I couldn't let it happen again.
Not on my watch.
I didn't care that I was young, too young, surely, to be planning what I was planning.
I never got a chance to be a kid, not really, not in the carefree sense of the word. I had to grow up quickly.
So I was fourteen going on thirty.
And I had a mom and little sisters to get out of a bad situation. I wanted for them to get the chance to be kids, to be free to be loud without worrying about being struck for it.
I wanted my mom to never know the feel of angry hands on her skin again.
I would get that for them, come hell or high water.
"At fourteen," Liv said when I fell silent for a long moment.
"At fourteen," I agreed.
It was young, surely, for any son to kill his father.
But normal or not, that was what I set out to do. Once I discreetly packed bags- for me, for my mother, for each of my sisters. I stole little sums of money from my father, bits here and there, money to start a new life with, sure, but also to ensure our transport off Puerto Rico and to the States.
It was a terrifying prospect, leaving the only place we had known as home. But the fact of the matter was, once the Ñetas found out what I had done, there would be no way to outrun them there. They had too many connections, too many eyes and ears everywhere.
We needed to get to the States, then move around a bit, only settling when we were sure there was no one after us.
So we needed someone in imports to be able to sneak us in.
And that cost money.
A fair chunk of money.
It took me six months to get it all set up. Six months of watching my sisters shrink away from my father, watching my mother walk around with bruises, watching my father get more and more paranoid, more and more fucked up with drugs.
I had a plan.
A date.
I thought that if I knew the exact moment, I would be able to psych myself up for it, do it in a calculated, careful way.
But then one night, I woke up to my mother screaming, crying. And then as I tried to wake up, shaking off sleep, I heard it.
Her body slamming into the wall.
I didn't think, didn't pause, didn't consider the repercussions of being impulsive.
I reached under my mattress for one of my father's many guns, one he never even noticed was missing months before.
I walked out of my room, heart hammering so hard in my ears that I didn't even hear the screams anymore.
I shouldered their bedroom door open, cocking the gun, moving inside, finding him standing over my mother's prone, unconscious body, looking as though he planned to kick her again.
But he wouldn't.
I wouldn't allow it.
I never would allow it again.
The gun rose, aimed.
My finger slipped, pulled.
The bang was loud in the small room, almost as loud as the choking sound my father made as he gargled his own blood for a long moment before he died.
I needed to shake my mom awake, giving her a moment to absorb the scene around her. Her husband in a pool of his own blood, her son with the still warm gun in his hand.
"We need to get the girls and run," I told her, voice as firm as I could make it when it was still cracking. "I have a guy who will get us out of Puerto Rico," I added, watching as she looked at me with drawn low brows, a mouth parted. "On a boat," I clarified. "But we have to go before the cops come. Before the gang comes looking for me. They won't let me live after this. We need to go before they get here."
Somehow, the threat on my life was what had her jumping up to her feet, wiping the blood off her face with the edge of the comforter of their bed.
"I'll get the girls. You pack food, mijo," she demanded, standing up straighter than I had perhaps ever seen her. Like the weight of her marriage to this man was lifted, allowing her to shrug off the hundred-and-eighty pounds of dead weight she'd been dragging along with her for almost twenty years.
I tucked the gun into my waistband, taking what money was in my father's wallet, and packed my school backpack with as much food as I could fit.
The girls were sleepy, scared, still dressed in their pajamas as we pulled them out of the house, using my father's car to get us a few towns over before leaving it and going on foot.
"You've been planning this," she'd accused when we got to the building where I had stashed all of our things.