Chapter 2 — Internal Struggle

I loved Saturdays. The restaurant had its busiest shift Saturday morning, so my father never missed it. That meant I got to wander the house on my own, doing whatever I wanted to.

That morning, I’d woken up when my father left. The garage door slammed shut behind him, and it jolted me awake. I hopped in the shower, and then changed into sleep shorts and my favorite old t-shirt. The pattern on it had long since faded, but it used to show the main character of my favorite movie. I’d worn the shirt so often that some of the areas had thinned to almost nothing, but that didn’t matter. No one else in the house would see me dressed like this. I knew when my father would come home, so I could hide out in my room.

As long as I didn’t make a mess, anyway.

I bounced out of my room and wandered into the kitchen. Our house didn’t have an open concept, and each room seemed like it belonged to a different house. My bedroom had been painted purple when my parents figured out my gender, and I still had most of the furniture from when I’d been a little girl. The only new thing was my bed, since my father destroyed the last one.

The hallway had wood floors, and the halls had been painted green nearly a decade ago. It had started to look worn and faded, but I doubted my father would repaint any time soon. From the hallway, I walked into the living room, which had a cushy feel to it. Fluffy brown carpets stretched across the room, with plush, leather furniture, and the television was quite large.

In comparison, the kitchen looked strange. We had a white backsplash, brown counters, white tiles and cabinets, with stainless steel appliances. My father hadn’t put much effort into the room I thought he cared the most about.

I brought my phone with me and set it down on the kitchen table after hitting play on some music. It started blasting out of the tiny speakers immediately, and I began to dance to it. Heavy bass and drums blared out of the speakers, and the singer belted out the lyrics like she feared no one would hear her otherwise.

I continued to dance and sing on my way over the fridge, where I found everything I needed for a nice breakfast. Eggs, bacon, and biscuits. Normally, I wouldn’t have been able to use the latter, because my father hated when I opened a package and stuck it back in the fridge. However, he had already opened these, and used up most of their contents.

The only thing I’d gotten from my father was the ability to cook. While the bacon started to sizzle, I got the biscuits in the oven and thought about how I wanted my eggs to be cooked. So many options…

I went with over easy, and about thirty minutes later, sat down at the table to eat my breakfast. The empty seats around me used to be upsetting. Back when I first came to live with my father after Mom died, anyway. She sat with me before, and we’d had a lot of fun together. She always insisted that I get something new to eat, and I’d listened to her talk about anything.

My parents had gotten divorced before I could even remember. Mom left Dad and took off with me. If a court hadn’t decided Dad earned visitation, I didn’t think I’d ever have seen him. It probably would’ve been for the best, too. Not that I would ever tell my father that.

My mother died just after I turned eight. The state handed me over to my father without a quarry, despite her will asking them not to. Sometimes, it was easier to ignore the warning signs, and that seemed doubly true of exhausted, busy social workers. So, I had lost my mother and had to live with the father that I barely knew.

He left me alone in the house a lot, because he had to work and thought babysitters would rob him blind. Or something like that. I used to turn on the television and just sit behind the couch, so it felt like I had someone to talk with. Then this horrible thing happened… where I got used to being alone.

The quiet didn’t seem so bad anymore. I could walk through the house, listening to the sounds it made. The settling and creaking became familiar. The way the wind would hit the windows didn’t seem so strange. I could sit alone in my room for hours, just reading a book.

I’d never had friends, so that didn’t seem strange to me. Maybe it should have, but I had gotten too used to the quiet. Sometimes, I went so long without talking that when I did, the sound of my own voice startled me. I’d spent plenty of days at school without anyone trying to draw me out of my shell, and Dad wouldn’t say anything to me if I didn’t give him reason to.

I finished off my breakfast, rinsed every dish in the sink, and put it in the dishwasher. Then I went out into the living room and plopped down on the sofa to watch some television. Catching up on my shows took barely any time, because I read more than I watched television.

Which meant that I had some more time to dance around the house, singing. I started doing just that, feeling a lightness in my chest. Feeling safe, at least for the next few hours. Before he decided to come back home. If I ever got friends, it would literally be for my own safety.

My elbow hit the lamp while I danced around. My heart shot into my throat, and I whipped around to grab it, only to catch air. The lamp caught the edge of the kitchen tile and broke into a thousand pieces.

