When the Countdown Ended, I Became the Family Curse Chapter 03 (Continue)
It was just Sean and me in the house that day. I needed to use the bathroom, but my bedroom door wouldn’t budge.
I pounded on it until my knuckles ached. “Sean! Let me out!”
No answer. Just the sound of something heavy crashing to the floor on the other side.
Then Sean screamed.
When the door finally swung open, it was Mom on the other side — and the first thing she did was hit me across the face, hard enough to snap my head to the side.
“You jinx! I knew it — I knew something would go wrong with you here!” Her eyes were bloodshot, wild, almost unrecognizable.
She collapsed onto the floor, rocking, howling. “God, what did I do to deserve this — raising a daughter who destroys everything she touches!”
Dad walked in on all of it — Sean’s leg bent at an unnatural angle, Mom on the floor screaming. Something in his expression hardened instantly.
He grabbed me by the collar, hauled me off my feet, and threw me onto the bed.
“Mia! You’re a goddamn curse — why don’t you just die!”
I was sobbing so hard my throat had gone raw, but I tried — I really tried to explain.
“Mom — Dad — it wasn’t me. Sean climbed the cabinet trying to reach the candy on top —”
They locked me in.
No food. No water.
Through the door, I could hear the house going on without me — Mom banging things around in the kitchen, Dad coming home from work, Sean whimpering about his leg.
No one mentioned me.
I curled up on the cold mattress, one cheek throbbing and swollen. My skin burned with fever, but underneath it I was freezing, shaking, and the edges of the room started to blur.
I thought, this time, I really might die.
And maybe that was fine. Maybe dying was the easier thing.
The fever dragged me under, and eighteen years came flooding back in fragments.
As far back as I could remember, my parents looked at me differently. I didn’t understand it at first — just that they held me the way you’d hold something made of glass, like I might shatter if they even breathed too hard.
There was tenderness in it, but something else underneath — something tangled I couldn’t name.
Later I realized what it was. Pity. Helplessness. Grief for someone who was still standing right in front of them.
They never talked about my future.
Our whole family had been living on a countdown.
My teacher, Ms. Davis, used to tell my parents what a good kid I was. So well-behaved, she’d say. Never any trouble.
She didn’t know I just didn’t care.
I’d been the easy kid my whole life — not because I was good, but because nothing felt worth wanting.
Other kids in kindergarten cried over candy, threw tantrums when they didn’t get a gold star.
I never did. My candy was always the biggest. My gold star always came first. That was the deal when everyone knew you were going to die.
The teachers loved me. No fuss, no needs, no problems.
Only I knew what it really cost to be that easy. I wasn’t behaving — I was just waiting.
Waiting for the numbers to hit zero.
After Sean was born, the guilt in my parents’ eyes got harder to miss.
He was five the first time he grabbed my food off my plate. Mom caught him and smacked him for it — hard.
He was wailing. “Why does Mia get the best stuff and I don’t?”
Mom didn’t answer. She just kept smacking him. Afterward, she locked herself in the kitchen and cried until there was nothing left.
“Mia.” Sean’s voice was barely a whisper. “Are you gonna die?”
“Mom says you’re gonna die. But I don’t want you to die, Mia. So you can have the best of everything, okay? All of it. Forever.”
The faces from my memory and the faces from this morning kept overlapping, merging, until my head felt like it was going to split open.
Did they love me?
They did. But that love had an expiration date — it was never meant to last, only meant to say goodbye.
The countdown ended, and the love went with it.
If I’d actually died, the love would have stayed intact — preserved, untouched, permanent.
We would have stayed gentle with each other forever.