Wake Me Up Inside

This is a slow burn like most of my LS stories, perhaps even slower than usual. So, if you're just looking for a bit of a happy romp before bedtime, better move on to something like my '

All I Want for Christmas C'est Toi

'.

Big thanks to @

THBGato

for Beta reading and pointing out my cultural misconceptions, and to @

DawnDuckie

for reading and giving me a much-needed reality check on life in Small Town ND. Still, for the purposes of the story I've taken some poetic licenses, so all the wrong bits are mine, not theirs.

-----

++ Wake Me Up Inside ++

Bring me to life

I've been living a lie (bring me to life)

There's nothing inside (there's nothing inside)

Bring me to life

"Fucking dyke."

He muttered it under his breath, but I still heard it. As I was meant to.

I ignored him, like I ignored the looks and whispers and the slurs.

It was a classic bullying victim's survival tactic. Ignore them. Don't provoke them. Maybe they will tire of it and move on to other targets.

The problem was I knew it didn't work. Hell, I had a degree in counselling that said this shit didn't work.

I looked at Ellie at the register as I put my groceries on the belt. She looked at me with an awkward smile, like she was trying to wordlessly apologize for the abuse I had to endure in her presence.

It obviously wasn't her fault. Still, she just as obviously didn't like it.

But she just worked here, and the asshole that had just thrown his bigotry at me was her sister's father-in-law.

Fucking small town.

Every day I regretted moving back here.

But every day I was glad to be close to Dad. He probably didn't have long now, and he was all I had in the way of family.

Living in the nursing home now, just waiting to die.

The least I could do was be here for him.

And then there was the farm.

"How are you today, Olivia?" Ellie beeped the first items through, trying her best to act like I didn't just get a slur thrown at me.

I sighed. Not her fault her sister married an asshole with an even bigger asshole as a father.

"Pretty good, not too bad." I gave her a smile. It was nice to know that there were still people in this town that didn't think less of me for being true to myself. Ellie was one of the good ones.

She was younger than me by a year, a wallflower in high school, pretty and smart, but socially awkward.

I was neither pretty nor smart, but I had been a rebel, a handful, a nuisance, a problem causer. Trying to find my way in a world where there didn't seem to be anyone else like me and hitting walls at every turn.

'Argumentative, aggressive, seeking negative attention' was the written judgement in my file by the school counselor. As soon as I could, I ran away to college.

Ten years later I was still the 'fucking dyke' around here.

Small towns don't forget easily.

I guess that having an affair with a married woman over twice my age wouldn't go down well in a religious rural community.

Hell, I probably could have told myself that Pastor Anderson at the Lutheran Church would make a huge stink about it when he found out.

It was his wife I was fucking after all.

The last beep rang as Ellie passed me the apples. I was going to make some pie for my visit to Dad tomorrow.

I paid with my card and smiled at her.

"Thanks Ellie, see you Sunday."

"See you Olivia," her smile was genuine now, "have a good one."

"Thanks, you too."

I pushed open the door and strode to my truck with my bag of groceries. I dug for the keys in my pocket before realizing I had left them in the ignition. Funny how quickly you fall into old habits without thinking, leaving keys dangling in ignitions and front doors unlocked, just like folks had always done around here, trusting neighbors more than locks.

It was early April, the prairie finally waking from months of frozen slumber. I was grateful winter's bitter grip had loosened, even if the North Dakota wind still had teeth some mornings. After nearly a decade living in a warmer climate, I had lost all enthusiasm for below zero temperatures.

This wasn't New Mexico, for sure.

---

The drive out to our house was long enough for me to get through three Billie Eilish songs. As I hummed the last bars of All the Good Girls Go to Hell, I turned the corner around the barns and the old farmhouse came into view. It wasn't very big by any standards, a comfortable two-storied house with a wide porch and a second-floor gallery above it. It faced east, and my Dad used to start many summer mornings out on that porch with his coffee, watching the sunrise.

