New Moon
1.0
Angel wanted to throw something. Or, rather, she wanted to take a hot shower and soak her feet and pretend that her life didn’t completely suck at all times of the day. She was sweaty, covered in dog food crumbs, bruised, and smelled like old food found in the back of the fridge. It was so late that it was almost considered early, and she wanted to drown herself in alcohol. She wasn’t normally in a terrible mood such as she was now, she was just mostly in a “not good” mood. Part of it had to do with her life, and part of it had to do with her living conditions. Angel liked her family, she deeply loved her little (twin) brother, but since she had come home he had started to hang out with people a lot more than she remembered, and someone was always at her house it seemed. Even now, as she was pulling into the driveway of her two-story childhood home in her beat-up station wagon, the lights on the second floor lounge (hallway) were on and she could see flashes of light from (probably) a gaming system.
Angel’s brother, Aaron, was lucky. He didn’t feel the need to fill all of his spare time with a job, so he went to the local community college and hung out with his friends. Angel, having just recently returned home from Active Duty Army for two years, was inclined to do something with her time--and her life. She spent two years as a Cannon Crewmember, mostly just loading rounds into tanks and sitting in overly-warm Humvees. Her life now was considerably less active and the pudge, and fifteen pounds, she had gained showed it clearly.
Angel sighed, putting her little runner into park and turning it off, letting out a grunt of dismay and slight pain as she eased herself out of the driver’s seat and standing up. She looked back into her car, noticed her fallen phone beneath the gas pedal, and groaned as she bent over to pick it up. It was late and the summer-air had cooled off, the stars dim and the moon completely missing from the dark sky. Aaron had left the porch light off, thankfully, and she slammed the car door shut without fear of fighting through a swarm of moths and other night-bugs with wings and bad attitudes.
The exhausted woman kicked her shoes off after walking through the unlocked front door, locking it behind her. Her dirty sneakers tripped over one another and she glanced up the steps directly in front of her to see light streaming out from under the curtain Aaron had hung up to block light from the second floor. The noise from upstairs was loud, but came through her damaged ears a little muffled. She had left her hearing aids at home and the ear plugs she wore at work gave her a headache so she didn’t like wearing them. Her hearing had been shot since Afghanistan and she knew she would be dealing with the after-effects for the rest of her life. Too bad the military couldn’t fix her nightmares the way they could (try to) correct her ruined hearing. Angel didn’t really want to deal with whatever moron males her brother had brought home this time--she tended to ignore them and home as much as she could--but the shower and clean clothes were upstairs and the odor she was emitting was beginning to bother her. She filled her water bottle up with ice and cool water, grabbing her discarded shoes as she made her way up to her awaiting room.
“Angel!” Aaron called, taking note of her shadow trying to slide past the group huddled around the television screen with gaming controllers in their hands. “How was work?”
Aaron and another male were sitting in the corner on the only love seat in the hallway-made-gaming-lounge, both holding a beer. Aaron had his phone resting on his thigh with a text pulled up, but the other male was sipping his beer and watching the other two males game with unhidden boredom.
“Hey,” she muttered, slinking past the black futon with it’s back to the door, and darting into her closed-door bedroom. She dropped her shoes and water bottle, one in the small closet by the door and the other at the head of her twin-sized bed. Exhaustion pulled a little stronger at her, but Angel refused to go to bed without showering first. She stripped her outer-clothes, pulling a robe over her underwear and tying the belt tightly in the front.
She stepped back into the hallway, taking a quick right out her door and directly into the latrine, closing the door with all but a crack and pulling the shower door open. She turned the shower on as hot as she could, and opened the door, walking back into her room with a short, “If you have to piss now is your chance.”
She spend the next few minutes finding her perfect “Shower Playlist” on Spotify and grabbing a clean pair of underwear and a slightly-oversized-but-definitely-tighter-than-last-time-she-wore-it-sweater.
