People were so fucking gullible. A little bump, a slight graze, or an innocently distracting smile was all it took. In the hour I’d been wandering around The Battery, I’d already lifted three wallets. The sum total of cash I’d collected didn’t amount to much; did no one carry cash anymore? All I’d gotten was a measly $27, but that was three or four meals for me, which was more than I’d had in the last week. It’s not like I could count on my father to provide me with basic necessities like food, shelter, and clothing. Peter Stratford didn’t do anything for anyone unless there was some benefit in it for him. Not even for his own son. The truth was, my father was a bum. And worse than that, a drunk. And when he drank, he got mean. Hell, he wasn’t the nicest guy when he was sober, come to think of it. But at least when he was sober, I didn’t have to choose between finding a place to hide out or becoming his punching bag for the night.

  In my short 13 years of life, I’d had more injuries than I could count. What started as pushing and the occasional backhand had become bruises that could no longer be covered and repeated trips to the ER. Dad always had a cover story ready for the doctors, though. If there was one thing my father was good at, it was bullshitting people. He’d turn on the charm and showcase his smarmy grin, and they’d eat his shit up and probably ask for seconds. At least it worked with most people, especially the ladies. Unfortunately for the both of us, it hadn’t worked so well with the teachers at my last school. After noticing a pattern of injuries, the teachers notified the district, who then contacted social services. Faster than it took to blink, I was pulled from public school, and he began “homeschooling”. I use that term as loosely as possible. He’d basically found a homeschooling association that allowed him to pay a fee, turn in quarterly “reports” on my progress and call it a day. In actuality, he wasn’t teaching me squat. And since I was no longer in school and getting free lunch, I got one meal a day, at best. Many days, I just went hungry.

  At first, I hadn’t been keen on turning to a life of petty theft. But considering, when not drunk off his ass, my father was the very definition of a smooth criminal, I guess it ran in the blood. God, I hoped that was all I’d inherited from the man. Well, that and my dark hair. With the inky black strands, I was a miniature version of my father. I’d once heard a woman compare him to a fallen angel. What a joke. More like the devil. Either way, considering my genetics, I guess it made perfect sense for me to be out here robbing people blind.

  I’d been picking pockets and running petty scams since I was 10. Having smaller hands and nimble fingers often came in handy. Whether it was switching cards during a game of three-card monty or swiping a wallet from a loose back pocket, I had always had a penchant for taking things that didn’t belong to me. Whenever I had the occasional flare-up of conscience, I just reminded myself that no money equaled no food. I did what I had to do to survive. Most of the time, I didn’t feel guilty about it. My marks were almost always walking around in designer clothes, name-brand shoes, and flashing expensive-looking jewelry. So no, I didn’t often feel bad. What I did feel was envy. Here I was, risking life and limb for scraps, and they were walking around with Rolexes on their wrists. I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that running away from home would solve my problems, though. As much as I’d like to be free of my sorry excuse for a father, I knew I’d be worse off on the streets. There were far scarier things out there. A punch I could take, but some of the other things I’d witnessed in the darker alleyways of downtown Charleston, I couldn’t. So, for now, I did the best I could to get by. But I swore to myself that one day, I’d have everything I deserved and more. Always more. Because once you’d had a taste of nothing, you could never accept less.

  One day, I’d be someone to be envied, someone important. The minute I turned legal, I’d get as far away from Peter Stratford as possible, and I’d never look back. No ties, no emotional attachments. I’d be my own man, and I’d make a name for myself. As I watch a couple walk by, obviously coming from some glitzy event, the woman decked out in diamonds—a thought occurs to me. Yeah, I’d make a name for myself. Hell, maybe I’d make several.

  If rumors were to be believed, this entire city was haunted. That was typical of Southern towns as steeped in rich history and as covered in blood as Charleston, South Carolina. I didn’t mind the ghosts, though. Over the years, they’d become companions to the shadows that followed me everywhere I went. From a young age, I’d heard and seen more than the average child, even when compared to other children raised within the upper crust of Charleston society. Having a mother with the reputation of being a black widow will do that to a kid. But, now, it seemed, as an adult, the sins of the mother were fated to become muses for the daughter.

