I was a mistake, that's what my mother wanted to say, but instead she spent my entire life implying it without saying the actual words. My father was a rebound from her not-so-great-bad-boy boyfriend whom she dropped out of high school to be with. I think my mother first accepted the date with my dad to make Mr. Not-So-Great jealous, but that wound up seriously backfiring. She became pregnant with me when she and my father were first dating. She always acted like the pregnancy was something that happened to her, that she had no control over it. As if people don't understand how babies are made.
Not a day went by that she didn't let me know how much she had given up for me. The weight of her decision to keep me, hung over my head every day. I was never allowed to forget what her life could have been like if I'd never been born. It filled my body with constant stress that manifested itself in a myriad of ways. The pressure to live up to her expectations was insurmountable. It was like I was wearing a shirt with a collar that was too tight and the older I got and the more pressure she put on me, the tighter the collar became until I could barely breathe. I needed to come up for air, but she just kept pushing me down. She spent my life trying to mold me into the person she wished she were, instead of the person I was meant to be. I needed to be the best at everything, an impossible task that only left me feeling like I was never good enough.
Yale was her dream, so it became mine. I got so used to doing whatever she wanted that I didn't know what it was I wanted anymore. Who was Caitlyn Coates? That's what the news stories said the longer I was missing, but I couldn't answer the question myself. A scholar, a beauty, the perfect daughter, the most popular girl in school? I was all of those things and yet none of them at the same time. I had no idea who Caitlyn Coates really was, yet everyone around me seemed to think they knew exactly who I was. They put me in a box and thought they knew my life, but they had no idea who I was or what I'd been through.
Of course there was no point in explaining any of that to them now. Death has a way of making life's biggest concerns obsolete.
YOU ARE READING
Lies Left Unsaid
Mystery / Thriller"The fact that I was murdered didn't come as a surprise; it was the fact that it hadn't happened sooner which shocked me." High school senior, Caitlyn Coates, has everything going for her; she's beautiful, brilliant and rich. With just a month until...
