On my way to school, I stopped by a store for pens and paper, looking for some shiny trinkets, and seeing the magnet beads, I bought them. In the car on my way, I counted them, curious how many beads she would take or if she would pocket the hole thing.
I was really anticipating it, not concerning myself with my father's punishment that would wait for me after he found out that I only went to school for my afternoon lessons.
Arriving at school, I went to the locker room, and on my way, I did not run into Lesly. Changing my clothes, I put the magnet beads away. During the break, I would decide where to place them for her to find.
When I went to the sports hall, I saw her and the few students who had already arrived. After reading the attendance and getting the dumbass under control, I could feel her gaze on my body while stretching as well as when running. I liked it; to be watched by the object of my own observation gave me a feeling of reciprocity.
If she already watched me, I made sure to win before letting dumbass choose whoever and go to ask about the cat. I am eager to know more. Had she ever seen the cat while it was alive? Was the reason for her hallucinations the inability to part with it?
Hearing that the cat was older than her, I just realized that I had no idea how old she was. Stunned and unhappy that, despite her youthful looks, she was further away from my age than thought, I made sure that she knew that I was at least an adult, not one of the other kids she taught.
Only when I moved away from the incoming volleyball because I had lost my mood to play, did I snap back. For a cat to be more than thirty years old is impossible. Besides, the stuffed cat did look just like a normal adult cat, maybe even smaller, not a miraculously tattered body overstepping its peak by lengths.
My uncharacteristic good mood returned when I thought about the new bait for the polite little crow. When the break approached, I followed Dumbass and his friends. A few of them tried to befriend me, and sometimes when I am bored, I even listen to them, but the people I had hung out with are already in college because of the year I missed school.
Because my mother had killed herself a year ago, and I was the one who found her. Despite me not really being affected, my aunt, the sister of my mother, was adamant about having me on her farm helping out, to get out of that house. She had feared I would have been the next one to get pushed to the brink. My father was especially busy with work and the funeral at that time, so he wasn't interested in my whereabouts, but he was still irritated when he had the time to think of me being at home a year longer before he could throw me at some prestigious college.
When I found my mother with slit-opened wrists, she was unexpectedly still conscious, having time to leave me a message. Her words had hit me harder than her death ever could.
"Don't ever enter the cellar."
As if she knew that I would be the one to find her, as if she held on before her heart stopped, staying awake just to leave me these words. She wasn't a good mother—tough at the wrong times, soft at the wrong times. So, if she just disappeared from my life, I maybe wouldn't have even noticed, only using her as a guardian since I had outgrown my weak body on which she could take her anger out.
However, what to do with her cryptic words? This house had never felt like home; it had never been a place for a child to bounce about and go explore. I have never been to the cellar mentioned. And I wouldn't change that fact. Not because whatever she had found inside was enough for her to die, but because whatever it was that could throw her over the edge of sanity had to do with my father. And besides hoping to kill him in affect when he went too far, I wasn't concerned enough about him to explore my father's psyche, interests, little hobbies or whatever it was down there, under my bed and the table I sat to eat at.
However, if my mother hadn't killed herself, her dead body wouldn't have lured out little crows. And the little crow was now in the midst of getting baited, and that was at the hands of the wrong Lennister.
"She is just angry at me." The laughter brought me out of my thoughts,
"Don't speak as if you know her; haha, what as show off."
"Pfft." Dumbass stood up and cupped his hands before his groin, moving as if fucking a mouth,
"I had that teacher-whore between my legs, sucking me out to the last drop the day before yesterday."
"Yeah, yeah, sure, you are just bullshitting us with what you dream of at night," Another guy jested.
"Don't believe me? Her nipple has a birthmark, looking like shit raining on her titts!" Everyone besides me laughed.
Seeing my lighter inside the locker, a picture emerged in my mind. My father's arms around her, his hand in her shirt, gripping her tightly. It was such a disgusting picture that the dumbass wouldn't even know how to compare with that filthy speech, masking his insecurity while putting others down, trying to get accepted by his peers so desperately that he dared to talk about her.
What I had seen with my own eyes had been so repellent, that it made one want to undo it.
To purify and let the flames devour whatever, whoever, it was that attempted to dirty her.