  My ghosts manifested themselves in the form of art. The sketches and paintings hung and stacked upon themselves within my studio, wouldn’t be out of place on the walls of some dreary gothic castle. In reality, they most likely ended up the conversation piece of some stuffy party, where high-priced champagne and trysts in shadowy corners went hand in hand with cigar smoke and the trading of stock tips. I knew my paintings had been purchased by buyers from all over the world, but the darkness splashed across my canvases still lent to a reputation as somewhat of an oddball, even in the eccentric circles of the Southern upper class. While I could put on a ball gown and mingle with the best of society when the occasion called for it, I was honestly more at home in a cemetery or wandering around downtown Charleston long after the partygoers that usually littered the streets had gone to bed. For them, sunset was when the city really came alive. For me, I’d take those few precious hours after all the fun but before the sun came up, when everything settled to an eerie silence.

  In truth, I’d spent most of my life in the dark. I knew that embracing the nightmares that flashed behind my eyes, then releasing them onto a tightly pulled piece of cloth, wasn’t a healthy coping mechanism. My best friend, Siren, often told me that I needed therapy … or Jesus. I suppose I better start praying because my mother would never allow a shrink to get up close and personal with my demons, and it wasn’t for fear of me saying something that might incriminate her. She just wouldn’t be able to handle the embarrassment. The shame of having a daughter whose issues couldn’t be quelled by several glasses of wine and a Xanax. You just didn’t do therapy when your peers spent their days sipping sweet tea and blessing people’s hearts and their nights sleeping with each other’s husbands. This lifestyle often led to the complete and total nervous breakdown of what was once a belle with a life to be envied. One whose existence was now reduced to long “vacations” at the old family plantation in the country and whispers behind delicate hands that sported manicures to rival even the deadliest of monsters.

  To avoid suffering a similar fate, I chose to channel my childhood traumas in a way that kept my mother placated and money in my pocket. My money. Not family money. I didn’t want a dime of the fortune my mother had spent a lifetime amassing, first on her back, then on the dotted line of a life insurance policy. Or should she say policies? In my short 24 years, I’d been a Carrow, a Winston, a Prescott, a Michaelson, and a Stratford. Each stepfather came and went in the blink of an eye. Not via a divorce attorney, but in a very tasteful casket. Appearances had to be maintained, after all.

  Husband number five seemed to be sticking, however. I wasn’t sure if it was because he and my mother were a perfect match in both tastes and temperament, or if it was due to the fact that Peter Stratford had turned out to be a con artist of the highest caliber. I was sure my mother would rather be stuck in an unwanted marriage than admit that the man that she herself had conned into holy matrimony shortly into my teenage years had been conning her right back. Peter and my mother seemed to have been cut from the same cloth, albeit cloth with two very different price tags. My mother was a killer, dressed in silk and pearls. Peter was a con man and a violent drunk. But only behind closed doors, where he always made sure the bruises and scars could be easily hidden from the world, beneath the designer clothing my mother so preferred. Luckily for Suzanne Stratford, she had still been riding on the coattails of her last husband’s will when she found out that her new husband was flat broke.

