Dare You to Hate Me by B. Celeste (classic fiction .txt) 📕

with her wedding ring I’ve always been obsessed with glinting in the light, and her copper hair falls messily over her shoulders because she hates doing things with it.

When I slide off the couch and tug on her shirt, she takes a few moments before setting the paper down to look at me. “I’m just stressed, Ivy. Don’t worry.”

I’m not sure when I realized that I hated those two little words. Don’t worry. How could I not worry when hushed conversations in the kitchen turn into heated phone calls in the living room? Or when their voices raise in their bedroom and Dad would storm out and slam the front door behind him and be gone all night?

I don’t know what’s been going on, but Dad stopped coming home for dinner at his normal time, Mom stopped reading to me at night, and soon it was just me and Porter at the kitchen table while our mother took calls in other rooms. Sometimes I’d hear her talk about Grandma Gertie and a trip to visit her, but most times I’d hear the store brought up and listen to the muffled cries my mother tried hiding behind closed doors.

It came time to worry when Dad came home late last night to find Mom waiting for him with a face void of emotion. I snuck out of my room to listen to their conversation and heard him tell Mom we have to sell the house and find something smaller. Mom had asked, “Why can’t you let the store go, John? I’m tired of it not going anywhere.”

And even at the tender age of eight, Dad’s response sliced through me like I knew it wasn’t right. “I can say the same about us, Kate.”

Their voices become louder as they moved down the hall, their argument becoming heated until I heard something loud in the kitchen crash.

Mom yelled.

Dad yelled back.

For the first time, I took refuge in my closet and burrowed into the line of ugly dresses that I hated wearing. The material may have been scratchy against my skin, but it served as a barrier that drowned out some of the noise.

“Why don’t you go play?” Mom suggests, breaking me from the memory of falling fast asleep in my closet until a mixture of bright blue and red lights flickering underneath the door woke me up.

I think of the one thing that always makes me happy on Saturdays and wonder if it’ll work on Mom too. “Want to watch cartoons with me and Porter?”

Her smile doesn’t take right away, and when her lips curl upward, it’s slow and nothing like the warm one she used to flash me. “I’ve got adult things I need to handle right now but maybe next time.”

It isn’t until sometime later when Porter and I go to our rooms to play when I realize something isn’t right. When I go to ask Mom about it, the landline is held up to her ear as she shakes her head at whatever paperwork she’s going through.

“I wish I’d never married John and had the kids sometimes,” I hear her say into the phone receiver. I stare down at a picture of four badly drawn stick figures surrounding a house that looks like ours with a nipping feeling taking over the pit of my tummy.

When she looks over to the hallway and sees me standing there, her eyes widen before closing for a few seconds, blowing out a deep breath. “I’ve got to go, Janet.” Hanging up, she rubs her eyelids with her fingers and turns from the paper scattered table to me. “It’s grown women talk, Ivy. That’s all. I’m just—”

Stressed. She’s stressed. Dad’s stressed.

“…don’t worry,” she finishes, patting my arm before gesturing toward my room. “Why don’t you go make sure Porter is napping and then hang out in your room for a while?”

Her dismissal comes naturally, a common occurrence etched into everyday routine that I expect with every passing day.

As I turn back to my room, I notice an empty space on the wall where our family portrait used to hang. Mom made sure we all dressed nicely and smiled for the cranky woman behind the camera. I’m not sure why, but I glance at the garbage can and see the broken frame and shattered glass with the very picture still between the two destroyed pieces.

Mom doesn’t say anything about it.

I don’t often let myself linger in memories, pretending instead everything that led to my poor decision was simply a nightmare. The long sleeves I wear hide the reminder well enough where it’s out of sight out of mind, but the thick pink scars are there to taunt me when I need reminding of the reality I gave myself.

Seeing him again doesn’t help. Aiden was the one good thing in my life before it turned to shit. His house was my happy place when mine was a war zone. His tiny bedroom closet was my escape when mine couldn’t filter the noise—the screaming, the crying, and the blue and red lights.

Maybe I don’t mind the noise my housemates create because there’s a bite of familiarity in the loudness they produce. Even after packing a single bag and sneaking out of my childhood home in the middle of the night, I still think about that house and everything that went on inside, wondering what would have happened if I stayed.

From the outside, the home was what one would expect a blue-collar family to live in. My parents were the American stereotype—husband and wife, two kids, and a small store they ran with big dreams of success. Dad had a business degree and used to work at a bank until getting the loan approved for Underwood’s Grocer, and Mom helped out until she had Porter and decided to be a stay-at-home mother.

On the inside was a different story than the one people seemed to envy.

I usually refuse to think about the nights I spent huddled behind a row