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he eventually realized, the vague pressure he’d put on himself to be a good son and a good role model to his brothers felt like a ton weight while at home. He suddenly felt hemmed in by all the things he was expected to do and be, based almost entirely on who he had been when he left home at eighteen. There was no room for who he had become or who he wanted to be.
Now if you’d met him at any number of those ceremonies where he accepted awards for bravery and such, anyone would be right to believe his story that that early trauma and his mother’s eventual death at his father’s hands had seared in his brain the good work that EMTs do in impossible circumstances. And so you would assume that the guy wasn’t haunted by the past. But Billy knew it was bullshit. He knew that every shift the guy worked triggered some feral part of him that only knew fear and anger and hatred, and couldn’t understand the world without those things. Billy knew that the polished
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All you had to do was ask her and she’d happily tell you that the dancing came later. Her mother, who’d shot her uncle’s dick off when she realized what he was doing to her little girl, had enrolled her in dance to help her express her grief and heal and the little girl, traumatized and temporarily mute, had fallen in love with ballet.
