Read Olivia's Trek (1) for Free Online

is giving them to you.”
    Pulling my arm out of her grasp and any safety she offers, I slam the bathroom door shut, locking myself in as I talk to myself in the mirror.
    “Sure, Aunt Victoria, what started out as weekly trips to the school ‘cannabis club’ for weed products, soon turned into prescription pills, then to cocaine, and eventually ecstasy. I pop Percocets like M&Ms. Any few friends that I did have at school now shun me and all the teachers have stopped trying to find out why my grades are slipping.”
    I can’t even bear to look at my reflection. “Oh and Lucien Borgia raped me.”
    I hear muffled voices through the door and creep down to listen through a crack.
    “It’s going to be all right, Preston. Please calm down.”
    “No, it’s bloody well not going to be all right, Victoria. Our family is on the verge of catastrophe and we are just standing around doing nothing about it.”
    “Maybe it’s just a phase she’s going through. You read about it all the time.”
    “A phase? Like the one my brother went through and that he’s still going through thirty years later. Something is just not right. Do you recognize her anymore, Victoria?”
    Listening to them talk about me actually makes me feel so bad that I put the end of a towel into my mouth so that I can cry properly. I was now hurting the only people who I was grateful for. The people who had taken me in when I was twelve and shown me a decent life and who provided me with a life of love and culture I would never have known existed.
    The guilt and shame makes me want to scrape my insides out.

Chapter Six
    Lucien Borgia
    The vicious and cowardly crime that has been perpetrated by someone known to me, close to me even, against my poor innocent Olivia, of all people, has filled me with rage and the deepest revulsion . I’m mad.
    My father always quotes Saint Thomas Aquinas talking about anger being an attack on the evil present in the mind, and how if one ignores this evil—the thing that’s wrong—the result is sadness. He’s right. Olivia’s been suspended and now she’s sick. That makes me really angry and disgusted. Rules are there to be respected and they’ve been broken.
    I was only just thinking that the thing about being murdered is that it usually comes as a surprise. Well, to the victims in Mafia II anyway. It’s not like a person wakes up expecting on that given day that they are going to die.
    Walking over to my CD player, I hit play and whack the volume up full blast before slipping on my boxing gloves. Eminem. Good choice, Borgia. There is an old saying in boxing, a great boxer plays chess and the average boxer plays checkers. A great boxer like a chess master plans his moves by setting up his opponent, takes advantage of tactical errors with pinpoint sharp-shooting, and uses combinations when his opponent is on the defensive. He positions himself where he makes his opponent think he is just out of range and catches him coming into his perfectly timed counterpunches.
    Evander Berkelely has made himself my opponent by betraying me and hurting what belongs to me. Drug dealing scum.
    The screen on my iPhone lights up and the highlighted text says that the boys have picked Evander up and are on their way over here. I psych myself up in front the mirror, making finger gun gestures at my reflection. Hey, Narcissus, I totally get how you fell in love with your reflection in a pool of water.
    Clique by Kanye and Jay-Z comes on and my body is possessed as it launches into a frenzied boxing training regime as I picture Evander’s reptilian hands handing out drugs to Olivia.
    My nose is directly in line with the vertical seam between the mirrors while in my stance. I move my upper body quickly to the left so the reflection of my right ear is past the seam of the mirrors. Avoid the jab. Quickly I move my head back to the center so my nose is in line with the seam again. Moving my upper body quickly to the right so my left ear passes