Page 126 of Phobia

She didn’t want to listen when I told her that I couldn’t go back. Not that I didn’t want to, I simply couldn’t. Every single memory I had from Seattle was now tarnished by that one night, when the monster I didn’t expect decided to tear through my innocence, taking away all the bits of me. The bits I never wanted to give away.

She didn’t want to hear the word depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.We didn’t have that in our time, she said when I begged her to let me stay at home, to lick my wounds in peace, in private, where no one could see how much the once vibrant Danika Eleara Ascelin fell. My mother, Laura Montgomery, didn’t even try to understand what had happened.

Not that I wanted to talk about it, but she should’ve tried to at least listen. To hold me when the nightmares became too much to bear, and when the stale scent of sweat he had that night was an omnipresent entity, reminding me of the night that changed everything.

“Eleara!” she blasted, coming closer to my bed in the tiny room I used to call mine. “Are you even listening to me?”

“I’m listening,” I answered flatly, looking at that spot on the wall that we never covered. The indent where my father had slammed his fist when my mother asked him for a divorce. The indent that, just like so many other things in my life, would stay with me for years to come.

Ten years ago, on the same day, the same night—Devil’s Night—instead of serving her famous roasted chicken and potatoes, my mother served divorce papers, tearing our family apart. I didn’t blame her, I never did, but she maybe should’ve done it better. Their divorce was an impending thing, just waiting to happen. I knew it when I was seven years old, and I knew it when I was nine, but it didn’t make it any easier listening to their screaming and shouting, calling each other names, regretting that they ever married.

I could almost hear my father’s words, even now, so many years later, when he stormed inside my room, looking at me with so much fury, so much pain.You will always be my daughter,he'd murmured as my mom screamed at him to get the fuck out.

He'd slammed his fist into the wall in a fit of rage, making me jump from my bed.

That was the last time I ever saw him.

“Do you know what day it is, Mom?” I asked her, turning my eyes to look at her. I’d avoided looking directly at her lately, because I feared she would be able to see the void in my eyes, the one I saw every time I looked at myself in the mirror.

“Monday,” she answered, confused. “Eleara.” God, I hated when she used my middle name instead of my given name. “You have to get up. Go out, take a walk. God.” She huffed, placing her hands on her hips. “I can’t do this anymore with you. If you’re not going to go back to college, then you’ll have to find something else to do. A job, a hobby, something. The library has an open position and—”

“No.” I stopped her incessant rambling. I wasn’t going to be like her. I wasn’t going to work in the library just because she did. I wanted my own life, to build my own destiny, to not repeat the same mistakes she did. “I’m going to go to City Hall today and see if there are any openings,” I murmured, lying through my teeth, but I wanted her gone.

I couldn’t stand to look at her, to feel the disdain in her words, in her gaze.

Her lips thinned, her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything. She simply nodded and walked out of the room without a second glance. “I’ll be out late,” she yelled loud enough for me to hear. “Don’t wait up.”

I wouldn’t.

I stopped waiting a long time ago.

***

Winworth was special, but not in the way that Disney World was special, or one of those places with pretty sunsets and long beaches, where the air tasted like happiness and the laughter was something you could hear on every single corner.

No, Winworth had none of that.

Sometimes it felt as if someone had simply vacuumed all the joy from this town, leaving behind the slithering sadness, crawling over the walls of the houses that looked so pretty, but oozed with sorrow. There was no future here, and if you were one of the few lucky ones who managed to get out and live their lives somewhere far away from Winworth, you knew how much better those other places were.

There was always something weird about the thick forest surrounding us, and the stares from the people on the streets, as if they all knew a secret you weren’t privy to. There was a sickness spreading from deep beneath the ground, spreading its poisonous vines from the West Side to the East, where the Morass Asylum was located, visible from where I stood right now.

A river separated Winworth on the sides, and I always found it funny that we actually lived on the West Side where all the rich families resided, pretending we were one of them, when we most definitely were not. I went to school with them, with all those rich kids who knew there was something better for them out there.

Most of them were a few years older than me, but I could still remember Judah Blackwood and his entourage strolling through school as if they owned the place. In a way, they actually did. All but one. The one I could never quite read, the forever enigma—Lazarus Morass.

The only surviving member of the family.

The teenager who lived in an asylum his father used to run. He was four years older than me, untouchable, regal, and I never dared trying to talk to him. No one did.

No one except for Mikaela Harper, who disappeared one year before I started high school.

And when she disappeared, so did the carefree smile Lazarus used to carry all the time, and after his father died, Lazarus became someone people avoided.

But I could recognize his pain as if it were my own. He wasn’t a boy they should’ve been afraid of. He was just another soul, trapped in the cage of this town, unable to find his way out. Last I heard, he was still here, living in that massive house, barely coming out.

Turning around, I headed toward the small diner that had been here for as long as I could remember, standing at the very edge where the West Side ended and the bridge leading toward the East Side started. It’d been owned by several different families over the last couple of years, but it never closed down. I never quite understood why the Andersen family sold it in the first place—the diner was the only place where anyone could get decent food around here.

I pushed the door open, welcoming the warmth I was momentarily enveloped in, shaking off the tendrils of cold that still clung to my skin, and walked toward the booth at the far left of the diner, avoiding the stares and whispers of the people sitting around. Some of them went to school with me. Some were older and some younger, but they all knew about Danika Ascelin, the girl who vowed she would never come back here, only to be forced to return barely a year after she left.