The Boy Behind The Glass • Stydia

9. make me fade

C H A P T E R • N I N E

Lydia used to see the world in black and white.

There was good and bad, right and wrong. There was no in between, there was no middle ground.

The moment her father walks out the door, Lydia sees grey. She sees the no man lands between good and bad. She sees the tipping scale of right and wrong, truth and lies mixing into one.

Her father had decided he was leaving almost a year before she found out. Before he revealed his big news that crushed the 12 year old. She watched from the front porch, eyes hard and expressionless as her father puts the last box in the trunk of his car.

He looks at her and sighs. "I'm sorry, Lydia. I know this is hard-"

"But it needs to happen," Lydia finishes, repeating and quoting what her father has been saying all night. This needs to happen, Lydia. I need to go. I'm not happy here, and everyone deserves to be happy, remember?

What about Lydia's happiness? What happened to her mothers?

Her father looks pained but Lydia can't find it in her small heart to feel sorry for him.

"I love you, Lydia. Don't ever forget that. I may not be living here anymore, and I may not be with your mother, but that doesn't mean I love you any less."

"It just means you can leave," Lydia says. "You can leave me."

"Lydia. . ."

She doesn't listen. She spins around, hot tears burning her eyes as she runs back into the house. She's sprinting up the stairs, ignoring his calls and bursting into her bedroom. She slams the door shut, breath coming quick and short as she uses the ancient bolt to lock it. She scrambles back, legs giving out underneath her until her back is pressed up against the foot of her bed.

"Lydia?"

Her eyes snap from the door to the mirror, where Stiles is sitting crossed legged like he always does. His face is pinched with concern, pale skin white in the moonlight that shines through her bedroom window.

"He's leaving," she whispers.

Stiles smiles sadly. "I know."

*

Things don't get better after her dad has left. Instead they seem to get worse.

Her mother throws herself into work. She spends all day at her office, face buried in paperwork when she's home. Lydia watches as she wastes away, saying that she's fine, there's nothing wrong with her.

But Lydia knows how her mother copes. She watches as the wine bottles are drained, their recycling bin fills up to the brim with empty bottles. Every time her mother raises the wine glass to her lips, Lydia's hope fades just a little bit more.

"My father coped like that," Stiles tells her one afternoon, months after her father has left. "When my mother died, my real mother, he spent all of his time at the police station and the pub."

Lydia looks down at her hands that are clasped in her lap. She's chewed her normally perfect nails viciously in the last months, made them sore, bitten down to the quick.