I pull on my baggiest hoodie and jeans, so my mother won’t pitch a fit when she gets back from wherever she’s gone.
When I return to the living room, Randall has turned up the volume on the television. Either he turned it down so he could catch me sneaking in the door, or he’s blaring it now to irritate me.
I take my book bag to the dining room table, which is in his sight range. I hate how he watches me.
I angle my chair away from him, spreading out my textbooks and notes. Windsor Academy makes us do a lot more homework than I’m used to. The other kids have been there since Kindergarten. I’ve been struggling so bad that my mother hauled me to the doctor for some stupid medication that’s supposed to help me focus.
It doesn’t help. Actually, it makes me jittery and my hands shake. Worse, it amplifies the problems I already had with lights being too bright and noises being too loud. Even normal sounds from the other students—snapping gum or a pencil tapping against a desk—sound like popcorn exploding inside my ears. It makes me jolt and twitch. Marcus Green calls me “Spaz,” and some of the other kids are picking it up too.
Randall’s blaring baseball game is driving me nuts. Every crack of the ball, every abrupt roar of the crowd, sets my teeth on edge. Even though I’m not supposed to wear headphones around him, I sneak one of the buds out of my pocket and slip it into my right ear, under my hair.
That helps a little.
I labor away on my chemistry assignment. We’re supposed to draw a diagram of photosynthesis, something I’m actually enjoying. I spend much longer than necessary sketching out the details of the plant cell, filling in the sun, the leaves, and the chloroplast with colored pencils.
Randall hauls himself out of the recliner to get another beer from the fridge. He comes back with two.
“Where’s Mom?” I ask him nervously.
“With Leslie,” he grunts, sinking back down in the chair.
That’s not good. Randall detests Leslie. Every time my mother goes over to Leslie’s house, she comes home tipsy, making raunchy jokes. Last time she ran her car into the corner of our garage.
Leslie is my mother’s oldest friend. They used to work together at The French Maid. My mother told Randall she was a cocktail waitress, but from the pictures in Leslie’s old Facebook albums, I’m pretty sure they were both strippers. This was before I was born.
The longer my mother stays at Leslie’s house, the angrier Randall will become. While I’m trapped here with him.
Once I switch over to math homework, baseball gets even harder to ignore. Knowing it’s a risk, I slip in my other earbud, turning my music up loud to drown out the game.
I’m just starting to grasp the properties of parallelism when my earbuds are wrenched out of my ears.
I leap out of my chair, almost tripping over my feet trying to get away from Randall. He’s holding my headphones by their cord, his eyes so bloodshot and his face so congested that I realize in an instant that he’s quietly been growing drunk while I was working over here, deaf and oblivious.
“I’m trying to talk to you,” he snarls.
“I’m sorry,” I gasp, holding up my hands in front of me, helplessly, desperately.
Randall’s fists ball at his sides. I have no idea how inebriated he is, or how angry. He doesn’t drink as much as my mother, but when he does, it can get just as ugly.
Luckily, he’s not yet swaying on his feet.
“You know the rules,” he snarls.
He takes my iPod and locks it in the living room cabinet.
I want to cry.
Who knows how long he’ll keep it in there. I’ll have no music, none at all, until he deigns to give it back to me.
I don’t bother to beg—I already know that doesn’t work.
And now Randall’s out of his chair. Now he’s focused on me.
“Your mother’s obviously not coming home for dinner,” he grunts. “You’re going to have to make it.”
I don’t know how to cook. No one cooks with regularity in this house. Sometimes my mother does it, grudgingly. More often Randall orders in, or we scrounge leftovers out of the fridge.
After rummaging frantically into the cabinets and the fridge, I decide on spaghetti.
Before I’ve even filled the pot with water, Randall is already barking criticism at me from the kitchen doorway.
“That’s not enough water.”
“Why isn’t it boiling yet?”
“No salt? Perfect—assuming you want your spaghetti bland as plaster.”
“Don’t break the noodles, are you fucking stupid?”
He doesn’t tell me what I should be doing. How am I supposed to make the noodles fit into the pot when they’re too long and apparently can’t be broken? Desperately, I poke them with a spoon, trying to get them to sink beneath the bubbling water.
The noodles bend and I’m able to close the lid of the pot. Moments later, it boils over, dousing the stove top in foaming pasta water.
“You fucking idiot!” Randall roars.
He yanks the lid off the pot, turning the heat down.
I want to scream at him to do it himself if he’s such a culinary genius. Because I want to keep my head on my shoulders, I bite my lip until it’s bleeding, hiding my face in the fridge as I search for the shaker of Parmesan cheese.
Randall has lapsed into sullen silence, furiously wrenching the lid off the jar of sauce and dumping it into the pot so hard that it splashes out on the kitchen tiles.
“Clean that up,” he orders.
I have to get down on my hands and knees to mop up the sauce with a damp paper towel. I can feel him watching me crawl around, wiping up every last spatter.
I have a horrible feeling that he’s angry enough to tip that pot of boiling noodles onto my back. As quickly as I can, I finish cleaning and throw away the paper towels.
I set the table for three, hoping, praying, that my mother is on her way home.
My throat is too tight to eat. Randall takes one bite and then spits the noodles out and shoves away his plate.
“Tastes like fucking play-dough,” he snarls. “How much salt did you put in there?”
“I don’t know,” I sob miserably.
He glowers at me, his pale, piggy eyes almost disappearing beneath the heavy shelf of his brow.
“You’re as useless as your mother. The only thing on this earth she’s good at is sucking cock. Did you know that, Mara? Did you know your mother is a world-class cocksucker?”
There’s no answer to this that won’t enrage him. All I can do is stare at my plate, guts churning, hands shaking in my lap.
“How do you think a woman gets good at that?” he demands.
When I remain silent, he slams his fists against the table top, making me jump.
“ANSWER ME!”
“I don’t know,” I say quietly.
“Practice, Mara. So much practice. I should have known the first time she put my cock in her mouth, looking up at me, smiling like a professional. I should have known then she was nothing but a whore.”
The thought of Randall’s wrinkly old cock brings me to the edge of vomiting. I have to swallow down the bile, my eyes fixed firmly on my plate. This is the only form of resistance now—staying quiet. Ignoring him. Not giving him anything that will justify what he actually wants to do.