  They were a match made in Hell. In fact, the only good thing that seemed to accompany stepfather number 5 was Merrick. Merrick. Just thinking about him made my heart stutter a little. When my mother took the plunge again shortly after my 15th birthday, I had expected to have to feign love for another aloof father figure. What I hadn’t anticipated was for that father figure to be accompanied by a freshly turned 17-year-old son. I’d like to say that, at 17, Merrick had been your typical rebellious youth with more mouth than sense. But, even then, there were shadows in his eyes that told of dark deeds and barely healed wounds. It wasn’t long before I learned the hard way that his stoic demeanor and tightly leashed rage were simply byproducts of his environment. At 17, Merrick had seemed to be on the cusp of something, whether great or terrible, I hadn’t been sure. Now, at 26, he was one of Charleston’s youngest entrepreneurs and philanthropists, though I believed that most of our social circle considered him a trust fund baby. To the outside world, a sophisticated and charismatic bachelor. They had no idea that his father had entered the marriage to my mother as part of a scam because he was broke. Even now, I had no idea how Merrick made his money. To me, he was a fountain of secrets and cold indifference. Which I guessed was only fair, considering I did my best to keep the terror that made up the darkest parts of my soul hidden from prying eyes.

Even his.

  Which explained why I was currently sitting alone in a cemetery at midnight. While that in itself wouldn’t be out of the norm for me, the surrounding streets seemed unusually quiet tonight. It was a Friday after all, and Friday nights in Charleston, even at midnight, would usually be filled with raucous barely-legals stumbling down the streets after exiting some bar they’d managed to con their way into with a fake ID. Or I’d be hearing the crackling of a loudspeaker for one of the guided ghost tours coming to an end. But not tonight.

  The weather was already sweltering, and it was only late April. But that too wasn’t unusual for the South. I liked to make jokes that we lived in the prettiest part of the “armpit of the United States”. My mother, however, didn’t find that amusing. She would attempt to lecture me on “being a proper young lady”. I was anything but proper. My outward appearance was a direct contrast to the trauma in my past and the art I created. Maybe it was because of those things that my wardrobe looked like a color factory explosion. I loved tie dye, neons, and jewel tones, the latter of which was my favorite because they tended to compliment my deep green eyes. My hair was a mass of auburn curls that leaned more towards strawberry blonde than the true copper red I wished I’d been born with. Nine times out of ten, you’d find them tossed up into a messy bun at the top of my head. Natural curls and Southern humidity did not mix. I also had a bad habit of accidentally painting my long locks when I wasn’t paying attention. When I felt the urge to paint, nothing else around me existed. It was almost as if I’d entered a trance of sorts. All of my inner turmoil, stress, anxiety, and fear would pour out of me and onto the canvas. Whenever I finished a painting session, I almost felt … purged. My soul, a tiny bit lighter and a little less black. When I wasn’t actively painting, I was sketching. Siren often likened me to a monster, having crawled my way out of the muddy swamps because my fingertips were constantly stained black from the charcoal I favored. I’d usually just laugh those jokes off, though. It was easier than dredging up the fact that both Siren and I knew that monsters were real. We’d lived with them for years. I was probably one of the only people on the planet who knew that Siren had a shaded past all her own, and knew what lay underneath all those pretty tattoos on her back. Scars of the physical, mental, and emotional variety.

  A text chime suddenly jolts me out of my inner musings, the noise ridiculously loud in the too-quiet night. I usually put my phone on silent when I visited the cemetery. I didn’t like to disturb the dead, and while I didn’t mind the ghosts, I also didn’t need any more than the ones I carried with me every day.

  Just as I reach into the pocket of my oversized linen overalls, the text sound chimes again. Cringing inwardly, I quickly silence the phone before looking down at the display. Speak of the devil, and she shall appear. At least electronically.

  Smiling, I shake my head ruefully. Siren was always bored. Of the two of us, she was definitely the more outgoing one. The extrovert to my introvert. While I was perfectly content to hole up in my studio, elbow-deep in paint, Siren was forever thinking about her next set of plans. I was sure it was a form of rebellion to combat years of suppression and abuse. How she’d kept that abuse hidden for so long, I still didn’t know. We’d been best friends since childhood, from the day we’d met in second grade, when I’d been getting teased for my frizzy hair and in retaliation she’d convinced Tiffany Wilson that she was adopted, we’d been inseparable. Tiffany wasn’t adopted, as far as I knew, but it didn’t take much to make an eight-year-old cry. Siren probably knew more about me than anyone. She knew the ins and outs of my personality, my favorite foods, my favorite hobbies. But she didn’t know what made me tick. Because, despite how close we were, I feared that if I was to let her into my brain, she’d never make it out again. So, over the years, I’d told her the bare minimum. For her own protection and because she was already dealing with enough shit of her own. It was the parts of me she did know that made her able to predict that I wasn’t currently in bed.

