IT’S BEEN TWO months since I got home. The other day, I spent my birthday under the covers, rocking and crying. JuJu don’t like how things is going. She walk in my room from one window to the next, pulling up shades, letting in light. “You home, safe. He can’t get to you no more.”

I focus on all the green crayon-like colors in my room—one’s in the rug beside my bed, leaves on my bedspread, different color green markers in a cup on my desk. “I’m fine, JuJu.”

I go back to finding colors. She wanna hold me to a deal she made with me. I get another month to get my own self together. If I ain’t right in the head after that, she taking me to one of them trauma centers. “I been reading about sex trafficking. And I’m just gonna say it, Char—that’s what he done—stole you, raped you, sold you.” JuJu wrap her arms around me.

“No, I wasn’t. No, he didn’t.” I shake my head and don’t stop. “They paid Daddy.”

“He ain’t your daddy.”

“He paid me. It was business, that’s all. Anyhow, he had to teach me a lesson. I’m hardheaded, he said it. You always said it too.”

“I was stupid, saying them things. Letting men—come to the house staying day and night drinking and eyeing you.”

I lift my hands, and cover her cheeks and mouth. “They never done nothing to me here at home, JuJu. And we had to eat and pay rent. I don’t blame you. I never blamed you.”

Whatever happened to me out there wasn’t my fault, she says. None of it.

“But I feel like it was.” I hug her so tight we seem like one person.

“If I had done better by you—”

I wipe her tears with my fingers, dry my fingers on my jeans. “Some girls only learn the hard way.” Them Daddy’s words, JuJu’s sometimes too.

“That’s why you got to go see somebody.” Her words come out soaking wet with tears. “Because he got in your head. Left his trash there, his evil ways and ideas. Violated you.”

I break down when she say that word. I’m not smart, but I know what it means. “If I go to a trauma center or therapist, they’ll call the police. They’ll lock him up.”

“Why you still care about him?”

I yell like she’s yelling. “There’s other girls there who got nobody else but him! No sisters who want them! No houses to go to! Nothing! And I left ’em, JuJu. It’s my fault. Everything is my fault—even Cricket being gone.”

Holding me, she remind me that I’m home, hers, and she won’t let nothing bad happen to me ever again.

Grown-ups promise you stuff like that, when they shouldn’t. ’Cause they can’t keep their word with people like him out here. Only they don’t know that. So, I promise my sister that I will try harder to get better to be different, and get back to being the old Charlese. It’s what she wants to hear.