Page 1 of Pocketful of Shame

Chapter One

Romi

Don't you think it's strange that we live here?

Why Pocketful?

Come on, Romi, think.

Open your eyes, babe…

Chris Capaldi's voice continued to haunt me long after the doctors sedated me, catapulting me into a semi-state of awareness, and making my body pliable against my wishes. My brain couldn’t move beyond those words, that one specific question he asked me the night he died. I didn’t know why we lived in Pocketful, but Chris was right. Itwasstrange. I'd never thought about it before that night, but couldn’t stop now.

Drowsy and disorientated, I fell in and out of sleep during the transport process to the facility in Texas, unable to take in my surroundings, unable to feel at all. Every time I came to, another dose of drugs was flushed through my system, and so the haze continued.

Time passed in a numb wave of blankness as I was moved from one hospital to another, one state to the next. I couldn’t take anything in, not the doctors or nurses speaking to me, not the pain in my chest, or the fear I knew Ishouldbe feeling. Everything inside of me was void.

Minutes drifted into hours, possibly days, and I didn’t care. The only voice that was a constant in my thoughts belonged to Chris. The only face that fought through the haze of my mind belonged to Sketch. Weirdly enough, a Natalie Merchant song continued to echo through my mind;My Skin. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t stop replaying that song in my head, or how I even remembered the lyrics through the jumbled mess of my thoughts, but it was there, playing loudly, over and over like a broken record, reminding me of everything that was just out of reach. Reminding me of my feelings. Reminding me of Sketch.Hauntingme.

When I did wake, it was to a foreign room, unfamiliar faces, and another round of medication. Too disheartened to question the pills being prodded between my lips, I swallowed them down like the good girl I was, and allowed the darkness to cloak me in an unsettled state of sleep.

This was my pattern, my routine, for the next several hours, days, weeks? I couldn’t tell anymore and it didn’t matter. Strapped to a bed in Tully House, the so-called rehabilitation center that was supposed to have the miraculous cure for my fucked-up mental state, I stewed in my depression.

These people couldn’t fix me. They wouldn’t know where to start. I wasn’t sick. I was broken. No amount of therapy or medication could absolve me of my memories, of the impending threat echoing just beyond the walls of Tully House. The moment I allowed my mind to remember that night at the restaurant, it was like a dam burst inside of me, smothering me, overwhelming me with broken memories of information that felt information,urgent.

You're in danger…

If they find out you know…

When the drugs wore off, I mapped out a list of the people who had wronged me. In my mind, I plotted my revenge. There was something inside of me that demanded Ifight back. It was something that sounded an awful lot like Chris's voice.Protect my brother,he'd begged me. Well, I was done. So fucking done. Protecting Sketch Capaldi had landed me in a fresh new hell with my hands bound and my hope non-existent. No more.

I was happiest when I was fed more pills. I didn’t care what they were. They kept the constant thoughts and memories away. Kept my brain from attacking itself, and I was glad. I didn’t want to think, to feel, toremember. I welcomed the numbness, the feeling of nothing.

What did I have to wake up to? A dead boyfriend and a vengeful ex-best friend? A father who bailed on me when I needed him most? A vindictive stepmother-to-be? A chip on my shoulder and a target on my back? And questions; more questions than I could ever possibly answer. And a life that was so far from the one I had anticipated that it made it hard to breathe.

No, I didn’t want to wake up to that.

* * *

In the corner of the room, a radio was playing softly. The station the nurse had selected was playing Jess Glynne'sTake Me Home. I absorbed the lyrics like crack to my soul, keeping my eyes clenched shut as I listened dutifully to every single word that drifted from the little speaker.

I didn’t know how long it had been since my last influx of meds but I felt different, more clear-minded than I had in days, and it was disconcerting. I wasn’t sure if I liked this version of me. Awareness wasn't my friend right now, not when my thoughts were too painful to contemplate. My eyelids felt sticky and damp and I presumed that was because of the sheer number of tears that had escaped me since those men came to take me from the hospital in Lake Charles. I knew that I was in Texas now, a whole state away from my problems, but that wasn't a good thing.

Because I was isolated.

BecauseSketchwas isolated.

Forget about him, Romi, you did your best.

Don’t you dare forget about him.

Shut the hell up!

The sound of a magazine being flicked open and pages roughly smacking against each other filled my ears and caused me to grimace. Furious with the noise for distracting me from the song on the radio, I clenched my jaw so tight that my molars protested against the move. Pulling on my wrists, I found I was still bound to the plush mattress beneath me. My feet were the same. I was tied down like an animal.

A rare and sporadic swell of undiluted rage coursed through me, so potent that I knew in my heart that my relationship with my father had been fractured beyond repair. I could never forgive him for doing this. These people had cracked something critically important inside of me and I had lost contact with the part of my humanity that offered forgiveness.

For a moment, I wondered if this was how Sketch had felt when he was little; locked away from the rest of the world, trapped in a state of confusion. Then I swiftly pushed the thoughts from my mind. I didn’t want to feel sorry for him anymore. I was tired of having sympathy for a person who had made it his life's mission to destroy me.

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