Chanelle Hayes - Baring My Heart by Chanelle Hayes Read Free Book Online Page A

teen world, I was about to put my parents through one of the most horrendous tests of their lives.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Cry for Help
    I had settled into this kind of horrible, destructive pattern with my parents, where I was basically living with Scott but would occasionally turn up at home to pick up some clothes or books – and fly headfirst into another row. One day, we were fighting about my ‘lack of respect’ towards them when I simply felt that I couldn’t take any more. As the sparks flew, I could feel my anger rising like a big ball of fire.
    ‘How can you have a go at me about this trivial crap when you’re hiding such big secrets from me?’ I yelled. ‘You know how much it means to me to find out the truth about my mum but you won’t just do that one small thing for me. That’s the reason I’m always at Scott’s – because I can’t stand being here with you! All you do is lie to me and treat me like a stupid idiot. I won’t put up with it any more, OK?’
    As they stared at me, stony-faced, I shrieked, ‘You don’t care about me. Not one bit. Why are you keeping this from me? If you were good parents, you’d just tell me. I’ve had enough!’
    Mum tried in vain to calm me down. ‘Look, we’re not goinginto this all over again,’ she said. ‘Now dry your eyes and just try and see it from our point of view for once.’
    They both left the room and I suddenly felt like I didn’t belong with this family at all. ‘These people don’t even love me,’ I thought. ‘The only person who loved me was my real mum and she’s dead.’
    I wasn’t in control of it but something inside me had snapped. I’d tried reasoning with them, I’d tried shouting and screaming, I’d even tried running away and I felt there was nothing else I could do. I just couldn’t cope with it any more.
    I’d never had any suicidal thoughts before but, all of a sudden, my next move seemed blindingly obvious. Looking back, I feel mortified that I could have hit such a low point at such a young age but what I did next seemed to make perfect sense. It wasn’t something I had planned at all but I knew exactly what to do. I went into the lounge and took a bottle of whisky from my dad’s drinks cabinet and stormed up to the bathroom with it. I could hardly focus because I was crying so hard but I locked the door and got on with it. I’d seen this sort of thing on TV shows like
Casualty
and it looked easy enough. There were a load of painkillers in the bathroom cabinet, which I knew would do the trick.
    I caught sight of my face in the mirror and it shocked me. My eyes were wild and mascara was streaming down my face. I remember thinking how much older I looked, like there was a huge weight on my shoulders that should never have been there.
    From the noise I’d made and the sound of my crying, Mum and Dad realised I was up to something and started banging on the bathroom door.
    ‘What are you doing, Chanelle? Let us in!’
    ‘No! I’ve had enough.’ I screamed. ‘You don’t love me! Go away!’
    There was no stopping me now. I was completely hysterical.
    ‘I don’t want to live here any more. Let me leave or I’m going to swallow all these tablets!’
    Mum again begged me to open the door. ‘We can sort this out, just don’t do anything silly,’ she shouted.
    Dad, too, was beginning to sound panicked. ‘It doesn’t need to be like this. You’re our daughter. We love you.’
    ‘I don’t care what you say,’ I screamed. I don’t think that I really wanted to die but, the way I was feeling, if there had been a button I could have pressed that would just turn everything off, I would have hit it in a flash.
    I started rifling through the half-used packets of paracetamol, aspirin and ibuprofen and began popping the pills out of their foil packets and forcing them one by one into my mouth. Somehow, I knocked them back with slugs of whisky, which tasted absolutely vile and smelled just as bad. Even a faint whiff of