Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 1 - Chapitre 6

ADELINEI stare down at the huge red F at the top right corner of my test sheet and dread pulls me into its icy waters, drowning me in it till I’m utterly frozen. “Just because you stare at it like that doesn’t mean the grade’s going to change, Addie.” It takes Cassidy’s snide remark to break the ice around me. Cassidy is my roommate; has been since the 10th grade when I moved out of my mother’s home in downtown Chicago and into the school’s dorm. My mother spent a shit-ton of money to get me a space here and it hadn’t mattered much to me then; after all, I was on a scholarship program and the school covered all of my tuition expenses. It was the least she could do to support me. I’d lied to her about the reasons I didn’t want to live with her anymore; told her I needed to stay close to school to practice better, to hone my Cello playing skills when in truth, I just got sick of coming home everyday from school to her and her lovers sucking faces. It pained her to do so but she let

ADELINEI hate James Sullivan but I hate mum’s bear hugs more. There was a time I used to love them; the time when it was just me and her after dad died. Whenever she pulled me into that tight embrace, I would smell dad all over her and in a way, it felt like he was still here with us and I didn’t have to miss him too much. Then she came home one day, smelling entirely different. For days, I tried and failed to figure out what changed. The new scent only grew stronger until the reason finally made itself known. It was the tall dark man I ran into in our kitchen one spring morning. He’d stayed the night and he was helping himself to breakfast from our fridge like he owned the place. Wallace, Mum’s first boyfriend. They broke up when I turned eight and it was one ugly breakup that had my mother secretly crying herself to sleep every night. I was too young to understand why she was always crying or why Wallace wasn’t lounging around our home anymore like the jobless prick he was. T

ADELINE“Alright, talk.” I say, as I sit across from my mother in the VIP section of a fancy restaurant she picked out for us to have this ‘talk’ that we have never had before. After all these years, it only just occurred to me on my way here that mum and I talk about everything; about our favourite shows, about school, about Cello and sometimes even boys, but never about her relationships. Halfway through dinner—it was always halfway, always—she would simply say something like, “hey, I’m seeing someone new. His name is Matt and he works in finance,” and depending on what kind of mood I was in at that moment, I’d either nod or ask what went wrong with the last guy. She would just shrug and then we would go back to our meal while I mentally prepare myself to start seeing Matt who works in finance in his boxer briefs, standing in the middle of our kitchen while sipping coffee from the ‘Best Mum in the World’ mug I got for mum on Mother’s Day. So yes, it is weird sitting across from