I stared at the little shards as my chest got that tight feeling and my throat closed up.

It’s okay, I thought, Just a lamp. Nothing important. He can’t get upset over a lamp, right? Just clean it up, and make sure that you get every little shard of glass. It’ll be all right. He won’t notice it right away, probably. How often do we even use lamps? It’s okay. Just start moving. Just pick up your feet and start moving. Walk.

The words kept repeating in my head, but I couldn’t seem to get the signal to my feet. I had to get moving, though, because standing there meant nothing got done.

Move.

I sucked in a hard breath that hurt my throat and lungs. When I let the breath out, it felt like my body remembered how to work. I stepped around the glass, and rushed into the garage, where we kept our vacuum and broom. I grabbed both, and ran back into the house, where I immediately cut my feet on broken glass.

A spot of blood appeared on the carpet.

My chest felt even tighter, and I ran from the living room, down the hall, and to my small bathroom. I sat on the toilet, with my feet dangling into the bathtub. No air came into my lungs, and I’d braced myself against the wall. Each second felt like an hour where I couldn’t breathe right.

Can’t stay here forever. You have to fix what you’ve done. Move, move, move. Get up. Stand up. Do something.

I slammed some bandages onto my feet and dashed from the bathroom to my bedroom. Once there, I pulled on socks and shoes. Another trip out into the garage provided me with carpet cleaner and the mop. I vacuumed the carpet thoroughly, until I felt like every piece of glass had been picked up. Then I got down on my hands and knees to start scrubbing the blood from the fibers.

All in all, I spent about two hours trying to make sure that I got every part of the house cleaned up. I vacuumed three times, scrubbed the carpet four, mopped twice, and I only stopped because I knew my father would be home soon and I needed to hide.

My feet hurt, and when I pulled my shoes off, I found bloody socks. After changing those bandages, I laid in my bed, curled into a ball, and prayed.

Dad came home fifteen minutes after I laid down. My stomach tensed and I curled up even tighter.

Please, don’t notice anything. Please.

I listened as he rummaged around in the kitchen, probably looking for something to drink. Then his heavy footfalls started to move through the house, making my throat close up. One wrong thing, and my father would come at me like an angry bull. He walked through the living room, and his footfalls started to get softer… as he headed to his bedroom.

I went limp on my bed, closing my eyes in relief.

Mom would be so upset by this.

Mom doesn’t exist anymore.

My Saturday had been ruined, but now that my father had gone to his room, I felt like I could relax. I picked a book off my shelf, one called Your Heart is Mine, by my favorite author, Nicole Thorn. I sat down on the mattress, and started to flip through it, my hand resting against my cheek. She had set the book in a world far different from the one I lived in, and I thought I enjoyed it because of that. One where monsters didn’t exist, and parents mostly just ignored their children.

It seemed nice.

***

Something crashed against my wall, and I shot into a sitting position. The book fell from my chest and hit the ground next to the bed.

A second later, I heard my father scream, “Whilda!”

I flinched at the sound of my name and jumped off the bed. In doing so, I ended up kicking the book underneath. I barely noticed, because my heart had begun to race, and I had to double over, bracing my hands against my knees. “No, no, no,” I whispered, the soft, sweet sound of my voice strange in my ears. It had been so long since I’d said anything, I forgot what I’d sounded like.

His thundering footsteps came down the hall. The closer they got, the harder it became for me to breathe. My eyes darted around the room, and I stared at my window. It looked so normal. Just a window, with a screen to keep bugs out. It didn’t work all that well, since a dead spider sat between the glass and the screen. It would be so easy for me to open that window, pop the screen, and get out of the house. Get away from my father. Mom would’ve wanted me to do that. I didn’t know why it seemed so hard for me to get my feet moving.

Just leave.

A meaty hand slammed against my closed door, and I flinched away from the sound. The second hit had my door swinging open and slamming into the wall. I turned around to see my father standing there. He never looked scary to other people. I could tell from how they interacted. He stood just under six feet, with a whipcord thin body, a balding head, and faded blue eyes that matched mine. People acted like he couldn’t be a threat. Like a man that small couldn’t hurt a thing.

He scared me more than anything.

Dad stepped into the room and seemed to take up all the air. “What the fuck happened?” he asked.

I opened my mouth but had to try twice to talk. “What do you mean?” Stupidly, I thought maybe I could diffuse the situation.

