A Girl Like You // D. Swing [DISCONTINUED]

Chapter 6

Donald DeGrate

"What's wrong?" She asks, taking a sip of her milkshake. "Nothing, why?" I asked, leaning forward and resting my arms on the picnic table, not bothering to look away from her.

"Because you keep staring at me. What's on your mind?" She asks and I shake my head with a smile. "I missed you, that's all." She smiles and tucks some hair behind her ear. "I missed you more." She says.

I reached across the table and I grabbed her hand, intertwining our fingers. "So, how was it down in Georgia?" I ask her and she lets out a long sigh. "Oh, boy. Well, GSU is a great school. Great teachers, great students, just a great place to be, in general. Um, I actually spent a lot of time with my Grandmother and my cousins while I was down there and I saw my mom."

I furrow my eyebrows, "Really? How did that go?" She shrugs. "Uh...it went." She lets out a dry chuckle and grabs her straw, taking another sip of her milkshake. 

I could tell that talking about her Mom still bothered her. Every time she was mentioned, she would get this certain look in her eye that I couldn't quite decipher but her body language said a lot more than her words ever could.

"You know, you never did tell me about what happened between you and your mom," I say, rubbing my thumb across the back of her hand soothingly.

Silence captivates us and the only thing that could be heard are the birds chirping and the sound of cars zooming past the park. "You don't have to t--"

"No, it's fine. I-I think I'm ready to talk to you about it. I trust you enough." She says, looking up at me and I give her a small smile, which she returned.

"Alright..., so..." She trails off and she sits there quietly and she grabs her straw and starts to stir the remainder of her milkshake. "I'm sorry... I don't even know where to start..." She says with a small chuckle. "It's fine. Take your time." I kiss the back of her hand soothingly and she gives me a small smile.

"Alright, so, when I was about fifteen my parents had gotten a divorce and that's when everything went downhill. My mom started drinking, doing drugs, the whole nine. Like, she would be gone for days at a time, out doing who knows what-"

"Where was your Dad?"

"He had left out of the country for a business trip so Wesley and I were stuck with her." She says, tapping her nails against the table.

"She would leave for days at a time so I was left there to take care of Wesley, myself, and make sure everything was straight for us. Every morning I'd have to wake up extra early to help Wesley get ready, send him off to school, get myself ready for school then right after school, I'd have to rush and pick him up from school, and take care of him. Whenever she did come home, she'd be with a new man. Every time and I'm pretty sure she was sleeping with them for either drugs or money to get drugs." 

I tell could tell she was starting to get angry as she reminisced by the tone of her voice. I rubbed my thumb across the back of her hand soothingly to try and relax her. "Eventually, it got so bad to the point that Wesley and I had to stay with her because she stopped paying the bills. We had stayed with Sunny for about two weeks before she showed up at Sunny's doorstep at three in the morning and literally dragged Wesley and I out of the house then she took us back to the house and when we got there, there were two men sitting in the living room." Her eyes were starting to water and her nostrils flared as she kept going. 

"She tells Wesley and I to go into our rooms and about two hours later, we had fallen asleep and while I was asleep, one of the men that were in the living room had snuck into the room and h-he climbed into my bed and he started touching me, then when I woke up and tried to scream, he covered my mouth and he kept on touching me then I started to kick and scream and he got frustrated and he hit me." At this point, her voice was cracking and I could tell she was about to break down and I honestly, didn't want her to go any further with her story.