Hi everyone. I've had this story in a folder for a while, and I just now decided to bring it back. I think I'm getting inspiration for it again. Yes, I know it's rough. That's why I need all of you to tear it apart! Hope you enjoy the read, and I look forward to hearing your opinions.
Chapter One
The bridge was dark and lonely. Now and then a car zoomed past, but never once did one stop to take notice of me, to acknowledge the girl standing on the rail, looking down. I was only a shadow against the river, nearly invisible. It was understandable that no one saw me.
The toes of my shoes hung over the metal just a little. My own taunt against the danger of balancing so precariously on the thin rail.
My face ached. There would be bruises tomorrow. Bruises that people would pretend not to see, or be too frightened to ask about. Funny how living in a world so full of people and living things could feel so empty and isolated. Even standing in a crowd, I felt cold and alone. Even as I breathed, and my heart beat, I felt so dead.
“Get a grip,” my brother would say.
“Quit feeling sorry for yourself,” Mom would snap. I heard their voices in my ear as if they were standing right behind me.
Yet both of them had their own problems. Did Justin tell anyone about the porn he couldn’t seem to tear himself away from, tell anyone about the nightmares he had in the middle of the night?
And Mom. Where to start with Mom. She went through boyfriends like I went through a bag of Pizza Combos. Nothing made her happy, and sometimes I would look at her and catch this desolate, helpless look on her face. She seemed so lost and desperate to find whatever it was that would fill the hole inside her.
And I knew she had a hole; there was no doubt about it. Because I had a hole. It was right in my chest, unseen but absolute. We all had holes. It was something I’d learned as a little girl.
“Mommy, why are you crying?” I would ask her when I found her crumpled on the couch. And she’d look at me with her bloodshot eyes, smiling bitterly.
“I’m not crying. You have to have a heart to cry, and mine’s been torn out of my chest, so that’s impossible. Must be the cold getting to me.”
Funny how the truth lies in the words that are supposed to avoid it the most. We were all experts at lying, and all experts at knowing whenever the other was lying. It was all a pattern. Justin was the only one who bothered to ask when he sensed that I was pulling an act. And if it was something stupid, like the kids at school whispering about my weird hair that I had tried to cut myself or the threadbare clothes we’d picked up at a Salvation Army somewhere in Portland, he’d forget about it and go his own way again.
That was the way we’d developed, us Diamond’s. No, seriously, that’s our name. Diamond. It used to be a good ground for jokes on holidays and special occasions. Back when Mom actually cared about our lives and when Dad was alive.
Oh, honey, she’d exclaim, unwrapping a small Christmas present, what is it? A diamond?
Dad’s eyes would twinkle. Now, why would I get you a diamond, he would reply, when you have one sitting right next to you? And then Mom would huff at him and he’d laugh, trying to kiss her on the cheek as she playfully pushed him away. One of the few memories I could remember.
I missed those days. The good days. I called them the Distant Days. They seemed like another lifetime, lived by different people.
They were like the fog that hovered over the ground when I looked out the window of the trailer in the mornings. It appeared to be so real, substantial, but when you walked out and tried to touch it, all of it seemed to disappear around you and was so untouchable. That was what my memories of those days felt like. Had they really happened? I had a lot of trouble remembering. At the oddest times pictures popped into my head, like Justin and Dad having a wrestling match on the floor, or Dad bringing me a small stuffed dog home from work. I used to turn to my brother, and ask him if he remembered any of it happening.
“No Cassidy,” Justin said when I asked him. “Those days didn’t happen. None of those things ever happened. Don’t think about it. Your mind is just playing tricks on itself.”
Sometimes he said things that didn’t make sense.
Most of everything didn’t make sense to me, anymore.
The river rushed beneath me, loud and glittering. It looked cold. Would it feel cold against my already-chilled skin? Probably only for a moment. It would only hurt for a moment.
