Page 26 of My Rules for Revenge (Twisted YA Mysteries #1)

A fter school, I dreaded going home. We lived in a cramped apartment in an old, decrepit building near the highway. There were homeless people who lived on the street corners leading up to my house. I saw them so often I could still remember their faces.

One of them usually shouted very hurtful words at me. He had half his hair missing, and his dirty toes poked out through his greasy black shoes. He also had no teeth, so I mostly heard angry gibberish.

It wasn’t the best place, but my parents weren’t rich—they just did what they could with what they had. I just wish my family were calmer and more stable. I forgave them for not having a lot of money. I couldn’t forgive them for having a household that was in constant turmoil.

My parents usually fought six times a week.

I often came home to a fiery, screaming match that upset my stomach and my nerves.

I was then forced to run to my room, where I would lock myself in until late at night.

That’s when I would sneak downstairs to eat something that my mother had cooked.

By then, the fighting would’ve died down as my father watched his late-night soccer matches on TV.

On one particular day, when I walked inside my house, I heard nothing but silence—it was unprecedented. Usually, if they weren’t fighting, my father would be complaining about his job to my mother, who had to listen to him.

When I walked into the kitchen, I saw my mother washing dishes. I went over to greet her. When I saw her face, she was crying. I knew something was very wrong. A painful lump formed in my throat as I prepared for whatever news I would inevitably hear.

“Hey, Mom. What’s wrong?”

“I’m okay, honey. It’s nothing.”

“Oh…okay,” I replied as usual.

My mom brushing me off like that was nothing new. She wanted to always stay strong and never show me weakness. That’s the way she was raised, I guess.

“How was school? How are your studies?” she asked.

“School was good. I’m doing well in my classes,” I replied.

“How are your grades? Do you still have straight A’s?”

“I have one B, but I’ll fix it,” I said hesitantly.

“I know you will, honey. You’ll get that scholarship to Bright Rock or wherever. You’re an incredible student. You work so hard.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“You’ll be great at chemistry. That’s still what you want to do, right?”

“Yeah, I want to be a chemical engineer. It’s interesting stuff, Mom.”

“That sounds excellent!” she exclaimed.

I sensed a tinge of sadness in her voice.

Something was definitely on her mind, but I never pressed her to talk when I saw her like that, because it was typical in my culture for people to keep their issues internalized.

You just learned to deal with it and not burden others with your problems. Unfortunately, I learned that too late, and that in itself is a problem.

“I need to talk to you, Indira,” she requested.

That day was different. If she wanted to talk to me about something serious that was going on, it meant it was something huge. Something that she couldn’t hide from me.

I softly nodded and sat down at our wooden dining table. My mother sat right in front of me. She looked at me with gloomy eyes.

“Your father isn’t home, so we have the chance to talk,” she explained.

“Okay. What’s going on?”

“Indira, it is a wonderful thing when two people fall in love and get married. However, the passion in the marriage that was once there can deteriorate. It can slowly die,” she sadly remarked.

“Why are you telling me this? What’s going on?”

“I’ve never told you this before, but your father and I had a marriage of convenience back in Nicaragua. His parents and my parents practically forced us to be together,” she explained.

“Oh, wow! That’s something.”

They never revealed this to me, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. I knew since I was young that their pairing seemed a bit engineered—more about convenience than love.

“I love your father, Indira, but lately it’s been hard to keep going.”

“I know, Mom. I get it.”

My mom began to sob as she wiped away her tears.

“Sweetie, I think your father is sleeping with another woman.”

I felt like I was about to throw up. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.

Seeing my mother’s deeply hurt face didn’t help.

Despite everything he had done to us, I couldn’t believe he was capable of this.

I knew he was an old man with a bad temper, but that was disgraceful and disgusting, and I never felt more ashamed to be his daughter.

I knew my mother was telling the truth because she never spoke to me about these things.

“Mom, that’s horrible. Oh my god. What led you to think that?”