  That wasn’t a lie. I did, in fact, have a meeting with my agent. He’d called me to let me know that there was some issue with my latest painting. The majority of my art was held in a gallery in Downtown Charleston. It was showcased there, available for sale to anyone who happened to wander into the gallery, but most of the pieces were also listed on my website. The gallery sales were handled by the broker there, and the website sales were handled by my agent. I would normally put him off. I wasn’t big on the business end of the art world. If I was honest with myself, I hated selling my work. Nearly everything I painted felt like an extension of me, so when it came time to sell, it was almost as if I was giving away a part of myself. Buyers could speculate all they wanted as to the inspiration for my art, but only I knew the truth, and that was that the darkness that bled onto the canvas most of the time I sat down to paint were scenes from my nightmares. Except a lot of those nightmares weren’t actually nightmares but memories pulled from the deep recesses of my mind. And almost all of those bad memories could be traced back to my mother. Even thinking about her now causes a knot of anxiety to form in the pit of my stomach. Despite the rumors surrounding my mother’s previous marriages, some of which I had a disturbing amount of insight into, our relationship had always straddled the fine line between life and death without actually tipping over. Any time we were together, a threat hung heavy in the air. I wasn’t sure what stopped her, especially knowing that I was privy to some of the darkest parts of her. I knew it wasn’t love or even affection. My mother had always been detached and cold. How I turned out to have any semblance of empathy for others, I had no idea.

  She was goading me. I knew she was. This was a common bit between the two of us. I’d downplay my accomplishments, and she’d remind me how much talent I had and what I could do with it. Siren was the ultimate hype person. Which came in handy when you had a family that was constantly talking down their noses or shitting all over you. Outside of my mother, my stepfather was, well … he was a bastard. Plain and simple. Then there was Merrick. Despite his demeanor of general irritation whenever I was around, he was still the closest thing I had to family. Which made the crush I’d harbored for him since I was 15 very inconvenient. In my mind, I knew we weren’t related by blood, so the idea of something happening between us didn’t skeeve me out. I may have, in fact, entertained a fantasy … or 500 … about what it might be like if Merrick ever let his iron control slip and saw me as a woman, not just his annoying little stepsister. But I wasn’t a fool. Even without the barrier of our de facto familial relationship, Merrick absolutely refused to recognize the possibility that there was a single sexual bone in my body. If by some miracle of God, he ever did, the gossip mongers of the city would have a field day with two step-siblings fooling around with each other. I had a feeling a scandal like that would finally push my mother over that fine line. Bringing myself back to the present, I realize I haven’t responded to Siren’s last text.

  The very idea of my mother “running around” with anyone was laughable. My mother and Siren had a love/hate relationship. As in, Siren loved to hate my mother. I was positive my mother returned the sentiment. Of course, she would never say it outright. She’d just make it glaringly obvious by her resting bitch face and the thinly veiled snide remarks that she wielded like daggers. Suzanne was anything, if not civilized, even with people she disliked. It made it easier for her to wield the knife if you trusted her enough to give her your back. Siren and I exchange a few more texts, not regarding my mother thank God, and then end our conversation with the promise of a girls night tomorrow night.

  Exiting the cemetery, I walk the short distance back to my townhouse. I lived in downtown Charleston, and anyone would tell you that everything within downtown Charleston was within walking distance of everything else. Besides being a city full of rich history, it was also a college town. At any given moment, the streets were littered with students walking from here to there. Of course, I did have my own car, but there was just something about wandering the cobblestone streets, especially at night, that helped clear my head.

 

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