Are you afraid? that tiny inner voice I’d started to hate and long for all at once whispered. It was the voice I heard when I was most dead inside, had sunk to the lowest point. When I heard it, conceded to its dares, I felt warm again, felt as if I was brave and strong and untouchable. No one would dare do the things I did, because they feared for their lives. I wasn’t like that.
“That’s because everyone else isn’t stupid,” Justin snapped when I told him. “They’re not suicidal. Don’t listen to that voice, Cassidy. Or I swear to God I’ll have you put in one of those nut bins. You should already be in one.” Then, if he was feeling really irritated or mean, he would add, “Remember what happened last time you listened to it?”
But I listened to it now, just as I had many times before. It fascinated me, the rawness, the pure power of it. Just to see if I could do it, I lifted my foot, now standing on only one foot on the icy, slippery bridge rail. My leg trembled as I struggled to remain upright, and I uttered a short, insane laugh.
See? I’m not afraid.
Another car passed, the engine rumbling and the radio blasting. I looked over my shoulder, wondering if they would be able to see my silhouette against the moon, but apparently not. It kept going. Just like everyone around me, just like the days and time itself. Going, going, going. Would it ever stop and let me catch up?
“You’re worthless.” Adam’s voice, throaty and sneering. I closed my eyes and could picture his face, drawing nearer. He was the one I had been with earlier, the one that had hit me across the face until my head spun. “I saw you at that bash with Rita’s cousin, Cassidy. You think I wouldn’t find out? Think I wouldn’t know? Huh? Huh?”
I said nothing. Didn’t defend myself, didn’t even cry when my nose spurted blood. I was used to pain. Adam had learned this long ago, so he got tired of it after a while.
“I ever catch you with another guy again, you won’t get off so easy,” he muttered, raking a hand through his greasy hair and turning away. “Get outta here, Cassidy.”
Calmly, quietly, I took up my bag and my sweatshirt, slipping out the door. I was good at disappearing—always had been. Even when I was little, Mom told me I would vanish for hours at a time, and cause all of them to go into a panic, looking for me and thinking I had been kidnapped. After the din had died down and everyone was convinced I’d been kidnapped, I would appear again, serenely slipping onto Justin’s lap. I was punished, and people demanded to know where I had been, but apparently I never answered, and only asked for Pizza Combos or juice.
Odd that I couldn’t remember any of this, not even glimpses or phrases. It was as if the majority of all the years up to my thirteenth birthday had just vanished. Up till the day the police came home and told Mom that Dad had been shot on duty, trying to intercept a gas station robbery. Justin told me later, before he’d become a hermit, that I’d done nothing, had no reaction to the news. I disappeared for a few hours, and came back only when the police were gone and Mom had cried herself to sleep. My cake went uneaten, my presents unopened. Turning thirteen turned out to be nothing but a black hole that I would continue to fall in for years to come.
“Why can’t you just stop asking questions, Cassidy?” Mom would mutter angrily, shoving me aside after one of my desperate attempts to remember. “It’s in the past. No point in going back.”
Our tiny house was filled to the brim with resentment and anguish. I couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand what I knew was happening behind Justin’s door, couldn’t stand the horror movies Mom always insisted on watching, thinking that watching other people’s tortures and fears and pains would distract her from her own. If I tried to fall asleep at home, I had to fall asleep to the sound of screams or suspense music. Oftentimes I would just lie there, staring at the peeling yellowed wall, trying to block all of it out.
That was when I started spending the nights at Adam’s. I didn’t have any girl friends anymore—I’d been put into the freak-she’ll-come-to-school-some-day-with-a-gun category, and the guys who were into drug dealing or partying seemed to be the only ones willing to spend time with me at all. Oh, there were the girls who invited me to church. But if their God couldn’t save my Dad, what made them think He could save me?
Adam treated me pretty good, most of the time. It was only when he found out about my little excursions that he turned into a monster. I stayed with him, because most of the time the beatings were deserved. I did cheat on him a lot. He had seen me dancing pretty intimately with Rita’s cousin. Okay, we’d been grinding. So I didn’t blame him for flipping.