“He’s been coming home late, and his shirts have the smell of a woman’s perfume. You don’t notice how late he comes home because you’re usually in your room studying,” she explained.

“Jesus Christ. I can’t believe this.”

“I’m only telling you this because I didn’t want you to find out from anyone else. I wanted it to come from me,” she clarified.

“Why? Why would he do that? You’re always trying to please him. This doesn’t make any sense.”

“I don’t know. Some men, no matter how hard we try, are impossible to please,” she pointed out.

A strong seed of hatred began to grow in my heart that day. I wanted to beat my father’s head in with a sledgehammer. I wanted him gone.

“He’s dead to me,” I declared.

“Honey, listen to me. I know this is a very, very difficult thing to hear. Trust me, I was crying for hours while you were at school. I cried until there were no tears left. I’m still crying now.

I wanted to kill him. I wanted to strangle him and scream at him until he died, but I can’t do that,” she said.

“You should,” I recommended.

“Your father and I have our issues, but I want to try to work things out with him. I want to forgive him.”

“Mom, no. How can you forgive him? Forget about that. You need to leave him. No, we need to leave him. I don’t want to see him ever again.”

“That’s not realistic, honey. He pays all the bills, and he pays for my school. I can’t support us if we leave. I’m also terrified of what he might do if I tried to divorce him,” she explained.

I grew angrier and angrier at the prospect that we were imprisoned by this one man’s hand.

“Mom, this is crazy. He’s a horrible person. You should take him to court and make him divorce you. Then you’ll get child support, and we’ll be okay.”

“I understand the way you feel, sweetie. Listen, I’ve been thinking this over for a long time.

I’ve considered all my options and all the possible outcomes.

The best option for me is to forgive him and to work things out with him.

This is not only for my sake but also for yours.

He’s a very angry man. I don’t want to provoke him.

I’m not entirely sure how he would react to me leaving him.

I don’t want to find out,” she said pessimistically.

I got most of my qualities from my mother, Claudia Guerra.

Despite her poor upbringing, my grandmother had sent her to a religious academy where the education was top-notch.

Despite being a housewife, she was a well-spoken, intelligent woman.

She wasn’t doing too well in her online classes because my father constantly harassed her.

If she were left alone, she would have excelled. This I knew for a fact.

Unfortunately, my mother was a pretty introverted person who rarely revealed her feelings.

Whenever she fought with my father, she would repeatedly tell him to leave her alone and to let her be.

She never revealed that she felt he was tormenting her or that he was the reason she was failing her classes.

She didn’t want to argue at all, which made my father more upset.

It was so frustrating living under their roof.

Their arguments typically ended with my mother offering to do something for him to appease him.

It was a constant cycle of toxicity that never ended.

“Mom, are you sure you want to work things out with him?”

“I am. You know I love you, and I only want the best for you. This would be for the best.”

I wasn’t sure what to say next, so I stood up and hugged her.

I knew that the best thing for me would’ve been for my mom to leave my father.

That man was a storm of violence who brought thundering, gray clouds over our heads whenever he was around.

I didn’t want things to end that way. I stayed up the whole night thinking and decided that I would do something about it.

I couldn’t just let my mom stay with a tyrant. I needed to make things right.

In the meantime, my problems at home were the last thing I wanted to think about. For the rest of that week, I couldn’t wait to go to the movies with Heather and Vivian. I was looking forward to it.

I lied to my mother that I was going to study at the library and scurried down the street to Vivian’s car.

She told me to ask permission from my father as well, but there was no way that was happening.

I considered my relationship with him officially nonexistent.

He lost that privilege with me. I didn’t care that he paid for everything.

He somehow worsened the rift our family already had and blew everything up for good.

When I got inside Vivian’s car, Heather screamed at me. According to her, that was her way of showing me she was happy to see me. I screamed back because she scared me. Vivian screamed because she also got scared. We all got a good laugh out of that. It helped me forget my issues at home.