Unconventional Scars

Unconventional Scars

By Allie Gail

Kindle Edition

Copyright September 2012 Allie Gail

Cover Design by Laura Shinn

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced
or transmitted
in any printed or electronic form without permission.

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, or any place, event or occurrence, is purely coincidental. The characters and story lines have been created from the author's imagination and are used fictitiously.

****

“One is easily fooled by that which one loves.” Moli
è
re,
Tartuffe

PROLOGUE

Items are being thrown haphazardly into the back of the muddy Honda Civic. The trunk, the backseat are almost completely filled with boxes, loose cloth
ing
, shoes, random items. The woman, a gaunt blonde wearing too much makeup, is scurrying in and out of the low-income apartment, slinging her life’s belongings into the car with all the care of a delivery driver on the last day before retirement.

“You ready yet?” Her companion, a stocky, slightly balding man in his
early
forties, lights a cigarette and inhales it, looking around nervously. She makes one last trip inside, returns with her purse and a battered vanity case, and closes the apartment door. Her hand is shaking. She needs another
V
alium. Maybe there are some left in the bottle in the glove compartment.

“What about the girl?” she asks, though she already knows the answer. Max doesn’t like kids
, even grown ones.
He told her that from the start. They just get in the way, he said, they’re too damn needy. She’s inclined to agree. Anna isn’t a bad kid, though, and she feels an unwelcome twinge of guilt for what she’s about to do. But Max has
more money than she’s ever seen in her life
,
and he’s promised to take her to
Mexico
where they can live like royalty on the beaches of
Cancun
. Is she
honestly
supposed to pass up an opportunity like that? Stay here in this hick town and be poor trash
forever
? The girl will just have to understand. After all, she isn’t a baby anymore.

“She’s old enough to take care of herself,” Max tells her irritably. “Look here, I didn’t risk everything so I could waste my time babysitting
someone’s
brat. Are you coming or not? I’ll feel a lot better once we’re on the road.” They’re taking her car
instead of his, just in case.
Although a
s far as he knows, nobody suspects a thing.
But he
isn’t taking any chances, not with so much at stake
.

An elderly lady appears in the doorway of the apartment next door and says something to the blonde. The woman snaps back an abrupt answer, muttering expletives under
neath
her breath. Max crushes out the cigarette with his cheap knockoff Italian loafer and gets in the car. She follows, thinking not of the daughter she’s leaving behind, but of the beautiful new wardrobe Max has promised to buy her, and frozen fruity rum drinks and room service and balconies overlooking the
tranquil
turquoise waters of the
Caribbean
.

1

Life wasn’t fair.

At least, it wasn’t in the humble opinion of Anna Moore. Not that anyone ever bothered to
ask
her opinion – she was avoided like a rogue patch of poison ivy by the other tenth-grade students. Sometimes she wondered if they actually thought they could contract her poverty just by being in her presence or brushing against her in the hallways at school. As if her pathetic life and bleak future were somehow afflictions that might be contagious. Something airborne that required a vaccination, lest one suffer the humiliation of being labeled
welfare case
or
scum
.

Normally she was ignored, treated as some invisible ghost in worn jeans who haunted the school learning algebra
ic equations
and
world
history with the rest of them, always eating lunch with her nose in a library book so she didn’t have to dwell on the fact that she
was
alone. Most of the time she wasn’t bothered. But
occasionally
there were the nasty comments from those who were lucky enough to have affluent parents,
who
would never know what it was like to want for anything. Like in the cafeteria today, while she was walking to an empty table with her free lunch tray.

She needs to be sterilized so she doesn’t reproduce. That’s where all my parents’ tax money is going.

She
wondered what they’d say if she
told
them precisely where their
parents’ tax money
was going. A good portion of it went straight up her mo
ther’s nose
.
As if they would care
!
It was easier to just blame her, call her trash. It was this way in
every one
of the five states she'd lived in, as
far back
as she could remember.
Poverty was universal
, after all
. Everybody recognized it.
And
feared it.
A
better-you-than-me
mentality.

Scuffling idly along the sidewalk with her schoolbooks in her arms, Anna blinked back a stray tear. Did they think it was her fault, really? Was it her fault that her mother found it more important to party than to get a job? That she left her daughter alone sometimes for days on end so she could score pills and snort cocaine with her flavor-of-the-month? That she sported designer handbags given to her as gifts from the various men she dated, some of them even
married
men, while her child wore
salvaged
rejects
from a thrift store
? Whose fault was that, exactly? Someone really needed to explain it.

She desperately wanted beautiful
things
like the other girls at school.
After landing
a weekend job at a fast food restaurant, she'd thought maybe she could finally buy some nice
new clothes
of her own. It hadn't quite worked out that way. More often than not, the money had to be spent on food or getting the electricity turned back on. When it came to paying bills, her mother was less than reliable.

