Page 54 of Elijah's Hope
“I wasn’t… I didn’t plan this. I needed to get out of there! To find some new place to go so I could start my life over.”
“So you used me,” I said, that hollow feeling forming in my gut again.
“In the beginning, yes. But that changed. My feelings… Whatever you think of me, my feelings are real.”
I ran my hand through my hair thinking I could scrub out all the information I had been given. Only I couldn’t. I was left with only one truth.
Shelby was a liar.
“How can I possibly believe you?”
Her mouth wobbled as if she wanted to object but, of course, she realized she couldn’t.
“Do I even know who you are?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “I’m just Shelby.”
Shelby. My sweet, amazing, wholesome Shelby. The profile I picked because I thought she’d grown up the opposite of how I had. I’d so badly wanted a taste of that life. Normalcy and goodness.
Not poverty and porn. That life I already knew.
And for a time, she had given it to me. Only it was all lies.
“I need to go,” I said, heading for the door. “I have to think. I can’t… I’m sorry but I can’t even look at you right now.”
I saw her flinch and it hurt. It hurt to know I was the one who did that to her.
As I closed the door behind me, I heard the faint sound of her voice.
“Bye, Eli.”
* * *
Pleasant Town Trailer Park
Shreveport, Louisiana
Six Weeks ago
Shelby
I cracked my eyes open, but it hurt. I turned, and I could see light pouring in through the curtain above my bed. Shit, how much did I have to drink last night?
It hurt to think about it. It hurt to think about anything, my head was so full of cotton balls. I pushed up and thought something was weird. Different. I looked down at myself and saw that my T-shirt was on inside out and backward, the tag sticking out under my chin. I guess if I had been drunk, I might have done something like that…
What day was it? Tuesday. I didn’t usually drink during the week. I forced myself to think about to last night. Why would I have done that?
Jimmy had been over. Hanging with my uncle. Which sucked when your ex-boyfriend, if I could even call him that, was still hanging around all the time. That’s how he had gotten me to go out with him in the first place. Just kept badgering at me, telling me how I thought I was too good for him (which I was) until finally I let him guilt me into doing it.
Or maybe I had started to believe that a guy like Jimmy was the best I could do.
He was fucking me, and I was so miserable that this was what my life had come to, I put an end to it after a week.
That was over a year ago. But sure as shit, he was still over at our trailer all the time. I was going to have to say something to Rip. If he wanted to hang withhis boy,then they could do it over at Jimmy’s trailer. Besides Jimmy was only thirty and Rip was pushing fifty. The two of them needed to find friends their own darn ages.
Again, I tried to push through the cobwebs of last night. I had finished cooking Rip dinner. Jimmy showed up. I got them beers and left them sitting outside talking their usual bullshit about how they needed to come up with a plan to get rich quick.
Rip had been trying to get rich for as long as I knew him. Certainly since I had been living with him. My momma’s brother, he was my sole choice for custody after she’d died. I used to wonder why he bothered to take on raising a kid. But when he’d started making me part of his get-rich plans, I learned real quick.
