Abuse

[megafire7]

Title: Abuse
Major Warnings: Violence. Parental abuse. Do not take this tag lightly
Summary: Brett is an absolute bastard. Looking at how he treats Verona in Shaking Hands 9.9, and the various reasons why it's terrible.

 

When you last heard from me, I talked about Mrs. Ferguson, and her treatment of her son. In that post, I mentioned that there is a difference between being kind of a shitty parent, and being outright abusive, and that Mrs. Ferguson often straddles that line.

Brett Hayward does not straddle that line.

Brett Hayward is an abuser. This is not, I hope, something you need me to tell you, at this point. So, if you all know that what he’s doing, what he did in this chapter, is atrocious, what am I doing here?

When I started reading this chapter, I got to this part:

“Verona!” her dad raised his voice. His fist pounded on the wall three times.

He’s done that before, for example in the horror show that was Avery’s visit in Stolen Away 2.5:

Avery stopped. There was a heavy thud, followed by two more. Bangs against a wall or floor. Three bangs in total.

Verona sighed.

“What was that? Is he okay?”

“That’s how he calls me when he doesn’t want to yell,” Verona said. She handed Avery the packet of microwave-heated limp fries. “Excuse me.”

And that prompted the thought that this was oddly physical for Brett’s abuse. He’s usually more of an emotional grindstone for Verona’s self-worth.

How prescient that thought was.

Of course, Brett’s outburst didn’t come completely out of nowhere. There is, after all, the following bit from Stolen Away 2.1:

March Break. Verona’s mom had taken her to Vancouver to see distant family over the break. Lucy had gone over a few days after her friend was back, and arrived to find one of Verona’s shelves of art supplies and finished art pieces on the floor. Clay models and stuff broken, cast down in way that made it look like they’d been swept from the shelf in a single motion.

Now, that was only a description of what happened, and it’s mentioned that Verona didn’t talk about the details much, so it’s a very distant view of an event. It means we didn’t get to feel what it was like. How bad that must’ve been for Verona.

Well, we got there now!

So what I want to talk about today is different kinds of abuse, and their effects. We’re going to be using Verona’s conversation with her dad from 9.9 to examine these different kinds, and that means it’s going to be rough. That interaction was, itself, deeply unpleasant, and I’m not sure I should be endeavouring to make this commentary ‘fun’. I will, however, try to keep things entertaining in some fashion.

Last chance to click away, I suppose.

He was in the bathroom, door closed, light shining through the gap. She closed the door to her room. Success.

“Verona,” he called through the door.

Not success.

We start with Verona trying to sneak in so as to avoid a confrontation with her dad, which fails, because somehow this asshole has an extremely good instinct for knowing when she’s in. This could be a result of the overuse of the connection breaker.

Verona decides to try and ignore him, instead, but Brett isn’t so easily dissuaded.

“Verona!” her dad raised his voice. His fist pounded on the wall three times.

So, now that we know where Brett’s more violent tendencies lead, we can take a closer look at this. Brett punches the wall to get Verona’s attention, three times in a row. We know he does this regularly enough that, by the time Avery comes over, Verona is completely and utterly used to it.

Punching the wall like that is violence, and as an act of violence, its purpose is not just to get Verona’s attention, it is also to keep her on her toes, to intimidate her, to make her feel unsafe. It is Brett asserting his dominance over the house, and making Verona someone to show up when called. In doing so, it is incredibly degrading in its own right, reminiscent of nobility ringing a bell for their servants, but at least in that case it didn’t make the house shake.

“Verona!” her dad raised his voice, barging into her room, as she sent it.

“Knock!” she replied, going to the door and pushing on it, trying to push him out. He was wedged in the doorway, and all she did was squish him slightly. “What if I was naked?”

“I spent years wiping your rear end, Verona. I’ll start knocking when you start acknowledging me.”

This is followed by a complete lack of regard for Verona’s privacy, or any reasonable boundaries whatsoever. To make this clear, children have a right to their own space, and they should get to exercise more autonomy over that space as they grow older. A child not wanting to be seen naked by their parent is a justified concern, and something they are right to be upset about. Asking one’s parent to knock before entering is a completely reasonable boundary for a child to set, and, ideally, the child’s able to lock the door altogether.

Having a safe place to retreat to is vital in psychological development, so denying that is psychological abuse.

