My Kind of Crazy - Robin Reul Page 0,58
try to calm her down. I don’t want to wake up Dad and have to answer a million questions. Not right now. I wrap my arm around her shoulders and lead her up to my bedroom in the darkness, stepping quietly and carefully to avoid the squeaky floorboards.
Once she’s in my room, the rawness of seeing what’s been done to her takes my breath away. She curls up fetal on my bed, crying and covering her eyes with her balled fists. I stand there frozen. I have no idea what the hell I’m supposed to do.
I watch her body quake and convulse with each round of fresh sobs, and I worry that Dad will hear. I make a little shhhh noise, which she must take as me trying to comfort her because she reaches for me. She leans on me and I wrap my arm around her so she can cry on my shoulder. Slowly I can feel her start to relax and eventually her crying subsides.
She seems calmer now, so I turn off the light and lie down on the bed next to her. She angles into me and puts her head on my chest. Her hair tickles my nose, and I try to push the spiky bits away, but they spring back into place. Stroking her hair seems to soothe her though.
“I’m sorry. I just…” she whispers and then her chest heaves with gasps. Snot pours out of her nose as new tears stream down her face, dampening my T-shirt.
When her breaths begin to normalize again and she stops shaking, I ask her quietly, “What happened?”
She shakes her head. “I can’t talk about it.”
I try to reposition myself since my arm, which is pinned beneath her head, is starting to fall asleep. “Hold up. You show up at my house in the middle of the night half dressed, your hair all hacked off, hysterically crying, and you won’t tell me what happened?”
She sniffles and wipes at her nose. “No.”
“But—”
“Please, Hank. Please just be here for me.” She locks gazes with me in the dark. “You’ll only hate me. I don’t want you to hate me.”
“Why would I hate you?”
“Because I know you. You’ll feel responsible. But I brought this on myself.”
I sit up. “Well, now you have to tell me what’s going on.”
She shakes her head and runs her fingers self-consciously over her hair. “I can’t take it if you’re mad at me, Hank.”
I try to reason with her. “Listen to me. I’m not going to be mad at you, Peyton. Christ, are you kidding me? I need to know what happened. Who did this to you? Please. Tell me.”
She’s shaking like a leaf, her eyes wild. “I stole some money from my mother, okay? I found it in a jar in the back of a closet, and I figured she’d never notice it was gone. Or she’d think she was so fucked up one night that she forgot she spent it. But she found out. So I tried to cover my tracks and told her that Pete must have taken it.”
Peyton shudders. “My mom confronted him, and he told her I’m a liar. Then she went completely ballistic, accusing me of trying to break them up. Yeah, I lied, but she always takes the word of some deadbeat loser over mine. She’s never there for me.”
Her lip starts to tremble so I take her hand, not really knowing what else to do except listen.
She says, “Of course, she’s high, completely wasted, which is nothing new. They both are. So I go to my room to get away from them, and the next thing I know, she’s in there, pulling down my records and smashing them, tearing my posters, calling me a whore and a thief, telling me I ruined her life and that she wishes I was never born.” She shakes her head. The tears are flowing again.
I squeeze her hand, and she keeps talking. “So I tell her that makes two of us, and then she starts grabbing me, shaking me, slapping me, and I can’t get her to stop.”
My stomach twists. It’s hard for me to even compute how her mother could do something like that to her, and how terrified Peyton must have been while it was happening.
She reaches for her hair again and looks at me with red-rimmed eyes, trembling as she says, “The next thing I know, she’s got these scissors, and she pins me down and starts hacking off my hair.