I sit on the edge of my front steps, drawing in the snow with my foot. A frowny face starts to take shape as I watch the wind blow the flakes all around in a white blur. The wind whistles past my numb ears and I pull up the hood of my thick coat. I can almost hear her voice over the howling, screaming along with the wind. She cries for everything she can never be, never have.

The door opens and footsteps slush through the snow. My dad stands behind me, squatting so he sits at my level. "Why don't you come inside?"

I shrug, jacket rustling, "I like it out here."

"It's freezing."

My leg pauses from its artwork and my foot starts jiggling uncontrollably. My hands, tucked away in thin gloves, start fidgeting with my fingers. My father sighs, brushing off the snow a short distance from me and sitting down, looking down at the face slowly disappearing as snow fills it in. "Why is it so sad?"

I erase it with a quick swipe of my hand, inching further away from him, folding my arms to keep my hands from shaking. "Its sister died...And its mom doesn't want anything to do with it."

Christmas is supposed to be a day of joy. Most people at this hour are opening presidents underneath a big tree, a warm fire blazing in the hearth, laughing and doing whatever normal people do. The last real Christmas I had was two years ago and my parents ended up fighting over some stupid thing.

My mom kept asking if I liked my gifts a while after that, as if she wanted to make sure that she did okay. Paranoid that she didn't. Now I'll never have to deal with her frazzled voice again, always frantic, always second guessing that she somehow messed up.

The Christmas after that none of us really felt like having "family" time. We didn't have a family anymore.

My dad coughs, rubbing his forearms, "Come inside?"

I listen to the wind again, staring up at the white sky. The snow whirls in a sort of dance, the groaning of the wind its music. It blows from here to there, lost. I wonder if she's up there somewhere, blowing on the breeze along with the birds. "No," I finally say, closing my eyes to listen to the rhythms of the snow.

"You, uh, want to talk?"

I almost laugh. My dad never cared about talking before. My entire life was simply "suck it up," "if you have a grievance, take it up with God," and "go to your room I'm having a talk with your mother." They never had "talks," they had squabbles or fights. They had battles.

No one could ever win the battle; no one could ever win the war. Everyone ended up losing.

"You want to come in and eat something?"

"I'm not hungry."

That's my default answer. I say it to myself, to Ben, to my dad, to everyone even when my stomach feels like an empty pit. I don't know why I always say it, but I can't say anything else. As if for some reason I won't let myself eat. I've grown used to the pangs in my stomach, the dizziness, and the headaches.

Drawing in the snow again, I glance over at my dad who has his dark eyes glued upwards. He sighs, still not looking at me, "I know things must be hard for you lately with your mom and me and with school and everything that's happened. I know I don't really understand every-I don't understand things but I'm trying, I'm trying to understand."

I stare at my other foot, elbows on my knees, snow slowly burying it. Surprising how warm it feels, covered in its suffocating, cold embrace. "You honestly think I can just talk to you? Huh? Tell you that I get bullied every single day for no good reason and that I feel like absolute crap all the time. You wouldn't care would you? No. You'd ask me why I'm getting bullied not how I feel about getting bullied."

He'll always focus on the little on the tiny imperfection and hold onto it, pounding it into place, ignoring everything else. He brushes the snow off of his leg, "So why are you getting bullied?"

He smiles at me as if it's some sort of joke but I shake my head, staring into the whiteness. "Because they're scared," I finally say, shaking my foot, watching the powder blow off.

"Why?"

I take a deep breath. He'll never ask how I'm feeling, he doesn't want to know. He doesn't care about anything but facts. Obsessing over facts that I don't want to say, that I haven't even told myself. "Because of how easily they could become me."

"What that's supposed to mean?" his voice grows harder.

I suddenly want to run into snow, let it consume me, let it hold me in its cold grasp, watch as the white slowly turns to black. Death will grab my lifeless hand, pull me away from everything. And I'd be free.

But I stay still, mouth opens but I quickly close it. I can't say this to my father, he'll never understand. Rodrick uses my sexuality as an excuse to beat me up, but I can see in his face every time he snarls in disgust that he's terrified of me. Everyone has something. Rodrick's alcoholic dad probably threatens his life every night. Griffin's parents have divorced, and he has a brother that is her age, when she died. And everyone has something, something hiding in the dark, waiting to pounce.

I'm an example. I sort of cautionary tale of what happens if you let that darkness in.

And it's not a beautiful tragedy. It's dark and horrible and all-consuming. The pain doesn't just stop with one person giving into it, the pain spreads from person to person, like a virus of misery. It leaves the monsters in our heads reminding of every horrible thing.

He'll never understand that.

My dad never even cared before. He never asked about how I'm feeling or about my day. Now he suddenly thinks he has the right to know?

Funny when someone's dead how people finally start listening.

Tears had started pooling around my eyes, running down my red cheeks. My fist clenches and I close my eyes, trying to block out everything. Block out the world. Only, instead of staring at the snow, I stare at an image of her room in my head. It always appears when I least want it to, a perfectly preserved picture of what lays just a few yards above me. An empty room. The one person I thought would understand, just gone forever.

I will never just get someone to talk to, no dad who is just there, and a mom who'll sit me down and slap some sense into me. I get a dad obsessed with keeping the kitchen clean and a mom who left me crying at a restaurant, never wanting to see me again. Just because I look like her dead daughter.

Just because I'm a reminder.

I hate it, and if I try to forget, my face so similar to hers always haunts me. Her door always one down from mine. I take a shaky breath, picturing the four lilac walls, the wood floor and pink carpet, the perfectly made bed. Everything the same as the day someone last lived in that room... only more empty.

No one had dared touch anything in her room. Her diary still lies untouched on her bookshelf.

Ever since that day my parents lost a bit of themselves. They don't touch her photos. They don't touch her room. They don't touch the memories

They locked up a piece of themselves and threw away the key.

So they don't notice me.

They never notice anything, but what is there to see, really?

All that's left are a bunch of broken pieces on the floor, hiding in the darkness.

Wiping a single tear from my eye, I stand up, leaving my father alone in the darkness of the noonday sun.

——

This chapter is a little passive and more of a tail scene, if you know what those are.

It's a little more thoughtful but I hope you guys like it!!!

It's Christmas time in here even though it's May now, but next chapter, pretty sure there's some solid tea. 

So if you want to see Ben have an identity crisis, STAY TUNED!