GLORY // book one

- PART 10 -

THEO

~

I NEVER THOUGHT IT would be this way; that I would ever feel so much hate towards anyone, let alone so many people. My father was always a sore subject, sure. But, I didn't always want him to want me, not so much anyways. For a little while when I was younger, I thought having a mother was more than enough. Before she got so bitter and I got so broken.

She used to paint. My mom. Not often, but every once in awhile, on a rainy Sunday when there was nothing to do, she would take out her brushes and big canvases, and she would paint for hours and hours. I would sometimes join her, usually ending up with paint on my face and in my hair. But most of the time, I just liked to watch her.

One time, she painted me. Her hair, for once down and falling down her back, was golden under the yellow lights, so pretty. I remember wondering why my hair couldn't be pretty like that. Instead, it was often a curly mane that couldn't be tamed.

For that painting, she had braided my at-the-time long hair back and I wore a puffy purple dress. Back then, it felt more like dress-up than a chore. I felt more like a princess than a doll.

But, for some reason, that all changed a bit after my eighth birthday.

I didn't know why, but my mother became colder and harsher after that. Granted, she had never had the most patience, but after that she had none. Everything that I did was wrong. And she stopped painting.

I found a letter the next summer, as I was helping unpack her office in our newest house. A letter fell from a dusty book I dropped, wrinkled and torn a bit. It was from my father, dated a year before. He called my mother some bad things. Called me a mistake. I didn't have a chance to finish reading when the paper was snatched from my hands.

That was the first time my mother slapped me.

After that, I realized my father had something to do with my mother's . . . changes. It soon got so very twisted and the truth probably blended with lies. But I never forgot how my mom used to paint. Or how after he wrote to her, she stopped.

__

I woke up not with a gasp or a shout that morning, but with a sniffle. Whatever cold-and-hangover-induced coma I had fallen into that night left me feeling weak and out of control. I hated it; especially since lately everything I did seemed to be the wrong move. I felt like a different person each day. Sometimes I hated everyone and other times all I could think of was how big of an ass I was being to people who . . . cared about me for some reason.

In all honesty, that morning, I wanted to cry.

It's been two weeks since Snape relayed the news from my father. I don't think I've slept well one night since. I mean, usually, it's hard to fall asleep when I haven't had practice or I drank a lot of pumpkin juice at dinner. But, this was different. Instead of random nightmares of tsunamis and elephants, my nights were filled with memories from when I was younger; things I hadn't thought about in years.