“Work that good, huh?” Aaron laughed as she slunk back into the empty latrine, the toilet still letting out little noises from a recent flush. She turned the volume on her phone speaker as high as she could get it, thankful for little things like the shower head being quiet. Angel fully stripped, glancing at herself in the quickly steaming mirror and grimacing at what she saw. She turned, dropping her clothes, and ducked into the scalding water. The majority of the next 15 minutes of her life involved her dropping the clog into the bathtub drain and laying on the bottom of the tub while her feet soaked and her hair was saturated in conditioner. Her phone was playing Army running-cadences that she hummed along with, eyes closed and fingers tracing the broken-up scar on her left leg. Her deaf side.
Angel didn’t drink often, but she was extremely grateful for the opened and still sweating wine cooler Aaron left for her on the latrine sink. She spent too long drying off and wringing out her hair. A year to clean her ears with Q-tips and brush each and every tooth individually even though she was going to inhale alcohol in a moment anyway. She applied deodorant and lotion from the little shelf she had installed above the toilet when she got home. She made sure the black ink surrounding her ankle was healing correctly and checked the bottom of her feet to see the damage that the calloused skin had gone through yet another night. Finally, she pulled the shirt over her head, rubbing her head one more time with the towel before hanging it up on a hook. She left her discarded clothes and took the wine cooler with her out into the hallway, easing herself into the only chair in the room, tucking her legs under her while trying not to let out a noise of pain. She nearly succeeded.
“Hey,” Aaron raised his beer to her from across the alcove in the wall, taking in her sleep-deprived state. “I figured you’d go straight to bed.”
Angel shrugged, taking a sip of her drink and staring blankly at the game on the screen before her. “Too tired to do anything, not tired enough to sleep.”
The two guys actively gaming were familiar to Angel; she had seen them many times since she’d been home, even though she was still clueless on what their names were. They seemed mostly okay, though, and when they weren’t yelling she didn’t mind them. The man sitting next to her little brother, however, was completely foreign. He was big, she could tell even though he was sitting, and he didn’t look thrilled to be in her house, much less her company. She glanced at him, noting the scowl on his attractive face, and sighed. Dark features, strong bone structure, clear skin, dark lashes. He was almost gorgeous.
He reminded her of someone she fucked back on deployment, and she wasn’t really sure how that made her feel.
“Angel, have you met Scout?” Her brother spoke up again. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been here when he’s come over.”
“What?” Angel squinted at her brother as a sudden onslaught of bullet bursts shot from the speaker directly to her left and covered up her voice. “Fuck,” she flinched away, glaring at the speaker for a moment, heart suddenly racing, before looking back over at him. “What did you say?”
“I said,” Aaron said a little louder and definitely slower, “Have you met Scout?”
Angel hated it when Aaron talked to her like she was slow and stupid. She wasn’t slow OR stupid. She just couldn’t hear a damn thing he said when he was muttering or when there was a lot of noise around her and she would appreciate it if he realized that. He never seemed to realize it.
She shook her head, looking back at the television screen. “Can’t say I have,” she responded, still sipping at her drink.
Aaron said something to the man beside him, but Angel was tired and sore and had considered that to be enough social interaction for the week. She stood, leaving her unfinished drink on the floor by the chair. She collected her dirty clothes from the latrine floor and made her way to her bed. She knew it would still be some time before she fell asleep, but at least there was alcohol in her system to expedite the process. Her brother would still be up for two or three hours, even more if his friends stayed the night. It happened about once a week, and he was about due for another night of torment for her.
1.1
Angel was pretty sure she wanted to kill herself. It was not-quite ten in the morning, the bruises from work had definitely settled into her muscles, and her brother was being so loud he woke her up from the nightmare-infused sleep she regularly got. The noise was coming from the kitchen downstairs; loud music, pots and pans, and a distinct smell of bacon. She was going to absolutely slaughterAaron.
