Cursed

“You good for nothing low-lifer, you have a family to support! A daughter who needs schooling, clothes on her back, and food in her stomach. Wake up!”

Snapping my eyes closed tighter, I drew the blanket over the pillow and tried to succumb myself in the already present darkness. Just another rude awakening in the Moore household. Emphasis on rude.

That was my mother, Lillian, she was yelling at my father to wake up. He really doesn’t have to be out the door for work until about 7:50 A.M. It’s only about 6:10 A.M. I don’t have to be up for at least another hour, he doesn’t either. Yet, still, at the same time every morning, she insists on waking everyone up just to point a finger and yell at my father.

They’ve been separated for about two years now, and she insisted on living in the same house for the sake of my normalcy. Yeah, right. Separate but living together, could have fooled me for World War III.

Throwing the blanket back as my mother’s mouth ran another earful of insults no one was interested in hearing, I stormed to my door, whipped it open, and made my way down the hall. Budging past my mother who slammed her fists against the door instead of actually turning the knob, I pushed the door open. Sending a freezing glare at her over my shoulder, I pushed the door closed and twisted the lock.

When I turned to greet my father, I found him buried beneath a pillow and a blanket, doing as I was, to block my mother out. I tucked my pale blond wave behind my ear and crawled onto the bed. He knew it was me, because this also was a part of our morning routine, but still didn’t turn to greet me. Throwing the blanket back, pushing the pillow from the bed, I sat cross-legged and prodded his shoulder endlessly.

Finally, he turned his head toward me and peeked a cobalt eye up at me, hooded and half-closed from irritation and sleep. “Good morning, Sadie.”

Rolling my eyes, I grinned falsely, “I guess you could put it that way.”

From beyond the door, you couldn’t hear my mother anymore. She was off doing God knows what, but neither of us cared. There were times when I wished it was just me and my father. He was the one who really took care of me, my mother just made us both bitter, tired people.

Groaning at the movements of stretching his limbs, my father lifted his heavy arm onto my shoulders and drew me in for a very ungraceful embrace. He kissed the back of my head and groaned once more. “Well, best to hop to it. She’ll be coming back in here soon enough, and we don’t need that.”

Rolling away from him and off the bed, I pressed my toes to cold hardwood floors I hadn’t noticed were sucking my warmth before. Releasing a quick gasp, I left and headed back to my room.

Staring at my high day bed, I imagined sleep, yearned for it, actually, but turned away from it dramatically. It felt like one of mother’s after hour soap operas, but it was real. My bed and I were in a relationship, but my mother and school kept trying to tear us away from each other—it’s a tragic love story in the making.

After assembling a tan sweater that’d go down to my thighs, and a pair of ripped skinny jeans, I headed my way to the bathroom across the hall. Downstairs, I could still hear my mother badgering my father to get ready quicker—“Hurry up, Alexander. You’re going to be late soon enough.”—and his footsteps, showing that he ignored her every jab.

At 7:30 A.M. every day, the bus collects children two blocks away from my house. Five more blocks from there, we end up collecting Luna Jacobson, my father’s business partner’s daughter—Moore & Jacobson Titling Company—and best friend. Still stuck in the seventies, her mother named her Luna, because she was born at night. She was my very opposite, with cropped unnatural red hair, cloudy blue eyes, and tanned skin. She had legs long like a giraffe’s neck, and a natural, almost obnoxious feel to her.

She smiled when she got on the bus, her eyes connecting to mine and a wave trilling through her fingers as she moved down the squished aisle and plopped beside me on the bench. “Morning, chick,”

Glancing through my peripherals, I smirked at her. “Not much of a morning.”

“Ah,” she dragged, “The she-devil drew her pitchfork and jabbed at’cha, did she?”

Pulling my eyebrows together in clear confusion, I shook my head, meeting my hand over my eyes. “You paint the weirdest pictures at too early in the morning, you know that?” she just laughed, “But, yeah. She did. She needs to stop or I’m going to really give her my final decision.”

“Dun-dun-duuun.” She sang in a deep, manly undertone.

Nearly six months ago, just at the very start of the school year, my mother and father gave me an ultimatum. Live with my mother for senior year, or live with my father. Living with my mother would mean living in my house with her, and living with my father would mean living in an apartment somewhere close to school so that I could still attend Fairview. Right now, I was living the best of both worlds—even if it did feel like the best of no worlds—with having both parents in the same house, going to the same school, and living comfortably at exactly where I was at.

It felt selfish, to say the least. Shrugging, I turned my head away, “We all knew it was going to come to this. That I’d end up living with him. She can’t put herself aside for anything, and I can’t deal with that.”

“Well, Sade, don’t make your decision just yet, you’re angry and crabby right now. It just feels like a swing vote, you know?” Luna said with a halfhearted shrug, the corner of her mouth pulling down.

I shook my head, my fingers flinging to my temples as I massaged the oncoming headaches away from my peaceful mind. “Yeah, I know. I don’t want to talk about it right now, okay?”

She nodded, her mouth pulling into a straight line as she turned her head away from me. We sat in a somewhat comfortable silence as the thrum of adolescence behind us buzzed too loud for my headache to go unnoticed. I wanted to scream. This was my mother’s fault. If I could get more than three hours of sleep, I wouldn’t have migraines. I had to tell myself to bite my lip until it hurt or bled, warding off the anger.

Luna touched my arm, breaking my spell and gathering my attention back on her. When I turned my head to look up at her, she smiled softly, “I’m sorry. I mean, I don’t really know what this is like. But, we should do something fun tonight.”

