BETRAYAL: The Izzy Nichols Story

By Marian Andrew

Her parents hate her, her friends aren't who they say they are, and ex-boyfriends are tallying up on her forever shitlist. Izzy hasn't got unreasonable standards, just unachievable luck in love.

Izzy Nichols has money, attends a private school, spends her summers at the beach surfing, and comes off as a social butterfly. But it

• Language: English
• Publisher: MA Crown Ink Publishing
• Release date: Jul 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9783910930063

Marian Andrew

Marian Andrew is an original New Yorker with a British education and currently lives in Germany with her husband, son, and two cats.Working as a fashion designer for the last twenty years she has lived and continues to work throughout Europe and America. Her career has taken her to several places in the Far East, Middle East, and North Africa, constantly gathering ideas, inspiration, and experiences throughout her travels.Marian hosts a fortnightly podcast, 'Marian Andrew's Indie Books & More', that aims to support indie and hybrid authors within the writing community; it's a free service, and links can be found on her website.Her hobbies include ballroom dancing, binge-reading e-books, and trying out recipes from favorite celebrity chefs' culinary books.

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Prologue

Dating was always like rolling dice. Whenever I set out on a date with a new person, I looked for a six. Still, the reality was whenever I did date someone, it consistently felt like I rolled a three. 

It was never as if I had high unachievable standards; it was that inner feeling deep inside me that spoke to me. 

He’s not the one.

To be in love is what makes us human. I went through my teens and young adult life wanting, forever desperate, to have that feeling. And because I could never achieve it, I felt inadequate, isolated, and incomplete.

I recognized the reasons why I was stuck in limbo. There were too many inner demons inside the emotional baggage that I dragged around with me everywhere I went. Most of the time, I just pretended they didn’t exist, kicked everything under the rug, and fantasized my childhood never happened. Keep quiet and carry on like I was normal to the world because that was how they taught me to behave. Airing your dirty laundry was taboo in my house because a. no one actually cares, and b. you will never get anywhere in life because people hold your personal weaknesses against you.

I bet none of you reading this give a fig about my dirty laundry. Why would you? You all know I came from money; what could have a poor little princess like me have suffered my entire life? A girl with vast access to wealth giving a tearful account about not having any meaningful relationships, desperately seeking attention because mommy and daddy were too busy earning money to play with me. Or maybe you think I was that poor little rich kid wandering around trying to find meaning in the world.

You see, that is primarily the problem, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. No one really cares to know what goes on behind closed doors. People see the exterior shell of someone and judge them on how clean their surface looks. My facade looked squeaky clean for a long time. 

If you went over my persona with a magnifying glass, you might have come across a few flaws in my porcelain disguise. I wasn’t perfect, but generally, all people wanted to see was champagne. Prestigiously expensive, seductively icy, and shimmeringly radiant. From as far back as I can remember, that was how I was brought up, and always made myself appear as such. For most of my young adult life, I searched to find out who the hell I genuinely was. Along the way of my self-discovery, I have done some ugly things that I am not proud of.

Confessing everything is going to free me with what plagued me my entire life. I’m not sure I genuinely want to acknowledge what lurks inside me. Still, I had done irrational and selfish things my whole life when it came to my love life, and it was never out of love but out of fear. All that negativity didn’t just happen overnight. It had been simmering around my soul since I was a little girl, and all it needed was something to trigger it for hell to break loose. The upside-down situation was that I had no contingency plan to control the demons inside me from imploding themselves on my consciousness and taking over my mind. My demons had free reign of my conscious when I saw red.

So hang onto your seats because, with my story, I’m going to slam into you like a sledgehammer when you least expect it. Behind the tale of every psychotic person lies some twisted, diabolic tale of indecent assault or exploitation that triggered the snap of imbalance inside their brain function. Some form of either emotional or physical abuse existed in these individuals. In my case, it was always both, and I always managed to hide it well. Every time it happened, I wanted the world to know about it because I desperately needed saving. But by the time my foot stepped outside, I would have already buried it so deep within me that it felt like it was no longer critical.

So yeah, that’s right. I’m clinically nutty as a fruitcake. At least, that’s what every online test I’ve done seems to have diagnosed me as. And, that’s not the least of my problems. I’ve done something terrible, maybe even evil. Not everyone who has suffered abuse comes out of the dark and joins the green pastures. I won’t tell you just yet what I’ve done because it’s important you understand my life and what led me up until that point. Maybe you will understand me better; perhaps you will condone what I did; you might just hate me in the end.

