Isabela Part 3
“Either you’re really cynical, or I’ve always been wrong about you!” My voice is low, still weak from the exhaustion my body is showing. After all, I'm getting dehydrated from pouring everything in my stomach out. “I didn’t make that blog, Bianca. And I always thought it was you! My diary disappeared, and I believed Nate had stolen it as a joke, and that you had taken it, seen what was in it, and used it to do that.”
I don’t know how or why, but now that I see her talking about Nate with such a thirst for justice in her eyes, I realize she truly believes the things she says. If she’s manipulating me, Bianca is really good at faking emotions. She deserves an Oscar.
Bad people have something in their eyes, even when they’re pretending. There’s a lack of shine. Because when something hurts you, your gaze ignites against your will. Emotionless people are incapable of making their eyes show emotion while pretending to empathize. That’s how you unmask a bad person. You stare deeply into their eyes and see for yourself.
There’s shine and fire in this woman’s eyes before me. And if she didn’t make the blog, who did? It’s childish to believe Bianca based solely on intuition, denying all the years I hated her... But I’m shaken.
There are other people who were interested in ending my relationship. One of them, I put in a wheelchair. The other, I haven’t seen since I was eighteen.
When I freaked out and attacked my stepfather, he was hospitalized for months. I, on the other hand, spent weeks in bed due to the kicks and slaps he gave me that night.
Marcos didn’t stay unconscious for even two days. When he regained consciousness in the hospital, the first thing he did was close the investigation the local police were conducting about the assault he suffered.
After all, my stepfather wouldn’t want me to give a statement, would he? Who would care if a girl suffering abuse went to testify at a police station? He knew I would end up speaking, especially with all the anger I was feeling at that moment.
Those were chaotic months afterward. My mother forced me to return to school, and everyone called me names or turned their backs on me when they saw me in the hallways, even spitting on me. In the first few days back after my suspension, I ran and cried from the insults I heard, hiding in the locker room, the same one I used to shower in. But that place felt like a mausoleum, carrying the bones of the relationship I lost. Being there was suffocating and drove me insane. Even the walls seemed to scream at me that Nate would never come back to me. That I should kill him in my heart, and only then would I be able to rise again.
After a while of being a punching bag for the students, and even for some teachers who treated me like trash, I remembered that I didn’t have to swallow everything. I could be my new version. If people were cruel to me, I would be worse. So I started fighting the girls who insulted me until they were scared and stopped. It was like something bad was taking hold of me, silencing my trauma, because Afefobia didn’t even tickle me while they were scratching me or pulling my hair. The desire for revenge was so strong that I only got off them when my body ached from hitting them too much. I was suspended dozens of times for those fights, but my mother always found a way to keep me from being expelled.
As for the boys, I insulted them with every name, made biting jokes that attacked their fragile senses of masculinity, and many other things. At least they gradually left me alone. I no longer cared about being accepted, as I did at the beginning of the year. I preferred to be feared.
Things eased up not only because I became a bully, but because another class from the second year was merged with ours, and there were more people to shift the focus of the petty arguments. People started dedicating more energy to being homophobic toward Bernardo, but Josiah began to lay down the law in class, forcing people not to mess with his best friend. He was the tallest and strongest boy in the class, and everyone was afraid of him. And Jow was afraid of me, as I always insulted him whenever he looked in my direction. That’s how I met both of them, at the end of 2015. However, we only became friends when Ana came into our lives at the beginning of the following year.
At home, my stepfather was discharged after a while. And as I expected, my mother became his babysitter and hated me more each day. That little scene of throwing myself on top of him to defend him didn’t move me. Thank goodness my heart was already armored against her, or it would have broken to see her caring for that bastard. The good thing was that she didn’t try to hit me anymore. I think Diana also understood that some screws came loose in my mind, and I ended up becoming another person. Moreover, she knew I was ready to finish the job I started on her husband.
I came and went from home as I pleased; there were no more rules for me simply because I started to not give a damn about anything. I spent most of the week at Hellen’s and only returned when that bastard Marcos, even invalid in a wheelchair, started sending me threats. He said he would ensure Nate was arrested. His bargaining chip to keep me from leaving home for good was that he would bury the allegations against my “ex-boyfriend” if I waited until I was eighteen. That piece of shit pedophile was obsessed with me; that became clearer and clearer. My mother pretended to be blind to it.
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