I should’ve been thinking about bouncing.
Mentally packing up, saying so long to Mom and Dad and Ben and Uncle Brent and Aunt Trude and Sebastian and Melissa and Goldy and my new Sealy extra-comfort bed.
To the entire Kristal house, which someone was warning me I wasn’t safe in.
Lorem.
Who was three fries short of a Happy Meal. Your average internet troll taking time off from Fortnite and the latest rant from PewDiePie.
That’s what I kept telling myself, when I wasn’t telling myself the opposite.
That he knew something.
And was warning me for my own good. (Yeah, I’d decided Lorem was a he, after basically flipping a coin.)
Your friend, he swore.
My grandma used to play this game with me before she became persona non grata—tracing letters on my back and making me guess what she was spelling. I L-O-V-E Y-O-U being her go-to phrase, even as the sharp tip of her fingernail triggered wrenching chills up and down my spine. That should’ve been a lesson—love hurts.
The words on Facebook Messenger had the same effect.
You’re not safe . . .
I couldn’t shake the chill long enough to get warm.
I could hear Mom and Dad whispering about something in the kitchen.
I knew what that something was.
I’d heard them come home—Mom first, walking in sometime after five, then Dad about a quarter to seven—and I’d heard Ben down there being Chatty Cathy. Ben, who spoke about six words a week to them, and it was just like I’d pictured it, minus Becky Ludlow walking in, even though I knew that was just a matter of time—it wouldn’t be the landscaper walking through the front door next time.
Yeah. It was probably time to bounce.
Only I wasn’t going to.
I refused.
For one thing, Mom was making chicken and mashed potatoes again.
“I’m making your favorite tonight, Jenny,” she said cheerily. “How about helping me cook?”
You’re correct. I’d been expecting something else. Something along the lines of:
We need to talk, Jenny . . .
Or:
How could you do this to us, Jenny . . . ?
Or:
We’re calling the police, Jenny . . .
I’m making your favorite hadn’t made the list.
“So how was your day, hon?” Mom asked, taking a frying pan out of the cupboard.
“Yeah, what’d you do all day, Jenny Penny?” Dad said, staring at his iPhone on his way out of the kitchen.
I looked up Ben’s memorial page to get my facts straight and then forgot to log out, and Ben walked in and left a note for me: WHO ARE YOU?
“Not much,” I said.
“I worry about you,” Mom said. “Being by yourself all day.”
“It’s fine.”
It was fine. Everything was fine.
Mom was putting on an apron that said WORLD’S BEST MOM on it, a Mother’s Day present from Ben, I guess, before he began toking weed and leaving threatening notes for me. I was standing by the stove, having been given the job of peeling potatoes and dropping them into the pot of boiling water. When I picked up the first potato—it had those gnarly eyes on it, which makes you wonder why someone ever tried eating a potato in the first place—something even uglier flashed into my head, and I dropped the potato straight onto the floor.
“Sorry,” I said, as I gingerly picked it up.
The closet.
I was suddenly back inside it.
The one off the kitchen, which really made it a pantry.
No.
It wasn’t a closet. It wasn’t a pantry.
It was a cell.
The punishment place.
It’s so dark . . . I’m scared . . . please, I’m so scared . . . please let me out . . . please . . . I won’t misbehave . . . I won’t . . . I promise I won’t . . . Mother, please . . . PLEASE . . . I promise . . . I’ll be good . . .
The day I left, I counted the scratch marks on the back of the closet door. After fifty, I gave up. There was a ripped bag of moldy potatoes sitting on the floor. In the light of day, they looked like things you peel and eat and mash, instead of things you fear. But it was the smell that got me. I associate it with raw terror now. It smells like raw potatoes.
“You okay, hon?” Mom asked me.
I knew how I must’ve looked, which was not okay.
“That time of month,” I said.
“Sorry,” Mom said. “Can I get you some Midol?”
“I’m fine.” My hands were shaking. I hid them behind my back.
“Maybe this wasn’t exactly the best day to ask you to cook. Why don’t you go in the living room and lie down.”
“Honestly, it’s just cramps.”
“You sure?”
Mom was flouring the chicken, dropping the pieces of chicken into egg batter and then gently rolling them into the soft mound of white. Dad was in the living room watching a basketball game— I could hear the play-by-play. I needed to leave this room.
Only I needed to ask a question first.
“Where’s Ben?” I asked.
Mom stopped. She had white flour all over her hands, making it look like she was wearing gloves, the kind women used to wear in pictures from the fifties. “At his friend’s,” she said.
