3

 

 

 

 

3

 

 

Where we are now, this town has been home for a touch over two weeks. It’s a moderate size suburban square, sprawling, kinda poor but not trash-torn. There’s a water tower up on one of the higher hills, which you can see from almost everywhere around. It doesn’t look so big from a distance, though it must be, or it wouldn’t loom like that. Metal bars and splayed legs. A dome-topped cage held high. The high street isn’t long but it snakes around in sections, hiding the post office behind the supermarket, the library behind the mechanics. I don’t know where the schools are yet—maybe tucked farther back.

My mother says this town is a perfect ‘launch pad’. Small, safe. Separate, but connected. It has a coach depot and a train line and a highway running by. It’s a place with many exits. No locked doors. We live like rumors in towns like this. Sketch-book versions of ourselves with scratched-out features and unknown names. Vague address, no kin. This is the kind of town we get to stay in long enough to find a rhythm, feel familiar. Settle down on shallow roots. The type of weed that tears out with one easy tug, and barely turns the soil. Some towns like this, we get close to forgetting we’re not really supposed to stay. Staying too long makes leaving difficult, like the way leaving Auntie Clem was difficult.

Our friend here’s name is Susie. I want to tell him he’s got a girl’s name, but I don’t know if that would be safe. How he would react. His eyes are soft when he looks at me, but I’ve seen him clenching his hands when he’s stressed, pushed, unsure. They open and shut in slow-grasp spasms, like he’s looking for something lost in the air around his hips.

Hey, Little Kitten, he calls me. Darling. Pretty One. Doll.

He says these names smirking like a friend, like a joke, hands on his hips, his shoulder shrugging like, Shucks. There’s nothing sharp in his eyes, and the way he says it makes me giggle, or at least smile. That smirk of his, it’s the safe type. So far.

“You could be your mom’s sister,” he said the day we first met. “Her baby half-sister. Same eyes, same skin, same hair. Guess maybe it’s better in some ways, to be so close in age? Huh?”

What was he seeing in his mind? Pillow fights and makeovers. Me and her doing each other’s nails, wearing each other’s clothes? Blending into each other the way day moves into night? What Susie imagines about my mother and me is almost true, but the parts he doesn’t see are truer.

“She’s still my mom,” I told him.

“Yes she is, Little Miss,” he said. “But what does that make me?”

It sounds like he’s flirting, but I don’t think he is. To me it sounds more like stuff he says to make sure I don’t feel left out. Maybe he’s right, and this is something I need. The way he is when they’re in the same room together pushes me to the edges, to a place that isn’t really the outside but feels as good as. Like I’m mostly forgotten in this time. Watching him and my mom, it makes my stomach clench.

I don’t say much to Susie yet. New friends are harder to read. They might start off nice, easy-going, even fun, but sometimes they have a way of changing. It can start as small as a twitch. A flash. The way they show the thoughts within. A tensing somewhere supposed to be hidden, flickering to the front. Too quick to catch if you’re not watching for it.

I’ve been there before.

Uncle Dan, it was the way he raised his index finger at me one day when he caught me going through his magazines. Babes with bulbous breasts and plastic eyelashes, fingers making Vs between their legs to show the pink inside. Their dumb doll faces oblivious to all the scribbling he’d done on their bodies, eyes scratched out and sternums split with red and black pens. Scissor stitch-marks around their nipples, red ink spirals to show the skin peeling back. He’d pressed down so hard he’d torn the paper in places. He caught me when he wasn’t supposed to. His index finger up, stiff and trembling. So desperate to scream at me, he sputtered for a while first. That kind of anger, it has a lot to do with shame.

Uncle Vern, it was in the tilt of his head while he watched me watch TV. Smiling like I was a puppy asleep on the carpet, when really I was just cross-legged on the floor, gaping at the infomercials. When really I was trying to learn about knives, how they cut through leather boots and tin cans like nothing can scratch their metal. When I was thinking how great it would be to have a knife like that of my own. His smile was soft and sappy. The shadows on his face shifting as the light from the TV flickered bright, then dark, and then back again. I saw it all when I turned to look at him, and he stared back at me for the longest time, his hand trembling on his belt buckle, fingers nudging at the tongue. He only looked away in the end because I wouldn’t. Staring back at him, thinking about knives while the glare from the TV burned the side of my face.

With Uncle Steve, it was in the first moment when he held his hand out for me to shake. Wrapped his fingers over mine with the smell of bleach and dirty skin. His yellow-toothed grin opening above my head.

I don’t like him I don’t like him I don’t like him.

I don’t know why or how I decided so fast. I was too young back then. I didn’t know the things I know now.

Susie isn’t anything like these other men. I don’t know why my mother chose him, but Susie let her choose him, so in some way he must be like the others—or she wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here. We’d be catching trains inland, we’d be hitchhiking out of the hills. I wouldn’t be sleeping on his couch every night with a blanket clenched around my body, which smells like cigarette smoke. I wouldn’t be lying awake listening to those staccato slapping sounds, the squeaking bed, those overblown moans coming from the next room. I wouldn’t be lying awake all those hours afterward, listening for the sound of bare feet stepping softly down the passage toward me.