Roger Murphy is one of the biggest drug dealers in Plexton and I’ve seen his ugly face—all puffy and red with an overgrown mustache and beard—all too often at my mother’s trailer. She might claim she’s nothing more than a stripper to the cops who bust her every once in a while, but I know the truth. There’s no way she can afford Roger’s shit from what she makes at the club.
Roger grins as he steps away from the Cadillac that's parked halfway on the grass. “Just stopped by to see yer momma,” he says. His belly jiggles as he moves, the whole middle of him rounded like a pregnant woman. He’s packing the same rot beneath his skin just like Patricia. His teeth are cracked and yellowed with age and drugs. His hair, straggly and limp. And as he gets closer, I can smell the sweet metallic odor that gives me an answer to my earlier unspoken question. Well, at least now I know where she got the cocaine.
“She’s asleep,” I state.
He strokes a grubby hand down his unkempt beard, fat fingers catching in the snarls and yanking free a moment later. “Well, that’s too bad. Cuz you see, I came to pick up payment for my last … delivery for her.”
Dread sinks into my guts, twisting something foul and sharp into my abdomen and making it bleed on the inside. “She’s inside,” I say without inflection, “wake her up if you want. I don’t care.” I finish my way down the concrete steps and take slow measured strides towards the end of the driveway. “I’ve gotta get to school.”
Don’t look at him, I tell myself. Keep walking.
Roger’s hand reaches out and grabs ahold of my arm as I move to pass by him. My body stiffens. Rage seeps from my pores. He's touching me. Fucking touching me and I don't like it. I look down at where his hand rests against my bicep. “Actually,” he starts, “I think we should go wake her up together, don’t you? I want to make sure my other payment is cleared up.”
I try to jerk my arm from his grasp, and when I fail to break his grip, something electric moves through me—a stinging sensation. Fear. I push it down. Shoving it deep into the recesses of my soul and stomping it into submission. I'm Avalon Manning, I tell myself. I fear nothing and no one. Doesn’t matter if the words are a lie, they make my back straighten and my nerves stop jumping around beneath my skin. “No, I don’t,” I say through gritted teeth. “And I don’t have any money. Patricia does. Figure it out with her.”
He eyes me for a moment. “Ya know, li’l runt,” he says, his fingers growing lax on my upper arm. “I ain’t ever met another kid who talks ‘bout their mom like that. Yer pretty grown, ain’t ya. Ya actin’ all womanly now. Telling me what to do and shit. Only bitches who ever do that are the ones suckin’ my cock.”
I grimace in disgust. That will never be me, I think.
“How old is you again?” he asks.
“Fourteen.” Too fucking young for his old eyes to be looking at me the way that he is.
He uses his free hand to once again stroke his beard as he hums in his throat. I want nothing more than to rip myself away from him, but I'm not stupid enough to think that he didn't loosen his grip on purpose. He's waiting for something. Is he waiting for me to do exactly what I want to do? Pry myself from his grasp and run? The screen door behind me squeaks as it's pushed open. Against my will, relief pours through me. Hope. Patricia is a shit mom, but if she’s here, maybe she’ll make sure he doesn’t force me back inside.
I look back, but her gaze isn’t on me. It’s on Roger and her eyes are alive with something grotesque. All at once, my relief shrivels into nothing along with my hope. She’s not out here to fucking save me. She’s here for what he can give her. And if he offered her enough drugs, she’d probably offer me up to him like a fat turkey on Thanksgiving Day. It’s a wonder she hasn’t forced the issue yet. Disgust whips through me.
“Roger?” Patricia’s voice is a repulsive purr, but finally, Roger’s hand drops away from me completely and I’m able to push back the urge to gouge his eyes out with my dull fingernails until it doesn’t even register anymore. “Do you have what I need?”
Roger looks me over once more and slides his fat tongue along the length of his bottom lip before lifting his gaze to meet hers. “Yeah, baby,” he says, striding forward. “I’ve got everything ya need.”
“Avalon.” I stop when my mother calls my name and look back. “No more crawling in through your window. If you’re coming home tonight, use the front door. If you break the window, you’re paying for it.”
Come through the front door and see her in all her naked disgusting glory, she means, while Roger or one of his friends pounds into her dried out pussy. In response, I flip her off and keep walking. But even as Roger goes into the trailer and the door shuts behind both him and Patricia, my heart still beats rapidly, an unsteady tune in my chest. Fear is the presence of powerlessness, and for girls like me—without a single fucking person to give a shit if they live or die—it’s always present.
I hate it. I hate it with every fiber of my being. It makes something sinister and disgusting curdle in my gut. A wrath unlike any other. It makes me want to walk into Patricia’s trailer and take one of the knives from the kitchen block and slit Roger’s throat when he snorts a line of cocaine off of the dirty glass of the coffee table. That’s not exactly the image a fourteen-year-old girl is supposed to carry with her. It’s not something that should make her smile—but smile I do.
Around these parts, Roger's a baller. He has the drugs. He has the money. He has the authority.
I have absolutely none.
But even in death, he and I are the same. Rich. Poor. Man. Woman. Doesn’t matter.
Clenching my hand into a fist, my nails dig into the flesh of my palm. I wait for the moment that my nails break skin and blood coats my hand. I feel the pain. I suck it in and I let it blend into the other sensations creeping through my body. The pounding of my heart slows. The tingling prickle of numbing anger recedes into the darkest depths of my mind.
I lied. I do hate her. I hate her. I hate her. I. HATE. HER.
And I hate the fact that I do even more. Because kids aren’t supposed to hate their parents, and parents aren’t supposed to threaten to whore out their kids. There’s so much hatred inside of me that it’s burning me from the inside out. That’s when I realize that I’m already so close to being just like Patricia. I’m standing on an edge of no return. One slip and I’ll fall down the dark hole that she probably did years ago before she even had me, and ten years from now, I’ll either be dead or still here—in this fucking town, sleeping in that fucking trailer. Except then, I’ll have a kid of my own from a man who I won’t even remember.
Bile coats my throat as I stop at the edge of the street, the bright yellow school bus passing across the road and turning down until it curves around to my stop. The image of myself is so real in my mind. And even though I look nothing like Patricia, I can see only her in everything I might do. My heart begins to race.
I can’t let myself. Hot tears burn in the backs of my eyes, and I suck them back, refusing to let them fall. Refusing to be weak like her. I’m never going to let a man like Roger Murphy touch me again without my permission. If he tries, then I’ll kill him. It’s as simple as that.