Brett saying he’ll start respecting Verona’s reasonable boundaries only if she does something for him in return is abuse (and that’s assuming he’d actually follow through, which is not bloody likely). It is also entirely backward. By giving your child a space for themselves, you give them a place to recharge and reengage with the relationship from a better place.

We’re also establishing here that Brett is physically stronger than Verona, a beat we’ll hit a few times before the climax. It makes sense, of course, for a (physically) grown man to be stronger than a teenage girl, but the text is priming us to keep that in mind for what’s to come.

He continued, not seeming to care much. “Can you pull something out of the freezer to start defrosting for dinner? That’ll take an hour, and you could get started on painting in the basement in the meantime. We can make a night of it.”

Brett completely ignores Verona’s distress at him barging into her space, and continues to make demands of her. He does not engage with her as a person whatsoever. This is the first thing we picked up on way back in Arc 1, but just because we’ve come to expect it, that does not mean it’s normal, or not worthy of note. Verona exists in his mind only in the sense of what she can do for him.

We saw in Shaking Hands 9.7 just what he means when he says ‘we’. What he means is that Verona will do the work, and he will do the supervising, which is to say, he’ll do nothing but complain about his own life, interposed only by his complaints about Verona not doing things the right way.

Note, for example, how he only mentions a thing for Verona to do. In a more healthy relationship, he would’ve said something like ‘you could get started on [x], while I handle [y], alright?’ But he doesn’t. Verona is the one doing things in this house.

One of the things we learn while she’s setting up the protection runes is that Verona doesn’t actually hate work. She actually quite enjoys figuring this stuff out when she has a goal in mind, and the way she describes putting up the drywall (on her own) could be a source of satisfaction in a different parenting environment. Hell, we see her coordinating the ward project with the other two.

Verona doesn’t hate work. It’s just that any potential joy she could derive from doing it gets absolutely smashed to pieces. Time and time again.

And despite how horrible he treats her, and how unfair this whole thing is, Verona still tries to throw him a bone:

It was a bit of a gesture, for her dad. For better or for worse the painting would get done, or at least there would be enough paint on the walls to mask the diagram stuff.

Or enough damage done, maybe.

In which case she’d fix it. Sand down the lumpy paint maybe, or something.

Silly, maybe, and absolutely not a reasonable way to get the painting done, but the fact that she’s still thinking of doing these tasks he keeps dropping on her head goes a way towards showing how much she’s internalised this behaviour, and how, despite the fact that she knows it won’t work, she’s still trying to satisfy him.

And it brings her satisfaction to do this work.

She felt good about this, she was being a decent-ish human, doing good practice. All she needed was to keep this momentum going.

But, of course, her dad is a black hole for momentum.

“There is no way you taped things off and put in a solid amount of effort down there in the time you spent.”

Her dad was behind her.

With the earlier mention of the violence of Brett hitting the wall, and his physical superiority over Verona, you can feel him loom behind her, and this goes to show how that violence is intimidating.

“Check it in the morning, maybe.”

“A response. My daughter actually acting like a human being, treating me like a human being. Stop the presses.”

Keep in mind that Verona was just thinking she was doing her dad a favour, and when she says something to him, he responds by being a passive-aggressive jerk about it. This would instantly have me thinking ‘why do I even bother?’

And making a point of Verona ‘actually acting like a human being’ is especially mean-spirited. It is a statement designed to make his 13-year-old daughter feel bad. It’s emotional abuse, especially when combined with the idea that she is finally treating him like a human being, when he has utterly failed to treat her like one.

This is not how a parent should act, but then, Brett is not a Parent, he is a Child. He is not acting like an authority, or providing any kind of stability. He’s deliberately being a pain in the ass, and making things more difficult for Verona on purpose.

“And back to ignoring me?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It almost never feels like I can say anything that’ll make you happy so I’m not saying much, that’s all. I’m just trying to live and let live.”

Verona has grown mature enough to realise this, and refuses to play this little game Brett throws her way, rejecting the premise outright, but Brett isn’t having this.

“You’re living off of me, Verona. I’m paying for the electricity, I’m paying for the water you’re drinking, I’m paying for this house, I’m in debt for this house, as a matter of fact, because it’s important to me that you have a nice home. Those clothes on your back? With paint on your shorts and drawings scribbled on your shoes?” She turned, bending to get her bag, and her dad’s hand at her shoulder stopped her. He scooped up her backpack.

