Perfectly Flawed (7 page)

That was how Hilary met my mother; they were
in the same home a few times before a Scottish couple adopted them
both.

My mother was the product of a teenage
pregnancy and while the girl thought the beautiful baby she was
giving up would go to a good home, something that she couldn’t
provide, it turned out that my mother had a serious heart
condition, one that needed immediate attention and surgery. All
interested parents quickly backed away because they thought it was
too much effort. They even thought that she wouldn’t make it past
her second birthday. By the time it was over, she had the surgery,
she was good and even better than before, she was three years old.
Most people want to adopt babies, not toddlers. That was how my
mother found herself in foster care, bouncing from home to
home.

Hilary told me that when my mother spoke of
this, she would dive into this pit of depression, the old feelings
overwhelming her. She felt hurt and unloved and unwanted. Tears
would flood her large honey eyes. She was only in search of a
family to love and care for her the way she deserved the way her
birth mother intended.

As she searched for it, my mother decided to
look after a little redheaded girl with large green eyes and no
smile on her freckled face. My mother was older than Hilary by
seven years but that didn’t stop her from watching over Hilary when
they were in the system together. She felt that it was her duty to
keep Hilary on the good track, not letting her keep any, um… bad
company.

When my mother turned fourteen—Hilary was
seven—the same family took them both in. The couple couldn’t have
kids of their own and thought that fostering children was better
than nothing. Soon, my mother was adopted, as was my aunt, and they
were officially family. Hilary always told me how much of a dream
it seemed, to have a family
and
a sister.

My mother was the only family Hilary knew
before that.

Not long after that, the couple adopted a
four-year-old boy, Sam, adding him to the puzzle that was their
family. He fit like the perfect piece, adding dysfunction and love
to their lives.

Glancing around the room at the pictures
lining the walls—the pictures of Hilary and my mom, of Uncle Sam
and my mom, of my grandparents, of my siblings and my mom, of my
family as a whole one Christmas when I was two. It’s easy to assume
that they were just close friends—that they kept in touch after
they went to school together. My mother had dark chocolate skin and
long dark curls that sprang like a coiled mattress spring. She was
tall with model-like features. She had the body and motion of a
well-trained dancer, all grace and beauty. I look most like her,
I’m told on occasion.

I don’t see it.

Never have.

Hilary is short, just a millimeter north of
five-feet-one, with fair freckled skin and bright orange-red hair
that falls to her shoulders in an even line. Her eyes are a lovely,
vibrant green, like emeralds. She has an athletic body brought on
by running track and playing soccer, volleyball, and basketball
throughout high school and most of college.

With a small, tight smile, as if it’s taking
all that she can muster not to cry at the sight of me, she turns to
walk up the stairs, leaving me in the memory-decorated living room,
fighting the urge to cry myself.

Two

After Hilary leaves for the hospital, I’m tempted
just to lie back on the couch and nap. I’m tempted to dive into my
subconscious and swim among the darkness. The thought of sleeping
for a good ten hours or so is so overwhelming, so tantalizing, that
I can feel my body unconsciously lean back to succumb to the wanted
escape, but, unfortunately, I have work to do.
Damn
homework!
So I go and work on my remaining calculus problems
like a good little girl, successfully finishing what I couldn’t in
class. I practice my violin, playing through
Brandenburg
twice until my fingers can find the notes on their own. After that,
I am dressed in Spongebob Squarepants flannel sleep shorts, which I
bought because they were fuzzy, with
Beowulf
open in my
lap.

My alarm wakes me before I can even realize
that I fell asleep.
Beowulf
is on my chest, my body as the
bookmark. I only made it ten pages before I clonked out for the
night, succumbing to the pulls of my exhaustion.

Forcefully, I start my morning routine in a
hazy blur—too tired to move, really—still smiling, though. I
realize that I didn’t wake up screaming from a nightmare like a
normal morning.
That is great news!
My nights are usually
filled with scary, unseen moments coupled with the feeling of
drowning, suffocation, and falling, and my mornings are usually
spent stripping the nervous sweat from my body as I try and calm my
nerves before I face the rest of my day.

