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XOXO, Bellamy

#mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #traumahealing #momblog #momlife #parenthood #selfgrowth #selfcare #relationships #healing #grahamnathanielslaughter #GNS #thedcripper #thebeastof495 #thecharlottesvillestrangler #truecrime #horror

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katielove732 thank you so much for the alt text!!! I use a screen reader sometimes and it means so much when my favorite people take the time to make the internet more accessible <3

bellamy.slaughter @katielove732 Of course! As the mother to a disabled child, I am ALL about inclusion and kindness for everyone!

October XX

How does Felicity Keating know.

I can’t spend one more second in that school, so I put the finishing touches on my makeup while waiting for the Green Line toward home, breathing carefully through my nose and focusing on the minute details of my mother-mandated eyeliner in an attempt to get my nervous system under control.

Heart pounding. Shaky hands. Tapping foot.

She can’t know. There’s no possible way she could know.

My childhood memories are all shot—recollections of anything before the end of the trial are watery at best, missing for months-long stretches at worst—but even I know with one hundred percent certainty that it’s impossible. There’s nowhere for her to fit. No gap in the story that makes sense. Even the three people in the penthouse building lobby who saw me stumble out of the elevator were identified for the trial.

And I forgot to demand Felicity’s phone number, so I can’t even ask.

As soon as I’ve ensured that the eyeliner wings are even, the train pulls up with a squeal. I grimace. This is the 7000-series with screaming brakes that the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority hasn’t fixed yet. It makes my skin crawl. Still, when the doors hiss open, I squeeze on anyway, because right now I’ll take even the worst train to calm down.

I’m fully aware of how stereotypical it is to have a special interest in trains. Mine is the Washington Metrorail specifically. During bad days in the summer, without school to escape to, I’ll pick a line and ride it to the farthest end, stepping out of the final station to greet the blazing sun in another state entirely. I consider doing that now. I have to transfer to the Orange to get home anyway, and I could keep going. All the way out of the city, into Virginia or Maryland.

Not that there’s anything for me out there in either direction. But so I can wait for the pounding in my head to die down, staring out the window as the station lights flicker past.

But I get off the Orange Line at Eastern Market anyway.

This, too, I think Dr. Lý would call self-harm.

When I get home, Mom is in the living room.

That would be bad enough on its own, but there are also strangers in the house—and between having a knife held to my face half an hour ago and this, I can’t tell which is worse.

I stop in the doorway, backpack dangling from my elbow where I aborted the usual move to fling it onto the floor. Mom sits primly on the white couch with a bespectacled writer, no doubt telling her canned woe is me story. The producer points out a light fixture to an assistant and suggests a different wattage. A cameraman frowns at his expensive machine, adjusting whatever it is cameramen adjust, and one of Mom’s lawyers perches at the kitchen table to review a document to the tune of $350 an hour.

Absolutely not. I ease the door closed and take a silent step toward the stairs, but it’s too late.

“Morgan,” Mom coos, reaching a slender hand toward me. Every eye follows her, ravenous for whatever’s caught her precious attention. And—fuck, she’s dressed like me. A black skirt and red sweater, a vague approximation of my school uniform, is she serious? “Welcome home. I forgot to mention, we’re doing some prep work today.”

Sure. It slipped her mind. As if she ever tells me anything.

“Right,” I say. “I’ll get out of your way.”

“Oh, none of that. You need to meet everyone.” Mom excuses herself from the writer’s corner and narrows her eyes in warning: Don’t embarrass me. Like she can read the impending breakdown in the tension between my eyes. “Though, how about an after-school snack first.”

We don’t have snacks in this house. We have a bulk bag of unsalted almonds and way too much celery juice. If I want something with even a whisper of the sugar a human brain requires to function, I’ll have to dig out the box of stale snack cakes from under my bed, and that is clearly not where I’m being led.

Instead, Mom ushers me to the kitchen and uses her body as a barrier between me and the film crew, or a roadblock to keep me from bolting. Shit. I lean against the counter and jam my hands into my eyes.

If she knew what Dad and I had done? Together? She’d rip me limb from limb.

Mom immediately yanks my hands down. “Don’t do this.”

I start, “I’m not—”