“Give that back.”

“Part of that money comes from me, you know. Your mom gets too much credit when she can be bothered to send money, then you get excited to buy clothes. But I’m paying for those clothes, Verona. Take that money she’s sending, put it toward your additions to the bills, and imagine the money coming out of my pocket for your clothes. For your art stuff. For your computer. Does that help you to understand my frustration here? Because it feels like you go out of your way to avoid giving me any thanks or credit for this stuff.”

This is a big point that Pale explores a lot through Verona and her father: Parents have a crazy amount of power over their children, to the point that children are forced to accept a lot of bullshit just to be able to survive, and the moment they complain, the parent can run down a list of things they do for their children in order to guilt them into accepting the way they’re treated.

When this emotional manipulation works, you get a situation like Talia Graubard, whose internalisation of this forms one of the blink-and-you-miss-it tragedies in Gone Ahead 7.8:

“I don’t think I will,” Talia said. “And my mom is not horrible. I have a roof over my head, food, education, practice, and opportunities, thank you,” Talia said. The reply sounded automatic.

Fact of the matter is that these are basic necessities that a parent should provide. In an ideal world, children shouldn’t have to worry about this at all. The child, after all, did not ask to be born, and any attempt to make them feel guilty for existing by presenting them as a resource drain like this is horribly abusive.

The fact that Brett is resorting to this tactic when Verona refuses to play his earlier game is indicative of the prime emotion driving him in this interaction: a loss of control.

But we’ll dig deeper into that when we get to the violence.

“Give it back.”

“Why would you even need your bag? You’re not going out tonight, Verona.”

“Yes I am,” she told him, setting her jaw.

“I told you to defrost dinner and you ignored me. You’re staying for dinner and you’re staying in tonight. We’re going to have family time.”

She reached for her bag and he pulled it out of the way.

Verona saying ‘give it back’ immediately brings to mind a stereotypical bullying scenario, which nicely serves to frame the feeling this scene conveys: Brett is bullying his daughter.

When she pushes back against his abuse, or simply refuses to go along with his game, he finds something she wants, something she likes, and he takes it away from her. He doesn’t have a good reason to take her bag away, and she doesn’t need to justify having it, but that’s not the point. The point is that by finding a way to punish Verona, he has found a way to reassert control over her, and by showing that she actually cares about it, she proves to him that it works.

And that, too, is abuse. Brett is trying to hurt his daughter emotionally to see what gets a reaction out of her, and then seizes on it to make her feel worse.

“I have stuff to do.”

“Why do I somehow never rate, Verona? Why do I never get five minutes of your time? Tell me.”

“I was just downstairs, painting.”

“Five minutes of your actual time. To talk, to be a family. Give me a hug once in a while. Say ‘I love you, dad’. Unless you don’t, or you don’t think I deserve those things, when I work as hard as I do.”

Here Brett guilts Verona for not properly showing affection. He makes it so the only way she can avoid his anger is to compromise herself emotionally, to sacrifice her own feelings and priorities so he can get the emotional satisfaction he is looking for.

And he never quite gets around to asking himself that question, does he? He never bothers asking himself why his daughter can’t stand to be around him. It can’t be a problem on his end, it has to be a problem on hers.

Also, he never gives Verona the opportunity to talk and be a family, because the only thing he ever says to her is what chore he wants her to do next. When what he wants her to do next isn’t actual construction work, that is.

(I also noticed here that Brett speaks with emphasis a lot more than Verona does, which also adds to the particular dynamic in play here.)

Verona, however, has achieved a degree of perspective and independence in her time at the BHI, and won’t be guilted so easily:

“Your second job is editing a blog using free blog software.”

He shook his head.

“It takes a few hours a week, and the only reason you get as much money as you do is because the clients are old newspaper owners who don’t understand technology! You bragged about that to Mr. Sitton on parent teacher night!”

So she challenges him. Keep in mind that the amount of emotional manipulation Brett is throwing at her is really overwhelming, and Verona doesn’t have the same luxury we do of going over Brett’s words and figuring out what he’s doing and where he’s wrong. Verona can only grasp at things to throw back at him, and this is the easiest one within reach.

Especially given how often Brett goes on about how he works two jobs. This is something he’s built a lot of his identity around, as a hard-done-by hard worker, when, apparently, his ‘second job’ doesn’t take much time and actually pays reasonably well.

