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“And you’re the one who let him take them. ”
“I trusted him. ”
He makes a disgusted sound. Looks away from me. Wipes his hand over his mouth.
“You shouldn’t have,” he says, for the second time. And he looks at me, more sad than angry. “I thought you had better judgment than this. I’m disappointed in you. I’m … I’m disgusted with those pictures, and I’m disappointed. ”
It breaks something inside me to hear him say that.
It hurts.
But I think the thing it breaks—it’s not my heart. It’s some last delicate fragment of the bubble. It’s the part of me that was still my daddy’s girl, living in hope that if I were perfect, he would love me best. Love me most. Love me always. And his love would make me powerful.
It hurts to hear that I’ve disgusted him. It hurts to know that from here on out, he’ll never love me in quite the same way, if he finds a way to love me at all.
But I don’t need his love to be powerful.
I’m already powerful.
And there’s enough work for me in the world, just trying to fix this one thing, that I could spend the rest of my life doing it.
“I’m sorry you’re disappointed,” I tell him. “But I’m human. I’m nineteen. I make mistakes sometimes. And I think … you know, maybe I should have told you right away. Maybe that makes this harder for you, because I’ve had seven months to think about what these pictures mean and you’ve had, like, seven hours. ”
I step closer to him and put my hand on his arm.
If he flinches slightly—if my heart contracts—I ignore it.
I’m not disgusting. I’m his daughter.
“But, Daddy? Here’s what they mean to me. They’re an act of hate. They’re vengeance against me, from someone I never treated badly. They’re undeserved. And even if they were deserved, what does that mean, exactly? That if someone takes naked pictures of me, I’m a bad person, so they get the right to call me a slut on the Internet? Are you trying to tell me that just because I didn’t stop Nate from aiming his camera, I deserve whatever happens to me, forever? I deserve this attack because I asked for it? Do you hear how ugly that is?”
“I never said you asked for it. ” He sounds different, his voice choked and unsettled.
“Yeah. You did. ”
My father has always told me that the first step toward getting what I want in life is to know what I want. You figure it out, and then you go after it.
So I make him look at me. I make him hear me.
“You did. ”
This is my power now, and he doesn’t have to like it.
I’m going to use it whether he likes it or not.
I’m going to keep using it until people start listening.
West stands up as soon as he spots me.
He’s been waiting in the Student Affairs reception area, sprawled opposite the office assistant in a high-backed pink chair that is too small and entirely too fussy for him.
I was in the meeting for over an hour, but he’s in exactly the same spot where I left him. The only thing different is that his hair has arranged itself into grooves—plowed-through furrows that I stare at blankly for a moment until I figure out they’re from his fingers.
How many times did he have to run his hand through his hair to leave it looking like a springtime field?
“How’d that go?”
He touches my elbow when I get close, slides his hand to my waist. With light pressure, he steers me through the door and into the hallway.
