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I should have known the fight was coming before it began. I should have seen the signs.
The mid-November afternoon brand of southern California sun slanted into the VanDeer's family room, but I, my dear reader, stood apart from its color and warmth. In the yard beyond, sprinklers only the rich could afford popped out of sod in which only the self-important would invest, brute-forcing green in this sea-blasted desert.
Inside, the VanDeers—in order of birth: mother, one son, and two daughters—sat on the couch, loose-jawed and glaze-eyed before their favorite netcast novella. Mrs. VanDeer had scheduled off for her children's online schooling service that day. Now they were free to watch the rerun marathon leading up to the conclusion of “Xochitl's Xaga.”
There was no room on their couch for me. I wasn't wanted there. I leaned against the family room's entryway and watched the VanDeers ignoring me—mostly. Every few seconds, Clint, the boy, would lift his middle finger at me. The third time he did that, I knotted my arms, and the state-issue HandRight I used for school jabbed my bony hip through the pocket of my uniform jumper. This reminded me of the dictionary letter I hadn't finished reading on the bus ride home. I slipped away from the VanDeers in search of solitude in this, their house.
I wandered into the formal living room, past the foyer rack that held our hats and veils. The windows darkened their tint, deflecting the brunt of the sun's uncontrolled heat. Accordingly, the living room lights rose to their programmed level, draping Mrs. VanDeer's collection of Cherished Hours figurines in a warm glow of rosy adoration. The figurines festooned shelves on the walls, an antique curio cabinet, and the lace runner-topped coffee table.
I crawled under the table, belly-down upon the frost-blue, knuckle-deep carpet. I pulled out my HandRight (forgive me, reader, for treating trademarked names as common nouns, but I'm sure you do the same). I did not need the HR's mirrorshell to curve up, because I had no three-dimensional acties to play. Those would have cost money that the state did not have to spend on entertaining foster children. Instead, all I had were dusty selections from the public domain: encyclopedia entries, folk tales, classics, style manuals.
Today I had nothing better to do than read a dictionary. I'd arrived at the letter “E.” I loved saying its big, mouth-filling words aloud: equiponderate, exegesis, exigent. They tasted like fresh fruit, delicacies that no one but me seemed to appreciate. Absorbed, I was listening to and whisper-mimicking the pronunciation guide when Clint found me. I squeaked when the toe of his shoe reached under the table and jabbed my ribs.
“Ay. Foster kid,” Clint said. “Why aren't you watching the casts in the family room with the rest of us?”
I saw nothing of Clint other than his soccer shoes with the retractable cleats. I curled into the tightest ball I could form without bumping against the bottom of the table.
“Because you're not part of our family,” Clint gloated, his pubescent voice cracking. “That's why.”
I saw his cleats emerge. I'd been kicked with those cleats before. On that day, Clint had told Mrs. VanDeer that my bruises were self-inflicted. Of course Mrs. VanDeer believed him. Why wouldn't she? He was her flesh and blood. I was nothing.
“Get up,” Clint said.
I obeyed, removing as much of myself as possible from the likely trajectory of those cleats. Scurrying to the opposite side of the table, I clutched the HandRight in both hands, using my elbows for leverage against the squishy carpet. When I finally stood before Clint, the coffee table between us, I shielded the HR by bending my shoulders inward.
In the time it had taken me to emerge, Nancy and Jacki, the VanDeer sisters, had decided that Clint and I were more entertaining than “Xochitl.” Jacki, almost her brother's height and just as mouse-haired and dun-faced, stood in the room's pointed archway, her frothy nano-grown lace sleeves folded across her narrow chest, her green eyes glittering with anticipation. Nancy stood at her sister's elbow, looking from Clint to me to Jacki with her long-lashed China-blue eyes. Her wheat-gold curls bounced against her stiff white collar with each jerk of her neck.
Clint flicked a glance at his audience. His smile curled. He reached across and pushed my shoulder back, nearly knocking me off my feet.
“Hey, Slouchie. You slouch like a reject cripple.”
“My name's not Slouchie,” I said quietly. “It's Jane.”
“No, it's not, Slouchie,” he declared, instructing his sisters, “Say hi to Slouchie!”
“Hi, Slouchie!” Nancy giggled, waving her arms in mock welcome. Jacki's eyes only glittered more.
“You can't change my name,” I informed him with all the authority a ten year-old girl can muster when facing a bully four years her elder.
“Can too,” he sneered. “I'm the man of the house. Now give me that HR, Slouchie. It doesn't belong to you. My family pays taxes, so that's my family's HR. That makes it mine.”
“Yeah!” Nancy shouted.
“Give it back, mooch,” Jacki jeered.