Brett talks a lot about his financial problems, and how he’s in debt for the house they live in, because he thought it important Verona have a nice house. Thing is, Verona has never cared about their ‘nice’ house, and he has never asked her if she wants him to make this sacrifice.

This is self-martyring to, again, make Verona feel guilty.

“I come home so tired I don’t have the energy to do anything else and then I put the extra hours into that so you can have your clothes and art supplies. I give my all and then some for your sake, for this house, for you. But when I need something? A few minutes out of your day for the lawn, or painting? You do a half-assed job and then run off to Lucy’s or Avery’s. When I’m sick, in and out of the hospital, nothing. I’m still not all the way back to ‘better’ and nothing from you. You’re a selfish, spoiled little brat who screams like a toddler when she can’t get her way. You’re thirteen, Verona. It’s time to start growing the fuck up.”

Again, Brett frames everything he does for Verona in the context of financial compensation, and, in return, he expects her to act as his maid, his gardener, his cook, his interior decorator and his nurse. He also now downplays the demands he makes of her, saying it’s only ‘a few minutes out of your day’, when, earlier, he spoke of ‘making a night of it’. He is framing the bare necessities he’s putting is as some monumental sacrifice, while making the demands he makes of her seem like nothing in comparison.

And any objection to the way he treats her, the way he guilts her over giving her the bare minimum? Well, that’s ‘selfish’ and ‘spoiled’.

It doesn’t need to be said that calling your child a ‘selfish, spoiled little brat’ is emotional abuse designed to hurt their feelings.

On top of that, Verona ‘screaming like a toddler’ was when she finally found herself at the end of her rope having to deal with all the pressure Brett put on her and hit a breaking point. It clearly surprised him when she did it, but he’s been sitting on it to throw it back in her face here.

And the big thing here is that, if he wants Verona to act more grown up, he’ll have to treat her with all the respect that comes with, first, and give her the opportunity to be an Adult, rather than forcing her to Parent him.

“Why would I want to grow up when there’s an iota of a chance I might grow up to become you?” she asked, reaching for her bag. It felt like her dad was twice her height, when he wasn’t. It was just that his stomach jutted out and added to the distance she had to reach to grab a dangling strap.

This constant assault on her emotions is getting to Verona, as we can see by the fact that she starts emphasising more.

We also get another beat of her dad’s physical superiority, his ability to play keep-away with her stuff, which is still incredibly childish.

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” he said, voice hard. “You’d have to care in a meaningful way about another human being to become me, Verona. Like I care about you. But you don’t. So instead, you’re well on your way to becoming your mother. Except, wait, no, she actually puts effort into one thing in her life. You’re your mother if she stopped trying!”

The idea that Verona doesn’t care about other people is patently ridiculous, of course. The idea that Brett does care about Verona even moreso. He keeps insulting and belittling her for the crime of standing up to him for how he treats her, even disfavourably comparing her to her mom, for some ungodly reason.

This is, again, emotional abuse. You don’t talk to your kids this way, and you don’t talk to your partner this way, either.

“How would you know what I succeed or fail at!?” she asked her dad. “What do you even know about me? Do you know what I do? What’s happened to me in the past few months? Why I was so scared for Avery that night, when I asked you for help in the storage room? Do you know what shows I watch? The art I create?”

“It’s really telling that when I ask you to make an effort you think of fun drawings and television, instead of anything that matters.”

Brett fancying himself a psycho-analyst is especially galling, at this stage. He blatantly invalidates Verona’s interests and hobbies, and then he wonders why she finds it so hard to care about anything, when none of the effort she puts into anything gets any positive reinforcement from home.

He doesn’t even register that she’s calling him out for not giving her the time of day, when he constantly demands that of her.

“My friends matter! What we’re doing matters, but you don’t have a clue!”

“Because you don’t tell me anything!”

“And I have no intention of telling you anything because I have tried, dad! I’ve tried for years!” Verona shouted. She blinked hard. “Ever since the divorce I’ve tried and nearly every time you’ll turn it back on me. If I say I have it hard you say you have it worse without ever listening! So I’ve given up trying! Do you know how many times I almost died this summer!? Or worse!?”

I was going to comment on him not even giving Verona the opportunity to tell him about anything, but fortunately, Verona is wise enough to do that on her own. She does a really good job asserting herself, given the stressful situation.