“Everything . . . okay with him?”
A mist of flour was drifting over the center island like a passing cloud.
“You know Ben . . . ,” she said.
Mom and I were cooking dinner. Dad was in the living room watching TV. How was your day, Jenny? they’d asked me. Another normal night in the Kristal house.
“Maybe I will go lie down,” I said.
I had to flee that stench. And the place it’d dragged me back to. Dad was lying on the couch staring at the Knicks game. I needed him to stare at me right this minute. To break down the closet door and rescue me.
“What’s the score?” I asked.
“Knicks down by a thousand,” he said morosely. “It might as well be.”
“Are they any good this year?”
“Not much.”
“Did that guy make a foul?”
“Yeah.”
He remained glued to the game.
I’m here, Dad. Me. Right here.
I’d stretched out on the orange love seat. I hadn’t been aware that my legs were splayed out in a right angle, but something I was aware of is that most times when I wanted attention—from men at least—this is how I got it. It was subconscious, or unconscious, not sure what the difference is exactly, only that it wasn’t something I set out to do but would somehow find myself doing. Like some weird blind reflex. That social worker who’d lectured me in juvie hall had asked me if I knew I was being provocative. Not to her— to Otis, the ancient black guard who’d escorted me into her office. I didn’t know it until she mentioned it. The way I’d slowly sauntered over to the chair, giving Otis a good long look at my ass. She’d thrown in my provocative behavior at the Charnows’ just to prove her point. Mrs. Charnow ratting me out for leaving the bathroom door wide open when I took a shower, just as Mr. Charnow passed by.
It’s understandable, she told me, you were sexualized at a very early age. But it’s not excusable. What happened to you as a child wasn’t your fault, she continued. But acting on it now is.
That’s what I was doing now, I guess, legs wide open enough to provide a peek. Acting on it. Falling into old habits I couldn’t seem to break.
“Did you miss me a lot, Dad?”
That got him to finally look over. And look.
I felt a sudden wave of nausea. Stop.
I quickly tucked my legs up under me, as Dad averted his eyes.
“Sure I did, honey,” Dad said quietly, his gaze directed somewhere over my left shoulder. “Of course I missed you. Why wouldn’t I?”
Fair question. Why wouldn’t a dad miss his daughter, except that I could show him a mom who hadn’t missed hers. I used to sit at the front window and wait for her. I know—real Little Orphan Annie of me—but I honestly kept thinking she was going to show up any minute. Even though they kept saying she wasn’t—that she hadn’t wanted to take care of me anymore, so this was it and I better get used to it. A pang of a memory: eleven years old and watching a TV ad for a silver charm bracelet being hawked for Mother’s Day. Give her a token of your love, each charm something to do with your kid, like a soccer ball or a ballet slipper, and I was wondering what charms would be on my bracelet—a comic book, maybe—and I realized I was forgetting what she looked like, my mom, her actual face, and I asked them why she hadn’t loved me, my mom, just blurted it out like that, and they filled me in, just in case I was still confused on the matter. Oh, your mommy loved you, honey, she just loved Christy better . . .
I’d thought Christy was another girl. They laughed and wrinkled a glassine bag in front of me. Christina, Tina, Chris, Christy, Crystal . . .
“How much?” I asked him, not liking that tremor in my voice, as if the shaking in my hands had spread to the rest of me, wanting to physically sit on top of it. To squelch it.
“What?” he said.
“I never asked you what was it like. How much did you miss me?”
An announcer in a paisley suit was droning away on TV: He is swishing and dishing tonight . . . showing hustle and muscle in the lane . . .
“Very much, sweetheart,” Dad said, looking back over at me. “A lot.”
Now it was my turn to look away. At the blank wall, so he wouldn’t see me reverting into Jobeth. The version who hadn’t been left in that motel parking lot yet. The one who’d grab onto a parent’s leg and refuse to let go.
I wasn’t going to take off.
Consider it a promise.
I’d bounced around long enough. More than a fucking basketball.
There’d been too many years out there. Squatting in junked trailers with roaches. Sleeping in motel beds with snakes.
This was my last stop. My last chance.
Where I had a mom who came in to comfort me in the middle of the night. A dad able to pull pennies out of my ears.
You’re not safe in that house.
Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.
You’re wrong. For once in my life that’s exactly what I was.
Safe.
They don’t exactly have a very good track record of keeping Jenny around, do they?
This one excluded.
I was staying.