But one thing is for sure; you will enter my mind and see the real me. Not poor little rich girl, nope, she never existed. She was just a front for what I undeniably became.

***

I’ve always questioned if we are born violent and whether our DNA gets imprinted with it. Or do we accumulate such aggressive tendencies as we grow up by absorbing them from our environment?

I believe I may have found the answer when my son was born. We are born with a brain similar to that of a computer’s empty hard drive, just waiting to fill up. As infants, we become spellbound with everything around us, and our minds begin to assimilate from the moment the doctor separates us from our mother’s womb.

My earliest memory is not of violence but torment. Often, in the middle of the night, my mother would suddenly become frightened of something and run into my bedroom to cuddle with me in my bed. I was only five years old, but she scared me when she did that, and I hated it. I abhorred my mother’s nightly outbursts, scampering into my room like a banshee at night, telling me there was a monster in her room. The only other person in her bedroom was my father, and I knew he was fast asleep.

It wasn’t until I was 7 or 8 when I started to show initial signs of the internal fury that would eventually evolve to become my very own nemesis against myself. My parents had organized an outing on the same weekend a classmate of mine was having a birthday party. I refused to join my parents because I would miss out on the party. After several arguments, I thought I won. Except when I heard the garage door opening from underneath my bedroom windows, I peeked out and saw both my parents in their sports-convertible pull out from the driveway. I couldn’t believe it; they were going to leave me alone the entire weekend. Fear, anger, and disbelief suddenly gripped me. I balled up my fist and punched my bedroom window. Glass shattered all over my hand, but I don’t remember it hurting. I recall the emotional pain I felt instead. A few minutes later, I saw them pull up in front of the house. I closed my curtains, cleaned the glass fragments from my hand, and wrapped it up in tissue. My dad came inside and told me to get into the car. I did without further objection, hiding my hand inside my jacket pocket. I’m sure both my parents knew what I did because quietly and quickly, they replaced that window. Neither of them ever brought up the topic with me.

These were the unspoken rules in my home; we never talked about things. There was no analysis nor a review of actions. It was the kind of psychological mechanism that protected my parents’ ego, shame, and discomfort. Except I burned years of my life revolting against the machine that shielded their false identity. The implications I suffered were not light; they were permanent and self-destructing.

I was born Isabella Di Angelo; almost everyone calls me Izzy, except my parents, who called me Bella. As a third-generation Italian-American, I have no connections to Italy other than my paternal great grandparents and my name. I don’t speak Italian either; my dad did, but never at home, mainly because my mom was of Maltese descent and only spoke English.

My father was a finance trader in New York and relatively successful at his job as the vice president of one of America’s top financial corporations in the ’80s. He was your typical Gordon Gekko character with regards to his career. Sometimes I wonder if that movie character was actually loosely based on my father. My father smelled of money, and I am not joking; rich people really do smell of dollar bills. Except unlike Gordon, my dad was smart to do a quick split before the authorities ever got wind of any dodgy trading, and he took us and his wealth with him too.

When I was 7, we abruptly moved to the other side of the world, or at least that was how I saw Aptos, California. When he unofficially announced his retirement, my father was only 45 years old, and we legally changed our surname to Nichols. My parents drilled me never to use the name Di Angelo again.

There was never a doubt in my mind that my father made his wealth by double-dealing on insider trading and other things back in New York. When I was a young teenager, I discovered some secret documents inside the back of my parent’s bedroom closet. One included a letter signed by my mother addressed to a lawyer stating that my father was deceased. I don’t know what my parents did to get their wealth, but it certainly was not legal, and that letter alone was dubious, to say the least. Soon after my little snooping in their closet, these documents disappeared, and I never discovered them again. I imagine they realized I found them and removed them from accessing them. I never questioned them about it, and they never brought up the topic with me. I just knew they were generally shady characters.

***

Aptos, California, is where I have almost all of my childhood memories. It’s an unincorporated town in Santa Cruz county, and when we moved there in the early 90s, there were possibly just over 15,000 residents. But it was your typical west coast suburban kind of town, with lots of coffee shops, parks, long strips of sandy beaches, and breathtaking sunset views of the Pacific Ocean. Our home was a little more inward toward the vineyards instead of the ocean. But everything was within a ten-minute car ride.

