later, the door burst open, and my father stormed in, seizing me by the hair and throwing me to the floor. I grimaced as my face smacked into the bare floorboards, but the crack of my bedframe getting splintered into a million pieces soon distracted me from the pain. A foot in my back prevented me from getting up, and I winced every time I heard something break, shatter, or tear, my heart twisting up in a tight, painful knot as I heard my possessions get destroyed.
By the time my mother let me up, my room was a mess. My bed was destroyed, all my clothes were torn to pieces, and my desk and window had been smashed, the curtains torn to shreds. Broken glass, wood, metal and fabric lay all over the floor, and even the ratty blanket I'd been granted had been torn clean in two. I shivered.
"That's what you get," my father told me. "Clean that shit up. You can stay in a room with nothing after the way you spoke to your mother today. When you're done, you sit on the floor and don't fucking move. If you need to go to the toilet, you can piss on the floor, and I hope you step in it." He turned and stormed out, but my mother stayed, her eyes boring into mine. 77Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡJiqZF2El3i
"You're a disgrace," she told me. "Had you held your tongue, this wouldn't have happened to you. If you apologise, I might consider getting you some new clothes. But you had better mean it. Otherwise, you can go to school in the same clothes every day until they rot off your body. Then you can go naked."
I shivered as she left, my heart a tight ball of misery in my chest. I knew I was innocent of wrongdoing, but at the same time, if I didn't want to end up a dirty mess from being forbidden the most basic of human needs, I'd have to knuckle under and apologise. It galled me to have to do so, but it was either that or go without the needs my parents by rights should be giving me, regardless of their own personal feelings on the matter.
Or I could run away. In fact, I'd planned for such a day as this, and once the TV fired up downstairs, I knew I had one chance to get out of here before the shit hit the fan in a big way. My parents didn't give two shits about me; that much was clear. But neither would they willingly let me go. 77Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfDvSZo5kXJ
It was up to me to take my fate in my own paws.
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