Page 35 of Beautiful Venom
Her now closed eyes are actually a deep denim blue, her facial features are petite and perfectly harmonized. She even has a dusting of freckles on her nose.
She often dressed like a hobo, never putting on makeup and even wearing thick-framed nonprescription glasses so as not to be noticed. I can’t say that helped, because she often suffered malicious male gazes.
The thought that one of them could’ve done something to her just now forms a knot in my heart.
Ever since I became an adult, I’ve made it my mission to protect her just like she protected me when we were young. For some reason, men are not as attracted to me as they are to her. I mean, I get looks, but they’re not like the ones she gets. As if she’s blood and they’re vampires who want to suck her dry. As soon as they see me, and usually, some of my pepper spray, Tasers, or the landlord’s guns that I clean as a side gig, they fuck off.
But I couldn’t protect her this time.
This time, one of them got to her first.
I hug her, my head pressing against her chest as tears blur my eyes. “You said you’d never leave me alone, Vi. You…promised.”
The words constrict my throat and I tremble all over. Like the day she ushered me out of bed and helped me put my shoes on. She was also shaking as we hid by the corner. She was thirteen. I was twelve.
“Do you trust me?”Violet once asked me in the darkness of the room where we shared a bunk bed.
I nodded.
Living in the system since I was six, I learned not to trust anyone, but Violet is different. Some kids hate it when they have a foster sibling. They despise having less food to go around and sleeping in bunk beds.
They can get malicious and even violent.
Not Violet.
Ever since I arrived at this house in the New Jersey suburbs a year ago, she’s shared her food and her hiding nook in the closet.
When I got here, Violet had been with Martha and Gerald, our foster parents, who only use the system for extra income, for six months.
Violet has often said we need to get out of here.
One night, Martha called her a whore who was trying to seduce her husband. I called Martha a bitch and her husband a creep because he was the one looking at Violet while licking his lips when she was wearing plain cotton pajamas. Vi never dresses in a revealing way. Like never.
She’s been growing breasts and hips and getting curvier over the past year, and that creep Gerald can’t take his sleazy eyes off of her.
Another day, Martha beat me up for talking back until she busted my lip open. Violet apologized on my behalf, promising I wouldn’t do it again.
Vi apologizes a lot. She also stands with her head bowed, listening to Martha calling her an ugly whore just like her slut of a mother and telling her she should be thankful that they took her in or she would’ve died on the side of the road like her drug addict mama.
Violet always swallows the knife with its blood and buries her wounds deep. She never complains or causes trouble and prefers to suffer in silence. It wasn’t until recently that I found out Gerald touches her inappropriately, letting his hands wander and linger where they shouldn’t.
To avoid conflict, she chooses to remain silent instead of speaking up, but she always speaks up when it comes to me. She always tries to rectify the situation and shield me under her wings.
She always says I need to be careful with my spicy mouth, but I’m nowhere near as patient as she is and get easily wound up. I’d rather be beaten up and spend nights without any food and thrown in the attic than let Martha and Gerald get away with their shit.
Which is why Martha beat me the hell up earlier tonight. I clawed at her face, and when Gerald pretended to break up the fight, I kicked him in the nuts.
He punched me so hard, I lost consciousness. When I came to, I found myself locked in the attic.
It’s a dark, airless box, and the only light is the white streetlamp’s shadow slipping through a narrow, dust-coated window high on the wall. The wooden beams above are splintered and warped, cobwebs clinging to them like silent witnesses to the hours I’ve spent here.
The stale smell of mildew and trapped heat sticks to my skin as I pull my knees to my chest and rest my head on them. I stare at the light dusting of snow falling and landing on the windowsill.
Right. It’s going to be Christmas soon. I hate the holiday season.
Ever since my parents died and I became an orphan, it feels like a needle stabbing an old wound, undoing the stitches and making me remember what I lost.
The floorboards creak under a hesitant step. I perk up as a key jiggles in the lock and then the door opens.
