CHAPTER 8

“I’m not sure if it was him,” Sam said. “There were 4 people with his name. Two of them were private and had no picture. I sent them both a message.”

“And?”

Sam shook his head.

“I haven’t heard anything back.”

“Dad would not be on Facebook.”

“You don’t know that,” he answered, once again defensive.

I sighed and walked over to my bed and lay down. I stared up at the yellowing ceiling, paint peeling, and wondered how we all had reached this point. There were towns they’d been happy in, even times when their mom seemed almost happy. Like when she was dating that guy. Happy enough, at least, to leave me alone.

There were towns, like the last one, where Sam and I both made a few good friends, where it seemed like they might actually stay—at least long enough to graduate in one place. And then it all seemed to turn so fast. Packing again. Saying goodbyes. Was it too much to ask for a normal childhood?

“I could move back to Oakville,” Sam said suddenly, interrupting her thoughts. Their last town. It was uncanny how he always knew exactly what I was thinking. “I could stay with friends.”

The day was getting to me. It was just too much. I wasn’t thinking clearly, and in my frustration, what I was hearing was that Sam was getting ready to abandon me, too, that he didn’t really care about me anymore.

“Then go!” I suddenly snapped, without meaning to. It was as if someone else had said it. I heard the harshness in my own voice, and immediately regretted it.

Why did I just have to blurt things out like that? Why couldn’t I control myself?

If I’d been in a better mood, if I’d been calmer and hadn’t had so much thrown at me at once, I wouldn’t have said it. Or I would have been nicer. I would have said something like, I know what you’re trying to say is that you’d never leave this place, no matter how bad it got, because you wouldn’t leave me alone to deal with all this. And I love you for it. And I’d never abandon you either. In this messed up childhood of ours, at least we have each other. Instead, my mood had gotten the worst of me. Instead, I acted selfish, and snapped.

I sat up and could see the hurt etched on his face. I wanted to take it back, to say I was sorry, but I was just too overwhelmed. Somehow, I couldn’t get myself to open my mouth.

In the silence, Sam slowly stood up from my desk chair and exited the room, gently closing the door behind him.

Idiot, I thought. You’re such an idiot. Why do you have to treat him the same way Mom treats you?

I lay back down, staring at the ceiling. I realized that there was another reason I snapped. He’d interrupted my thoughts, and he’d done so just at a moment when they were turning for the worse. A dark thought had crossed my mind, and he’d cut me off before I’d had a chance to resolve it.

Her mom‘s ex-boyfriend. Three towns ago. It had been the one time her mom had actually seemed happy. Frank. 50. Short, beefy, balding. Thick as a log. Smelled like cheap cologne. I had been 16.

I had been standing in the tiny laundry room, folding my clothes, when Frank appeared at the door. He was such a creep, always staring at me. He reached down and picked up a pair of my underwear, and I could feel my cheeks flush in embarrassment and anger. He held them up and grinned.

“Dropped these,” he said, grinning. I snatched them out of his hands.

“What do you want?” I snapped back.

“Is that any way to talk to your new step-dad?”

He took a step closer.

“You’re not my step-dad,” I said.

He grinned.

“But I will be—soon.”

I tried to go back to folding my clothes, but he took another step closer. Too close. My heart pounded in my chest.

“I think it’s time we got to know each other a little bit better,” he’d said, removing his belt. “Don’t you?”

Horrified, I tried to squeeze past him and out the door of the small room, but as I did, he blocked my way, and roughly grabbed me and slammed my back against the wall.

That’s when it happened.

A rage had flooded through me. A rage unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I felt my body heating up, on fire, from my toes to my scalp. As he approached me, I jumped straight up and kicked him, planting both feet squarely on his chest.

Despite being a third of his size, he flew backwards through the door, cracking the wood off its hinges, and kept going, ten feet into the next room. It was as if a cannon had blasted him through the house.

I had stood there, trembling. I had never been a violent person, had never so much as punched someone. Moreover, I was not that big, or strong. How had I known how to kick him like that? How had I even had the strength to do it? I had never seen anyone—much less a grown man—go flying through the air or shatter a door. Where had my strength come from?

I walked over to him and stood over him.

He was knocked out cold, flat on his back. I wondered if I’d killed him. But at that moment, the rage still filling me, I didn’t really care. I was more worried about myself, about who—or what—I really was.

I never saw Frank again. He broke up with my mom the next day, and never came back. My mom had suspected something happened between the two of us, but I never said a word. She did, though, blame me for the breakup, for ruining the one happy time in her life. And she hadn’t stopped blaming me since.

I looked back up at my peeling ceiling, heart pounding all over again. I thought of today’s rage, and wondered if the two episodes were connected. I had always assumed that Frank had just been a crazy, isolated incident, some weird burst of strength. But now I wondered if it was something more. Was there some kind of power inside of me? Was I some kind of freak?

Who was I?