“The lamp is missing, and there’s a bunch of broken glass in the trashcan,” he said. “What the hell happened?”

Funny how it could become so hard to breathe, when I hadn’t done anything but stand there. I also felt stupid for not emptying the trashcan. I had gone to so much effort, making sure my father didn’t see what happened. I could’ve lied if he hadn’t seen the glass, saying I didn’t know what happened to the lamp. He might’ve thought someone else took it, or that he moved it. I didn’t know. I could’ve tried, though.

But he had seen the broken glass.

Swallowing, I said, “It fell over.”

“Fell over?” Dad asked, taking another step closer to me. “Or it was knocked over?”

“I bumped into it, and knocked it over,” I admitted.

All the humanity seemed to drain out of my father’s eyes. My shoulders curled inward, as I waited for his fists to land on me. They would hit my arms, my stomach, my chest. Each blow would hurt, but I wouldn’t make a sound. He hated it when I made noise. He said that I wanted the neighbors to hear and call the police. That was why he usually waited until night fell before he hit me. No one would come to save me then.

Dad didn’t reach for me. He stormed over to my nightstand and ripped it up. I ducked down, images of being nailed with the piece of furniture running through my head. Instead, it hit the wall by my desk, adjacent to me. A hole appeared, along with chipped plaster and paint. The nightstand fell to the ground with the sound of splintering wood. It rolled to a stop, and I saw the cracks in the drawer.

“How do you like when I break your things?” my father asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was an accident.”

He sneered at me and grabbed the nightstand again. “Accident? I don’t believe that. You need to learn how to respect what doesn’t belong to you.” He slammed the nightstand down on the floor with all his power, and the wood splintered even more. The drawer broke in half, and I flinched at the sound.

Dad stormed over to the bed and flipped it onto its side. The mattress hit me, knocking me back against the window. My pillows and blankets went flying, while he shoved the bedframe around. The metal ripped at my carpet, pulling it up in a hard line.

I had to scramble out of the way, if I didn’t want to get hit.

Finally, my dad turned to my bookshelf. My wonderful bookshelf, with such a modest collection of novels on it. Every birthday and Christmas, I would just ask for gift cards. I’d save every penny that I found and take every deal that I could find from authors looking for reviews, trying to build up the collection. I’d barely managed to fill up a bookshelf. I loved each of those books, even the ones I hated, because they belonged to me. I loved that I could read them without having to stop by the library, and I loved being able to hold them in my hands and smell the ink.

I stood up, opening my mouth to beg for the lives of the books that I adored. My father moved before I could. He grabbed the edge of the shelf and ripped it away from the wall. The entire thing, the cheap shelf that I’d bought at a garage sale two years before plus my precious books, all came down.

The shelf hit the ground with a resounding crack, and I flinched upon seeing it. One of the books got caught halfway under the shelf, so that the spine had been smooshed to the floor.

“I’m sorry!” I said, because I could still salvage those books. “I should have been more careful. I’m so sorry!”

My father didn’t even look at me as he started to stomp on the bookshelf, destroying it even more. I would’ve rather he beaten me. He grabbed the books off the ground, throwing them, ripping them down the middle, slamming his foot on the destroyed pages.

The strength went out of my legs, and I sank to the ground. My father eventually stopped, his breath sawing in and out of his mouth and his shoulders shaking. He glanced back at me, his eyes still too bright, looking almost delighted with what he had done.

He didn’t say anything as he walked out of the room.

I scooted back, so that my shoulders could rest against the wall. I stretched my legs out, staring down at them. I’d kept my socks on, to hold the bandages to my feet. One of them had a smiley face on it, and the other had a cartoon dog. They looked too cheerful for what just happened in this room.

All my things laid around me, ruined or broken. If I left for the rest of the day, my father would give me that beating that I feared. It would hurt, I’d cry, and life would feel grosser than it already did.

My chest hurt.

When I felt like I could move without falling over again, I pushed to my feet. I wanted to take care of the nightstand first, because that would bother me the least. I could live without a nightstand. Instead, my feet carried me right over to the bookshelf, to rip off this most painful band-aid immediately.

I knelt down and lifted the bookshelf. It cracked in two immediately, leaving me with the top half. I set it aside, and then moved the bottom half. The individual shelves, I set against the wall. Then I stared down at what remained of my books. Dad had ripped most of them to shreds and their pages laid around my room like body parts off a corpse. I wanted to look at what could be saved, though.

