The Raven Cycle Boarding School

Chapter Twenty

"Why didn't you come home and say hello to me?" The woman cries shamelessly at her son. Her face is bruised and she is skinny to the bone. She shivers in the tattered shirt and old pants she wears tight against her frail body. "You're suppose to be there for me. You're not suppose to be the wretched boy you've grown into. You disappoint me." She screams through her tears.

"I-I'm so sorry I, I didn't think-" the boy starts to explain in dismay. He stares at his tortured sickly mother who he knows he has let down by just being himself.

"When do you ever think?" She snaps at him. Then immediately a choking sob overcomes her and she runs to the couch and throws herself upon it.

"Mom I'm sorry," is all the boy with sandy hair and the secondhand Aglionby uniform can manage to say for himself.

"Are you?" She says sharply. She quickly gets up from the couch and is eerily quiet. It's almost as if she had never been crying in the first place. She only looks sharp and cold now-- much like the blades he has acquainted himself with many a times.

"What?" The boy chokes out in fear.

The mothers eyes darken further and the boy stares in fear because he could swear that as he watches, her eyes turn black and gooey and sink further back into her skull.

"Are. You. Sorry." The mother spits out. "Because I don't think you are. I don't ever think you are. Even when you make life so much harder for me, your own mother, I don't think you're sorry at all."

"No, no I am!" He screams at her in fright. Suddenly he is no longer the young man he was, but instead he feels smaller now. Everything looms down at him and his voice is higher, his fist smaller, and his eyes wider in fear. He is now the small boy that he use to be, the small boy that can do nothing to stop his fathers rage or understand his mother's feelings.

The mother shakes her head and says one final word--sarcastically, knowingly,"Adam," She sneers.

The door behind them pounds against its frame. "Adam!" A stern, deep voice calls from behind the door. Adam freezes in place, he doesn't even breathe. He knows that voice. That is the voice of Robert Parrish. That is the voice of his father.

"Adam," His mother hisses.

"Adam!" His fathers voice yells in time with the bangs against the door.

Adam doesn't know what to do. Adam can't move a muscle. "Adam!" His chest refuses to move to give him the breath he craves. "Adam!" His eyes dry and stretch wider and wider, he feels the stretch of the skin around his eyes slowly stretching to far, slowly tearing itself apart, slowly leaking blood down into his vision. "ADAM!" Should he open the door for his father? He refuses to look at his mother's crumpled form that is lying on the ground with her moth mouth gaping open "ADAM" and milky eyes staring at him accusingly. "ADAM" The pounding against the door grows louder "Adam" and louder and louder. The door starts creaking off its hinges with a sound that resembles nails scraping a chalkboard. "Adam!"

Adam flies upwards in his bed. His hair is dripping with sweat and his chest moves up and down at double time to try to force more and more air down his lungs. Adam's face is still frozen in the fear of his nightmare, but slowly, almost carefully he looks around the room.

"I'm in our dorm," Adam mumbles numbly.

"Yes, you're in our dorm at Aglionby Academy," Gansey explains carefully. He stands just a bit away from Adam's bed now.