The Reckless Oath We Made - Bryn Greenwood Page 0,46
bathtub! I was trying to take a bath, and I accidentally knocked it off, which I wouldn’t have done if you hadn’t set a fucking box of fucking dishes on the edge of the fucking bathtub. I cut my foot open, and you’re still blaming me for—”
“Because you don’t have any respect for anything!”
“For this shit?” I grabbed the nearest thing: the box of figurines Gentry was holding. “I don’t respect this because it’s shit. And you care more about this than you do about your family. You’d rather pile this shit up than have Marcus come stay with you. So fuck all of this shit.”
I dumped the box on the sidewalk, but that wasn’t enough, so I stomped on it, too. Right while I was in the middle of trying to annihilate all those little Snowbabies, I realized it was the wrong box. It wasn’t the box of chipped thrift-store figurines. It was Mom’s treasures. The champagne glass Dad won for her. The little animals she’d inherited from her mother. LaReigne’s baby dishes. I bent over, meaning to salvage something, but Mom laid into me. Slapped my head, pulled my hair, the whole time screaming. I didn’t even put up my hands to defend myself, because I deserved it.
Gentry stepped in between us, which I hated for him to do. I honestly would rather have taken my beating than have Mom smack him. From where I was bent over, I heard the sound of her open palm on his back and shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Please stop. I’m sorry.”
“You hateful, selfish girl! All you care about is yourself.”
At least she wore herself out pretty fast. She stopped hitting Gentry, and trying to hit me, because she couldn’t catch her breath. For a minute or so, I stayed where I was, crouched down with Gentry bent over me protectively. When he straightened up, I stood up and tried to apologize again.
“I didn’t mean to, Mom. I thought that box was something else.”
“Get away from me. I don’t want you here.” She was rocking back and forth, taking big shaky breaths, and then in this soft voice, she said, “I want LaReigne.”
I wanted LaReigne, too. I wanted the LaReigne who had held my hand when I was eight years old. The LaReigne who could make Mom listen to her. I wanted her to come and help me figure out what to do, and that wasn’t going to happen. LaReigne wasn’t going to come save me. Maybe I was going to have to go save her.
“You don’t want to be here, and now you don’t ever have to come here again,” Mom said.
It was true that I didn’t want to be there, and I wished the other part was true, too.
Gentry stood between my mother and me, scratching the back of his neck. I could tell he was upset, but after a minute, he put his hands down and said, “Thy nephew, my lady?”
If it hadn’t been for Gentry, I don’t know what I would have done, because I staggered toward the street kind of in shock, and followed him to his truck.
“I’m sorry about my mother hitting you. I’m sorry about all of this. You probably need to sleep before you go to work,” I said, as Gentry opened the passenger door for me.
“Nay. I labor not on Friday even.”
“Oh, I forgot it was Friday. But you’ve been up since last night, haven’t you?”
“Nay, I slept this morn,” he said. By my math, maybe he’d gotten three hours of sleep before he showed up to rescue me again. That was all he said, and I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t another apology, so we didn’t talk on the drive.
At the school, I was late enough that the buses had already left. There were a couple of kids waiting to be picked up out front, but Marcus wasn’t one of them.
In the main office, nobody was at the front desk, so I rang the bell.
“I’m here to pick up Marcus Gill,” I said, when the secretary came out of the back room. “Is he still in his classroom?”
“No, I think he got picked up before lunch.”
“You let somebody else pick him up?”
I didn’t feel calm, and I must not have sounded very calm, because the secretary got the logbook and brought it to the front counter.
“It’s okay. We wouldn’t let anyone who wasn’t authorized pick him up.” She flipped through the logbook until she got to a form with Marcus’ name