My celebratory happy dance is short but
sweet; only four twists of my Spongebob-clad hips because I don’t
dance. But I continue to bounce when I walk. I like the little hop
in my step, now that I think about it. I should be happy more
often.

I tug on my clothes, deciding on a pair of
light blue jeans, minus the frayed holes at the knee, a dark green
t-shirt that brings out my eyes, and a green beanie that I knitted
myself during the summer. Yes, I’m a nerd that likes to knit in her
spare time. I run down the stairs, still feeling euphoric, and flip
the lock on the door for Zephyr and Jamie. Like normal. It’s all
normal for me.

I distract myself, while singing a New
Medicine song lightly under my breath, as I slide everything I
need—all the finished homework, every large textbook, all pieces of
sheet music—into my striped Dakine backpack.

The door opens, the hinges crying out for
oil, and I turn to greet Zephyr with a wide smile on my face. I
wonder how he’ll act when he spies my good mood. He’s always the
first one to walk through the door, usually leaving Jamie to walk
over by herself and complain about being abandoned. Sometimes she
even smacks him on the back of the head. I normally have a
makeshift breakfast for them but I am running a little behind on my
normal schedule. The dancing threw me off.

Red drops splatter soundlessly against the
white carpet by the door, dripping from something long and
metallic, glinting in the early morning light streaming through the
thin slits in the venetian blinds. A knife—a large butcher
knife—the kind that you would normally find sitting in a wooden
block in your kitchen or sheathed for protection in a drawer,
that’s what my eyes identify, that’s what’s dripping.

…
blood?

It takes forced effort, but my eyes slowly
trail from the hand clutching the blade up the bare arm splattered
with red to the face that I don’t recognize but I
have
seen
somewhere. I stare into the ocean blue eyes, pale and dark like the
center of the Pacific Ocean, almost as deep as the Mariana Trench.
But familiar, so very familiar, as they stare back at me.

An eerie smile splits his stone face. It’s as
if he’s finally found something.
Me?

“Josie, honey,” the man says with a voice
that chills my blood, locks my bones in places, and freezes me
where I stand. The vibrato of his tone sends a strong chill down my
spine, shaking my body viciously. “I’ve been looking all over for
you,” he continues, his voice haunting.

Josie?

I heard the name Josie.

One day, Dr. Jett told me about
Fight
or
Flight
. Whether, when in a stressful, scary situation,
you fight your way through it or you flee to protect yourself from
it. Then she mentioned how some people add
Freeze
as one of
the options. That’s when you’re too scared to do anything, too
scared to move, too scared to scream, too scared to fight for your
very life.

I always wondered, hypothetically, what I
would do if I were in one of those types of situations. Would I
fight or take flight because I couldn’t possibly freeze. I couldn’t
possibly
let
something happen to me.

But I don’t move. I don’t flee. And I don’t
think that I can fight.

Instinct only tells me to scream. My instinct
tells me to scream loudly, and I do.

My body falls to the floor, my knees crashing
to the carpeted ground, because the sight of this man in my living
room holding a bloodied knife scares me too much to move in any
other way. I’m still screaming, unable to stop, unable to protect
myself when he walks over to me. I can feel his footsteps vibrate
against the floorboards, sending something similar to shards of
glass up my legs. He’s like an earthquake, shaking me until I fall
to the ground, my hands splayed against the carpet, and trying to
make myself smaller. I try to shrink away from whatever is
happening, what
this
is, and become invisible.

At this one moment—I only want to be
invisible.

Shaking like a leaf, I know that I’m unable
to prevent what’s inevitable.

His hand grips my shoulder, his fingernails
digging into my flesh, drawing blood, stealing a piece of me. His
voice growls for me to shut up, to stop screaming, but I can’t. I
won’t. This is all that I can do. This is all that my body will
allow me to do. This is…

“JOEY!” a familiar voice seeps in, crying for
my attention, warring with the man standing before me. I’m saved.
They won’t let this man, this beast; hurt me. “Joey, please wake
up,” the voice begs of me. My body shakes harder, vigorously
quaking back and forth.

