chapter 8:

The burnt toast still clung to the roof of Blossom's mouth like a bitter memory. She'd chewed through it with grim resolve—equal parts hunger and survival instinct. May had offered her a sweater that smelled vaguely of lavender and stale incense, and Blossom had tugged it on without ceremony, grateful it at least didn't smell like smoke or weed or old regret.

After a brisk shower in May's slightly questionable bathroom—pink tiles cracked like ancient mosaics, water pressure barely better than a sneeze—she tied her damp hair into a loose knot, tugged on borrowed jeans, and stepped outside.

The air hit her in that usual Santa Carla way: salty, damp, and somehow claustrophobic.

Her stomach twisted when her phone buzzed for the hundredth time.

Mum.

She didn't even open the message. Just slid the device into her back pocket and kept walking.

It was close to 5 p.m. when she reached home.

The sun was already starting to tip downward, casting long, ghost-like shadows across the cracked pavement. Her house stood like a collapsing shrine—peeling paint, unwatered garden, blinds skewed like crooked teeth.

Inside, the air reeked of gin, sweat, and sorrow.

Her mother was curled into the couch like something feral. Mascara streaked across pale cheeks, eyes red-rimmed and unfocused, a bottle of Bombay Sapphire half-tipped against the cushion. Her sobs weren't even coherent anymore—just wet gasping sounds, fragmented words.

"Baby... baby, I—I thought... you weren't coming back—oh God—Blossom!"

Jenny's voice had gone raw. Tattered.

Blossom stood in the doorway, keys still in hand, heart thudding in her chest. Her breath caught. She wanted to be angry. She deserved to be angry. After all, she'd been thrown out of her own house less than twenty-four hours ago. Tossed aside like some unwanted thing. But now, seeing her mother in this state...

A sigh crawled out of her chest.

"I'm here, Mum," she murmured, voice quiet but steady.

Jenny turned her tear-blurred eyes toward her daughter. "I—I didn't mean it—I was... I was just having a moment—I forgot to take my meds—I didn't mean it—don't hate me—please don't hate me..."

Her words spilled like broken glass.

The meds. Blossom knew them by name.

Quetiapine. An antipsychotic meant to level out the worst of Jenny's manic spirals. It dulled her edges, but also made her sleep twelve hours straight and eat like she was bottomless.

Lamotrigine. The mood stabilizer. The one meant to "hold the tide." It worked—when Jenny took it.

Sertraline. The SSRI. For the depressive lows. Often forgotten. Often skipped.

They sat in a drawer in the kitchen, shoved between old receipts and sticky notes, unopened. Blossom had counted them more than once. Tracked the dates. Circled missed doses in her planner like unpaid debts.

Blossom didn't speak. She walked over, gently pried the gin bottle from her mother's shaky grip, and placed it—unceremoniously—on the table. Then, with soft fingers, she wiped her mother's tear-soaked face, whispering: "Let's go upstairs."

Jenny nodded, body limp, fragile. Blossom guided her slowly up the stairs, one step at a time, as though helping someone post-surgery. Her mother murmured soft apologies between sniffles. Things like "I ruined you, didn't I?" and "I used to be beautiful, didn't I?"

Blossom didn't respond.

At the top of the stairs, she gently steered Jenny into bed, pulled the sheets over her like snow, and kissed her mother's forehead—cool and damp.

"Sleep," she said.

She closed the door slowly.

The house was a war zone.

Clothes strewn across the hallway. Old dishes stacked like unstable monuments in the sink. An ashtray overflowing on the coffee table, mixed with crumpled tissues, half-melted candles, and what might've once been yogurt.

Downstairs smelled like rot and resentment.

But Blossom was used to this.

She tied her hair back, rolled up her sleeves, and got to work.

She cleaned until her arms ached—scrubbed counters, tossed bottles, vacuumed rugs stained with old red wine. Her fingertips turned wrinkled with bleach, nails rimmed with grime.

The home never really looked clean. But by 9 p.m., it smelled more like lemon disinfectant than despair.

She stood in the middle of the living room, back sore, face shiny with sweat, and thought: This feels like a parody of motherhood.

She was sixteen. Her hands were cracked from cleaning chemicals. She didn't go to parties. She hadn't kissed anyone. She hadn't even been a teenager in the way people wrote about in books.

She was always the caretaker.

Her therapist back in London used to call it "parental role reversal." She remembered that phrase like a scar.