Sighing, Anna dug in a pocket for her apartment key and smiled wanly at her neighbor, Miss May, who was peering out her front window with an anxious expression. Everyone called May Emerson “Miss May” and to Anna, she was a dear friend. Over the course of the past two years, the elderly woman had taught Anna how to cook, mended her clothes, given her valuable advice, and kept her company when they were
both
lonely. Truth be told, she was the only
real
friend Anna had. But now, bursting out of the apartment next door, her normally cheerful face was anything
but
.

“What are you doin’ here, baby girl?” She had
called her
young neighbor this
ever since they first met
. Maybe the girl was no baby, but to a woman in her eighties, anyone under the age of thirty was deemed a child.

Anna wiggled the key in the lock. Sometimes it stuck
because of the rust
. “What do you mean, what am I doing here? School’s out. Did you lose track of time?”

“You’re . . . I thought . . . do you know where your mama is?”

“I rarely do,” Anna replied dryly. “Why?”

“You mean you ain’t talked to her today?”

“No, I’ve been at school all day.”

May leaned weakly against the door frame and put a wrinkled hand to her chest. She looked like she might be
seriously
ill. “Oh, Lord,” she said, almost inaudibly.

Startled, Anna dropped her books on the doorstep and hurried over to the woman, anxiously placing a hand on her fragile arm. “Are you all right? Should I call someone?”
We don’t even have a phone
!
What do I do?
She’s having a stroke. Or a heart attack. Oh crap, do I remember anything from that CPR class last year?
Think, Anna!

May turned her worried brown eyes towards the teenager’s. She hesitated a moment before answering. “I saw your mama with some man this mornin’.
”

“Well, that’s hardly newsworthy. Don’t scare me like that!”

“
Ain’t never seen him before. They was . . . they was packin’ up stuff and puttin’ it in her car.
I asked her if y’all was movin’ away and she just said yes and left it at that . . .
they seemed like they was in a hurry so I didn’t bother her no more . . . but now here you come a-walkin’ home from school just like you always do . . .”

A sickening feeling hit Anna, dropping into her stomach like a stone. She stopped breathing. Bianca was no mother of the year, true, but
surely
she wouldn’t . . . she couldn’t . . .
no,
maybe she was just going away for a few days. She’d done that
plenty of times
before,
disappearing to
who-knows-where
with some fling.

Or Miss May was mistaken. She was old, she was going senile, had early onset Alzheimer’s maybe, but there was no way . . .
no way
she was right . . .

“You shouldn’t be here . . . this don’t make no sense,” May continued to mumble.

Anna threw the apartment door open so hard it bounced off the interior wall. Even before she reached her mother’s bedroom, a premonition hit her with crystal clarity, and she knew already, even before she snatched open her mother’s closet door and saw stark emptiness, she knew that it was true . . .

Her mother had finally abandoned her for good.

****

Philip Moore was still in shock. He had hoped the long drive from
North Carolina
to
Florida
would clear his head but so far he still felt blindsided and stunned.

How could he possibly have seen this coming? He hadn’t seen or heard from his sister in ten years, didn’t even have a clue where she was living, and out of the blue he gets this phone call from the Brad
ley
County
police
, no less, wanting to know if he had any idea where she might have gone. That she’d disappeared with a
corrupt lawyer
named Max Lockwood and
a sizeable amount of embezzled money had gone with them.
That she’d left behind her own
daughter
, for God’s sake, to be interrogated by the police who wanted
nothing more than
to find this Lockwood character. Jesus, Bianca had always been a wild one, but this was too much, even for her
!

And now that poor kid, Anna, dumped like a
n unwanted
puppy
by her worthless excuse
of
a mother, was in a foster home in some
microscopic
town in
Florida
that he’d never even heard of, waiting to be claimed by an uncle she hadn’t seen since she was six years old. If he could get his hands on Bianca right now, he’d strangle her.

Self-absorbed, narcissistic, greedy, bleached blonde
bitch
!

Lisa had been equally shocked when he had called her. She wasn’t a mother herself, but she was empathetic enough not to quibble when he told her that he wanted to bring his niece back to live with him. He tried to tell himself that his life wouldn’t change drastically. This was a sixteen-year-old girl, after all, not a toddler who had to be spoon-fed and diapered and tended constantly. From what the social worker said when she filled him in on the details, Anna had spent a lot of her time alone and knew how to take care of herself.
It won’t be a problem
, he’d told Lisa.

Although the more he thought about it, the more the doubts cropped up. Raised by a woman like Bianca, what kind of person might her daughter have evolved into? She’d been a sweet little girl once. For a time, after Philip’s divorce, Bianca had lived with him, not because they were particularly close, but more so because she couldn’t afford her own place. Their parents had been killed by a drunk driver when he was in college and Bianca was just two months pregnant, single and twenty-one. She’d continued to live in their childhood home afterwards, until it was repossessed due to her failure to make the payments. Being the only close family she had, of course he took her in. She was only a year older than he was, but already was jaded and seemed to think the world owed her.