Page 29 of Pulse
Chapter 11
Ren
I’d never run from anything in my entire life.
Ren Miller was a fighter from the first moment she was put onto this earth. I never backed down when things got rough. I picked up the phone and called the ambulance when I needed to, I stood up to my fears...I kicked life in the balls when it tried to bring me down.
I went to one of those public high schools where there was no uniform, so the segregation between the cool kids, the nerds and the poor kids was even wider. One day in year eight I turned up to school wearing the same clothes as the day before because I had run out of ways to make my few things look different and the mean girls had instantly latched onto me. They’d teased me all day until I bit back and somehow I’d gotten myself into a fight after the last bell had rung. It was a case of turning up to fight the bullies or run like a coward and be teased for the rest of my life.
They never thought I’d actually go through with it because I was the girl who constantly kept her mouth shut to go unnoticed. I was the quiet one in the corner too afraid to speak up incase it made me a target.
Needless to say I turned up, punched the most popular girl in school right in the face and promptly got suspended. The bitch got a black eye and I got grounded for a week, but they never bullied me again.
Yesterday was the first time in my life that I’d run and I felt like throwing up.
I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, wondering how a man was able to break the things inside me that I thought were unbreakable. Rolling onto my side, I glanced across the room and pushed the negative thoughts to the back of my mind.
I kept refusing to move out of Beat, so a few weeks ago Dad had extra storage built into the kitchen. Now the storeroom looked a lot like an actual bedroom. I had a rack to hang up my clothes, a set of drawers and a lamp, which was all I really needed. I still slept on a queen size mattress, but now it had a base. When I closed the door, it actually looked like a bedroom. It was my own space.
I actually liked waking up and knowing I was already at Beat. It’d taken a while, but it was more like home than that shabby rental in Deer Park ever was. Home had been wherever Mum was, but I had finally come to terms with what I had right now.
There was a crash downstairs and the sounds of the Twins laughing their asses off filtered upstairs as I sat up in bed frowning. Glancing at the clock on my phone, I saw the hour and wondered who let the cat out of the bag. Those boys were gym junkies, but even they weren’t that keen to come in at six am.
Pulling on some clothes, I shuffled downstairs and had to rub my eyes, confused at the sight of the Twins, Dad and Josie standing in the middle of the studio, a whole bunch of stuff strewn over the benches along the wall. At least half a dozen plastic bags and boxes were piled up, waiting to be opened.
“What’s that?” I asked and everyone turned around with big grins on their faces.
“Happy birthday Ren!” Dean exclaimed.
I groaned. “I thought I was going to get away with it.”
“Not on my watch,” Dad said with a smile.
Last year I didn’t have a party, or presents. I had a funeral. Birthdays were always an ‘under the radar’ event, but that was until I turned up at Beat.
“Thanks,” I said awkwardly. “But let’s not make a big deal out of this.”
“Why?” Lincoln asked.
“I don’t like birthdays.” They were just a reminder of how poor we’d been and how alone we were in the world. Now it was a reminder of how Mum wasn’t around anymore. It didn’t seem right to celebrate. A year older, a year wiser and another day that was now marked with me beginning my new life as an epic coward.
“You don’t like them?”
I shook my head. “What’s in the boxes?”
“An athletic company sent them over for you,” Josie said, pointing at the pile of stuff.
“What...”
“It’s a birthday gift,” she explained. “There’s a fancy gym bag, new gloves, shirts, tops, hoodies, hand wraps...all kinds of stuff. They really want you to sign.”
I stared at the pile of equipment and clothes from the newest sponsor to try and win me over and my mind actually misfired. I couldn’t look at their ‘gifts’ after a lifetime of having to scrape every cent together to pay the rent. I couldn’t look at them after seeing Ash so powerless.
