Revive Me || Stiles Stilinski

One

My mom broke all the dishes that day. The day I watched everything fall out from beneath me. The day I ran away from home. Those wretched twenty four hours flashed through my mind every time I closed my eyes, as though they were a movie playing endlessly on the back of my eyelids.

I woke up to the sound of sobs trying to be held back escaping my mother's chapped lips accompanied by her husband's yelling. "I do everything!" He shouted. "I pay the bills, I buy our groceries, I pay for your daughter's stupid volleyball club and I take care of the house!" He screamed. I was too scared to leave my room, afraid of the scene I would stumble upon if I did. I thought the warmth of my bed would protect me. "Meanwhile all you do is sit on your ass and knit all fucking day!" I heard the sound of glass shattering outside my door, causing me to jump and pull the covers over my head. My mother's sobs grew louder with every word he yelled. I'm not entirely sure when I started crying, but I know that I couldn't stop.

My door swung open, letting my step dad stumble in. "Please," my mother cried from the living room. "Please stop!"

I sat still on my bed, paralyzed with fear, as the drunk pointed his finger at me. "You," he said with so much disgust even I hated myself. "You worthless, lazy, unmotivated little-" His voice trailed off and he took a couple of clumsy steps towards me. "You ungrateful bastard!"

Bastard. That's what my real father called me when he left. He wrote a letter explaining how he couldn't raise a child out of wedlock and left me home alone at the ripe age of four years old, waiting for my mother to come home from work. I was only four at the time, but my mom had kept the letter and I have read it an abundance of times. But something about the way my step dad thought he had the right to call me a bastard made me snap.

"I'm the ungrateful one?" I spoke instinctively, having no idea where I was going with this. "I'm not the one leaving an amazing woman who loves me in hysterics on the floor!" I shouted. Surprised at my newly found courage, I stood up and pointed my finger accusingly at him like he had done to me moments before. "All you've done since the day you married my mom is verbally attack us!" I yelled. Tears were falling down my faces as though my cheeks were rivers. "Every time you open your mouth, I wonder which one of us you're going to hurt!" My mom was sobbing and begging for me to stop. "I've been waiting and waiting for the day where you just hit one of us!"

And he hit me. He punched me square in the face. Then he did it again, except this time it was my stomach and it made me fall to the floor. I cried out in pain, but that only made him want to hurt me some more. He kicked me. Hard. My mom tried to pull him away from me, but he just gave her a black eye and continued to kick me. Somewhere between kick number seven and my mom's crying, I lost consciousness.

When I woke up, I was where I was when I fell unconscious. My lip was bleeding and my stomach felt like it was a building that had just been demolished with a wrecking ball. It was more quiet than it was that morning. I limped into the living room, clutching my stomach, knowing it would bruise badly if it hadn't already. My mom was standing in the kitchen, smashing all the plates into the counter. I couldn't take it. I couldn't stand seeing her so broken over some ass hat who drinks too much. I made my way back to my room where I packed my bags and wrote my mom a letter.

"Dear Mom, I can't stand living here anymore. I'm leaving and I suggest you do the same. There are better men out there who are waiting for a woman like you to sweep them off their feet. Call me when you find one or when he's gone. I love you. No matter what. Love, Elizabeth."

Due to the sound of plates breaking, my mom didn't hear the front door open or the car engine start or the sound of me crying from my room all the way to some small town in California six hundred miles away from the hell hole that is my mom and her drunk of a husband.