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“Please don’t do this,” I whispered, choking on tears and glancing back at my mom standing in the entranceway. She watched on in silence as she sipped at her third glass of wine. “Mom…” I pleaded, though I knew it would be pointless.
There was a long list of things my mom would rather do than stand up to my dad.
Like wash her own laundry.
Shop at a discount store.
Stick her head in a raging hornets’ nest.
And now I could add, ‘get drunk while she watched her own daughter be tossed out onto the street.’
I gritted my teeth and twisted the bat in my hands, not removing my gaze from the machine at the other end of the cage for a second. Any moment it was going to send a ball flying at me at a speed that would hurt like hell if it connected with my body.
I should know.
I’d taken plenty of them.
Sweat built at the nape of my neck and trickled down my spine, my shorts and sports bra doing little to protect me from the midday sun as it beat down.
Every part of my body was poised. My muscles tensed.
Just waiting.
“Dad!”
“Don’t call me that. I know you’re not my child,” he snapped, reaching out and wrapping his hand around my arm. He dragged me out onto the porch, shoving me hard enough that I stumbled off the front step and onto the lawn. “Because I didn’t raise a whore!”
The door slammed shut.
The lock flicked.
Click.
That was my warning, much like a pitcher’s windup.
I pulled my front leg back into my load as the ball popped free, screaming at me like a bat out of hell. My muscles tensed, driving the bat that was hovering over my shoulder forward. The loud clack as it connected with the ball echoed through the air, the vibration of the impact resonating up my arms.
I knew my shoulders were going to hurt tomorrow.
I was well out of practice, and my form was horrible.
But it felt damn good.
Baseball had kept me sane when I was younger, and after pulling out my old bat to take a shot at Drew the other week, I was reminded just how much playing used to fill me up when I lived in that home that was constantly so damn draining.
Living with my parents was a rollercoaster that never stopped.
I knew I grew up more privileged than most other kids.
We had money, a nice house, and I had a private school education.
My mom was your quintessential housewife, while my dad was deep into politics. They expected my grades to be ivy league worthy—that I would end up at Harvard or Yale or somewhere like that. So when I was ten and got a taste of baseball during my physical education class, I convinced them that athleticism would look great on my college applications.
It was all so we would be that picture-perfect family people would vote for when my dad ran for mayor, without a doubt. But the pressure of perfection was heavy, and my struggle to carry it led to a rebellious phase, and instead of the perfect daughter, they ended up with a pregnant one.
And I ended up on the street.
To my parents, disowning me was a better option than the risk of ruining their reputation if the world found out they had a pregnant teenage daughter living under their roof.