We lived in this great big contemporary Californian-styled, designer home, with a front and back yard that was large enough to be groomed regularly by a gardening firm. We had a pool, a guest house, and a barbeque area where my parents entertained their friends on weekends and on the fourth of July. The garage even had this absurd two level, state-of-the-art hydraulic lift that stored my father’s collection of revoltingly expensive sports cars.

My best friend Kate lived a few houses down the street from me. Her home wasn’t as ridiculously swanky as mine, but she definitely wasn’t impoverished either. We were the same age and more or less grew up together. We were inseparable as kids and teenagers. Except Kate went to a local public school.

Despite my preferences, my parents made sure I attended an insanely expensive private school in Santa Cruz. My school was pretty exclusive; from what I remember, the tuition was almost similar to that of a private college. I’m not sure why I couldn’t attend a public school like my other neighborhood friends, but I hated that I had to wear a uniform. I found my uniform embarrassing because people recognized I came from money. I was not particularly eager to stand out in such a manner. I spent my middle and high school years with some of the world’s exclusively wealthy kids. Thankfully my crew of school friends never saw themselves as such either. Or just maybe I was a paradox of my beliefs and already lived inside such an exclusive world, so it felt normal to us.

Since both my parents had a lot of free time on their hands, they also dropped me off and picked me up every day from school. But most of the kids at my school had chauffeurs, so it wasn’t unusual to see kids dropped off in a private car. There were times my parents completely forgot about me, and I would visit the school secretary and ask her to phone my parents.

I was an only child, so I never understood how they could forget me at school. It wasn’t like these two ever neglected me; on the contrary, I couldn’t stand how they constantly stood over my shoulders all the fucking time.

Although my parents had a zillion friends and loved to entertain them, I was never allowed to have any. They never told me I couldn’t have any friends, but they made damn sure I would never have any either. Boyfriends were an unchartered territory I dared not to engage my parents with.

Every time I invited a girlfriend over, they would roast her to me afterward.

She seems a little too trashy….I don’t like her character; it’s like she’s hiding something…she doesn’t seem like the type of girl you should be hanging out with…the two of you don’t seem to have much in common, perhaps you should not invite her again…her parents seem too loose with her…. I was always too embarrassed to invite the same person home again.

But with Kate, they never seemed to have any issue. Maybe because my dad was best buddies with her dad. Or, perhaps she just knew how to manipulate my parents into thinking she was this obedient, shy, good girl.

I’m not sure if Kate ever knew what happened behind closed doors in my house, but I think she may have suspected something. One Saturday afternoon, she wandered into my home and found me lying on my bed in a fetal position. My eyes were swollen from crying, and I had several bright pink, raised, long welts that peeked out from under my shorts.

Had she walked in twenty minutes earlier, she would have found both my parents dragging me to the spare room that had nothing but an ironing board and a stone floor. She would have witnessed my mother holding my hair and banging my head onto the ground while my dad used a long equestrian whip to lash it against my legs.

Luckily the only damage I sustained that time was the lashings on my legs; usually, my ear would bleed a little. My mom always managed to slam my skull down on the stone floor at the right angle to cause it to bleed every time. I was around nine years old at the time, but these kinds of beatings had been happening for years and would continue years later.

My parents’ trigger button to attack me was super sensitive; sometimes, they would make up stories about me to get their thrill. I never bothered to walk on eggshells around them because it didn’t matter; I fell into their trap either way.

There were times I went out of my way to rile them up, just to see how far I could go with them until they snapped. Sometimes I just sat there and took the beatings; other times, I yelled at them to hit me harder, which only provoked them to use all the strength they had; but they would stop as soon as I was bawling my eyes out with pain and telling them that I learned my lesson. Whatever the fuck that was.

Half the time, I didn’t even know what I was supposed to learn from that beating. The only thing I got was that my parents were sadistic, vile creatures, and not a soul knew the real truth behind the masks they wore out in society.

Eventually, I had to quit my equestrian training because I could no longer enjoy the sport without thinking of my father’s favorite toy to torture me with. At first, he used a leather belt that he boasted was specially assigned to me. And I kid you not; with the number of beatings he gave me with it, he had literally worn that belt out. Then he discovered the replacement of his beloved toy, and it stuck for years.