I had a lot of fond memories of him on that porch. We often sat there together, watching the colors creep over the landscape and the light claim our land,

It became our thing after I couldn't sleep and found him there the morning after mom was buried. Just sitting there with his coffee, quietly mourning. I was only ten, and that was the first time I really understood how much he had loved her.

As I sat with him on the bench beside the front door, he silently gathered me close, and pointed towards where the first rays of the sun were blazing up over the horizon, bathing the world in warmth and light.

"See that, Liv? That's your mom, looking out for us. Making sure we're not alone."

I remember looking at the sun, and deep down I knew that it wasn't my mom. But I also knew that my Dad was right, it was her, and she was looking out for us.

And from that day on, that was our time and place, the spot where we could sit silently together and remember her or say whatever needed to be said without anger or judgement. In the winter we sat at the kitchen window, waiting for the darkness to flee.

I was fourteen when I told him I liked girls, out on that porch.

He just told me that was ok and that he loved me and that would never change.

I was never an easy teen, and I had it rough in high school. I never showed any interest in boys and my one try at kissing a girl was a fumble that bought me three years of being bullied, called a dyke, muff diver, rug muncher and worse, and generally being ostracized.

But I was stubborn, and I didn't take it lying down. If they wanted a dyke, I'd give them a fucking dyke. I cut my hair short, shaved on one side and swept over the other, dyed it in crazy colors, bought a used leather jacket, wore men's tank tops, braless and butched up in black skinny jeans and Air Force surplus flight boots. I became an over-the-top cliché.

I came out fighting, screaming my sexuality to the whole school, blatantly hitting on girls I knew had no interest and proceeded to be argumentative, aggressive and generally seeking negative attention wherever I could find some.

I never said that the school counselor got it wrong. I was an angry mess.

But whatever trouble I got myself into, my Dad was always on my side. Always in my corner.

He understood that I was acting this way because I was hurting. That it was a defense mechanism, and that behind the angry mask of the fights I picked with others, I was just a scared girl fighting myself. And on those quiet mornings, he asked me how I was, if he could help.

And I could talk to him. Tell him about all the shit.

Well, most of the shit. No teenager tells their parents all the shit that's going on in their lives.

My Dad was my rock. My one safe haven in a world that didn't understand me.

When he got sick, I had to come back.

I had tried to get him to move to New Mexico, but he said he didn't want to die in an unfamiliar place, far away from everything he knew. I understood. I was single after another inevitable break up and I had been thinking of changing jobs anyway.

So here I was.

Home sweet home.

---

Monday morning was crisp, it wasn't exactly warm yet, but a hell of a lot better than when I got here just after New Years. We kept the truck in the barn during the winter so I didn't have to brush the snow off it or scrape the windows, but I did have to plow our own driveway with the tractor.

I had leased the land and most of our equipment out to our neighbors, but for that tractor. I couldn't imagine selling the farm, and this way I could live there and make some money from the lease to pay for Dad's care.

Not that there was any real treatment for MND. The best they could do was keep him comfortable. When I got here, he was still moving around, but now he was in a wheelchair and was starting to have difficulty swallowing food. This fucking disease was an ugly fast mover. The doctors told me I should expect it to be all over before Christmas.

It broke my heart to see him like this, and even if I had only seen him once or twice a year during holidays since I went off to college, we had talked every week all those years.

I dreaded losing him. Nothing had ever made me so scared.

I didn't know what I'd do when he was gone.

I'd probably move back to Albuquerque. Maybe sell the land to the Johnsons if they would let me keep the house. I didn't know.

I just knew that once he was gone, there would be nothing left for me here but pain.

I parked the truck and walked to my office.

The bell rang for the start of the first period when I was halfway there.

It was some kind of cosmic joke that I now sat on the other side of that same desk in that same counselor's office, that I had first put my boots on fourteen years ago.

One of the older teachers, who remembered my troubled days at Maple Creek High, had called it 'poetic justice' with a good-natured smirk. Colin 'Murdermath' Murdoch was still a nice guy, one of the few that had recognized that when a teacher starts fucking a student, something isn't right when the whole town blames the student.

