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So much worse.
And that seemed impossible, because it was already going to be bad. I knew that was the case when Jimmy hadn’t quite had enough to drink just yet. Generally, a bit of alcohol mellowed him out enough that he either didn’t become as bothered by my presence, or he was simply too far gone to do anything about it.
The back of his hand connected with my face again. This time, the force of it sent my head in the opposite direction.
“Answer me, you dumb bitch,” he shouted. “Do you think I care how you feel?”
“No,” I rasped.
He hit me again. “What did you say?”
Damn it. I forgot.
“No, sir,” I corrected myself.
“That’s right. You’re living in this house; you’ll show some respect,” he warned me.
If I didn’t think it’d get me into any trouble, I might have rolled my eyes. Jimmy didn’t pay for this house. He barely scrounged up enough money to buy the drugs and alcohol he and my mother consumed. Food was a treat, and I was lucky to be able to eat something at least once a day.
The only reason Jimmy was here, the only reason any of us were here, was because my mother’s parents had given her their house when they died while she was pregnant with me. That might have been the only act of real love I’d ever experienced over the course of my life.
I had a place to live because people who were my blood relatives that I’d never met made sure of it. And to some extent, I guess my mother had shown me some scraps of love and affection over the years. I was fourteen, so she hadn’t neglected me so much that I didn’t make it to this age.
But it hadn’t been easy, that much was for sure.
For a long time, it had been just the two of us, but right around the time I was five or six years old, my mom met Jimmy. She’d been working as a waitress at a truck stop diner, and he came in one night. He told her the sad story of how he wound up in our small Pennsylvania town after leaving his home in Alabama. He claimed his mom was originally from the area, and after she died, he needed to come back and learn all about where he came from.
My mom ate up his story and invited him to stay with us while he searched for whatever he was trying to find. Needless to say, it had been years, and I still didn’t know a damn thing about Jimmy’s mom.
If my mom hadn’t realized she’d been duped, I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. She was supposed to be looking out for me, and it wasn’t more than two years of Jimmy living with us that my mom started showing me just how little she cared for my well-being. Jimmy married my mom, but I doubted he truly loved her.
It was all part of his plan to stake his claim to anything of value that she had. And when it came to discipline, my mother didn’t hide the fact that she believed he had just as much right to discipline me as she did.
But Jimmy’s brand of discipline was far worse than my mother’s could have ever been. Because where she’d share in a nasty way what I’d done wrong in cases where it might have actually been warranted before essentially giving me the silent treatment, Jimmy would scream and yell and get physical when I hadn’t done a single thing to justify that kind of reaction from him.
“Now, I’m going to ask you one more time,” Jimmy started again. “Why weren’t you here after school?”
“Because I had to take a make-up test in my English class,” I explained.
“Did you fail it the first time?” he questioned me, the sound of his voice grating on my nerves.
I shook my head. “No.”
“So, why did you have to take a test after school?”
The guy was such a moron. How he couldn’t put two and two together was beyond me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t say any of that to him unless I wanted to put myself in a worse position than I was already.
“Because I missed school on the day the test was initially given,” I answered, wondering if he’d recall why I missed school.
“Did you skip class?” he asked.
Apparently, I was giving the man far too much credit. He wouldn’t recognize anything that was staring him right in the face. “No, I didn’t skip. I just couldn’t go to school on the day of the test.”
Confusion washed over him, and I could see he legitimately had no idea why I would have missed a day of school. “You haven’t been sick,” he noted.
I shook my head again. “No. But I had a black eye, so my mom told me I wasn’t allowed to go into school that day. She didn’t want me to get you into any trouble.”
As though he believed he didn’t have a single thing to worry about, as though he hadn’t heard a word that had just come out of my mouth, Jimmy moved closer to me and shot me a menacing look. “Are you saying it’s my fault that you weren’t home from school on time today?”
