#FreewriteMadness – Day Eighteen

Tonight, I have a little bit more time to write than I have had over the past few days, so hopefully my word count will be more impressive than it has been so far this weekend. I'm planning to write a lot tomorrow and bring my official NaNoWriMo tally back up to par – it has slipped significantly this weekend, but such is life and these things can't always be helped. It was my dad's birthday today, so I was thrilled to spend plenty of time with him. 😊

Now: the novel! Let's get right to it.

___________________________

～ Sophie ～

Philly.com

I stand outside Dad's bedroom door, not knowing what to do. I've been pacing back and forth between his bedroom and mine for ages now. I want to tell him, but I know I'll probably get into so much trouble ... oh my God, this is probably a really bad idea...

I can't take being the only person who knows about all this anymore, though. I can't take the thought of facing Yvonne and the others for one more day, knowing that there's absolutely nobody I can tell, nobody else who might get it...

I knock on the door.

'Dad?'

I hear him get out of bed, turn on his lamp, stumble to the door ... when he opens it, he's all squinty and bleary-eyed and confused. 'Sophie? What are you doing up at this time of the night?' He looks at me a little more closely – I know my face must look like shit right now – and frowns. 'Soph? Everything okay?'

I want to, like, talk to him properly – I really do – but the way he's looking at me, all concerned and stuff, is too much. I burst into tears.

'Jesus! Sophie, what is it? Come in, come in...' He leads me over to the bed and sits down beside me as I plonk myself down and just, like, sob, harder than I've ever sobbed before in my whole entire life: even when Mammy said she was leaving but she'd totally be back, and then she wasn't, until she turned up here all of a sudden last week...

I can see that Dad is really scared. 'Sophie, please ... tell me what's wrong.'

'Don't hate me,' I plead with him. I'm covering my hands with my face because I can't even look at him right now. 'Please don't hate me...'

'Sophie, what is this? I could never hate you. Absolutely never! Please ... whatever is wrong, just tell me. I won't be angry, I promise.'

'I ... it's ... stuff has been going on in school. And now they're all saying that I ... that I ...' Oh God. No. I can't say this in front of Dad. I can't tell him that everyone is saying I'm a slut. I'd die before I'd say that to him. I can't tell him about the discos and what happened at the last one and everything Yvonne said ... I'll be in so much trouble for even going to the discos in the first place, so how can I tell him about anything that happened after that?

But I'm sitting here now with snot and tears dribbling down my face – it's totally gross, I wish I had a tissue – and Dad is staring at me, looking terrified, and I know I need to say something...

I can't say it. I'll have to show it to him. I take my phone out of my pocket and open up WhatsApp – that awful conversation – then I just hand it to him and watch as he reads everything. Absolutely everything. As soon as he gets to the part where Michael boasts about me being really easy, I know it at once. I can tell by the look on his face, like he's going to break something...

'What boy said this about you?' he roars. 'Who's this Michael? Tell me!'

Tears fill my eyes again. 'Dad, you're scaring me.'

'Tell me, Sophie,' he bellows, 'and I'll make him sorry that he ever dared –'

'Dad?' Oh no ... Luke is standing at the door now and his lip is wobbling. 'Why are you shouting?'

'Luke?' Dad turns around, bewildered, then sighs. 'Lukey ... listen, go back to bed, good boy...'

'Why are you shouting?' Luke screams again, and then he starts crying. 'I don't like all this shouting...'

'Oh God, Lukey.' Dad's shoulders drop. 'Listen, I'm very sorry. I didn't mean to upset you. Sophie and I are just talking about something right now, so –'

'Did you wet the bed again, Luke?' I ask him quietly. Normally when he gets up in the middle of the night like this, it's because he's just wet the bed.

Luke's face turns red. 'You promised me you wouldn't tell him, Sophie!'

'Luke! How long have you been wetting the bed? I thought you stopped doing that years ago.'

'You promised, Sophie!' Luke screeches at me.

'Well, Dad needs to know, Luke – I couldn't keep hiding it forever.' I feel really bad – I do kind of know that I'm picking on Luke because I'm angry that he interrupted my conversation with Dad – but I glare at him anyway. 'You should have stopped this years ago.'

Dad rubs his temples and lets out another huge sigh. 'Right. Right. Listen, Luke ... I'll go and clean it up, alright? It'll be okay, we'll sort it out. And Sophie –' he turns back to me, holding out my phone, looking like he's going to cry for second. 'I'll come back to you in a minute.'

He picks up his own phone on the way out, taps the screen a few times, lifts it to his ear ... when he's in Luke's room, I hear him say: 'Anne-Marie, hi. Listen ... it's all kicked off tonight, you need to come over...'

Oh crap. Now she's going to know all about it as well.

___________________________

That added up to 903 words. Hopefully I get more done tomorrow. I'm glad to have written something every day so far!

I want to end this post by giving a shout out to everyone else who has signed up to the fit of absolute lunacy invigorating creative challenge that is #FreewriteMadness. 😇 Make sure you go and support their work too! I have limited voting power (damn my not-quite-plankton but not-quite-redfish status 😉), but will upvote as many posts as I can per day.

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