“You selfish piece of trash.”
My mother’s voice didn’t just cut across the patio of the Obsidian Resort; it sliced the morning air in half.
I watched the ceramic carafe tilt in her hand a split second before my brain actually registered what was happening.
For some reason, I assumed she was just going to slam it down on the glass table for emphasis, the way she always did when she demanded our undivided attention.
I expected the china to rattle and the silverware to chime like nervous bells, but instead, gravity simply took its toll.
The heat hit me first as a concept, and then as sharp, stinging physical pain.
Freshly brewed coffee, still nearly boiling, cascaded directly over my head.
It slashed across my scalp like liquid fire, ran down the side of my face, and soaked instantly through the hood of my inexpensive gray hoodie until it seeped into my collar.
My neck felt like someone had pressed a heavy, scorching iron against it and simply forgotten to lift it away.
My lungs completely forgot how to breathe, and for a moment, there was nothing but a ringing whiteness in my skull as if my brain had short-circuited from the sheer shock.
Then the sound came screaming back into focus.
There were no gasps, and there were no horrified murmurs from the other guests.
Instead, there was laughter.
Wet, scalding coffee dripped from my eyelashes as I blinked blindly, trying to orient myself in the sudden chaos.
My chair screeched backward on the stone terrace as I tried to pull away.
Someone at a nearby table muttered, “Oh my God,” in that half amused way people reserve for drama that doesn’t actually belong to them.
My brother Caleb’s laugh cut through the rest of the noise, sharp and mean and high on adrenaline.
When my vision finally focused, his phone was already in his hand, angled perfectly toward me with the red recording light blinking steadily.
Beside him, my sister Maya had her device out as well, her mouth twisted into the kind of smile she used for her social media updates, a little too wide, with teeth a little too white and eyes sparkling with the joy of someone else’s humiliation.
Their cameras looked like twin little cyclops eyes aimed directly at me, unblinking and predatory.
It was content.
The back of my neck sizzled in the morning sun, and I could feel the coffee seeping down between my shoulder blades, hot and sticky and clinging to my skin through the thin cotton.
I smelled burnt hair and bitter roast, and the pain radiated outward like a halo of heat around my head.
My mother, Beatrice, stood over me with the empty carafe dangling from her limp hand.
Her chest heaved, her face was flushed, and her elegant features were distorted into something feral and unrecognizable.
A single lock of her perfectly highlighted hair had worked loose from her chignon, sticking to her temple with sweat.
“That,” she hissed, breathing hard, “is exactly how we treat trash.”
Somewhere in the corner of my vision, a waiter hovered, frozen in place while balancing a tray of champagne flutes.
He looked like he was desperately unsure whether to intervene or simply pretend he was invisible for the rest of his shift.
I could have screamed then, and it would have been justified.
I could have lunged across the table, knocked her over, and sent her sprawling into her own cold omelet and half eaten fruit bowl.
I could have slapped the phones out of my siblings’ hands and watched them skitter across the stone, their screens shattering like their fake, polished composure.
The urge was there, a wild and animal thing clawing at my throat.
Instead, I heard my own voice as if it were coming from someone far away.
It said absolutely nothing.
