Page 48 of My Heartless Soul

“Then do whatever it takes to keep your heart safe.”

“And if it’s too late?” I voice the fear that has been plaguing my mind for the past few days because I can only admit it to my brother, and I hear him inhaling and exhaling loudly.

“Sorry to break it to you, but there is no ‘if’ here. I think it was too late before it even began.”

Chapter twenty-three

The Past

Song: Hurts – Rolling Stone

“Get the fuck out of that room right this second.” Mother’s voice shakes the thin walls in our apartment, her fury pliable. But I don’t want to get out.

I don’t want to go out there.

To them.

What does it matter how I die? By her hand when she is mad at me or by her hand while she shoves me into the next waiting body? What does anything matter?

“Listen, you little, ungrateful bitch.” She kicks my door with her foot. At least it’s not my ribs this time. “I did not waste a fucking fortune on you today at the salon, so you will hide it all away. This one is a big deal. He is too important for you to fuck it up. So, get out here right this second, or I will send him in to you. It doesn’t fucking matter to me.” She bangs on my door one more time and leaves, but I know she didn’t simply leave me to be.

Like she said, there is no way out.

I’m stuck. And this cage with bare walls, drafty window, and a plain, old, and clumped mattress on the floor I am living in might not seem like much, but it is the only untainted place in this whole God-forsaken apartment, and I cannot have them come in here. Never. I need this little bit of sanity. Peace. Or an illusion of one.

This is all I have since mother took me out of school when I was thirteen, telling them I will be homeschooled from then on.

I wasn’t. I’m not. I try to teach myself as much as I can with the old notes I have saved from school. It is outdated, and I have learned it all by heart at this point, but I still reread every word. I redo every math problem and go over every science fact like it is my first time hearing about it.

Last week, I was also able to get into a library and check out as many books as I could fit into my backpack without arousing suspicion from my father, who was accompanying me. That is the only reason I’m allowed into a library in the first place, and he just might be hungover enough not to remember it and tell mother.

Coming home, I immediately shoved them under a loose floorboard inside my closet so my parents don’t see. Father won’t care. He is never sober enough to care, but he will tell her, and she will burn them to the ground after she beats me bloody.

Apparently, they will fill my head with unnecessary garbage when the only thing I’m supposed to be in this life is an obedient girl and a future wife to one of the men she always invites over.

As if they come here to find an underaged wife. As if any one of them will tie their life to a riff-raff like me. As if I am nothing more than a prostitute to them…

At fifteen years old…

I should fight. I should run away like I have been planning since the day my very first period ended, and I was faced with the bright future mother had waiting for me. But I didn’t becauseher plan failed. No one was stupid enough around here to believe a deranged woman and sleep with a thirteen-year-old girl.

Now, that doesn’t mean they didn’t do other things…

But that peace ends tonight. Because she found my first client. The one who won’t be satisfied with just looking at my young body or taking pictures of it. One that wants more than to simply run his dirty hands through it, slapping it, pinching it.

She finally found a sick, old pervert who was leering over my small, shaking body like the pedophile he was when he came over yesterday to “look me over.” I saw the money signs in my mother’s eyes when he paid her that deposit for me.

But I knew from two years ago that my life wasn’t safe, and I wouldn’t survive it, but I didn’t know where to go. The first few months, she watched me around the clock, not letting me out of her sight even for a minute.

For years, I questioned why my parents had me, and then, one night, I overheard their drunken conversation with our neighbors, who were as messed up as my parents.

I was a drunk accident that she didn’t know about until it was too late for an abortion, and for a long time, I thought that it was just some unholy reason that she didn’t give me up for adoption when I was born. But now I know better.

My mother is many things, but stupid she is not. She had plans for me to make her so much money she would drown in them. She was going to use my body as soon as I was old enough for it, and someone took her bait, and I’m just lucky it held out this long.

But nevertheless, her eyes track my movements, and I’m not allowed to step outside. After about six months, she started taking me to the store and back with her, but always with her or father, and that is how the whole year went.

You ask why I don’t run away at night?

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