The fact that it doesn’t amount to anything is all the more painful as a result, even if it means she gets away with her little slip-up here.

Verona backed up a step. “I’m dying, working my way into an early grave trying to give you this life. And I’ve told you that, time and time again, and I don’t know how to convey to you the gravity of that. I’m so frustrated.”

It didn’t matter.

It was like he was broken.

He went on, “I dig so deep, I hurt, mind, heart, and body, because of what I do for you. To give you this, to give you Christmases, birthdays. To make up for the fact your mom isn’t here for you. And all I want-”

He keeps talking about his sacrifices, his suffering, which is presumably on her behalf, even though he does it without ever even bothering asking if she wants those sacrifices.

And when he gets the opportunity, he instead finds a way to blame it on the woman he blames for everything else in his life. He venerates his own suffering, blames it on the person he’s built up as the villain, and then bundles all of this up to throw it at Verona the moment he feels she isn’t being grateful enough. To, once again, guilt her for complaining about his abuse.

He then also does that little thing where he makes Verona responsible for his emotions, his ‘frustration’.

“You want me to do the same?” she cut him off. “Do so much for you it hurts me?”

“I’d settle for more than a token effort. Or any effort at all, at this point.”

“But no, I don’t- no,” she said, shaking her head. “Because I have, and you didn’t seem to care. It never changed anything. I can clean the whole house and you act like it’s not enough. Is that why? Because to count, it has to be so much it’s bad for me? Like you claim you’re doing for me?”

And Brett’s veneration of suffering permeates his view of the world, where, if you’re not suffering, you’re not working hard enough. This is an incredibly messed up worldview that, in a better world, Brett would be working to get rid of.

The fact that Verona is able to put this together on the spot is really impressive.

“It’d be nice if you tried it once or twice, to get a view of things through my eyes. Maybe then I could be a brat to you, scream in your face? We could see how you like that,” he told her.

The ultimate irony here, of course, is that he is a brat to her. He is the bratty Child to her responsible Parent.

There is, of course, a stark difference between a child screaming at their parent, because their needs aren’t being met, and a parent screaming at their child out of some misguided sense of ‘getting even’.

Verona got mad at him over legitimate grievances, but that doesn’t matter to Brett. It’s all about how that made him feel, and how he can return that feeling to Verona.

“Get a life,” she told him.

She could see how that remark stung him, but his voice was level. “I can’t. I’m too busy trying to give you one.”

This argument has a lot of parallels to all the Coup and Claim lessons, focusing around who really owns Verona’s life. Now, the answer should be obvious, but Brett is stubbornly arguing that he owns Verona’s life, due to all the effort he’s put into it for her, and he has all these pithy comebacks to match her beat-for-beat, which is immensely frustrating. There is no satisfying slam-dunk to be found here, the way we might’ve hoped. We need Lucy for that.

But, just to be clear, Verona owns Verona’s life, and Brett’s attempt at taking that from her is abusive.

“No,” she told him, shaking her head. Her back was pressed against the counter, hands gripping the edge, elbows at shoulder height. “Because Jasmine works harder than you, and she still finds it in herself to be a complete person.”

“Jasmine paints a pretty picture for you while you’re over there but I know Booker had issues with getting drunk and being brought home by the police, and Lucy’s a problem child in her own way. Attacking her stepfather? She’s a failure of a mother, Verona.”

Verona is clearly being pressed into a corner here, and that’s not just physical, although, again, Brett being physically intimidating is an important part of this.

What he’s doing besides this is, again, invalidating Verona’s opinions and denigrating her friends and people she otherwise looks up to, by, uh, relentlessly twisting the truth. Booker being a teenager who got drunk is not that shocking, and a black kid having more trouble with the police than a white kid is… what you’d expect, really, and is not indicative of Booker being more of a problem child than average.

The frustration here is that none of these points are easy to argue in the moment, but there’s something a little more insidious going on here, that matches what Brett did a little while ago, too.

By denigrating Verona’s friends, he is building a justification to stop her from hanging out with them, so he can isolate her further and demand more of her time. Isolating someone from their friends is psychological abuse.

“Don’t talk about them like that. You don’t have any real idea what you’re talking about.”

“Speaking of failed mothers-”

“Shut up about her!” Verona screamed. “Stop comparing me to her!”