I heard no adult footsteps approaching. No one was coming to send me to my room in punishment for “starting” this mess, much less to rescue me. There was no one to protect me but me. I shoved the HR at Clint across the table. He snatched it from me. I backed away several steps.
Clint only laughed harder. “You know what? I learned about Buddhists yesterday. I learned that they were against in vitro embryo development. That's why all the informalized countries squashed 'em. You know what in vitro means, Slouchie?”
Whatever answer I gave would be wrong. I gave none.
He needed none. “That means unclaimed embryos like you. Buddhists think that unnatural things like you don't have souls.”
Lip arching asymmetrically, Clint leaned in towards me. “I like that. I think I'm gonna go join the Buddhists just so I can kill you. It won't be murder, because you're unnatural.”
Without thinking, I said, “The encyclopedia says that Buddhists were peaceful. Would they let you become one?”
Clint's eyes narrowed. He pinched the lower corner of the HR, dense enough to hold a terabyte in those days, between his right thumb and forefinger. He leaned backwards, pulling momentum from his body weight, his knuckles white from the weight of the HR. Then he pitched it at me.
I had time only to yelp in surprise and shift a few centimeters. Instead of hitting me squarely between the eyes, where it had been aimed, its corner caught my left temple. I sat hard on the floor, stunned, eyes swimming and ears ringing. My brain registered the sound of the HR landing past the rug's frontier, skidding across hardwood and cracking open against the tooled baseboards in a confetti starburst of chips.
“What the—?” I heard exclaimed from the family room.
I knew the speaker to be Mrs. VanDeer. I also knew she would blame the broken device on me, just as she would blame my kicked ribs and my swollen temple on me.
Then a warm trickle slid down my left cheek. I wiped at it with my palm, saw my own blood smeared there like a red flag. I lowered my hands in shock back to the carpet, and the fury I had suppressed during my ten years of mistreatment at the VanDeers' hands shot to my extremities. I recognized that I would fail every attempt to please or even be ignored by this family.
I had nothing to lose.
I launched myself at Clint VanDeer. I screamed, kicked, clawed. I leapt over the coffee table, scattering those miniatures in my wake, shattering them to pieces against the lace runner. My plum-sized fists made contact with Clint's chest with high-pitched thuds. Like a wild animal, I dug at his jacket and heard it rip. I tackled him to the ground and began pounding and scratching at his face, jabbing my bony knees into his stomach as hard as I could.
Clint's hands flew up, desperately covering his surprise-wide eyes. His legs drew tight to protect his lower regions, since his short pants did not sport any of the armoring going out of fashion at the time. All the while I howled. I howled like an ambulance siren. I howled for all the times I'd been the one beaten and not permitted to defend myself.
Then I was grabbed by my scalp with one hand and by the bow of my uniform skirt's waist with another. Mrs. VanDeer had arrived to yank me away from her whimpering son.
Mrs. VanDeer cried in pain, grimacing, lurching forward.
I fell to the floor, jerked back up by my hair, still retained in Mrs. VanDeer's hand. She clutched her lumbar with the other. “Abot! Come here, please!”
I doubt Mrs. VanDeer would have asked so nicely had voice recognition protocol not demanded such etiquette. I squirmed to get out of Mrs. VanDeer's grasp, but that only made her tug harder. By the time four and a half foot-tall Abot arrived, my head felt like a split coconut.
Abot was more decorative than anthropomorphic, but her one function was that she could carry things that Mrs. VanDeer couldn't with her bad back. Mrs. VanDeer dropped me, flailing, into Abot's lifting clamps. Abot's grips caught me around both arms, so I kicked and snarled, trying and failing to break free.
“Dear God!” Mrs. VanDeer screeched. “Is she possessed?”
My guardian dusted my germs off of her hands with the antibacterial pomander hanging from the thick gold chain about her even thicker waist. With fingernails genetically and expensively re-engineered to be perfectly pink and flawlessly sharp, she perked the foamy lace crowding about her multiple chins. Her two-carat diamond nose stud reflected chunks of light. Then Mrs. VanDeer's icy eyes fixed on mine with a look that made me stop and shudder.
Pointing one pink arc of a nail tip at me, her bejeweled perks keyring shining behind her knuckle, Mrs. VanDeer said, “Abot, take her to the at-home capsule. Please.”
Terror even more fierce than that inspired by Clint gripped me. “NO!” I screamed. “No, not the capsule! I'll be good! Please, no!”
“Thank you, Abot, that will be all,” Mrs. VanDeer said, the words to send Abot on her way.
The more I fought, the more Abot's clamps tightened. As I was carried off, my eyes captured an image my mind would hold forever: Mrs. VanDeer's smile a sickening rictus, as if nothing could please her more than seeing me on my way to a deathbed.