There were rocks below. If I were to jump, would those rocks tear my skin? Break my bones? How long would it take for me to die?
My leg muscles were screaming, my whole body tense. I was still balancing on one foot, still tempting fate. What would be my last thought, if I were to plummet into that river?
A breeze picked up, gently raking its fingers through my hair. I tipped my head back, closing my eyes. I bet no one ever thought about how life could collide with death so drastically. When I was staring death in the face, my entire body tingled—I never felt as alive as I did in the moments when I hovered on the edge of eternal darkness.
My leg wouldn’t be able to support me much longer. Soon it would crumple, and I would fall down to the river below. The icy waters would close in around me. What would happen then? When I was dead, would I still have the hole in my chest, the pain? Or would everything just be… peaceful.
“Are you in, Cassidy, or are you out?” Minnie’s small, pointed face, those shrewd, dark eyes. She had a place of her own, was one of the few who didn’t care who or what I was. The main reasons I’d chosen to be friends with her.
“In,” I said, reaching out and taking the bowl from her.
I’d heard all about drugs in school, had learned all about the negative effects it would have on your life, your system. And the first time I slipped inhaled from that bowl under my skin, it did scare me. But I was desperate, so desperate, to find a way without the dullness, the painful knowledge that there was something I didn’t want to remember.
I kept going back to Minnie, and the slight fear of the danger vanished. It became an escape. Not the one I’d had in mind, but it was enough. I forgot about my drunken, angry mother, my unresponsive, uncaring brother. Forgot about the shabby trailer we lived in, forgot about my failing grades and Adam and the quiet, persistent thoughts of death.
But you can only run so far before the past catches up with you. There’s no place you can hide, no reason to give to it to make it disappear. And I had so many regrets.
So the question was, as I stood on the bridge, whether or not I would give in to that fear. Was it weakness or strength that urged me to do this? Thought or recklessness?
When I was small, there had been a dog. A lab of some kind, named Tricia. Mom told me once that Tricia had stood over me as I played, and followed me wherever I went around the neighborhood. Like everything else in my life, Tricia disappeared one day. Mom told me she must have run off with some other dogs, but she had that look parents have sometimes, and I knew that Tricia must have been hit by a car or something.
For some reason, an image of that dog flashed through my mind as I stood over the river. Why was it that I could partly remember her—Tricia had black fur, and a wet snout—but I couldn’t recall one moment with my own father?
You warm, Cassidy? His anxious words… a whispered question…
“Hey! What are you doing?”
There was a group of kids crossing the bridge, two girls and boys. A guy was running toward me, and when he ran beneath one of the buzzing lights, I briefly caught a glimpse of a tattoo on his neck before I jumped down to the safety of the sidewalk, snatching up my bag and sprinting off into the darkness.
“What’s the rush, honey?” some girl shouted, staggering up, giggling drunkenly. She leaned on the guy who’d called out.
He shrugged her off, staring after me. “Wait!” he said, sounding oddly desperate.
I whipped away, speeding up, my sneakers pounding against the pavement as I ran off the bridge and onto the road.
I found a dry nook beneath the bridge, and huddled, listening as the group walked off, loud and laughing. The tattooed guy didn’t try to come find me, and my muscles relaxed when I realized that he’d kept going with the others.
After everything was quiet and calm again, I walked out to stand in the faint moonlight. The trickling waters glowed silver, and I squatted, scooping up a handful. It was freezing.
Not tonight, I decided, letting the water drip back onto the ground through the cracks in between my fingers. Not tonight.
I straightened, brushing myself off with my now-wet hand. I looked around me, and suddenly it seemed too isolated, too dark. I slipped my arms through the straps of my bag, and headed for home.
I figured heroin is much mroe serious and would affect her life more than I would want for the story. So that's the mistake with the sentence - slipped the needed under my skin, inhaled from the bowl... I don't know which one I should use just yet. But thanks, again, for spotting it.
