Pucked Off (The Pucked Series) by Helena Hunting

Author:Helena Hunting [Hunting, Helena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Helena Hunting
Published: 2017-02-21T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

SLAPPED IN THE

Face WITH MEMORIES

LANCE

When a person chooses to bury memories, there’s usually a reason. The span of time between my brother dying and my aunt realizing my mom was beating the shit out of me—verbally and physically—was the worst of my life. When we moved to Chicago, her beatings got worse instead of better, so I shut down. I locked everything away—all the good and the bad and everything else in between—and kept it stored in the dark place in my head.

It was almost like the mental place I go to when I get into a fight on the ice. Keeping the memories on lockdown is a lot easier than contending with them. Or at least I thought it was. But everything just changed.

I’ve been slapped in the face—not literally, I don’t think Poppy has a violent bone in her body—with a deluge of memories.

Now I understand why Poppy’s always felt so familiar. She is. Flickers of things long buried start to surface: my first week of school in Chicago, the still-healing bruises on my back and legs and knees, wearing pants when it was hot, all the attention from the teachers and other students.

A lot of the memories aren’t very pleasant, but the good ones that contain Poppy come hurtling to the surface now, obliterating everything else. She’s the strawberry blond girl with the long ponytail who looked like home.

Not home in the sense of parents and family, but familiar and comfortable, warm and welcoming.

For a while I’d tried to ignore her, but she was always in the same hall as me during third period, so eventually I caved. I pulled her ponytail because I wanted to touch her hair and see what kind of reaction I’d get. Her smile, so curious and innocent, was something I’d forgotten existed.

I’d never bothered to find out her name. Comfortable things were alluring but untenable for me back then. Hell, mostly they still are. Stability was frightening. After we moved to Chicago, everything—my mum’s happiness, my well-being and safety—was contingent on my success. And failure, perceived or real, required punishment. I accepted this because I knew I had failed my mum in the worst way possible.

Even after my aunt realized what was going on and my mum moved to Connecticut, I still didn’t trust the peace. I would push my aunt’s buttons, waiting for her to lash out, to the fill the void my mother’s absence had created. It wasn’t an absence in the sense that I missed her, but without the constant verbal and physical violence that had become normal, expected, anticipated even, I didn’t know what to do. I waited for the slaps—the physical attacks, the breaking me down emotionally. But they never came. And I didn’t understand it.

So I picked fights on the ice, needled players until they cracked. And I let them get in solid hits before I shut them down. If that didn’t satisfy the need for violence that had been conditioned into me, I would destroy my own property and myself.

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