I freeze, staring at the bottle in my hands and then back up at my father’s silhouette, which is quickly approaching us. “Blaise!” he bellows, and the rage in his voice nearly makes me pee my pants.
“What do we do?” I ask Jean, but Jean is getting to his feet and jumping over the gazebo railing and running off across the yard and around to the front, leaving me and the bottle. Fucking coward just ditched me!
“I see you, Jean!” my father yells after him. “Running, just as your daddy ran from you.”
Jesus, he’s being so harsh. I hope Jean didn’t hear that. I have a feeling that he’ll never be allowed back to the house after this.
But none of that really matters right now because if my father catches me drunk . . .
I quickly toss the bottle behind me into the bushes along the other side and then hear a sharp but quiet “Ow!” as it lands on someone.
I whirl around and see only movement in the bushes. It was a girl’s voice. Could it have been Seraphine? Did I hurt her?
But before I can even think about investigating, my father is entering the gazebo and looming above me.
“Get up,” he says to me, his voice low and eerily calm. The kind of calm that makes shivers run down my spine and my heart turn into a loud drum in my head.
I stare up at him, so scared that I can’t move.
“I said, get up,” my father says again. I can’t see his face, I can only see the shadows. For a moment he looks like a monster, the kind that shape-shifts in inky blackness. I expect to see a flash of red eyes.
Then, with lightning speed, he reaches down and grabs me by the arm and yanks me up to my feet until it feels like he’s going to pull my arm right off.
I know I shouldn’t show any weakness, but I’m screeching with pain.
He yanks me right up to his face, and I see a glimpse of his eyes, just a bit of light glinting off them. I’ve never been so terrified.
“Just as I thought,” he snarls as he breathes in deep. “You’ve been drinking. You’re drunk.”
“I’m not,” I try to say, but before I can further my feeble protest, he pulls back momentarily and slams his palm against my temple, rocking my world and sending me backward onto the floor. Everything inside my head explodes into jagged stars, and I scream in pain.
“Shut up,” he says, almost hissing. “And get up. You want to be a man? You think that because you’re thirteen, you’re a man now? You can get drunk at your own party? Then stand up and take it like a man, Blaise. Come on. Get up.”
I can barely hear, barely comprehend him. My father has hit me before on a few occasions, but they were usually a slap across the cheek or, when I was younger, the belt across my ass. But he’s never hit me like this, with hatred and venom in his eyes.
What if he kills me?
“Get up, Blaise. If you don’t, you’ll regret it forever. You want me to be proud of you? You own up to your mistakes, and you get to your feet after you’ve been knocked down.”
I have no doubt I’ll regret it forever. My father doesn’t give empty threats.
So I get up. I don’t know how I do it. Maybe the hit rattled my brain cells. Maybe the booze already killed them off. But I get to my feet unsteadily.
He leans in. “Look me in the eye,” he says in a low voice.
I do. His eyes are both calm and wild and completely unpredictable. I don’t know what is about to happen, but I know that he’s looking for something inside me, maybe to see who I really am and what I really deserve.
I hold his gaze and defiantly raise my chin, trying to pretend to be better than this, to be strong.
It is a mistake.
He hits me again, this time a backhand across my cheek, until tears squeeze out of my eyes and things turn swimmy and black.
Somehow I manage to stay upright, and I think that’s why he stops.
“Don’t lie to me, Blaise,” he says after he composes himself, slicking back his black hair and straightening his tie. “Don’t ever lie to me. If you think you aren’t being watched, you are and always will be. You have to earn your father’s trust, do you understand that now? And since you broke it, I fear it’s going to remain broken for a long time.”
You trust Pascal, you never had to put him through any of this, I think angrily, but I don’t dare say it. I never will. I hate to imagine what that would earn me.
“Now if anyone asks you what happened, I dare you to tell them why. Explain why you deserved it. You won’t find any pity from anyone, only disgust at what you have done. Now, I’m going back to your party, and I’m sending everyone home. If you’re out here getting drunk with that half-wit, you don’t deserve those kids as friends anyway.”
He turns around and strolls out of the gazebo and across the grass and back to the party.
I just stand there, torn between wanting to pull my hair out and scream or collapse to the floor and cry. Neither seems like a good choice.
Then I hear a shuffle in the bushes behind me and turn to see Seraphine step out, her hand at the side of her head.
“What the fuck are you doing here, spying on me?” I sneer at her, trying not to sniffle, trying to hold it together. I’m further humiliated now, the fact that this little girl saw all that.
“I was here first,” she says quietly in English. “And you threw a bottle at my head.”
“That was an accident,” I tell her, refusing to feel bad about it. Who cares if it hit her? I’m the one who was just smacked around by my own father.
But when she makes her way around the gazebo to the entrance, she’s still holding her head and looking like she’s in pain. I feel guilty.
Yet I still say, “Get out of here.”
“What does being drunk feel like?” she asks, staring at me with those big eyes of hers.
I shake my head, not wanting to talk to her anymore. “It feels like none of your business,” I say, waving her away as I turn my back to her.
There’s a pause in the air.
“My mother was an alcoholic. It’s why she died. My father was too. He didn’t die, though, he just couldn’t take care of me. That’s why I was an orphan.”
Against my better judgment, I say, “I thought you were born in India. Why do you have a British accent?”
She takes a step into the gazebo. “My father took me over to England. Outside London. I don’t think he was supposed to, and that’s when the social services took me away from him and put me in an orphanage.”
“They still have those? I thought that was something from Annie or Oliver Twist.”
She nods, still staring at me with those eyes. “I was in different foster families but would always end up there when it didn’t work out.”
“Why didn’t they want you? Too ugly?” Though I’m smirking as I say it, the part inside me that wants to be mean to her shrivels a little.
She doesn’t flinch. “Some were nice. Most weren’t. Most hit me just like your dad did. Maybe even worse.”
I raise my brows in surprise. “Really? Worse? Like what?”
She comes over to me and sits down on the floor, holding her knees up to her chest. She tilts her head down so that her bangs fall in front of her eyes and stares at the floor. “Sometimes,” she says, her voice so quiet that I have to sit down next to her, “this one lady—her name was Jane, but I don’t even think that was her real name. She wouldn’t let me eat. Only if her husband was around would she act like everything was normal, but if he wasn’t, she wouldn’t give me breakfast or lunch or dinner or anything. Instead she made me watch as she ate. Said I was too fat and it would teach me.”