The Way I Used to Be (The Way I Used to Be, #1)

by Amber Smith

Squeeze your eyelids shut, try, just try to forget. Try to ignore all the things that didn’t feel right, all the things that felt like they would never feel right again.

No, can’t cry. Because there’s nothing to cry about. Because it was just a dream, a bad dream—a nightmare.

Not real. Not real. Not real. That’s what I keep thinking: NotRealNotRealNotReal. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Like a mantra. Like a prayer.

I close my eyes again, but it’s all I can see, all I can feel, all I can hear: his skin, his arms, his legs, his hands too strong, his breath on me, muscles stretching, bones cracking, body breaking, me getting weaker, fading. These things—it’s all there is.

But this was supposed to be an ordinary Sunday.

How can it be okay, in what world is this okay?

like a tornado through my mind, whispering—his breath on my face—No one will ever believe you. You know that. No one. Not ever.

And clearly, nobody was going to hear me. Nobody was going to see me—he knew that. He had been around long enough to know how things work here.

I know somehow if it’s not now, it has to be never. Because he was right, no one would ever believe me. Of course they wouldn’t. Not ever.

His fingerprints not only all over every inch of me, but all over everything: this house, my life, the world—infected with him.

I always thought things were in color, but they were really black and white. I can see that now.

you stop paying attention. You don’t notice the one thing that’s different or wrong or off or dangerous. And I think about how maybe that’s what just happened to me.

I pour myself a glass of water, just so I have something, anything, to focus on other than my mom, the pointlessness of this conversation, and the endless train wreck of thoughts crashing through my mind.

I pray, pray harder than I’ve ever prayed in my life. To somehow undo this. To just wake up, and have it be this morning again, except this time nothing would have happened last night.

If it could all be a dream, just a dream that I could wake up from, then I would still be safe in my bed. That would make so much more sense.

And nothing will be wrong. Nothing will be different. I’ll just be in my bed and nothing bad will ever have to happen there.

“Wake up,” I think I whisper out loud. God, just wake...

I can only watch him get smaller, watch him fade from color to black and white, like everything else.

I pull my pillow over my head and I cry so hard I don’t know how I’ll ever stop. I cry for what feels like days.

I feel like I might just fall asleep and not wake up—in fact, I almost hope I do.

I’m trying so hard to just go back to my life. The way it used to be. The way I used to be.

I can’t stop. Can’t turn around. Can’t go back there. Ever.

Get the hell out, I get the hell out.

Hide me, I want to tell her. Just hide me from the world. And never make me go back out through those doors again. But I don’t. I don’t say anything. I can’t.

A ROOM WITHOUT BOOKS IS LIKE A BODY WITHOUT A SOUL—CICERO.

I stop myself, because sometimes I forget we aren’t really supposed to talk about this. We’re supposed to accept it. Supposed to feel like it’s all of us who have the problem. And we’re supposed to deal with it like it’s our problem even though it’s not.

Everyone would rather just believe the lies and not see all the damage he’s done. And it’s not fair that people can just get away with doing these awful things and never have to pay the consequences.

And I really wonder how people get to be normal like this. How they just seem to know what to say and do, automatically.

I suddenly hate this neighborhood, loathe it, despise the way we’re all so close that we can’t get untangled from each other’s lives.

If only I were sick all the time, things might feel a little more normal around here.

I feel like I’ve gone off somewhere else, like I’ve just sort of slipped into this other realm. A world that’s a lot like the real world, except slightly slower. This alternate reality where I’m not quite in my body, not quite in my mind, either—it’s this place where all I do is think about one thing and one thing only.

Lately it feels like my skin, just like my mind, has been turned inside out. Like I’m raw and exposed, and it almost hurts to even be brushed up against.

“Are you really okay?” I nod, even though I’m not sure if I am—if I ever will be.

“Why right now, though—did something else happen besides the gum?” It was the question I had been waiting for her to ask me for months.

“everyone” is her parents—they get to change their minds, change their lives, and hers.

Spoiled? I’m spoiled? I never ask for a thing! I never even ask for attention.

I open my mouth, not caring what comes out, for once not having a plan.

Because I let them push me around just like I let everyone push me around. I let them make me into a person who doesn’t know when to speak the hell up, a person who gives up control over her life, over her body, over everything. I do what they tell me to do, what everyone tells me to do. Why didn’t they ever teach me to stand up for myself?

They let it happen by allowing him to be here and making me believe that everyone else in the entire world knows what’s good for me better than I do. If I hate them, I hate them for that.

Why do I feel like, sometimes, I have no one in the entire world who knows me in even the slightest, most insignificant way?

Most of that hate, though, I save for me. No matter what anyone else did or didn’t do, it was ultimately me who gave them permission. I’m the one who’s lying. The coward too afraid to just stop pretending.

It’s over my life, my identity, my sanity—these are the things at stake.

I have to start standing up for myself. And it has to start with them, because it was with them that it began.

All you have to do is act like you’re normal and okay, and people start treating you that way.

she makes me feel like maybe I really am normal. Like things really will be okay.

I’m nice and safe in this little corner of the world. It’s like a break from life.

Everything has a place—a right way to be. Here, I don’t have to worry about who I am or if I’m being it right. No one bothers me, not even myself.

want to breathe it in. Hold it there in my lungs forever.

I don’t think this is in the script. I rack my brain. No, I don’t have anything to say to that.

I wish I could somehow make him understand that I want to say no as much as I want to say yes.