Sometimes he also used his feet to kick me, mostly when I had fallen to the ground, crouched in pain after one of his carnal belting or whipping sessions. He never actually used his hands to beat me, only to pull my legs out to get a good lashing of my hips, inner thighs, and buttocks.

My mom used her hands. She sometimes held me down with force to allow my dad to find the right places to whip me. Before that, she probably had broken a few dozen wooden spoons on my back; and then realized grabbing my hair and pulling me as she pleased was more effective in getting me to react.

But my parents were always careful. All lashings remained above the knee and below the waist. Never, ever, on my face and neck. Occasionally the whip found its way on my upper arms and back by accident because my father was trigger happy. But I always hid my marks from public view. Our detached home was virtually soundproof too, so if screams came from me, either no one heard them, or people just didn’t care.

Denim jeans were the best items to be worn during such a session because the whip wasn’t as painful as it was on bare skin, and the welt marks would just last a couple of hours and rarely broke skin. But this was California, where we wore shorts for about eight months a year, so I got caught without any protection most of the time.

Usually, the scars healed fast; sometimes, they would last weeks if they bled. I had some wounds high up in my inner thigh that lasted for years, and if anyone asked, I told them they were stretch marks. But the most significant damage was to my right ear. I developed hearing problems in my late 20s after an airplane flight and visited a specialist who told me I was partially deaf in that ear. I always had secretly thought I couldn’t hear very well, but from the number of times my mother slammed the side of my head onto the cold stone floor, I imagine I sustained some kind of damage.

***

I heard someone enter my room. I turned towards the door and saw Kate look straight at me. Our eyes met, and there was a mutual understanding of what had taken place minutes earlier. I think she knew that if I wanted to talk about it, I would have, so she didn’t say anything. I was too self-conscious to talk about it either way.

Do you wanna walk over to Jerry’s and grab an ice cream? she broke the few minutes of uncomfortable silence between us.

I wiped my tears away and sat up in bed, crossed-legged. I grabbed a pillow and put it over my lower half, trying my hardest to hide the fresh, pink marks on my hips.

Sure, do you want to wait for me downstairs? I’ll get dressed and get some money from my parents.

Even though it was the height of summer in California with sun drenching desert temperatures outside, I put on a pair of long denim jeans to hide my legs.

I walked out to the front yard with my red eyes more swollen than earlier.

What happened, Izzy? This time, a worried look was plastered on Kate’s face, and I could hear the concern in her voice. She probably thought I took another beating.

I’m sorry I can’t go. My parents won’t give me money. I said with embarrassment. It wasn’t enough that I had to bear my best friend seeing me with red lashings on my legs, but that I couldn’t join her to hang out either was a nail on my social life’s coffin.

A look of relief swept her face, Come on then, let’s go. We can share my ice cream. She smiled at me and looped her arm through mine.

Of course, I went and had a good time at Jerry’s ice cream shop. It was the one place all the kids under the age of twelve hung out with their bicycles during the summer. Except I ended up paying for it dearly that evening because I still went even though my parents didn’t give me money. Their excuse was that I made them look stingy and cheap.

That’s what my parents did. They found the simplest and the most absurd excuses to make me look bad. I was their evil, delinquent child from hell, and they never wasted time telling me how stupid and immature I was.

If my father was the monster of the night, then my mother was the equivalent of the goddess Hera. The mother of all gods, jealous of her daughter. Committing some heinous acts against her only child and often edging on my dad and knowing how to push his buttons against me. She was a trigger-happy kind of person, always on stand-by when it concerned me. But unlike my father, she tried to indoctrinate me against him, behind his back, and make herself the martyr. On a few occasions, she had found me alone and spoke in a low voice, always trying to make out that my father was behind the beatings. She told me he was a mentally sick and delusional man and that I was the reason she got stuck in her marriage. She was a bullshitter and a manipulator. A typical Greek tragedy manifester.

That’s why the hatred I felt for them was a lot more passionate towards her. She knew how to pull the violent strings of my father. There were times while he attacked me with his whip, I would look up at her, hoping she would show some mercy, and all I would see was her smirking face. Her eyes never lied. She enjoyed watching me in pain. She was evil, the