Your Voice - Donald Walsh

NINE

When Blake was 3 years old, her mother died in a car accident. Her brothers, Carter and Dane, were 3 and 2 at the time. She had always been the oldest. Which meant high expectations, pressure, and when she succeeded, the fall to the bottom just got that little bit harder.

Carter, to most people's surprise, was Blake's twin. However, she was still born 4 minutes and 31 seconds before him. Being the oldest, it meant Blake had to take the brunt of the lectures and punishments from their dad. She often took the blame for her little brothers because they didn't know how to face him like she did. They cried, whereas she always stood there, just taking it.

Their dad had been a sergeant in the military. He had plenty of awards on his uniform's lapels, which meant he had high expectations for himself. Indirectly, it meant he had high expectations for his kids. If you got less than 90%, it was 3 months of doing every chore in the house by yourself. If you didn't make your bed in the morning, you didn't sleep in one that night. If you spoke out of turn, you got hit. And god forbid doing something you weren't supposed to.

This hardened Blake's family pretty fast. Without their mother around, their dad ran their family like a military mission. He let them have their own personal tastes, picking clothing, music, entertainment for themselves, as long as they were always presentable. To his standards, of course. The reason Blake became friends with Jesse, aside from their shared love for film, was because he was nothing like her father. He was kind, friendly, funny, and often did things he probably shouldn't have.

Carter was going to Cal Tech, where he was studying astrophysics. He was always incredibly smart, and though Blake would never fault him for it, often made her look dumb in comparison. He was her complete opposite, in every way but one. Their taste in music was very similar. That was how they learned to speak to one another, eventually. At 8PM when their father turned the lights off and they were condemned to their meticulously kept bunk beds, they slipped in ear buds and communicated through music. They told each other how they were feeling through songs.

Dane was in his last year of high school, as an all-star athlete. He was captain of the football team, soccer team, basketball team, anything that involved some sort of athletic competition. Additionally, he was their dad's favourite. He had muscle, was tall, and looked exactly like him. Planned to go into law enforcement, somewhere. And while he might have been a big, strong dude, he was still Blake's baby brother. She doted on him when they were younger, and they kept the same dynamic to this day.

Though she loved her brothers dearly, this made Blake the black sheep of the family. A theatre kid who wanted nothing more than to become a director and live her dreams filming movies and doing things her father often deemed useless. They didn't even have a TV when she was growing up. She had to watch at Jesse's house. She had to be prim, polite, smart, fit, pretty, neat, a good cook, everything. That was the expectation.

So, Blake began expecting those things of herself. She put more pressure on herself than her father ever did, and punished herself when she didn't meet those expectations. Not physically, but she'd remove something she loved from her life as punishment until she could meet her requirements.

At 0500, they got up, made their beds, went running, Blake made breakfast, cleaned their rooms, and they prepared for school. When they got back, they'd clean their rooms again, finish their homework, do their chores, Blake would cook dinner, they would each sit down and play a single round of Hearts, one on one with their father, lose, and then go shower and straight to bed. Rinse and repeat. Every day. For sixteen years.

Over these sixteen years, with everything combined, Blake developed serious obsessive-compulsive disorder. Everything was cleaned to perfection, sanitized daily and set in its perfect place. The bed sheets were washed almost every day, pressed and done neatly on the bed, taught like soldiers in the army. Her compulsions were never violent or paranoid, but she began to notice them overtaking a lot of important things in her life.

Without her father's knowledge, she went to a psychiatrist, was given medication, and was slowly brought down from the intense level her disorder had overtaken. That didn't mean her symptoms were gone, in fact Beca always complained that her side of the room was incessantly neat and always cleaned, washed, vacuumed.

It did mean, however, that she no longer scrubbed her skin raw and almost bleeding when taking a shower, or having a panic attack when she found out she somehow got sick. Her symptoms took on the form of discomfort in large crowds, places she knew were dirty and an intense anxiety surrounding disorganization.

She'd told Beca in private, and she alongside Carter's worrying video calls and text messages helped her not only keep it from spreading rumours like a fungus but helping Blake through her anxieties.

And now, Blake was doing great. She loved Barden, loved the Bellas, and maybe even loved... well, she wasn't sure about that.