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

by Amber Smith

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’m not sure if I am—if I ever will be.

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

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

Sometimes he uses his words like weapons to chip away at my icy exterior and sometimes he can break through to the slightly defrosted layer beneath. But then again, sometimes he just hits solid iceberg. For instance, he knows what he’s doing when next he says, “And you should smile more too.” I look away, embarrassed. He has no way of knowing how sometimes it physically hurts to smile. How a smile can sometimes feel like the biggest lie I’ve ever told.

And I’m terrified he’ll see through the tough iceberg layer, and he’ll discover not a soft, sweet girl, but an ugly fucking disaster underneath.

And her big secret is really not such a huge deal anymore. It was all so long ago now, it practically never even happened.

He needed to make her feel worthless, needed to control her, needed to hurt her, needed to leave her powerless.

They wouldn’t hear, because my alarm clock was blinking 2:48 at me from the nightstand next to my bed. We both knew they were fast asleep on the other side of the house.

It’s 2:49: He had my days-of-the-week underwear on the floor. And somehow you still don’t understand what’s happening. Then he yanked my nightgown up—my favorite nightgown with the stupid sleeping basset hounds on it—and I feel the seam rip where the thread was already coming loose. He pulls it up around my neck, exposing my whole body, my whole naked, awkward body.

I tried to keep her legs squeezed together. I really tried—they were shaking from the strain of it—but by 2:51 he got them apart.

By 2:53 it was over. He let go of my arms. It was over, it was over, I told myself. When he ripped the nightgown out of my mouth, I started coughing and gasping.

His hands, his arms, can hold the pieces in place temporarily, maybe even for a long time, but he can never truly put them back together. That’s not his job. He’s not the hero and he’s not the enemy and he’s not a god. He’s just a boy. And I’m just a girl, a girl who needs to pick up her own pieces and put them back together herself.

“He came into my room. It was 2:48—I looked at the clock—by 2:53 it was over,”

five minutes is forever. Five minutes is the rest of your entire fucking stupid life.

All these maybes swimming around my head make me think that “maybe” could just be another word for hope.