DEAR DIARY, here we go again.
I thought Preston would be more pissed at me for blowing off yesterday's homework like that, but instead he just sat behind his desk with a serious look and said very softly that "It would be more productive if you wrote down more details, Cecilia." And then he said something like "I know it's difficult for you, but you need to let this out."
I don't know. I'm tired. I feel like I want to do this because I told him I would and because I have to, but at the same time I just want to forget about it and cry. Only I can't cry. I try, and it just gets caught behind what my eyes are now and then I start wheezing and my chest hurts. And I don't feel better afterwards.
But I don't want to go back to prison.
I was sixteen and my high school's spring formal was about a month away and somehow I managed to get my lab partner in Chemistry to ask me to go. I guess the twenty-sixth time I asked him if he was going to the dance he finally got the idea or something. I mean, I'd read him before that, and I knew he wasn't totally repulsed by me even though I was weird, but golly gee, dear diary, how can boys be so dumb? (Is sarcasm going to get me in trouble with Dr. Preston? Stay tuned, we'll find out together!)
Sorry.
Anyway, the catch was that I had to get permission before I could really say "Yes, I will go to the spring formal with you," so I went with my mom the next time she went grocery shopping and I asked her on the drive back. And she wouldn't answer the question. Not out loud, anyway. Inside she was thinking that she needed to ask Dad and that Dad would say no and anyway there wasn't money for a dress and dances were a bad influence on kids and really the rest of what she thought didn't matter because it was NO. What her mouth said was "We'll have to see," and not much else.
I begged her to say yes. I don't know why, it's not like Dad would say yes just because Mom did, but I begged anyway. She was starting to feel a little more sympathetic, but a sympathetic NO is still NO, and then I woke up in a hospital with a broken arm and a few dozen stitches and Mom was dead.
I swear I am not skipping anything. They say Mom lost control of the car and we went off the side of an overpass onto a busy freeway and a truck hit us. All I remember is Mom saying NO in her head and then a doctor was grumbling to a nurse about how much the greens fees were at his country club now. One second later, I knew that he was thinking that he had four more rooms to visit before he could go find an empty bed and take a nap, and that the nurse was thinking that she thought Tiger Woods was kind of cute and that it was so sad that this girl's mom didn't make it.
And that's when I found out that when the nurse thought "this girl" she really meant me, and that it was Mom who died.
The next thing the doctor thought, by the way, was how much he hated it when patients started screaming and wouldn't stop, and whether he'd ordered the nurse to bring him enough sedatives to shut me up. And I guess he had, because I woke up later on and knew Dad was in the room and he was thinking that it must have been my fault.
The thing is, I was really good at hiding what I could do from Dad and keeping his suspicions focused on stuff that had nothing to do with me being a mutant, as long as all I could do was read his mind and pick things up without touching them. What I couldn't hide was the fact that after a few hours I didn't need stitches anymore. I managed to keep the cast on for a little over a week, but they removed it at my first checkup because the bone had knit just fine, and in record time. No scars, either, which I still can't believe. Especially not now.
Anyway, now Dad was thinking all kinds of things about me, because pot and Mexican boyfriends and all that kind of thing just can't explain why your only daughter heals her injuries faster than is humanly possible. Unless, of course, she's not human.
From that point on, I was under a microscope. I was so scared, I couldn't do anything right. I had to cook dinner all the time instead of just three nights a week since Mom was gone, and every night while I was in the kitchen trying to stay out of the way, I knew he was out in the living room, piling up empty beer cans. Only this time the TV was turned off because the only show he wanted to watch was The Cecilia Johnson Mutant Talent Show, starring the filthy mutant who killed his wife. This idea kept growing in him, and I didn't know what to do. I didn't have any money of my own, I didn't have any real friends, I didn't have anywhere to go, and that was as far as I was able to think about it.
That's your hour, diary. My chest is starting to hurt and I can't write about this any more tonight.