“Stop emulating her! Gallivanting around with boys, like how she cheated on me, taking everything I give for granted!”

We know Verona’s right, here, when she says Brett doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but it feels like a weak rejoinder, like Verona’s floundering for a response, and that’s because she is. Her dad is deliberately putting her emotionally off balance and then continuing to hit her, and then projecting his own issues onto her.

He has been entirely unable to cope with his wife leaving him, and he keeps making this Verona’s problem, expecting her to be his emotional crutch, while saying how much she reminds him of her mother. It’s messed up and he needs help, but that is not Verona’s responsibility.

Verona’s entitled to be her own person, and denying her this is an assault on her Self.

“Shut up!”

He screamed, closing the distance on her, and with nowhere to go, his face angry and distorted as it closed in on hers, Verona dropped to the floor, back to the dishwasher, occupying the triangle of space between his feat and the upper body that leaned against the counter, head looking down at her.

“Not fun, is it?” her dad asked, straightening, face still flushed. “Stop screaming or I’m going to scream back. Grow up.”

This is the pay-off for those continued beats of Brett being physically stronger than Verona, where we have a grown man roaring in the face of his 13-year-old daughter, because she had the audacity of telling to stop treating her like shit. It is, in a word, despicable, and boy do I wish I could talk about this as the worst thing he does this chapter.

He is, again, making Verona responsible for his emotions, while projecting them out to her, and, well, he has his kid cowering in fear at his feet. He is acting like a brat, here, and when he follows this up by telling his daughter to grow up, this would become comical if it weren’t this horrifying.

We have never seen Verona cower like this, not even when the brownies had their hands on her did she feel this powerless, this small and helpless. It’s a testament to how much of a monster Brett is that he does worse to her than Bristow managed.

“You. First.”

“You have no idea what it means to grow up, or to try. You coast, Verona. You’re clever and you have talents and you lean on that, you lie, you dodge, you think you’ve figured out the systems to get the easiest, laziest ride, whether it’s school or chores here at home. Dodging consequences. And that works until it doesn’t.”

He speaks to her as if he didn’t cause this. As if he didn’t systematically grind down her ability to care, to derive satisfaction from hard work. Why would she bother putting in the work if she’s not going to get any acknowledgement from it whatsoever?

And when she does find something she cares about, that hasn’t been tainted or outright ruined by her dad, she starts to bloom as a person, she starts to address this problem he’s now practically kicking her for, but he doesn’t know that, because, as Verona herself said, he doesn’t know anything about her.

So what he’s doing here is, in essence, dragging her back down to his level under the guise of giving her a reality check. Verona does not have to take this and should not accept any of this as true, but it’s hard for someone to defend themselves against this sort of thing.

All in all, this goes to show that confronting your abuser like this never ends as well as you might fantasise it will. Escape is considerably more important, and you can confront and call your abuser out when you’re in a safer place and have support to fall back on.

She tried to squeeze out from beneath him, and he put a foot in the way of her hip. He went on, “Stop dodging and listen. Take it from me. I used to be fit, I used to be smart, I had a pretty, ambitious wife and then I hit the wall. Taking care of you, so she could further her education, so she could get set up in her work, put in the extra hours, sacrificing my own life, my own ambitions, my own health, waiting for my turn. And what did she do? Slept around, went to her friends, gave less and less and then she left me with a house I couldn’t afford and a broken heart.”

The physicality comes in again, and he can’t stand the idea that Verona isn’t actually listening to what is, let’s face it, absolute nonsense. That she’s trying to get away to some kind of safety, or even just some kind of equal ground, is something he just can’t allow. Again, though, once you have your kid in this position, you should realise that you’re doing something wrong, because this is physical abuse.

Besides that, he is, again, putting the weight of his own issues and emotions on her shoulders, while quite literally preventing her from getting away from those.

“Get over it,” Verona said. “I’m tired of hearing about it.”

This is an incredible rejoinder. It’s entirely true, justified, and she manages it from the position she’s in. Verona is so much more than Brett thinks she is.

“You need to stop daydreaming and face reality, Verona,” he said, leaning over her. “This path you’re on? You’re going to reach a point in your education where you aren’t clever enough, and you’ll scramble to catch up, and it won’t be enough. It’ll happen to your friendships, because childhood friendships rarely last. I don’t know what you’ve got going on with that boy you brought over.”

