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“What’s wrong? What’s going on? Talk to me.” His concern is laughable. Where was he a week ago when I needed him to be my friend?
“Don’t fucking touch me.” I slap his hand away. “Get your sister out of that house. I’m going to burn it to the fucking ground.”
I run again, back to my bike and Presley follows, shouting my name. But I’m so fucking angry and pumped up on adrenaline that even he can’t keep up.
I mount my bike, tears streaming down my face. Betrayal a heavy weight in my heart. It spins and turns with jagged edges, tearing through the muscle, damaging it beyond repair.
The ride doesn’t calm me down. Nothing can calm me down.
My mom’s voice floats through my mind.
“You have to take her.”
“You decided to have her, Francis. The hell is wrong with you? A child needs her mom.”
His voice was so familiar. How could I have missed that?
He even looks like me, she’s right. I’ve sometimes thought that when looking at the way his nose scrunches when he’s annoyed or playful. Mine does that. I just put it down to wishful thinking. I never knew who my dad was and my mom never wanted me and suddenly this amazing man takes me in and treats me like his daughter.
“I can’t look after her. I don’t understand her. I get too angry with her. She deserves better than me.”
She begged him. Begged.
He turned us away. His daughter. But she left me there anyway knowing he’d have no choice.
He had this house. He had this life. He had Lane. He turned me away. No… he didn’t just turn me away, he delivered me to the doorstep of that evil man and his son.
The second I hit the driveway, I drop my bike, race to the toolshed and pick up the heaviest thing I can find.
A mallet.
I take it back to his beloved four-by-four and bring the solid end down right in the middle of the windshield. I’m probably going back to the mental hospital after speaking to the journalist anyway, so I may as well get a few kicks in before the inevitable.
I lift it back up and hit it again, creating two circles surrounded by cobweb patterns reaching to every end of the glass, and a big circle in the mirror.
His alarm starts blaring but I don’t stop. I hit the passenger window right as the front door of the house flies open and Stanley steps out. He doesn’t speak, he doesn’t get angry, he doesn’t tell me to stop. He just lets me destroy his car, one window at a time, then the hood, and the doors. Glass scatters over my feet and the ground but if it cuts me at all I don’t feel it.
I keep swinging and hitting and swinging and hitting.
At some point Carter and Presley showed up, but Stanley told them to stop.
Everybody is just watching me.
My arms burn, my body is getting weary. I can hardly raise them anymore to swing.
“You know… I was seven when my cousin first pinned me down in my bed and raped me.”
Stanley’s jaw trembles but he doesn’t look away. He holds my swollen, tear-filled eyes.
I see Presley tell a neighbor to fuck off and Carter gets a little bit closer.
“Scandal… please,” he begs but I ignore him.
“Two weeks after YOU LEFT ME ON HIS FUCKING DOORSTEP!” I get a second wind and kick the side mirror with the bottom of my foot twice until it bends the wrong way. “I was so hurt, I couldn’t walk for a week.” I kick the side mirror clean off and it shatters on the drive. “I was nine when my uncle started making me kiss him down there, sometimes his friends watched, sometimes they joined in. The more I cried, the more enthusiastic they became.” I swing the mallet against the rearview window. “They’d starve me, beat me, torment me, give me new things and withhold them. So I wouldn’t tell. So I’d behave in public. So I’d be a good little girl.”
“I didn’t know what kind of life I was leaving you to.”
“My uncle made me come. He was my first orgasm. I was eleven. He used to love it. He’d get this sick satisfaction from making me feel good and then he’d make me tell him how much I enjoyed it and if I told him I hated it he’d just do it again.”
“Christ—” He looks away but I pick the side mirror up and launch it at him. He dodges it, but I have his attention again.
“You could have saved me. You could have kept me.”
“I’ve regretted it every day since.”
“Fuck you. You’ve regretted it? I’ve lived it.”
“You’re so strong—”
“DON’T PATRONIZE ME WITH THAT SURVIVOR BULLSHIT!” I scream and hit the car three more times. “My mom begged you to take me and you dropped me off on the door of a pedophile because you were too fucking scared to admit that you cheated on your wife. Am I on the mark?”