“Fun? What do we know about fun?” I asked with well more than a hint of sarcasm. We were natural shut-ins. We didn’t go out to places, we didn’t hang in large groups of people, we didn’t go to parties and get drunk. We sat in and watched horror films, lay on my or her bed and had DMC’s (Deep Meaningful Conversations), or went to the movie theatre.

Cracking a smile to my ignorance, Luna bumped shoulders with me. “That’s what I’m talking about. How am I ever going to get you laid if you don’t go anywhere?”

I would have rolled my eyes if it didn’t make my head hurt even more. “I don’t need to get laid, Luna.”

“See, that’s what I’m talking about. If I got you laid, you’d never be complaining. You’d always be happy and jumping around with energy like a two year old.”

“Oh,” I dragged, “I’d be just like you.”

She sputtered, her hand flattening against her chest and her eyes mockingly widening beyond capacity. “You say that like it’s a bad thing!”

Releasing a laugh that erased my tension, I slapped her thigh and nodded. “Okay, shut up. What kind of fun should we do?”

“Well, this sixteen-to-twenty club just opened a few months back. Everyone keeps saying that it’s crazy awesome and that there’s so many hot guys, it’s like a buffet. Ergo, why the hell haven’t we gone to it yet?”

By now, Luna had grabbed my hands, jerking them every which way with a pleading gaze. I let her for a few more minutes, but she could already see my answer on my face. “No, Lune. No, not this weekend.”

“Why?” she whined, her voice going high pitched and childish in one quick octave. “It’s not like you’re doing anything this weekend. We could have so much fun! You might even find out that you like doing stuff like this, and we can stop being such hermits.”

Staring at her with one eyebrow raised, I shook my head, trying to keep my mutual smile etched to my lips. “Do you ever think about anything else besides guys?”

“I’m only human. What do you truly expect out of me?” Luna clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, looking away with a hidden smile.

“Fair enough,” I managed through a quick, short giggle.

After another minute of silence, her persistence crept up on me with a whispered, “Why not, though?”

Peeking towards through my peripherals, I shrugged noncommittally and grumbled, “You know why.”

“Come on, chick. You’re hot. You’re like fire. Like, someone should toss a bucket on you, because you’re so hot.” Luna encouraged, her voice harbored a volume that was deep and loud. Turning her head, she scaled the seats that surrounded us. “Do I have to recruit open opinions?”

I didn’t’ think it was possible for my eyes to widen more than they did in the moment she said that, but still, they widened. She looked around the bus, her eyes settling on a boy sitting adjacent from us. “How about him?”

Grabbing her arm in vice, I yanked her into my side, whispering, “Don’t you dare, Luna. I’ll rip your voice box out and put it in upside down. You can go to this club, but I don’t feel comfortable.”

Opening and closing her mouth like a fish fresh out of water, Luna sighed with defeat. Without saying another word, she patted my leg as we pulled into the long, rounded driveway of Fairview High School.

“There it is,” she grumbled with a roll to her eyes, “The castle.”

The Castle is what the people who walked through the doors to this school called it. It wasn’t that it looked like a castle, because it didn’t. It looked pretty plain and modern, if you really wanted an honest opinion. Though, because our school mascot was the Knights, we had a little theme that went along with everything. Like, the gym, some people call it the Dungeon, and the commons area, where we eat lunch, is called the Round Table Café, our school paper is The Royal Banner. Cute, right?

Personally, I find it kind of stupid.

Walking through the doors, Luna and I walk up to our shared locker, stuff our coats and scarves away, and headed back down to the commons area. Sitting on top of the tables, we planted our feet on the seats and watched as our other friends and acquaintances filed in around us.

They all sat and talked around us, Luna joining in and turning her body away from mine as she gabbed about whatever little piece of gossip happened from the day before. I was too preoccupied to hear anything, too confused to open my mind before the focus of my eyes.

A boy with a tall build sat on top of a table three down from mine, one elbow braced on his knee, holding his chin up. The other hand was dangling off his lap, and his black hair spilled across his forehead and over his eyes, spiraling and curling against his neck in a certain stylish yet lazy way. He had on a faded blue V-neck that allowed me to see the pale skin of his clavicle, though it had the shadow of his arm and chin against it, and black straight-legged jeans that sat over black Vans moccasins. But what pierced me the most were his silvery blue eyes, staring and drinking and holding all of the secrets of everything around him.

And he was staring at me. Not only was he staring at me, but he was assessing me the same way I was. Something all-too familiar stuck out from this person, something I couldn’t exactly pinpoint off hand, and it was warping my mind in a fit of frustration.

And then he winked! Settling my head back a bit, my eyebrow shot high towards my forehead. Was he really serious? That was too cheesy for me to even acknowledge openly. Shaking my head and rolling my eyes behind my closed lids, I turned my head back to whatever conversation was still present between the other eight people at the table.

“Ooh!” Luna serenaded into my ear with a devilish undertone, “Looks like hottie a-ways down is checking you out.”

Turning my head back to her, glancing at him, and then resorted to a dramatic shake of my head, I huffed, “Right, right. I’m totally sure he is. Who is that anyway?”

She shrugged, her eyes taking him in and licking her upper lip seductively, “I don’t know, but I can always go and find out for you.”

“Luna—” I warned, but it was too late. She’d already hopped off the table and locked her eyes with the boy full of mystery a few tables down.