Elizabeth Anderson wasn't teaching anymore, but she had never had to answer for her sins, so to speak, in any official way.

To be fair it had started after my 18

th

birthday, and after graduation, but only just. And it wasn't me who seduced her. I guess Mrs. Pastor Anderson wasn't altogether satisfied by her husband's performance of his sacred duties.

She never had any trouble finding God with me though, bless her heart.

I didn't bear her any ill will. She had just been there when I was bursting at the seams with the need for a sexual outlet, and I guess I had provided something similar for her. It wasn't a relationship, I didn't love her, but was desperate to explore my sexuality, and being an outcast at school the chances of making that happen with my peers seemed nonexistent.

For me it was about not going to college as a virgin. I don't know what it was about for her. I had my suspicions though.

I hadn't talked to her since her sister-in-law found us naked on the living room couch, with my tongue buried in her pussy. She was outraged, practically foaming at the mouth, and she made sure the whole town knew that I was a whore that had seduced her brother's poor innocent wife.

And that had cemented me as the Town Dyke.

I didn't blame Elizabeth for what happened. I went to her bed willingly, and despite the fallout I didn't regret it.

It took me a few years to understand why I didn't regret it though.

She had given me my first sexual experience, soft, tender and loving, very unlike the rough fucking my angry rebel imagination had expected my first sex to be. She had shown me that lovemaking between women could be something else entirely. Something beautiful.

Deep down, I knew that of course, but that experience was in a way the first step on my way to making peace with who I was.

What I could not forgive her for, was not speaking up when her husband and sister-in-law trash talked me all over town. My Dad even had to listen to a thinly veiled sermon on the sins of Jezebel and modern-day immorality at church one Sunday a few weeks later. He never went to the Lutheran Church again while Pastor Anderson was in office. And although he never said anything to me about it, I knew that he had gone to their house that night and given them a strong piece of his mind.

It made them stop overtly harassing me, but the damage was done. A reputation like that dies hard in a small town.

The Andersons still lived in town, but there was a new pastor here now, a younger guy who seemed to be well liked. I wasn't exactly the church going type, so I hadn't met him yet.

I had seen Elizabeth from afar two or three times, but I wasn't sure she had recognized me. I looked very different now from the skinny, punky rebel she took to her bed. I had dark shoulder length hair and bangs now, and ten years of New Mexico cooking and better mental health had given me the curvy figure my scrawny ass teen self had once dreamed of.

Then again, maybe Elizabeth was just ignoring me. That suited me fine. I sure as hell wasn't going to give the gossips the pleasure of being seen chatting with her.

I closed my office door on the flow of kids finding their way to their homerooms, knowing I could get a bit of time to prepare for my first interview of the day, due in the second period. Robert, a junior jock not doing well with his science grades. He was a sweet kid, trying hard but just not getting there. He was coming in with his parents and I was going to recommend that he get tutoring and a bi-weekly counselling interview with me.

I suspected that he needed to get some things off his chest that he wasn't going to tell his parents, but it would probably take some time before he trusted me with his problems.

Next up would be Danny. He was one of my regulars: the goal there was to get him to stop acting out at school to get his problems at home out of his system. Absent mother, alcoholic father. Not a very original story. Danny hated counselling and he was warming to me like the North Dakota winter. Oh well, maybe he'd come 'round once he figured out that I wasn't going to give up on him.

It was weird to be working in my old high school. The chairs on the other side of my desk were even the same ones where I had regularly planted my ass in defiantly all those years ago. When I looked at them, I could picture a sneering kid with one side of her hair shaved close, a home pierced eyebrow, an attitude the size of Montana and her big flight boots resting angrily on the edge of my desk.

It was like being on the other side of a surreal ghostly mirror, looking back in time.

I hadn't come looking for this job, but the chronic shortage of teachers here worked in my favor. The position was open when I was preparing to move back here before Christmas and I had both the degree and the experience working with troubled kids.

My Dad used to say I was going to be good at it because I already knew what it was like to be one. He wasn't wrong: it helped. It was probably why I had gone into this line of work.