Angel got out of bed, peed, brushed her teeth, changed into a cleaner shirt and bra than what she fell asleep in, and took the little blue pill that prevented her from getting pregnant from its handy little light-yellow holder. Then she went down the steps, slowly, imagining how great it would feel to beat her twin brother to a bloody pulp. Every once in a while Angel would lose her cool in what her therapist referred to fondly as an “episode.” She had them a lot when she was in the hospital, but she tried her best not to flip shit in front of her brother like she was prone to do. He knew she wasn’t fully okay since she hadn’t gotten home, but no one--not even her parents--knew just how bad she was. Every day 22 veterans took their own life, and most days she pretended the PTSD and lack of good REM sleep without flashbacks didn’t make her want to do the exact same thing herself. But she was stronger than that. Well, not “stronger” really, she just didn’t think she had gone through enough to warrant it. Some vets actually saw some shit and did some things she had only heard of. Her? A stupid comrade got her fucked up and two people dead, but that wasn’t as bad as it could have been. She knew that.
“Aaron, I swear to fucking God if you don’t turn that shitty-ass music down I will slice your throat open with a pizza cutter,” Angel growled at the bottom of the steps. The guys inhabiting the space had gone silent when they heard her voice, the only sound was the obnoxious music Aaron’s phone was blaring, and the sizzling of food on a pan. Aaron looked at her with wide eyes, frozen in almost fear. She could feel her left eye begin to twitch, and she knew she had to cool it before she actually did slice her little brother’s throat.
Aaron reached over, turning the music down so it was only a slight hum, blinking at his sister. The three men from the night were in various states of exhaustion, coffee in front of one, milk in front of another, and juice in front of the third.
“How did you sleep?” Aaron seemed to joke, batting his lashes at her noncommittedly. She knew she had actually scared him, which she felt bad about, but the music was giving her a headache. She still wasn’t wearing her hearing aids and her left hear didn’t pick up hardly any noises, so the lopsided sounds gave her migraines.
“Perfectly,” she dead-panned, and he relaxed his shoulders.
She felt bad for scaring him, and rubbed the palm of her hand against her brow as hard as she could, walking past the two guys at her dining room table and ignoring the attractive man sitting at her counter with a steaming mug of black coffee--seemingly as dark as her mind--cooling in front of him.
With the near-crisis of his whacked-out sister going psycho and killing them all clearly averted for now, Aaron offered her a plate of bacon, which she declined with a head-shake, the smell making her nauseous. Angel liked meat--loved it, rather--but her dream was still fresh in her mind and she recalled how on deployment they weren’t always served the animal they asked for.
“Nice shirt,” Aaron turned away from her, and she glanced down at the well-worn ‘Fare County Animal Clinic’ lettering on the grey fabric. She had stolen it from him, she realized, but she didn’t feel any remorse.
“Thanks,” she muttered, grabbing a bowl from the cupboard and making her way to the pantry they kept all of their boxed and canned goods in. She grabbed her cereal, noting how the angry guy from last night--Scout--looked a little less-angry in the early morning with coffee instead of beer. He gave her a silent head-nod, which she took as a good sign that he would leave her alone. He, to her dismay, was not the one she should have worried about.
“Does your sister always flip shit first thing in the morning,” the orange juice drinking boy, the fair haired, blue eyed boy, asked Aaron, sipping his drink. “Because if so, I could definitely get behind that.
Angel silently poured her cereal, then the milk her brother handed her, into the pristine bowl. How nice would it be to throw the ceramic bowl in his face and watch it smash?
“Micah, shut up,” her brother said light-heartedly. Angel slid into the stool next to the still-silent Scout, spoon in and and back to Micah. Her knuckles were white with how hard she was gripping the metal, jaw locked in annoyance. She wanted to hit him, which definitely was not something she should do. Her therapist warned her it would be hard to adjust to civilian life, but the last month had been so hard she didn’t even know why she tried. Hell, the hospital she had been in for twelve weeks was terrible, but it didn’t amount to how sad she was all of the time back in her own home. And she didn’t even know why she was so sad.
