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“As soon as we realized Samson left, the boys that were here followed him,” Brenna called out as I jogged toward my bike.
“Rum,” my brother called, running toward me. His hair was a mess and his shirt was inside out.
“I’m not waiting on you,” I told him shortly, climbing on my bike.
“Dad was right behind them,” he assured me, yelling over his shoulder as he ran for his truck. “I’ll be right behind you.”
The ride from the clubhouse to Nova’s trailer was the longest eight minutes of my life. I couldn’t stop running our conversation over and over in my head. I’d begged and pleaded with her to tell me who had hurt her, and when she finally had, I’d assumed she was lying.
Chapter 18
Nova
Iwasn’t surehow the conversation started. There’s a chance that I will never remember, and I think that’s probably a good thing. Why would I ever want to know who lit the fuse that changed my entire life forever? Was it me? Was it Pop? Could I have changed the trajectory of the twenty-four hours after or had it been out of my hands from the beginning?
The first thing I do remember was Pop staring down at me, his hand clenched in a fist and the entire right side of my face throbbing painfully with every beat of my racing heart.
“You think it’s your place to go bitchin’ to the president’s wife?” he yelled, his face red. “What the fuck’s a’matter with you?”
I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t told Brenna anything, that she’d asked me and I’d told her that everything was fine at home, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t say a word. I was too terrified to move. Too terrified to speak. I was curled in a ball, protecting as much of my head as I could while he raged. We’d been dealing with his outbursts for months now, but I’d never seen him so livid or embarrassed.
It’s me, Pop. Your Bossanova. What are you doing?
The next few minutes felt like years.
He kicked me twice or maybe three times. I wasn’t sure. I was too focused on curling into as small a target as I could make myself.
And then, as quickly as it had begun, it just suddenly stopped. Pop muttered something I couldn’t hear, used one hand to toss a kitchen chair out of his way, and left the trailer completely.
I stayed where I was for a while, worried that he wasn’t quite finished and at any second, he’d storm back into the house. When I finally realized that he’d left completely, I slowly and painfully pushed myself to my knees and then to my feet.
I was dizzy and my back and thigh hurt so bad that it was making my stomach roll with nausea, but I was most worried about my eye. I could barely open it, which was the only reason that I wasn’t worried it was falling out of my head. It was so incredibly painful I was afraid to even look at myself in the mirror.
Shuffling toward the bathroom, I whimpered in pain, cupping my hand over my throbbing cheek and eye. When I finally stood in front of the mirror, I breathed a sigh of relief.
It was swollen. It was going to bruise. But I wasn’t deformed and my eye didn’t look like it was going anywhere.
Pulling a washcloth out of the cupboard, I ran it under the cold water in the sink and lifted it to my face, hissing as I made contact and forcing myself to leave it there. If I didn’t get something cold on it I knew that the swelling would be completely out of control and I was already worried about what people would say when they saw it.
It wasn’t logical and looking back, it was really fucking sad—but at that moment, I was most concerned with how impossible it would be to cover the gnarly black eye that was forming.
Every creak of the trailer and every car I heard outside made me shudder in fear and freeze in place while I straightened up the mess Pop had made in the kitchen. Nana was at work and Bird was at a friend’s and I didn’t want them to come home to a trashed house and worry that something had happened. Some kind of self-preservation or denial seemed to propel me forward, cleaning and making sure everything was just so even though the minute they saw my face, they would know that the dam had finally broken and Pop had crossed a line he couldn’t come back from.
I let the tears run down my face, some dropping onto my chest and others clinging to my neck as they disappeared into my shirt.
Everything was broken, and I knew that nothing would ever be the same. Up until that point, Pop hadn’t hit one of us. He’d bullied, and he’d intimidated, and he’d shoved us, and we’d taken it and turned the other cheek, but that was over now.
As soon as I had everything cleaned up, I made sure that the wet washcloth was hung up neatly in the bathroom and got into bed. It was barely seven o’clock, but I’d been working so much that I knew no one would try to wake me. Nana would be home anytime and I wasn’t ready for her to know yet.
I clasped those bruises and black eye to myself, hiding it even from the people who would’ve understood what they meant, and I curled up in bed, pulling the covers up to my forehead.
Nana must have picked up Bird on the way home because eventually I heard both of their voices, cheerful and loud as they came into the house. A few minutes later, my bedroom door opened and closed again behind me and I assumed they’d checked to see if I was sleeping and left me to it. I was awake as Pop got home later that night, acting as if nothing was wrong, and I was awake as Bird came silently into my room and made his bed on my floor, and I was awake when Nana and Pop eventually went to their own room and the house grew quiet.
I was still awake the next morning when Pop left for the clubhouse. I played opossum when Bird came back into my room and told me that he and Nana were going shopping for some summer clothes and then she was going to drop him off at the club barbecue on her way to work and could I give him a ride home?
Answering him without turning around felt conspicuous and weird, but he didn’t seem to notice as he murmured for me to sleep in before leaving the room.
And then it was just me again, alone in the silent trailer, my face still throbbing and my back a dull ache. I sat up in bed and groaned as my thigh pressed against the wadded-up blankets beneath me.
