Star Struck: ends of a preface (book 1)

Chapter 32

 

Chapter 32

Weren't you it?

~~*~~

There was something about my Mom that left me over the edge as a kid. It was something small, so insignificant if you look at it differently, that I forgot about it when it had mattered. I could not remember that it existed, not until this very moment.

Stella was a jolly girl. I knew that. Stella was brave. I knew that too. She was a beautiful confident woman that did not, in any way, get affected by anything that other people might say. She was my mother. My role model. There's no way I wouldn't come to know any of that. All her pretty points and skills and assets, I knew them because I wanted them. As a kid, there was nothing else I could ever wish for but to be like her—be Stella, not little Rebecca.

But as a kid, I was blind. Or maybe I wasn't and I just grew up and forgot. Right, I forgot.

Of all the good things Mom was known for, there were the flaws that no one else noticed. Of all the things that made her smile, there were the secrets that made her cry when and where no one would see. There were secrets that I never looked into because she was Stella.

To me, my mother was like this goddess. Divine, with a bright light shining out from her and a halo, donned as a crown. So when she fell, I was scared out of my wits. I knew that things would never be the same again.

There was one time when I find her lashing out at me. She snapped, screaming something incoherent that my younger self passed off as gibberish. I thought we were playing the princess and the evil witch game. I was a bit surprised because I presumed I was the witch, not the other way around. But I told myself it's all part of the act. She pretended that it was too, giggling at my startled face as my reaction was the result of a joke, not the warnings of a surfacing trauma.

It's okay, I told myself. Princesses can get angry too, sometimes. Not all the time, but they do. They scream when they had enough. Their eyes squint with their mouths hanging wide open. But when all of that is over, she'll laugh out loud, wave to everyone else that fawned over her beauty, and smile again.

Like I thought, that incident never happened again. And so I forgot, not until today as Rigel described how bit by bit, my mom was breaking. How every time I turned around, she would cry again and never smile. How she would always keep the screams in while I was near, and keep it even more as silence loomed over every time my Dad gets home late at night.

"That's why I never see him that often," I blurted out, more to myself than Rigel. "That's it, isn't it? He was out there with another woman while I was left alone with Mom not knowing what was happening with my family! That after all these years, I still don't know!"

When you've known nothing but lies, the moment those things break free and you're revealed with the truth, you wouldn't know what to do. I didn't. I wanted to strangle someone, but who? I wanted to scream, but it's not like that'll make a difference. But I shrieked either way. I cry out for myself. I cry out for my Mom. I cried out so that my Dad could hear, the man I never actually knew.

"All these years... Why?"

"I don't know, Becca."

My knuckles closed in a tight fist, my nails digging through the skin of my bleeding palms. Rigel noticed and tried to soothe the pain for me, trying to open up my fingers and do his whole healing thing, but I refused and shook his hands away.