Free The Perfect Son by Kyion S. Roebuck

That made me even more mad. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, so I texted Sean. He was always my voice of reason, and I needed to get away, so I started walking towards Ferndale. Normally, my walking wouldn’t have been a big deal, but I was distracted. I remember several cars blowing at me, but somehow I had managed to dodge them. Then finally I heard a horn, and it was loud and very close. After that, darkness.”
    “Your mother told me that you had been struck by a truck.”
    “I’m sure she also told you that I was in a coma for three weeks. That’s what everyone keeps saying, but it doesn’t add up. The accident occurred on May second, but the first day I remember waking up is November sixth. That’s over six months, but I supposedly woke up on May twenty-second. Well, where was I? There are pictures of me smiling, I have reports cards, graded assignments, and everything else showing that I was alive, but I remember nothing. You want to know what I remember? Darkness. While my body was off being alive, I was in the dark.”
    Sister Mary Ava watched as sweat started forming on Cody’s brow, but the temperature of the room had not changed. She also noticed that his pupils were starting to dilate.
    “Nana, I don’t know how to describe it. I remember feeling trapped. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t see, and I couldn’t breathe. It felt like I was buried alive. No, it was worse; I felt like I was trapped inside of a corpse. I tried to scream for help, but I couldn’t speak, and even when I did find my voice, no one ever came. All I could do was lie trapped in the darkness. Even death wouldn’t come. The darkness was just too powerful. My God, the darkness was always there. It wouldn’t leave me alone. Why? Why won’t it leave me alone?”
    “Cody, there is no darkness, now. You are bathed in the light,” Sister Mary Ava said quickly as she tried to draw him out of his mental prison.
    “It’ll be back. It always comes back. Every time I fall asleep it comes back, and no one can stop it,” Cody said while rocking. Sister Mary Ava was at a loss at what to do.
    “Cody, you must be strong. You beat the darkness before, and you can beat it again.”
    “I may be beating it now, but for how long will that last? How long will I have control of my body?”
    “As long as you will it.”
    At that, the rocking slowly subsided until only fine tremors coursed through Cody’s body. His mind was back in the present, but the thoughts from his recent episode were just beneath the surface. He knew that he needed to tell Sister Mary Ava everything before he lost himself.
    “The day I woke up, I was determined to find proof of what I had heard. Somehow Mom was keeping Dad away, and since he wasn’t staying away willingly, I wanted to find out how she was doing it, so I searched her office. I found a large, brown envelope, and in it was a sheet of paper and pictures of Dad and Principal Redman. Based on what I heard from the conversation, and what I read in her office, when she caught them, she took pictures of them while they were…
    She then showed the pictures to Dad, and told him that she would release them to the public if he tried to fight her request for full physical custody of me. Because Dad is a middle school teacher, and it happened in a classroom, he would have lost his job, and probably would have been labeled a pervert, too. If that had happened, I know Mom would have taken him to court, and requested full legal and physical custody. Dad always told me that Mom was a brilliant lawyer, and he never wanted to be on the opposite side of the aisle from her, so I guess he was too afraid to fight her.
    I can’t really say that I blame him. Mom has always been like that. She’ll push you and lift you up with everything that she has, but you better not fail her. She expects perfection, and if you’re not perfect, she’ll make you disappear. She has already done that to Dad. Now, she’s doing it to me. If