Breaking Free

People look at me differently as I walk down the hallway today. It's almost like they are seeing me for the first time. Honestly, I feel like a new person.
No one approaches me though, I would be lying if I didn't say I was grateful for that. I'm not exactly ready to be social just yet. The last time I had friends was before my mother died and after my father took his hold on me, I cut ties with everyone.
No one seemed to understand that it wasn't my fault I gave up on my friendships. It was my father's wishes and I had to do what he said or I was punished.
My punishments varied on the amount of anger my father felt toward my actions. Sometimes he hit me, other times, he just verbally scolded me. I learned quick on what to do to avoid being smacked though. After a few times of knowing that every time you did something wrong, you got hit, you started doing things right.
I'm not talking about your run of the mill spankings, my father sometimes hit me to the point that I bruised, one time he actually bloodied my nose and mouth. That was for back talking. I learned fast that when he said to do something, you did it without questioning why.
I grew up thinking that this behavior was normal for a parent until some classes in school warned of abuse and other things. Up until then, I thought all children were disciplined by their parents.
I hate to say it, but I was too chicken to turn my father in for anything because I have always been afraid that if I do, he's going to some how find me and beat me with in an inch of my life as he so fondly likes to put it.
The change with my father all started after my mother died. I started doing everything for him, that seemed to get him out of his, I guess you'd call it, funk.
For months, my father would sit on the couch and drink can after can of beer. The only time he wasn't drinking was when he was sleeping. I could tell, even though he would work, he was also drinking then. He was very lucky he was never caught and fired.
After I started doing things around the house. At eight years old, I was doing the cooking, cleaning and laundry around the house. Being eight, I didn't have a lot of things that I could really cook, so I lived off of peanut butter sandwiches. To this day, I can't even stomach the smell of the stuff.
I used to not blame my dad for his behavior because I could understand what it felt like when my mom went away. Although his loss was on a different level, it was just as painful because my mother had died.
Leaving me behind, my mother left me with a father that didn't even know how to take care of himself. As the daze of his loss started to fade, my father started doing more things around the house until he figured that I could easily do them. That's when everything started to go downhill for me.
At first, it was just my father asking me to do little things around the house, like laundry or pick up stuff in the kitchen after he cooked. Oh how wonderful it was to have hot food in my stomach instead of sticky, sweet peanut butter. I was perfectly okay helping out because those were things that I always did with my mother.
As time went on, the amount of things my father asked me to do around the house grew. By the time I was fourteen, I was doing everything around the house. My father never lifted a finger as long as I was at home. If he needed a drink, I got it. If he wanted food cooked, I cooked it.
It's now hard looking back at my misspent youth knowing that I lost out on so much childhood.
I watch as people watch me when I walk into the last class of the day. There are people staring at me and whispering things behind their hands.
A lot of people whisper the question "Is that Lina Stevenson?". I want so desperately to yell out that it is me, but I just blush every time and drop my eyes to my shoes and wait for their whispers to stop.
I want to break free and be who I want to be inside, but I'm so afraid someone is going to tell my father that I've disobeyed him.
When the final bell rings for the day, I put my ugly, big framed glasses back on and pull my sweatshirt over my head. My father will be waiting for me in the car when I get outside and I don't want him to see the tee shirt. I know that my punishment for wearing the tee shirt to school will be severe.
I walk nervously outside and look for my father's rusty Ford Ranger, but I don't see it immediately. I'm hoping that he hasn't forgotten me again because the evening bus from the school doesn't go to our little slice of land on the edge of town. That's the only reason my father picks me up from school anyway.
I look around for about fifteen minutes waiting on him, but he doesn't show up.
I walk myself into the front office of the school and ask to use the phone.
I dial my house number and wait for an answer from my father.
"Hello?" he slurs.
"Daddy, it's me, I'm still at the school," I explain. "You forgot to pick me up."
"I'm sorry, you'll just have to walk home, I've had too much to drink," his every word gives that away. Nothing is coming out straight. He's tripping over his words and I can hear him take a long pull off of bottle, I can only assume it's beer.
"Okay, I'll walk," I tell him reluctantly. He's not a fan of me walking home from school, but on days like this, it's the only choice that I have.
I hang up the phone and turn around to walk out of the office, someone is standing in the doorway with their back to me and I can't get out.
"Excuse me," I say shyly.
"Oh, I'm sorry," the person says.
"It's okay, I just need to get through," I say blushing a bright crimson red. I'm not used to talking to anyone other than my father.
The fact that the boy standing in front of me is extremely attractive to me doesn't help the fact that I turn into a bumbling idiot around people I don't normally talk to.
"I heard you say that you were walking home, do you want a ride?" the boy asks.
"No thank you, I'll just walk," I answer politely. I know that if I accept the ride from him, my dad will find out and get pissed off at me and the punishment won't be worth the ride.
I brush past the boy and feel an immediate spark between us. I don't know if it's my imagination or if something just happened between us. I glance up at him through my eyelashes and I can see a look in his eyes that match the feeling in the pit of my stomach. He felt it too.
"Sorry," I whisper as I hurry past him and down the hallway.
I don't dare look back to see if he's watching me.
Once outside of the school, I remove my sweatshirt once more so that I can walk a little more comfortably to my house. It's about eighty five degrees outside and I have a six mile walk ahead of me.
As I'm walking, the boy with the blue eyes haunts my thoughts. I think about his strong jawline and his chiseled nose. His blue eyes are the kind of blue that makes you think of the ocean. I don't even know his name but he's already got a dominating place in my thoughts.
He had been wearing a pair of fitted jeans, that weren't too loose that they fell off of him, and not so tight that they looked girly. The tee shirt he was wearing stands out in mine because it was a watery blue color that complimented his eyes very well.
The trek to the house from the school takes me about two hours and by the time I reach the edge of the road that my father live on, I'm pouring the sweat. I stop before turning the corner so I can pull my sweatshirt on over my head. I turn the corner and walk the final block to the house.
When I walk through the front door, my father is passed out on the couch. I'm guessing that he had started drinking before he left work since he was already asleep.
I walk softly past the living room and walk to the back of the house where my bedroom is located. I quietly shut the door and pull the sweatshirt over my head and discard it in the hamper by the bedroom door. I walk over to my bed and drop my backpack on it. I walk over to the closet and pull out a pair of sleep pants, a light, summery material. I pull of my jeans and step into the sleep pants and instantly feel a hundred degrees cooler than I had walking in the baggy jeans.
Inside of the closet, I pull out a tank top and pull off my sweat soaked, white tee shirt and throw it in the hamper beside the sweatshirt, I quickly pull things from the bottom of the hamper to cover the shirt in case my father were to look inside. If he saw that the shirt was recently worn, he'd get suspicious.
After pulling the tank top on, I walk out of my bedroom door and into the door on the left, where the joint bathroom sits. I walk over to the sink and run the cold water and splash my face, hoping to cool my body off a little more.
I grab a ponytail holder off of the back corner of the sink top and pull my hair into a high ponytail. The thing I love most about being home is that I don't have to wear my hair down. I absolutely love having my hair pulled up and the glasses off of my face. It makes me feel like a normal human being.