Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69577 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69577 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
“Who are you?” I asked.
He smiled. “My name is Apollo.”
One
My body came with a lot of terms and conditions I did not agree to.
—Birdee’s secret thoughts
Birdee
Thank God for small-town police stations.
Otherwise, I didn’t think I could make this happen.
I had only one goal.
Get a meeting with the woman that I’d once called Mom.
I had to talk to her and see what she knew.
The thought of her ruining Mable’s life any more than she had…
My eyes blurred as the police station transformed into a hotel room. The hotel room was small, outdated, and was in desperate need of some new carpeting.
Carpeting that was soaking up the blood.
So much blood.
Rivers of it.
Oceans.
It rose up from the pale brown carpet to slowly rise over my new shoes.
I loved these shoes.
They were perfect for the winter.
They…
“What are you doing here?”
I blinked, startled at the dead woman talking to me. “What am I doing here?”
“Can’t you just let me die in peace?” she asked. “You were the worst mistake of my life.”
My stomach clenched at the age-old adage.
“You say that all the time, and I know you mean it,” I found myself saying to the corpse.
“I tricked your father into having you.” She smiled then, the blood filling her mouth and nose now, the only thing visible were her cheeks and her lips. “I switched my birth control pills with placebos. They looked exactly like the ones he watched me take every morning.”
Of course she had.
“You were my ticket out of my shitty life,” she said. “A perfect scapegoat that’d have shiny, bright new credit.”
I gritted my teeth and counted to ten, hoping that it would help me control my temper.
It didn’t, and before long, I was screaming.
I blinked, and all of a sudden I was standing over her with a door in my hand.
“What are you going to do with that?” she scoffed. “You gonna slam it in my face?”
I raised it up high over my head, ready to bring it down on her throat, when she started to laugh.
Blood boiled out of her mouth like a long snake, aiming right for me.
“You don’t have the guts to do that,” my mother hissed. “You’re going to do what I say, or I’ll make your life a living hell. How bad do you want your sister’s man to stay out of jail?”
About as bad as the fact that I was contemplating murdering the woman that’d been with me since childhood.
“Do it,” she taunted. “Kill me.”
I woke up before I could hurt her, gasping for breath and staring at the ceiling above my head in confusion.
Would I ever stop dreaming about the time that Mable, Cody, and I had killed my mother?
It was never quite the same dream.
Sometimes it was me watching as Cody held the door. Other times it was a replay of the exact event where my mother had launched herself at Mable. When she’d done that, I’d intervened and tripped her. Just as she’d started to go down, Cody opened the door, and my mother fell against the door with a sickening crack.
There would have been no problem had Cody not opened the door at the exact right time.
Or she’d fallen in a space that was open.
The three of us had left, and I’d been feeling guilt at killing my own mother ever since.
Even if she’d deserved everything that came to her.
My mother had been an awful person.
From the first moment that I could remember clearly, she’d told me that I was a waste of space. It’d never stopped—the verbal abuse.
And at some point during my young life, my mother had started to take out loans and lines of credit in my name. When I’d gotten too many, she’d then started to take out loans in Mable’s name.
Overall, we’d discovered that my so-called “mother” had taken out over a million dollars in loans. Of that million in loans, she’d somehow paid it all off.
I’d only found this out thanks to Romeo’s friend, Apollo, who’d done a deep dive into our background.
He was a computer guru who had a way with computers, which was the complete opposite of me.
“Jesus, what’s wrong with you?”
I looked over at my best friend, Shade, who sat on the opposite end of the couch from me.
Shade and I had been friends since we were kids. He was the one person that I’d always been able to count on, and truthfully, I probably wouldn’t be alive without him.
“Nothing,” I grumbled as I sat up from Shade’s couch, wiping my eyes with my fists. “Why’d you let me sleep?”
I’d promised him that I would spend time with him today, and I’d fallen asleep instead.
“Probably because you look like you’ve gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson,” he said. “And you haven’t been sleeping. You know you haven’t. You needed some shut-eye, even if we were supposed to be watching a movie.”