❝spencer, all this week you've been holding my hands. what about your germ thing?❞
❝you were more important.❞
hazel finley is a liar. but she's a damn good one. and she's especially good at telling when other people are lying. she's the newest memb...
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❝I remember my childhood as a long wish to be elsewhere.❞
LOUISE GLÜCK
✩
3.5 : memories
(tw: mentions of r*pe, abuse, murder)
ONCE UPON A TIME, A GIRL IS BORN WITH HAZEL EYES. She is the second child of a budding young salesman and a beautiful aspiring lawyer, and the only name they think suitable to call her is Hazel.
And so Hazel Ophelia Cameron comes into the world, bright-eyed and curious.
Her older brother Oliver calls her Hazel Bear.
She calls him Ollie.
They are best friends.
It is just the two of them, Hazel and Oliver, until Hazel's fifth year, when their parents sit them down and tell them that soon they'd be three.
And so Clara Rosalind Cameron comes into the world, with an eager brother and sister ready to teach her everything they know.
They teach her to walk, to say bad words behind Mom's back, to ride a bike, and to skip rocks in the nasty creek behind the house. Oliver teaches her to throw a baseball and Hazel teaches her how to use the oven.
They are best friends.
Inseparable.
School years are spent at the kitchen table, eating Hazel's cookies and complaining about math homework, and summers are spent outside playing football, climbing trees, and tormenting the neighbor's elderly cat.
Until Hazel's twelfth year.
Their mother doesn't come home one night.
And when she does, she doesn't say a word. Just sits in her bedroom and cries.
Oliver makes Hazel and Clara play outside all night, makes them cook their own dinner, and when Mom goes to bed, finally he tells them what had happened. He says a man has done bad things to Mom, has hurt her terribly, and that she needs to be left alone.
Hazel is fourteen years old when she learns her mother had been raped behind the grocery store that night.
Their father is gone a lot on business, and by the time he comes home, their mother has healed a little. Or so they think. She smiles a little, at least.
They go to court.
They lose.
A month after the trial, their mother starts disappearing.