By 10 p.m., Blossom was freshly showered—again—and back in her room.

Her desk creaked as she sat, legs tucked beneath her. It wasn't elegant. Just old wood and peeling paint, with a sticky drawer and an unreliable chair. But it was hers.

She pulled the curtains shut, cracked the window open to let the Santa Carla air in, and switched on her computer. The screen buzzed, soft and blue.

Her journal sat beside her—worn leather, frayed edges.

A warm mug of instant coffee steamed at her elbow.

She began to write.

Not stories about romance or vampires or cursed boardwalks.

Just pieces of herself.

Poetry that felt like bleeding quietly. Words like:

I scrubbed the ashtray because I hated the smell of memories. I wiped the mirror because I didn't want to see her cry anymore. I cleaned the kitchen because nobody else ever did. I wrote these words because I needed something to be mine.

Blossom didn't cry.

She didn't scream.

She just exhaled—and kept writing.

The house was still in its silence—the kind of silence that doesn't comfort, but clings. That wraps around the furniture, settles into the corners, and drips like condensation from the walls. Blossom sat in the soft glow of her desk lamp, eyes reddened, fingers stained faintly with ink and coffee. She hadn't moved in hours. The clock read 6:07 a.m.

Her computer screen hummed gently, a small blinking cursor like a pulse. Her notebooks spilled across the desk in a storm—pages bent, scribbled margins, some torn halfway through in moments of impulse. Her poetry wasn't beautiful. It was jagged. Gutting. Scratched into the paper like a cry.

She wrote about everything.

About pain—how it hums in the bones long after bruises fade, how fear leaves fingerprints on the soul.

About trauma—about feeling like a caretaker instead of a daughter, about making toast with shaking hands while her mother screamed and sobbed behind the bathroom door.

About mothers—who cry in bathtubs at noon and drink gin like water, whose love sometimes arrives through apology instead of presence.

About fathers—who were good until they weren't, who left when life grew too loud, who gave her freckles and abandonment in equal measure.

About teenagers—awkward and aching, pretending they're fine, stitching their insecurities behind makeup and Instagram filters.

About childhood—that she never had. Dollhouses she never built, playgrounds she never played on. Just bills and medication charts and quiet resentment.

About herself.

Sometimes in third person. Sometimes in metaphor. Sometimes just blunt enough to sting.

Her body is a temple that got turned into a hospital room. Her laugh is borrowed from a better version of herself. Her hands know cleaning before they know holding. She isn't angry. She's just tired of being tired.

Coffee had become ritual. She didn't even taste it anymore. Her latest mug—chipped at the rim, a faded Hello Kitty design—sat beside the keyboard, cooling slowly. She'd drunk at least six since midnight, stomach bubbling like acid. Still not tired.

She didn't want sleep.

Sleep meant vulnerability. Dreams. Memories.

Instead, she rose, padding quietly down the stairs in borrowed socks, where the kitchen still smelled faintly of bleach and cigarette ash. It was 6:27 a.m. when she started another pot of coffee. The machine sputtered like it resented her for the early hour.

In the living room, the gin bottle still sat where she had left it. Her mother's sobs had ceased sometime in the night, replaced by the distant murmur of uneven sleep upstairs. Jenny wouldn't remember the night before. Not properly. Her bipolar episodes came in waves—sometimes explosive, sometimes depressive.

She was supposed to be taking:

Quetiapine, for mania—knocked her out, turned her dreams off.

Sertraline, to keep the lows from swallowing her whole.

Lamotrigine, her mood's middle ground. The balance. The part she skipped most often because it "felt too artificial."

Blossom had researched each drug. She knew dosages better than her own schedule. Had printed mood charts. Color-coded them. Tracked progress. Until Jenny stopped caring and Blossom became her own therapist, nurse, and cleaner.

No one sees the girl behind the caregiver.

No one reads the poem that doesn't rhyme.

Blossom sipped coffee like survival, her hands trembling. The scars on her mother's wrists. The marks on her own arms from where Marko had gripped too tightly. Everything came back to her in half-faded flashes and haunting dreams she hadn't dared to write yet.

She returned to her room—sun peeking through the curtains she hadn't opened. The windows were still cracked to air out the bleach. Her desk chair moaned softly as she sat.

She kept writing.

Kept bleeding words she couldn't say aloud.

Kept organizing them—some by theme, some by trauma.

Because at least on paper, she was in control.

At least in her poetry, she could choose the ending.