I just left my deadbeat dad and his wife after being homesick for the past 2 weeks

I graduated from high school last year and went to a college 300 miles away for theater technology, and I couldn't be happier. I'm way back into theater, I've got great grades, people like me (some even like me intimately), and I just feel like I'm doing so much better than I was at home. So, when I came back for Thanksgiving break, I decided to skip the long drive and stay with my father.<br><br>Things were fine at first. He obviously overwhelmed me with gifts and attention in a futile attempt to cause me to resent my mother. I politely indulged him, and my stepmother did her best to make me feel at home, but I knew they had some ulterior motive hidden deep inside of them. I knew my father's eccentricities better than anyone, and I could tell something felt bad. So, when they decided to take a trip to a relatively warm island in the pacific to get some fresh air, I thought nothing of it and tagged along.<br><br>It was a long plane ride, and for the whole time, my father constantly wanted to know what I thought about his "stability" and my stepmother was (literally) schmoozing with the flight attendants. I just listened intently, thinking that my father had finally found stability after the messy divorce from my mother.<br><br>It took days of relaxing on the beach for my father to bring up the subject I knew he wanted to bring up all along. He sat me down in his rental house and talked to me about how he wants me to stay there for the holidays instead of going back to college, and that he'd give me scholarships if I needed money for food and the like. I counted on this happening, and I told him that I don't know if I can stay that long. I tried to explain to him that I had commitments and that I wanted to see my friends, but he, of course, took me wrong and thought I was mad at him. He kept asking if I hated him, and if I thought he was a bad dad.<br><br>I knew I had to get out of there.<br><br>I excused myself and went to my guest bedroom, determined to find out what was going on. First, I checked my bag to see if I had any way to defend myself. I found a rusty old knife that I had taken from a stage prop that I had traded with my friend who thought it'd make a good weed grinder. Then, I had to find out what was going on. So, I bugged all of the rooms in the house, including my own, and tested my receiver (which was an old radio) to see if I could hear anything coming from the other rooms. It worked, and I had a way to hear and defend myself.<br><br>I thought I was crazy. I thought I was overreacting. I thought hell would freeze over before my father would do anything to hurt me. Well, a little over a week later, hell froze over and my father told me he was done keeping secrets.<br><br>I can only write this because I'm not in the house anymore. I'm writing this from an internet cafe in the island's airport. I'm using a stolen laptop to write this, and I haven't had more than a few hours of sleep for days. Give me a moment before you judge me.<br><br>What follows is a timeline of what I heard from the other rooms before I left. I have no way of knowing what happened in the rooms that I couldn't hear in, but I have guesses.<br><br>The first night I was there, my father and my stepmother had a long argument that lasted for hours and ended in what sounded like my stepmother crying. The night after, my stepmother went out while I was asleep, and then came back in the wee hours of the morning. She was talking on the phone, and I could tell that she was speaking in a language I couldn't understand. The night after that, my father and my stepmother had another argument, and it ended in my father screaming at her to do it again.<br><br>Then, on the fourth night, I woke up to the sound of my father slamming his car door outside of my window. He came into my room, holding his side and wincing in pain, saying that he was sorry and giving me a small wooden vial. He told me to drink it whenever I felt something was wrong, and he jumped my bed and left through my window.<br><br>The next morning, my stepmother seemed frantic. She was obviously overwhelmed, and I decided to indulge her a bit as I did with my father. That night, I was awoken to a loud crash, followed by a scream and my stepmother calling my father. She was trying to deaden the doll and get it to act limp, so she could drag it through my window.<br><br>Then I heard the sound of my window shattering, and a humanoid figure intimately caressing my bed. My stepmother talked to it and called it "my little doll", and fed it a salad with some medicine in it. That's when I knew I had to leave. So, I did.<br><br>I waited for the doll to calm down after the medicine kicked in, and then I grabbed my bag, ran to the airport, hopped on the next plane, and didn't stop running until I got to this internet cafe to write all of this down. I'm not going home for Christmas.