Annabel Lee ─ emily prentiss

ten

BEL'S episode made her late again. Not by much, but enough for Fred to shove her against a wall and Carrie to drag her upstairs to her room. She got the privilege of a timed five-minute shower, because the Howells seemed to think she submerged herself in fryer oil at work and would make their whole house smell like a burger joint, then was locked in her bedroom. She was always in her room by eight anyway—there was nothing else for her to do here—but the Howells didn't usually lock her door until nine.

Her initial plan was to get a jump on weekend homework, since it was early. Instead, the moment she was alone, she felt like crying. She managed to turn off the light and crawl into bed before she completely broke down.

Bel moved her pillows aside and slipped her hand in between her mattress and the wall, digging out Edgar the elephant. Some friend of her father's gave her the stuffed animal when she was a couple years old, and for years, she couldn't fall asleep without it. Now she saved Edgar for her worst nights, when all she needed was to not feel alone.

"I don't know how much longer I can do this," Bel whispered to the stuffed animal as she cried. She was losing her mind in this body, this house, this life. Anxiety held her in a death grip. She couldn't do something as simple as walk home without a full-fledged freak out. There were nightmares too. She kept waking up in the middle of the night from a dream about being tortured by Troy. Sometimes it was more like a flashback. Other times, her mind found ways to make it worse. It conjured up even more brutal torture. It made her watch what Troy did to the other girls. She woke up wishing she could dunk her brain in bleach.

The anxiety didn't stop when Bel got home either. Fred's voice alone sent her body into panic mode. He was the one who shoved her around and screamed at her and hit her with the worst thing he could find. When he got too close, she couldn't breathe. It was about self-preservation; if he accidentally killed her one day, it wouldn't be a surprise.

When Carrie came near her, Bel's heart kicked into full gear, pounding in her eardrums. She could hardly move. Carrie wasn't as violent, mostly just verbally aggressive, and sometimes that was worse.

"If only your parents could see you now," Carrie once growled when Bel tripped and accidentally dropped a few utensils unloading the dishwasher. "Worthless."

Bel hadn't been able to stop her face from falling and giving herself away. Tears welled up in her eyes. She managed to wipe them away, but Carrie saw. Carrie saw, and she knew it felt like a stab to the chest, so she kept that dagger in her belt for whenever she wanted to smash Bel to pieces.

"Good thing your parents aren't alive to get a look at you," she said as she shoved Bel into the bedroom tonight. "You'd be nothing but a disappointment."

This woman never knew Bel's parents. She didn't know anything about them, not even their names, yet those words ripped Bel's heart in half. Frankly, sometimes Bel thought Carrie might be right, because she was pretty fucking pathetic.

Sometimes Bel stared at herself in the bathroom mirror and wondered if her parents would love the person she'd become. At this point, she was nothing but a weak, skittish shell of a human. She was a total mess who couldn't walk home from work without a breakdown. She sat there and took whatever her foster parents threw at her. She was socially isolated, unsure how to let her "school friends" be real friends when her life was such a shit show. She didn't even have hobbies anymore.

Maybe they would understand that she was just trying to survive with the cards she'd been dealt. She hoped so. But there were other things about her that would have been true no matter how her life went, and she worried that her parents would disapprove. She worried that a lot of people would disapprove. She had the nagging fear that somehow, she would accidentally let it slip to Emily and freak her out. Then she reminded herself that she wasn't important enough to anyone to earn disapproval or disappointment. They could just drop her without a thought and not alter their lives at all, Emily included.