What If He Didn't Die?

Chapter 21: Hope and Warmth

CLASH!!!

The disturbing sound of utensils clattering on the floor breaks the silence of my tensed room as I watch the food it held, spill all over the white tiled floor.

"EASTER!" Mom shouts, expressing the disgust she's been trying so hard to hide.

"I said, I DON'T WANT IT," I yell back without hesitation.

"Easter calm d-"

"Fuck off Bella!"

I jerk away from Bella's touch. Her sympathetic face soon turns into a scowling one. Her eyes say hate but, I don't care.

Even they didn't seem to care when I told them I don't want to eat. Or when I told them that Dan is not dead, so many times. Or when I tell them anything, in that matter. They never seem to care.

"I'll clean it up, Mrs Brown. Please relax." Bella guides my hyperventilating mother out of my room.

"Good you made her leave," I state in an irritated voice and sit back down on my bed. Bella looks up at me, her eyes showing no form of acknowledgement. She opens her mouth to say something but decides otherwise.

She cleans up the mess created by my 'reckless behaviour' as they have started to call it as if I can't hear. Or maybe they know I can, they just don't care. Watching her pick up the spilt food makes me regret my actions but I'm too devoted to my angst to let it show.

Why should I consider their feelings when they never even try to consider mine?

When Bella finally leaves my room, for the first time in almost 5 hours I take a deep breath of sheer relief and throw my head back to lie in my bed again, but the air doesn't enter my lungs well. It scatters and falls in all the wrong places. She has been staying here almost all day. These days, they watch me like a wild dog, no worse, like a crazy rat in a science experiment, waiting for me to explode. It is so suffocating, I hate it, them.

I try to pull in another breath, staring into the blankness of nowhere but it comes with shudders again. Every now and then my head compels me to go through the events of the past week again, even though it knows it is torturing me. But maybe that is what it wants, torture.

Soon I feel the presence of a rising flood of emotions right at the centre of my chest and before it consumes me, I decide to get rid of it all. They are not here to watch me now, after all.

I bury my face in the depth of a pillow, from where none of my wails can escape and none of my tears can leak, and I cry in my safe haven. I cry and howl and yelp until all the knots of pain and irritation and frustration and anger are resolved beneath my skin.

But one thing keeps irking me even after draining myself of all the tears I could manage for a day. The question that why, why just when I start expecting everything to go back to normal, to 'happy', it only ever gets worse?

"Hey?" I hear Eric's voice, which is now back to being soft, with a light knock at the door. The last time I heard him was four days ago when he yelled at me like a horse.

"Go away." I snap at him without even looking.

"I don't have any food. I won't force you to eat. Just let me in okay?" He says sweetly, taking slow cautious steps into my room. He knows I will let him, that is why he does it. He knows me too well.

I look the other way when he sits on my bed next to me. A part of me doesn't want to even hear a single word he has to say but another part of me wishes he says the right thing. Like he always manages to.

"Easter." He starts and my whole body warms up in anticipation.

Please say the right thing Eric, please don't make it worse.