My eyes pop open to stare into a pair of
blurry brown eyes, wide and scared, staring back at me. I open my
mouth, take a deep breath, and prepare to scream against, but then
I recognize the brown eyes—
they’re not here to hurt me, they’ll
never hurt me
—and I take another deep, shuddering breath.

“Zephyr?” I sigh, surprised with how much I’m
shaking.

He is sitting on the edge of my unkempt
bed—
what the hell happened to my blankets?
—shirtless.
Shirtless?
He’s also barefoot in flannel plaid pajama pants.
I can see the two tattoos on his side, the two quotes he had inked
into his skin by a tattoo artist that didn’t care he was
underage.

The memory of the day comes back to me,
pushing my dream from my brain. I was with him when he got them at
the beginning of the summer last June. The minute the last bell
rang signaling the end of the school year, we walked to the tattoo
shop near school.

I can still remember the alcoholic smell of
the shop, how it smelled clean and sterile. If they didn’t care
about our age, at least we could tell that they cared about
infection. I can still remember the wide, toothy smile on Zephyr’s
face when he sat down, leaning back in the seat,
before
the
needed started dancing along his skin. I can even remember how that
smile fell from his face after the guy drew the first line, the
needle stabbing his skin repeatedly.

All those memories draw my eyes to my left
wrist, the one that holds my own tattoo. It’s a treble clef,
simple. I couldn’t really think of anything else to permanently ink
onto my body.

But all those memories don’t comfort me now.
They quickly disappear in a vapor-like state, quickly covered by
the large man with the knife, the one that called me
Josie
and told me to shut up, to stop screaming. The man that was looking
for me.

I can feel Zephyr’s hands on my shoulders,
his grip tight and hard against my skin. I realize that it was him;
Zephyr, that I felt gripping into me, not the man with the knife.
The man with the knife never touched me, he never touched me,
he
never touched me
. He never got close enough to touch me.

It was only a dream, Joey
.

“Holy. Crap, Joey?” Zephyr snaps, letting out
a large sigh. He drops his head—I notice his long hair is tangled
and messy, wild about his head, as if he were in a hurry to get to
me, to save me from something. I silently thank him for that. “What
the
hell
was that?” he asks loudly.

I can’t answer that. As much as I want to
spill what’s in my brain, as much as I want to open up and let
Zephyr in, I can’t. That makes me a horrible person and a worse
friend. It hurts me, hurts my heart to keep this from him.

“What time is it?” I ask instead, hearing the
terrified tremble in my voice as I ignore his question. I grab my
glasses from the bedside table—I guess I took them off at some
point—sliding them onto my eyes, and everything blurry comes into
focus.

“Early,” he snaps.

Then it dawns on me that Zephyr is in my
room, in my house.
How the hell…?
I remember locking the
door after Hilary left for work, I know that she isn’t home now
otherwise it’d be her on my bedside, and I walked through the lower
floor—per my usual paranoid nightly routine—to make sure all
openings to the outside world were closed and locked. Three
times.

I’m a bit paranoid.

“How did you get in here?” I rest my hands on
his arms, feeling the muscles tense as he moves to better look at
me. His expression is angry but his eyes are kind, soft.

“Hilary gave my mom a spare key a while
back,” he replies.
That
I remember; I know that Molly,
Zephyr’s mother, keeps all the spare keys in the same place: on the
inside of a cupboard in the kitchen. I discovered that when I went
scrounging through their kitchen for food a few years ago.
Everything is labeled like you would see in Bree Van De Kamp’s
kitchen on
Desperate Housewives
. You know, before the show
ended. “In case of emergencies,” he continues, adding, “I thought
this
was an emergency, I could hear you screaming bloody
murder in my room.” If only he knew. “You woke me up, Jo.” My eyes
wander to my window—it’s closed, I made sure of that before I
crawled into bed. Across the alley, his bedroom is illuminated with
a bright yellow light. “You scared the crap out of me, Joey, what’s
up?”