My Emotional Roller Coaster

CHAPTER FIVE : AUSTIN'S POV

Years back

After my mother got married to my father, my mother and I had to move to West Rose city to go and live with him. A week later I was enrolled in an elementary school as a second year transfer student. It happened to be the same day that the school was admitting first year students.

My mother was having a hard time getting her way around the school and she asked for help. The person who helped her happened to be Cassie's mother and since then they became really close friends. Cassie was also being admitted in her first year in the school and that's how me and her first met and automatically became friends.

Cassie's first year was not smooth since she would easily get picked on because she was somehow a social misfit. I always came to her aid. I was her hero for the longest time in our years of elementary school.

Everything changed when I was in my last year in elementary school when my father became a heavy alcoholic and everything at home started falling apart. One night when my mother and I were asleep, he came home shouting and thuds of fists could be heard on the house main door that made me cringe on the bed.

"Open this door or I'll break it down," he kept on shouting and that's the night violence started after my mother opened the door. My father lay on her beating her  and all she did was scream and cry and he seethed. I had tried helping her but I also got beat up. That was the first and definitely not the last day that he did it.

At first when he would do it there was guilt and an attempt to stop but as days went by he gave way, realizing how much he enjoyed digging his fists on her skin. With every hit he felt a cold zing of delight, a buzz he could not get any other way.

There were nights I would lay on my bed listening to the sound of fighting and I would think to myself that when mother left I would leave with her to flee the violence.

That same year, I slowly turned into an angry and violent person as well. I stopped being Cassie's hero, and instead became her bully. I would emotionally bully her every chance that I got and it made me feel better.
The year ended and I joined highschool the year after.

When I got to my second year in highschool, Cassie joined her first year in the same highschool and that's when I started bulling her physically. The more she kept quiet about it, the more I enjoyed doing it.

One night the same year, my father came home after midnight as usual and the moment my mother opened the door for him, he wound his fingers into her hair and shoved her face into the edge of the door. She lay down there bleeding profusely unconscious but later admitted in the hospital.

That night, I stayed beside her at the hospital bed and  for the first time I noticed all the scars on her face. I was no longer crying all I felt was remorse and anger. All I did was stare down at my hands twisting and knotting them as if doing so would hold back the turmoil inside me.

The next day my father forced me to go to school and on my way to class Cassie came running and bumped into me. Its like she was running away from trouble. She looked scared and she looked at me in tears as if she was desperately asking for help. All I felt was intense anger and seeing her like that, I saw it as a chance to let out all my anger, I snapped. I threw her onto the floor and brutally beat her leaving her unconscious.

Later that day after Cassie had been taken to hospital, her mother came to complain to the school's principal and she met me and my father at the principal's office. My father had been asked to come and pick me up because I was being expelled for good from the school. The moment my mother got to know about it, she had lost conscious again from a heart attack but she survived it.

A few days later, she got discharged from the hospital but she had already decided that we were only going back at home to pack our belongings and go live with her parents which was in another country. We moved and started our lives over again. I later got admitted into another highschool.

My mother's life was never the same. She got ill from time to time mostly complaining about headaches. She dedicated her everyday telling me that I needed to correct my wrongs someday and to promise her that I will never become like my father.

One morning after I was done with highschool, I woke up to go and give her meds as usual but she did not move or say anything. That's the day I lost her, and I lived everyday with regret but my grand parents were trying their best to help me get through it. At the funeral, my father had asked me to go back and live with him and join college at West Rose. I thought about it and later agreed to it but only because I had to fulfill the promises I had made to my mother.

I knew I had to go back and make it up to Cassie's mother and Cassie. I knew it would not be easy but I knew that's the only way I would honour my mother's death. My father had also changed for the better. He had remarried and also stopped taking alcohol.

He was trying his best to patch thing up with me but I did not know how to forgive him, probably because I blamed him for my mistakes and my mother's death or because I never knew how to forgive myself in the first place, because I blamed myself more.

I later joined college and during during my second year, life decided to give me another Chance when I saw Cassie today lying on the floor looking up at me. She looked different from the girl I last saw 3 years ago that I almost did not recognise her. As I helped her up she did not seem to recognize me and I thought that I should probably let her go so that she would fall back down, it might jog up her memory.

Throughout the day she is almost all I thought about and how to get her back into my life. Seeing her again after classes, I walked up to her and what came out of my mouth was "Cess I need your help!" I knew it was stupid the moment I said it but I had to make something out of it so I asked her to be my tutor.

I knew the old Cassie would say yes but I was wrong to think that she was the same. It was not getting any easier especially when she asked me the two questions that I was unable to answer her while we were in the car. Telling her the truth would only make her think that I was using her to gain my sanity and lying to her would only make her keep doubting me.

After dropping her off I wanted to give up and I hated myself for it so I went to the party I had been invited to, to get my mind off things. I downed a shot of vodka one after the other but it was not helping. Not even the girls around me and the music was enough distraction. So I decided to do what the drunk, frustrated and desperate me thought.

I drove to her place thinking if I don't get killed by an accident because of the drunk me driving, then Cassie's mother would kill me instead. I scared her at first when I got there but she later helped me in, and now I was sitting next to her staring at her. How could anyone ever think of hurting someone like her? I thought. She looked so innocent, but she also looked sleepy, tired and also uncomfortable with me staring at her. I looked away and sat up when I finally thought of a way to convince her.