Reclaim - Aly Martinez Page 0,27
mother or the song of her sobs as she cleaned the blood he’d left on her face.
I’d been beaten and told I was worthless.
I’d been cussed at, spit on, and all-around neglected.
It was safe to say my life was as far from rainbows and unicorns as one could get. But the grief I felt that night from knowing that Camden was never coming back was some of the worst I’d experienced in my short eleven years.
Around one in the morning, a flashlight in the distance caught my attention. A tsunami of renewed hope crashed into me and I scrambled to turn my flashlight back on and frantically waved my arms in the air so he’d know I was still there.
My excitement morphed into devastation as soon as I heard his voice.
“There you are,” Ramsey said, stomping my way with Thea holding his hand. “What the heck are you still doing here? When I got home and you weren’t there, I was scared to death you’d been kidnapped or something.”
I’d have rather been kidnapped or something.
I cleared my throat and got busy gathering my things so he couldn’t see my tear-stained cheeks. “Yeah. I was just getting ready to come back now. I must have fallen asleep.”
Thea walked over and pretended to help me shove my towel in the bag, whispering, “How’d it go?”
Awful. Terrible. Soul-crushing.
I had to swallow twice before I could answer. “Good. Everything’s good now.”
She smiled huge. “See? I told you it’d be okay.” She slung an arm around my shoulders and pulled me in for a brief hug.
I was too numb for it to warm me.
“Holy hell, this place is amazing,” Ramsey said, shining his flashlight around the creek. “I don’t think I’ve ever been back this far on the Leonards’ property before. Is it deep enough to swim down at the other end?”
Oh, no. No freaking way. I wasn’t good enough for Camden Cole. Fine. That I should have expected. But as much as I wanted to light that place on fire and never look back, I was nowhere near ready to let Ramsey and Thea take over our spot.
“No,” I lied. Memories of Camden cannonballing into the water flashed on the back of my lids, causing another nail to pierce through my heart. “It’s terrible here. There’s snakes and bugs. I’m pretty sure I saw some leeches in the water the other day.”
“Gross,” Thea said.
“Yeah. Stick with your tree.” Slinging my bag over my shoulder, I marched away from them—and every single memory of Camden I’d never be able to forget.
When school started on Monday, I did my best to pack all things Camden into a neat, little drawer in my head and locked it. He’d hurt me. So what? I should have been used to it by then.
It was time to put on a happy face and get back to my most important job of all: hiding from the world.
I woke up every morning.
Went to school all day.
I smiled more that first week than I had in years.
All of them fake.
All of them painful.
And all of them to mask how I was secretly withering away.
Regardless, I smiled on cue. Laughed when I heard a joke. I even skipped home when I got off the bus to put the final stroke on my masterpiece of deception. I was so good at playing the part that not even Ramsey and Thea realized I was only one breath away from suffocating.
A few times I'd slip up and ask someone around town if they knew where the Coles’ house was. No one did. Besides, what would I say if I went there? They probably didn’t even know I was alive.
And for what it was worth, I wasn’t.
It took two weeks and a chance run-in with Mr. Leonard before I returned to the creek. He’d cornered me at the grocery store and asked why I hadn’t been delivering him any worms. Fishing season was coming to a close, but there were still a few days warm enough for him and his boys to hit the lake.
There was nothing between those rocky banks that didn’t remind me of Camden, including the five dollars a day that was no longer in my pocket. I didn’t even have our ten-dollar bill because I’d hidden it under the insert in his shoe the last day I’d seen him. I couldn’t be sure if I was bitter enough to actually spend it or not, but I resented not having the choice.
Thea agreed to buy