I went through everything and started to cry when I realized that all the books had been damaged. Every single one of them. Most had pages torn clean out of them, others had cracked spines, one had been ripped right down the middle. My pile of ruined books got bigger and bigger, while the pile of salvaged ones looked so small, innocuous. Five books. Only five. I’d gotten them all from giveaways online. I’d spent hours scouring social media sites, looking for these books, and then losing the giveaways I entered. Two of the books I didn’t even like, but it still hurt to see them so damaged.

Those five books went to my desk, and I started making a pile of trash to clean up the next day, when my father left to do the grocery shopping. If he saw the mess, he’d just get angry again.

Next, I righted the bed, and realized that I hadn’t stopped crying as I did so. It took twice as long to walk around, gathering all my pillows and blankets, mostly because I kept stopping to stare at my pile of dead books. It shouldn’t have mattered so much. I knew that one day, he would probably wreck them. I knew it down in my heart, but that didn’t matter, because they had been mine.

As I picked up the blanket, the book I’d been reading before appeared. Your Heart is Mine sat on the floor, staring back up at me. Untouched. Unblemished. Undamaged.

A sob escaped me as I bent to pick up the novel. It felt good in my hands, and I walked it over to my little pile of salvaged books. Six. Now, I had six. A small, insulting number compared to what I had started the day out with, but a good start to a new collection. Another day spent online, hunting for more giveaways, and maybe I’d have seven.

Even if I got new books, I had nowhere to put them. A problem for another day.

I spent the next several hours trying to get my room back together. When I did, I just wanted to sleep.

The siren outside went off, and my eyes opened again.

When my father last destroyed my room, he had ripped the blinds off my window, so that I only had curtains. Because of that, I could stare out my window at certain angles, without having to move the curtains. Which meant that I could watch the humans scramble around outside, trying to get indoors before the siren stopped blaring in fifteen minutes.

The sun had started to set, and everyone needed to run and hide.

My neighbors all came out of their houses, grabbed their children, and rushed back indoors. I laid in my bed, watching through the small slit in my curtain as it became darker outside. Until the sun had vanished completely. The siren shut off, and I counted to three hundred in my head.

The streetlights all came on as one. They illuminated the darkish evening, including the houses across the street. The ones without gates surrounding them. I’d sat up many nights before, watching through the window out of curiosity as the Nightmares started to move. Some part of me always thought they would change, that some illumination would come onto them.

That never happened, and I mostly felt confused.

Fifteen minutes after the streetlights came on, the house across the street open its doors. A man wearing a business suit came out with four small children in tow. One of them looked no older than four, one about seven, and the last two couldn’t have been older than ten. They all stood on the front porch, watching their father as he secured the house behind him.

He checked the lock twice and then took his youngest child’s hand. They walked to the car that had been parked in the driveway—a Volvo. He opened the back door and ushered his children inside the car before climbing into the driver’s seat and taking off. Along the sidewalks, I watched other people moving. Teenagers, headed for school, leading their little siblings. I didn’t see any small children wandering around alone. I never had, either.

I laid in my bed, watching the Nightmares move, and remembered what my mother had always told me. She said that when the siren sounded, calling for sunset, I had to get inside. The night didn’t belong to us, she said. And once inside, I had to stay there until the siren for dawn came. Because the daylight didn’t belong to them.

When we were younger, our teachers would spend an entire lesson plan teaching us about Nightmares. About how, when the humans and the Nightmares started to dispute, it became ugly. The wars had been brutal, and humans hadn’t fared well. They came up with this plan, so that both races could survive. Humans got the daylight, and Nightmares got the darkness.

I’d learned this history lesson every year since grade school, but no one would tell us what Nightmares could do. They said that only the police were allowed to know. Otherwise, another epidemic could start. I’d heard rumors, though, and seen things on the news that suggested how dangerous Nightmares could be. It seemed wise to stay inside during the dark hours of the day, to avoid them.

Yet, laying there in bed, watching them walk around, I found it hard to believe that they could be dangerous. They looked normal. The parents ushered their kids into the car with familiar urgency. The teenagers goofed around on the sidewalks, on their way to school. The little kids liked to play around. They didn’t seem any different from humans.

I glanced at the pile of trash in my room, and thought, Then again, no one would believe my father could do this, either.