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

by Amber Smith

Life just goes, just happens, continuing as always. Normal. And I can’t shake the knowledge that life will just keep on happening, regardless if I wake up or not. Obscenely normal.

I think about how they say when most people get into car accidents, it’s less than one mile from their home. Maybe that’s because everything’s so familiar, 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 can’t believe it. I cannot believe he’s really done it. He’s managed to turn my brother—my true best friend, my ally—against me.

he walks away from me. And I can only watch him get smaller, watch him fade from color to black and white, like everything else.

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

Just because someone has always been seen as this incredible person—this hero—it doesn’t mean that’s the truth. Or that’s who they really are,”

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

Why didn’t they ever teach me to stand up for myself?

And I hate Caelin, too. Except I hate him because his loyalties are with Kevin, not me. I know that. Everyone does. Especially Kevin.

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.

My body is a torture chamber. It’s a fucking crime scene. Hideous things have happened here, it’s nothing to talk about, nothing to comment on, not out loud. Not ever. I won’t hear it. I can’t.

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.

He’s on his feet, just needing to show me how much bigger and stronger he is than me. As if I could ever forget. As if the entire world wasn’t organized just to make sure I never forget, even for a second, that any boy, anywhere, even my brother, could take me.

This is not the black-and-white world I once thought I was in. This world is alive and vibrating. And I’m alive in it—and that feels amazing.

My house is quiet. The sound of Mara’s car pulling out of the driveway fades to silence. And leaves everything feeling too still, too vacant. Empty, haunted—this house. Not by ghosts, but by us, by our own history, by the things that have happened here.

Don’t want to be held. Don’t want to be touched. Not by anyone ever again in my entire life.

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

Be over. Be over. I thought it was over. It was supposed to be over.

“I never hated you.” He sighs. “Yes, you did. I made you hate me. It’s okay, though, everyone hates me. I would hate me too. I mean, I do. I do hate me. I’m a horrible, horrible person.”

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.

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