Page 25 of Fuckboy Psychos (Scarlett Force 1)
Before all of this, my mother had a revolving door of loser boyfriends. Same deal with my aunt. And then we had the car accident, and my aunt lost her damn mind (understandably so). Then there’s Alexis, my older sister by three years.
She storms onto the porch in one of her moods, clearly furious at one of us for an infraction of unknown origin.
“I can’t get an ounce of fucking sleep in this house!” she screams, shoving at a stack of plastic pots on a nearby potting table and sending them flying while the four of us sit there and watch her rage. What else can we do? “You guys kept me up all night long, making all that goddamn noise.” She plants her palms on the surface of the table and glares daggers at me. “I’m fucking tired.”
“I got you a joint,” my mother says, gesturing in the direction of the back door. “Why don’t you go get it and you can smoke out here, maybe have something to eat?”
Alexis lets her dark brown gaze shift over to her before standing up and storming back into the house as I watch in silence. I don’t antagonize my sister—I understand that she has mental health issues—but I can only take so much from her.
I get that the accident fucked her up. I get that her brain chemistry is wrong. I know what her ex-boyfriend did to her.
Still, it’s hard to be screamed at the way she does sometimes. Before my uncle—my grandmother’s youngest kid—moved out, Alexis used to go into these mad fits and say that he was raping her against the refrigerator when he was in his room with the door locked. I saw it with my own eyes, her sitting on the couch and wailing.
But I don’t blame her for that. They aren’t lies, really. She just doesn’t see reality the way everyone else does.
My mom gives me a look, as if to warn me off my sister’s back. She should know better than anyone else that I really try with her. If she lays into me though, I will correct her. Last week, she accused me of being patronizing when I told her I’d be happy to take her to the park so she could walk off some steam.
My response was simple: if you think this is patronizing, I’ll show you patronizing.
“What?” I ask, laying my phone on the table next to me and grabbing a plate from the clean stack. “Don’t look at me that way when I haven’t said a single word this morning.”
“We all know how you can be,” Geneva says, even as I know she’d hate to hear that I call her Geneva instead of mom inside my head most of the time. “Don’t antagonize your sister.”
“Did I do anything at all to her?” I ask, looking over at my Aunt Anita. She’s barely paying attention to the conversation, playing a game on her phone instead. I don’t blame her. The accident changed every single one of us. Her, more than anyone, I guess.
“Were you at the track again last night?” Geneva continues, deciding to shift the conversation away from Alexis. My mother is a psych-nurse so she thinks she knows best. She’s practically diagnosed Alexis herself: schizophrenia with some additional head trauma. Every time she tries to get my sister in somewhere, things go badly, and she never ends up receiving a proper diagnosis of any sort.
“Yep,” I say, thinking of the fifty-thousand-dollar check that’s burning a hole in the pocket of my jeans. First chance I get, I’m heading down to the bank to deposit it. I consider offering up some to my grandma to help pay the bills, but then she’ll want to know how I got it, and how can I tell my seventy-year-old, very traditional grandmother that I bet my own body on a race?
It’s sick.
It’s twisted.
It’s beyond fucked-up.
Instead, I’ll use it to finance my way into the future. First stop, Portland. Then we’ll see where I can take things from there. I have skills; I just need a place other than Prescott to prove it.
My grandmother clicks her tongue in not-so-subtle disappointment. See, that kills me. But how can I ever explain to this kindhearted woman the way my veins run with lines of fire? How can I ever tell her that I only feel alive when I’m flying down the track? That putting my body on the line the way I did last night excites the twisted perversion inside of me?
“There’s no future in all of that,” Geneva continues as my Aunt Anita closes her game and stands up, offering the barest slip of a smile to the rest of us. My mom pauses to look up at her younger sister.
“I’m off to work. I’ll be home around five, so I can stay with Alexis if you want to go out.” Anita’s talking to me, I think, but she barely looks at me. She barely looks at anything anymore. It’s been almost two years since the accident, but that isn’t long when you’re looking back on the sort of loss that the Force family suffered.