“Do you want a play-by-play?” Verona asked.

“No. I hope you’re using protection, that’s all. He’ll move on, too, you know, because you’re taking the same course as your mom and I, all the worst traits of us both, and I’m alone, and one of the few glimmers of real joy I have is that your mother is truly alone, too.”

Brett is a bitter asshole, and he’s saying all of this just to teach his 13-year-old daughter her place. To drag her down to his level, assault her self-worth, her relationships, her connections, until she submits to him and falls back in line.

But she won’t just let him have that anymore, and that pisses him off.

“Gee, why did she leave you?” Verona retorted.

“She left you too, Verona. And I held you when you cried and you held me when I cried. But you forget that. You complain I don’t give you credit for chores but I at least look you in the eye and say hello to you in the morning. She’s a mother when she feels like it. Does she even get back to you on all your phone calls? She buys you presents you never use because she doesn’t know you.”

“You love that, don’t you?” Verona asked.

“She doesn’t want to know you. She doesn’t want you,” he said.

Verona’s head dropped.

So when Verona points out that he’s a bitter asshole who ruins every relationship he has, he tries to tell her that he’s all she has. That she doesn’t have any other options, because for all his faults, her mom has all of those and then some!

And, you know what, he’s probably right. Verona’s mom doesn’t want her, but that woman isn’t Verona’s only other option. Verona does have people who care about her and are willing to take care of her, and those are the very same people Brett is trying to isolate her from, also.

But when Verona realised her mom didn’t want her, and admitted it to Lucy, that was a difficult, emotionally vulnerable moment for her, and here’s Brett, throwing it back in her face, and it… defeats her.

He’s completely beaten her down, emotionally, but by god we still haven’t hit rock bottom.

“Don’t become her. Meet me halfway, even when you don’t always brim with love for me. That’s where it starts.”

“I hate you more often than I feel any love for you,” she told him.

He straightened, moving away from the counter, his face red, eyes wet, lips pressed together.

“I think you broke me,” she told him, as she rose to her feet. “Dumping so much of your whiny emotional garbage on me that I can’t feel things right anymore. You can’t make an eleven, twelve, thirteen year old your therapist or whatever without messing them up.”

It’s interesting to me that she finds some new ground by telling him she hates him, as if it’s a surprise to him, because in baring that vulnerability, in sharing that feeling, she finds her feet for a bit again.

“Maybe I’m a bad dad, but you’re a worse daughter.”

This, by the way, is not how that works. You can’t be bad at being a child. This may be something that makes sense to say to an adult daughter, but even then it’s more likely to be emotionally manipulative entitlement.

“Get therapy. Get a life. I can’t be the one person you care about, because you’re really bad at it. You’re breaking me more than you’re helping anything.”

“You’d need a bit of actual humanity to be a person in my life. I’m cutting off your phone service, another thing I give you. It’s not like you call me or check on me when I’m sick.”

She clenched her jaw, thinking of the diagram downstairs. She hoped he postponed that.

This is, again, Brett lashing out to hurt Verona, because he feels he’s losing control of the situation. He has no actual reason to take away Verona’s phone service. He’s just looking for another way to punish her, because clearly the emotional beatdown he just gave her didn’t do the trick of getting her to comply.

Taking away her phone service also means further isolating her from her friends, which I’m sure is just a convenient side-effect.

And she can’t even be angry about that, or mention just how unjust it is. She just… hopes he waits to do it. It’s really depressing.

“If you want your bag back, you’ll need to make things up to me. Start by putting dinner in the microwave to cook. Then we’re going to watch a movie and bond-“

He said that last word with a kind of venom, face red and distorted with hurt.

“-We’ll work on the rest of it later. I have a headache,” he told her.

He’s realised that Verona hates spending time with him, so now he’s using that as a punishment for her defiance, because everything else he’s doing isn’t enough. He has to make this a total victory, so he heaps punishment on top of punishment, including Verona not being allowed to have her stuff.

Again, when you buy something for your child, it is theirs, not yours. It is important for a child’s psychological development that they get to have stuff that they can decide what happens to (for reasons that I will get into when we get to the violence).

And then he tries to cut off the conversation by complaining about health issues he inflicted on himself by yelling at his daughter. All in a day’s hard work of abusing your child.

Screw him. Screw him and him having any right to be more hurt than she was.

