But I Love Him by Amanda Grace Page B

my cheeks, dripping off my chin, one after another.
    The girl staring back at me is not me.
    It is someone else.
    It is not me.
    Her eyes turn red as I watch her in the mirror. Her sparkling blue eyes look so hollow.
    She’s like the zombie version of me. The undead version.
    There is no way that is me.
    I close my eyes because I can’t look at her anymore.
    School can wait. I can make up another day. It’s Friday, anyway. By Monday the bruise will be gone and no one will have to know about it.
    I need to go back to bed, where the world doesn’t exist.
    I swipe my hand across the counter and the makeup crashes to the floor, and then I walk out the door and switch off those ugly bright lights.
    I’m going back to bed. And when I wake up maybe that ugly girl will be gone.
    April 27
    Seven Months, twenty-eight days
    I should have known when he said, “You’re so lucky I don’t hit girls,” that one day he would.
    And he did. He just hit me. I can’t seem to process it. I’m too shocked to move, as the same image replays over and over in my mind. The way his knuckles smashed into my cheek, the loud crack when skin met skin.
    Connor wouldn’t do that to me. He wouldn’t turn on me like that. He hits things, not people. He told me that himself, that first month we were together, when I saw all those scars on his knuckles.
    He loves me as much as I love him. And he would never hurt me like this.
    But I know by the look on his face that he’s more stunned than I am, and that it has really, truly happened.
    He hit me.
    I just keep thinking it, over and over, trying to wrap my head around it. I just keep staring at him, my face stinging so hard it burns. This didn’t happen. He doesn’t even look angry anymore. It couldn’t have happened.
    I sink to the ground but he catches me, picks me up before I can slide all the way to the floor. He carries me to the couch and sets me down as if I’m glass, as if I might break.
    He doesn’t see that I’m already broken.
    Tears flow down his cheeks and slide off his jaw. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He keeps repeating it.
    He’s so far away. I’m so deep inside myself that I can’t respond, can’t talk.
    He’s done it. He’s hit me.
    He touches the spot on my cheek with the backside of his fingers. I’m sure it is red. It is swelling; I can feel it grow, heat spreading across my face. My eye feels heavy, like it’s trying to close all on its own.
    “Oh, God, Ann, I’m sorry,” he keeps saying. Over and over. It is his mantra. He is sorry.
    He’s kissing my face and my hands and crying.
    “I swear to you I didn’t mean to. I don’t know why I did that. I’m so sorry. So, so sorry.”
    I know he is. I know he hadn’t wanted to do that.
    Just like I knew he would. It was inside him. I know that. I knew that it would come out.
    And even though I thought I was ready, I wasn’t.
    What do you do when the one person you want comfort from the most is the one who caused your pain? How can I want so desperately for him to wrap me up in his arms but also want so much for him to leave me alone?
    “Please,” I whisper, though I have nothing else to say. “Please.”
    I don’t know what I’m asking of him. I don’t know what I want right now, except to rewind the last ten minutes and erase it all.
    It didn’t happen.
    No.
    It didn’t happen.
    He is sobbing. I can’t make out his words anymore because they garble together into incoherent babble between his tears.
    Hitting me has broken him. What his father failed to do, he has done himself.
    All the times he has cried for himself, cried for the things he’d lived through, he’s never sobbed like this.
    But now he knows. Now he knows, just as I have known on some level, what is inside him. It lurks behind his eyes, growing and changing and waiting.
    And now it has happened. Now we both know who he is.
    We both know what he is.
    He cannot deny it anymore.
    And neither can I.
    April 25
    Seven Months, twenty-six