Angel took a few bites in silence, Micah bantering with her brother about something she really didn’t care about--or take the time to figure out--then Scout spoke to her.
“Is it short for something?” He asked, eyes boring deeply into his mug. Angel swallowed the bite of cereal in her mouth, asking “Is what short for something?” with food still in her mouth.
“Angel,” he glanced at her and she noticed just how amber his eyes looked. Golden. “Is Angel short for something?”
“Angelique,” she responded quietly, heart beating hard at what she had seen. The look in his eyes reminded her of that same person she thought of every night when she tried to fall asleep, and it alarmed her. Even the turn of his lips looked familiar. “What about Scout?”
“No, my mom was just a huge fan ofTo Kill a Mockingbird, much to my misfortune.” He looked away from her and she could suddenly breathe again. Why was he so familiar?
Angel didn’t respond, finishing her cereal quickly while her brother began serving up scrambled eggs and toast to his friends.
“Hey, Angel?” Aaron asked as he made his way past her for his own plate. She slid her washed bowl into the cupboard and looked at him expectantly. “Do you work tonight?”
Angel nodded, making a break for the stairs while his back was turned. She didn’t tell him she had an appointment first, but he would eventually figure it out. She thought. It didn’t really matter anyway, but it would work out either way.
1.2
“What’s new since the last time I saw you?” Dr. Amelia Baek was the only person in the continental United States who knew just how bad Angel’s mental health really was.
“I received a call back from the department about a job and they want me to go in for an interview tomorrow.” Dr. Baek didn’t know what the job entailed, exactly, but she knew Angel was trying to get a career in Law Enforcement, or as close as she could.
“And how do you feel about that?”
“I know I should be excited, really, because this is what I’ve wanted for so long, but I’m not. I haven’t been feeling well the last couple days, and I think Aaron and my parents are starting to notice. The behavior, I mean. When I got the call from the office I was ecstatic for, like, ten minutes. Then I realized I would have to put on clean and nice clothes and wash my hair and put on makeup and try to seem presentable, and it all just made me really sad. I don’t want to put that much effort into this and I don’t want to have to try to get this job. I just want to show up in whatever I want to wear at that moment in time and have them give me the job and tell me I’ll love it, and then just love it.”
“Feeling like this isn’t uncommon, you know.”
“I know that, but I’m not a sad or depressed on incapable of adjusting kind of person. I get put into a new environment and I flourish. I’ve already been in this environment, hell I grew up in this town, but I’ve never felt more like I’m drowning.”
“Not everything is going to be easy while you’re still adjusting to being back home.”
“It’s not that it’s hard, per say, it’s more like I’m just tired of it all. I wake up every single day and I don’t want to be here. And it’s not like there’s a specific place I’d rather be, because that isn’t the case either. I don’t know where I want to be, but it’s not here. I don’t want to be working some shit job for shit pay. I don’t want to drop bags of dog food and have bruises on my from it the next morning. I don’t want to be sad all the time. I don’t want to wake up in the morning and yell at my brother in front of his friends just because he woke me up. I don’t want to be so absolutely miserable living my miserable life just because it’s not as fun as what I used to do.”
“Well, how have you been sleeping?”
“Terribly. I keep having the same nightmare about what happened in Afghanistan. Only, I was the one who died. I keep seeing that crying little girl and she starts screaming and Kerch starts screaming and everything is on fire and suddenly I just don’t exist anymore. There’s fire everywhere and Don is shooting at people and Kerch is crying. And I’ve never seen Kerch actually cry before, but in my dream he cries and screams and completely loses his shit. Kerch doesn’t lose his shit. He’s not that type of person. And then, you know, I wake up. And I’m sweating and crying and my mouth is dry and I don’t know how I got to feeling this bad.”
