Love Lies A' Bleeding

Chapter 4: Party's After-Effects

The house where I live was pitch black when I arrived. All the lights were turned off. It was only a quarter passed eight, but it seemed like the whole neighborhood was already asleep. Well, it was Saturday. Most likely they were enjoying the night having a nice dinner while looking at the stars that twinkle at the dark night sky somewhere, like in a restaurant or some place out of town.

The lights that lined up the street were the only source of lighting. Without them, the whole neighborhood would have looked creepy.

Turning my purse into the light, I rummaged for my keys. When I found it, I quickly inserted it into the knob. When I heard the usual click, I pulled the door and entered the house. I didn’t open the lights. Using my phone’s dim light, I managed to find my way up to the stairs and to my room adjacent to the one where King used to sleep.

I realized as soon as there was only me and my dad left, without my younger brother making noises in his room and my mom making noises in the kitchen, the entire house was dead silent. I became aware of every move in the house. At nine in the evening, I would hear my dad’s car arriving from work. Then he would be moving around in the kitchen to drink beer or anything that could keep him awake for quite some time. And then, I would hear him opening the door to his study. Sometimes I would hear him moving around the house for some reason I couldn’t understand. And most of the time, I would be already laden with sleep by the time he went to his room to rest.

I would wake up at six in the morning and by the time I went downstairs, my dad would be already gone to work. He would leave my allowance on top of the breakfast table beside a plate of eggs. Then, I had to wait for another fifteen hours for him to get back home. It was the same every week. On weekends, he was either on a business trip or at home working in his study. We weren’t really into talking terms, but we did smile whenever we bumped at each other around the house.

I looked at the digital clock on top of my bedside table. It said 8:22. I t was Saturday and my dad was on a business trip. I could have easily gone to my mom’s house, but my resolve stopped me from doing so. I had to stay strong. This was the only way for all of us.

Without undressing or turning on any lights, I slumped my body on my bed. The familiarity of it brought me into instant oblivion the moment my back hit the mattress. Without realizing it, I had already dozed off to sleep.

Then, my phone started ringing.

“Fudge it,” I muttered under my breath as my cell phone continued to ring so loud, waking me up in the middle of plunging into the ocean with the dolphins, which was my dream.

I had to rummage around the mess for it, toppling displays on my bedside table, before I finally found it wedged between two old shoeboxes below my bed. I didn’t know how it got there but I must have been trashing around the bed a lot.

I looked at the screen and saw a number I didn’t recognize. For a moment there, I thought it was my dad calling. “Hello,” I answered, my voice sounding horrible from sleep.

“Did I wake you up?”

I sat upright. Now that made me felt past horrible. I knew that voice. I couldn’t be mistaken. It was a voice I was trying so hard to get off my system, but couldn’t. It was Henry Riviera, the one and only heartbreaker, my ex-boyfriend. He was a psychopath—not exactly someone with the disorder, but he was anti-social. Since our breakup, he had been stalking me at school. I saw him everywhere, even in places he wasn’t supposed to be, like the cafeteria. He once told me that he hates cafeteria food so he’d eat with his special lunchbox somewhere. But after our breakup, he started eating Mang Ben’s sandwich, as if it wasn’t supposed to annoy me. To top it all, he would be outside the gates of Luna East every morning as if he was waiting for me. Thank God, he never once walked up to me or else I would have broken down.