The principal hired me even though I gave her a clear heads up that some of the parents might have issues with my orientation and my history.

And I wasn't into the job two weeks when some of the people on the local school board took issue with my hiring and sent a delegation to Principal Stewart to protest, demanding that I be replaced.

She told them that if they forced her to let me go, given there was a well-known staff shortage and no other applicants for the position, she would have no choice but to explain to the parents in general why their children had no one to turn to when they got in trouble at school. She would explain that their children were going to be at a disadvantage because the school board was pursuing a personal vendetta against the highly qualified, highly recommended professional counsellor that was currently doing a great job working with their kids.

I blushed when she told me all this, incredibly thankful that she took my side so strongly. She was proud to have made them back off, but I suspected that they wouldn't let it lie. Mostly because I knew one of them was Rebecca Anderson, Elizabeth's bitch sister-in-law.

---

Dad was awake. Sometimes he'd sit sleeping in his chair when I came to visit. I would sit and watch him sleep, wondering how he could look so old and frail. He wasn't even sixty yet, but he looked ten years older.

"Hi Dad."

"Hi honey."

I gave him a kiss and a hug and sat down on the sofa. It was a good nursing home, all things considered, the room was big enough for some furniture, he had pictures of mom and me on his nightstand, of the farm on the wall and some books and things.

His speech had started to slur a little and the hard consonants were weak.

"Good day?" He always asked.

"Yeah, not too bad. I brought you some apple pie."

I got the pie out of the bag and got some plates and forks.

"How was your day?"

"Oh, you know, another busy day of sitting," he chuckled, earning himself a little cough.

Despite all the horrors of his sickness, he had never lost his good humor. At least, he never showed me anything else. I thought he must have moments of despair, but he kept them to himself.

"I went to the Johnsons for dinner last night, Alvin and Marjorie said they're coming to visit you on Sunday. Marjorie said to leave space at lunch because she's bringing cake."

Dad laughed; we were both well acquainted with Marjorie's 'cakes'. Huge things, packed with sugar and berries and held together with whipped cream.

"Alvin's already out seeding spring wheat over in section 20, rotating out last year's sunflowers. He says the soil's rested enough, it should yield pretty good. He's thinking of changing the rotation in the main and west sections over to lentils next year. There's a good market for lentils building and it will rest the soil well after the wheat. He might use section 28 and 29 for soy though."

"That makes sense. Alvin knows what he's doing. He'll take good care of the land."

Dad liked to know that his friend and neighbor would continue his life's work.

I cut a piece of apple pie and put the plate on the table beside his chair. His hands were weak and shaking, so even if he could still hold a fork it was hard for him to eat by himself.

His smile as I gave him the first bite warmed my heart.

"Mmmm, that is my favorite pie." He had another bite and closed his eyes as he enjoyed it.

"It always reminds me of your mom, you know?"

I knew. That's why I made it for him.

"I know Dad. Me too."

And for a while, we just sat there quietly together, silently enjoying the taste of good memories.

---

I got home around dinnertime. I left the truck on the gravel in front of the barn and hurried in through the light rain.

I popped the frozen lasagna into the oven and climbed the stairs to my room. I still slept there, something just felt wrong about moving into the master bedroom before Dad...

Yeah.

So, I had just cleaned out some space in my old wardrobe and moved back into my rebel years sanctuary.

My huge old Evanescence placard still dominated the room, Amy Lee's haunting eyes staring down from it.

Fallen was the soundtrack of my pain

. Going under

,

Everybody's Fool

,

Bring Me to Life

,

My Immortal

. I must have listened to that album a million times back then.

Even now, whenever I heard it, the sublime piano of

Hello

and the heartbreaking lyrics still accosted my soul like a familiar demon, reaching out for the black pit that it used to feed. The pit that I still carried somewhere buried deep inside.

Ten years, a university degree and a few relationships later, I could look at Amy on my wall without falling into that pit. Even if she brought back difficult memories, she also reminded me of how far I had come. And I guess I still had a little crush on her.