volante di angelo {two} fin

I remember those empty summers, when my friends would take me swimming in the lake. Sometimes I would lay back, letting my body float just beneath the surface, my hair in dark clouds drifting around my face. I would close my eyes, and wish silently to myself that the water would take me under, that the warmth of the sun against my skin would be replaced with rushes of cold from the dark depths of the lake.

I wasn't afraid to die.
Back then, I think I was almost looking forward to it.

It's okay, now. I have enough bottles under my bed to last a lifetime and countless nights to burn away. It's okay.

No one considers my feelings anyway, so it is best not to have any. (Or to pretend like it.)

My father calls me a disgrace, that I leave a scar on the family name with my ill behavior-

"Why can't you be more like Hisidoro?"

"Pull your skirt down and your shirt up."

"Imbecile bastard."

His words used to leave deep impressions in my mind, but now I laugh at them- isn't he the one who cheated on his wife countless times, to the extent that he has not one but two bastard chilren?

Adultery is despicable, disgusting- my father is as terrible as his sin.

I do not know who my birth mother is, probably because my father is such a slut that he doesn't even know her name, but the woman who is married to my father substitutes well enough. She looks down on me just as everyone else does, frowns when I come home with my pants unzipped and my hair ruffled, but she seems to care for me at least more than my father does. She knows of my father's betrayal, and that my brother and I are from other women, but she seems to care about us, about me, more than he does.

(That's all I've ever wanted, isn't it? To be cared about?)

She tries to offer me motherly advice, that perhaps I shouldn't sleep around so much, that maybe I should stop struggling against my father's will.

"I can do what I want with my life, and that includes my body, too," I'll say in response, brushing her off. "When I'm eighteen-"

"But you're not eighteen," she will remind me gently.

"Yet."

I think of turning eighteen often, of becoming legally an adult, so I can fuck whoever I want and get the hell out of this tangled web my family has laid out for me. When I am eighteen, I will not be a di Angelo any longer. Perhaps I cannot run from family drama and all of the plotting and scheming, but I can sure as hell try.

But I know that what scares me the most is not the plotting and scheming itself, but that I am becoming like my father- a serpent. Sometimes I admire the art of manipulation, like the way Belladonna Crocetti twists her words into people's heads. But other times these tangling webs of lies scare me- I can feel them brushing against my back, slowly beginning to coil around my wrists.

I prefer to watch chaos unfold, not be caught in the middle of it.

There are whispers that I will marry a Crocetti- the youngest, Francesco. The thought alone that I would even look twice at a small boy, only fifteen, is a fucking joke. If I had to choose one of the Crocettis, most of who I admit would not be a bad choice, it would be one of the older ones.

Here's the catch on marriage to a Crocetti: I couldn't leave all of this bullshit behind and have a life on my own. I would no longer be a di Angelo, but I would be forever stuck in this.

And I'm not sure I hate myself enough to go through with that.