“It’s going to happen. It’s called survivors guilt. You feel like it’s your fault because he died and you didn’t.”
“But it is my fault. If I’d been paying attention to my surroundings that little girl might still be alive.”
“Or, rather, she might have killed someone else instead.”
Dr. Baek, of course knew about the tattoo Angel got. The black script that encircled her ankle. Dr. Baek knew how much everything that happened in that desert meant to Angel, but even with her degree she wasn’t sure on how to help the20 year old. At least, not yet.
“Have you tried talking to your family about it yet?”
“Right, tell my twin brother that the reason that I threaten his life is because I’m actually the one who wants to die, not him. Tell my baby brother that I’m so mean to his friends because the last male I was close to got someone even closer to me killed. Tell the boy who grew up at my side that I didn’t want to wake up most mornings and that I want to quit my job and that I know it isn’t right to feel this way but I don’t know how to make it stop.”
“Could you imagine me telling my parents that their little girl went to war and when she came back she was more than just scarred? My mom thinks the reason I eat the way I do is because on deployment we were always stuffing our faces. Which is partially true, but the other reason I eat the way I do is because I’m trying to suffocate this feeling of wanting to suffocate myself and eating is the only thing that makes me not want to die. Until I’ve binge-ate an entire box of corn dogs at two am and feel like my stomach is going burst.”
“How am I supposed to tell my dad that I drink because it’s the only thing that can help me sleep through the night. How do I tell him that I was practically in love with someone who died because of me. How do I tell my dad that the reason I don’t like hugs anymore is because I gave my body to people who definitely didn’t deserve to hold it, and I’m ashamed of my own skin now. I’m uncomfortable breathing with my own lungs. I’m not proud of who I am or what I’ve done and I don’t know how to get that point across to my family without telling them every bad things I did on deployment, which would absolutely destroy them. No matter how much I may be suffering, I will never bring my sins to light with them.”
“Maybe that’s what’s been bothering you so much; not being able to confide in your family about what you did and what happened to you on deployment.”
“Doc, that isn’t it. I knew when I joined the military that I wouldn’t be able to tell my family about what I’d be doing. I knew I’d be put on a mission that would be hard to deal with. The military isn’t an easy job, and I know that. That’s why I’m talking to you. That’s why I’m here two times a fucking week. This right here is the only reason I get out of bed before noon. This room and chair and lighting is the only thing keeping me sane and I’m fairly certain it doesn’t even fucking help. Rather, all I want to is die. I don’t want to kill myself, I just don’t feel like living anymore. And if that isn’t completely fucked up, then I don’t think anything could be.”
“Angelique, this is all normal. Feeling angry and upset is normal. You aren’t reacting irrationally. Being depressed isn’t something that just comes out of nowhere one day, and you’ve been sad for a long time. The important thing is that you talk about how you feel and seek help if you need it. That’s what you need to focus on: you.”
Dr. Baek, as usual, was right. Dr. Baek was always right when it came to things like Angel’s mental health. She gave a no-nonsense response but she cared, and Angel knew that. Angel knew that without her visiting the woman twice a week she would probably be a lot worse than sleeping in late, hating her job, and drinking in her free time. She would be a lot was than a little scarred. She probably wouldn’t be alive.
Dr. Baek suggestion antidepressants for the tenth time since Angel started seeing her almost three months ago. Angel still declined. Dr. Baek then suggested they change their appointments to three times a week; Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Angel agreed, knowing it might eventually help, took the slip with a reminder to be in the office at 1000 Monday morning, and made her way from the office-like building in the center of the business center back to her car feeling slightly better. Not everything was fixed and better automatically, but her hour-long conversations with her therapist put her in a less angry mood. She would have to adjust her sleep schedule accordingly to wake up an hour earlier for her new appointment time, but she was almost excited. Maybe it would work at some point. Hopefully.