She hurried over to the dining room, and she picked up his laptop, holding it over her head. She met his eyes. “Trade you.”

They stood there, her dad at the far end of the kitchen, holding her backpack, her with the laptop, both breathing hard from the argument.

She wanted a rescue. She wanted an Other to storm in and distract her. She wanted Avery and Lucy to have realized she was late and to circle back.

The sink plopped.

“You have two options,” he told her. “Put that down, put the food in the microwave, and pick a movie we can both watch-”

“No.”

She wondered if he’d even thought through the second option. A road that wasn’t what he wanted. He seemed frozen.

But Verona has grown up, and has found her self-worth. She doesn’t take this kind of crap lying down, and she does fight back. She’s trying to assert herself as, at least, Brett’s equal, here. He doesn’t get to just set the rules unilaterally.

So when Verona rejects his ultimatum…
 

He held up her bag and she thought he’d drop it. She started forward-

He didn’t drop it. He swung it, hard, into the counter’s edge. She ran forward, laptop under one arm, and he turned, swinging again, his back to her, his body blocking hers. The bag hit the counter, hit it again. She scratched, clawed, pushed-

He kept going. She tried to squeeze past, to get a grip on the thing, and she couldn’t.

He threw it across the room.

“I don’t care anymore,” he told her.

She stood there, stunned, mind numb, as he strode from the room and went to the stairs that led up to his room.

“I have insurance,” he told her. “If you want to scream, I’ll scream back. If you want to break stuff, I’ll break your stuff. I can replace my things.”

She dropped the laptop into the sink, where it splashed in the water. Then she went to her bag, checking the contents.

Brett Hayward resorts to the final bit of power he’s been implicitly threatening his daughter with: violence.

So let’s talk about control.

For the healthy psychological development of a child, said child needs a place to call their own, and stuff they own. They need the ability to assert a degree of control over their environment, over their space, because that control provides a degree of safety that any individual’s mind needs to recuperate and rest and develop properly.

Children who don’t get this kind of control over their environment will often lash out in an attempt to assert some kind of control over what’s going on around them, and what they experience, because this lashing out may hurt, at least it’s their hurt, rather than a hurt imposed upon them by the outside world. In the more extreme cases, this is where you hear of abused children smearing the walls with their own faeces, because that’s the only ability to assert control they feel they have.

We’ve already established that Brett is a literal manchild, and when he starts losing control of the situation, of his own daughter, he lashes out, he does his level best to make her hurt, because at least that is a hurt he causes. It makes himself the agent in a world where he believes things just happen to him.

I don’t think he’s actually ever tried another way to leave his mark on the world, and on Verona specifically. He just resorts to childish sadism.

And, of course, this feels really fucking jarring. It’s a shock to see this guy, who has been doing nothing but complaining about his health, act so physically violent, to actually smash her stuff. It hurts to see this happen, in a very different way than the emotional beatdown he gave Verona earlier.

Glass had broken. Her glass pens. A bottle of ink. Something pricked her, and blood welled out around the black ink that stained her fingertips and nails. Books in there were ruined. Notes, clippings from the Blue Heron.

Spell cards. So many spell cards.

She pulled out the word-changing quill, broken in half. The big red button was okay.

Wood rustled. She gently retrieved it.

The cat mask gave as she pulled it from the confines of the bag, broken into three pieces, with the third piece clattering to the floor.

Lucy had made that for her. She’d touched it up a bit, but it was… it was an important gift. A symbol of where she belonged.

She lifted it to her face, trying to position it where it would be if she wore it normally. It fell in its three pieces to the floor.

And now we finally see what it must’ve been like for Verona when Brett demolished her art shelf. When he ruined a skill she’d worked hard on attaining, something she’d put a ton of effort into and was proud of. Something she had put a lot of herself and her Self into.

And he took it away from her, while berating her for not doing those very things she was learning to do. This is at least the second time he’s hamstrung her attempt at becoming the very thing he says she’s too lazy to achieve.

And it leaves her broken, once more. It leaves her efforts ruined, and her Self, her connection to her best friend, in pieces.

Confrontations with an abuser, especially an abusive parent, hardly ever work out the way people like to fantasise they do, when that abuser still has that position of power. The priority should be getting out.

Verona cannot go back to that house.

It’s time to call on Lucy’s and Avery’s promise.