“Yes, not long after my eighteenth birthday. Homeschool. I never attended public school.” For a fleeting moment, resentment darkens the shy lightness in her eyes, and it’s a look I recognize in myself. She’s hiding behind her timid exterior, and the lack of interaction at school may be the reason for her awkwardness. This is why she’s eager to break bad. “I left home shortly after.”
“Where’s home?” I ask, crossing my arms over my chest. “And why did you leave?”
Camilla straightens her posture and stands firm, jutting her chin out. It’s a shallow show of bravery, but it’s what I was looking for to know she has the balls to endure a life on the underbelly of society.
“Claremont, North Carolina.” She flickers between defiance and dread like a light bulb about to burn out. “There was no choice. I would have died had I not left.”
She’s dramatic, but I believe there’s grit behind her coy exterior. Inez and I share a look and a wordless exchange, and it’s clear we’re on the exact same page. Camilla’s the real deal, but she has a lot to learn if she wants to keep up with the likes of us. I hope she has it in her. Otherwise, what wasn’t ruined by her home life will be obliterated by putting a price tag on her body.
With nothing left to say, I excuse myself and pass between Camilla and Inez to my room to prepare for today’s appointment.
“Don’t worry, Cara. I’ll let myself out,” Inez calls after me in an amused tone. In a lower voice for Camilla’s sake, she says, “I swear, that girl will be the end of me. Listen to everything she says.”
I’ve just started to run my bathwater when I hear faint scratching on the door, but it grows louder the longer I take to answer. He deserves to slum it with the new girl for a while.
“Filthy traitor,” I say as he rushes in and runs circles around my feet. His bald spots are filling in, and his rib bones aren’t as noticeable as they were before this little bastard domesticated himself in my home. He does a good job of being close but not in my way, and I don’t mind when he jumps in bed with me at night; he’s a perfect personal heater.
I scratch behind his ear and say, “Don’t forget who gave you this life, Dog.”
Inez may have tipped Camilla off and warned her to keep her distance, or maybe she can take a hint, but she doesn’t bother me while I’m in my room. The door is kept closed, and I don’t hear a peep from the other side. If this arrangement is going to work, she’ll need to make herself scarce and respect my boundaries. We’re not roommates in the conventional sense, and I’d like to make our time together as brief as possible.
If only Talent had caught on as quickly as Dog and Camilla, maybe…
No, Talent isn’t good for me. To consider a life where we share a future is out of this world and can only bring harm. But I find myself thinking about him as I sit in front of my vanity, smoothing my hair into a high ponytail. It’s best we sever ties before we dig ourselves in too deep.
Taming an escort, and nailing a coveted heir sounds like a good time. But it’ll only end in disappointment. Reality would hit us fast, and once the novelty wore off, the truth about how different we are would rip us apart.
Another example of what-not-to-do I picked up from Cricket’s tumultuous relationships. This has everything to do with the circle of dirtbags she rolled with, who spent more time beating and demoralizing her than actually giving a shit about her wellbeing. She repeatedly gave affection to men who smelled like cheap beer and sweat. The first two weeks were always a hurricane of belligerence and lust, where she dreamed about a wedding and often moved us in with a man she barely knew.
“Can you at least attempt to be nice to him, Lydia? Marty’s done a lot for us.” Cricket’s ponytail had come loose, and she wore a white-striped tank top without a bra. We’d recently moved in with her newest boyfriend, and they’d still been in the honeymoon stage. “He wants a relationship with you, baby. It will mean the world to me if you’d give him a chance. Marty might actually be the one.”
Marty was an overweight alcoholic, thirty years older than Cricket, and he had a wandering eye for his girlfriend’s fourteen-year-old daughter. It gave me the creeps, and I pushed my dresser in front of the door at night because I didn’t trust the way he always found an excuse to rub my shoulders or squeeze my knee when my mom wasn’t looking.
“Think about it, you can finally have a father.”
She stayed with Marty longer than the others. As much as I didn’t care for the man, I had my own bed to sleep in and the bathroom we shared had decent water pressure. When we had a steady place to live, I was able to figure out the bus schedule and make it to school more often. Once I accepted that Cricket chose the same type of man over and over, I normalized the daily bouts of overdrinking and screaming. The alternative was spending the night in the Buick until she found a different “Marty” and then it started all over again. What was the point of asking her to choose better?
Marty had been a long-haul truck driver, but his time on the road lessened the longer we stayed. He went from flashing stacks of cash to impress us, to never leaving the house at all. His constant presence was as unnerving as his unwanted touches and lingering stares. On the nights when my mom worked late at the club, I went with her not to be home alone with Marty.
“Why don’t you stay home and make me dinner, sweetheart?” He’d stand in my doorway with a can of beer hanging from his fingertips, red and clammy from high blood pressure.
“Make your own fucking dinner, Marty,” I’d say, shoving my way past him.
I never told my mom how uncomfortable her boyfriend made me feel. He had such a hold on her, I didn’t feel like it would be enough to make her leave. I endured by avoiding the house whenever I could and keeping a knife under my pillow in case he broke through the dresser I still kept in front of the bedroom door. When their relationship started to worsen, she blamed a lot of it on my refusal to treat Marty like a dad.
Little did she know he didn’t want to be my dad.
He wanted to be my daddy.
Once the money ran out and the heat was shut off, Marty hadn’t worked for months but put all the blame on Cricket. She didn’t work hard enough, long enough.
“You’re clearly not making the men in that club happy, Cricket, you know what I mean?” he’d yelled at her one night.
“That’s what you want, Marty? You want me to fuck other men so you can sit on your ass and watch TV all day?”
Marty didn’t watch TV all day. He watched me.
By this point, I’d attended school regularly and managed to make a friend who lived in the same part of town as us. I don’t remember her name or even what she looked like, but her parents were the same or worse than Cricket and Marty, so we were able to run the streets unsupervised.
One night we wanted to catch a horror flick at the dollar movie theater. Normally, some perverted twenty-something year old who cleaned the theater after every showing opened the back door for us if we flashed our tits. He wasn’t working this night, and the club my mom danced at wasn’t far, so we walked over to steal cash from Cricket’s purse.
“Has anyone seen my mom?” I asked around after we arrived at the club.