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  “Thank you,” I said, quietly. Earnestly.

  She looked away.

  I didn’t know what had caused the sudden sympathy, but I was afraid to say anything else, to disturb the fragile moment of peace.

  When my father got to the kitchen, he stopped.

  “You left the dishes for me?” he called over his shoulder.

  I knew that tone.

  Shit.

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “For Kandy, then? For Karla?” he called.

  I shook my head.

  “No, sir,” I said.

  I had wanted to watch TV with my sisters. Was that so fucking wrong?

  “Tabitha, come with me,” he said. “We need to have a talk about respect. I am going to respect you enough to have it privately.”

  I looked at my sisters, giving them a sunny smile. It didn't meet my eyes, but I hoped that they were too young still to realize that. I hoped.

  My feet led me after my father, up the stairs, in the last light from the enormous window over our front door.

  When we got into my bedroom, it wasn’t that his body language changed. That would have been easier, somehow, giving me something to expect, some cue to watch out for. He relaxed a bit, his eyes sparkled with the same easy humor. The coldness behind the humor didn’t increase. It was just… still there.

  He still looked like the Daddy the two little girls adored, but I knew that he was going to hurt me.

  “Give me my shit back,” he said.

  I handed him the baggie.

  Tense as a bowstring, I was still glad to get it away from me.

  “You live rent-free,” he said. “Do the fucking dishes. End of lecture.”

  I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  He made no move to leave, so neither did I. He just stood there, looking at me. Eying me up and down.

  “As soon as Kandy leaves, I’m out of here,” he said. “I’ll be back Sunday. Tell them you saw me in the morning, all that shit.”

  I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  I dug my sharp thumbnail into my palm. It was so, so, so important that I didn’t look too happy about that, or he’d stay just to spite me. I needed to know that he would go. We’d have fun without him. We hadn’t had a weekend without him in months.

  He nodded, turned, and left the room, stomping down the stairs.

  Before I joined them, I sat on the edge of my bed, shaking and crying a little. I didn’t know if I was relieved - or just afraid of Tuesday.

  When I woke up on Tuesday morning to my father shaking my shoulder, I knew I had maybe two minutes to get ready.

  He was already dressed, and his eyebrows were raised in a sardonic challenge.

  I didn’t even wait for the door to close behind him before dashing to my closet and yanking off my thin pajama shirt.

  My fingers had to wake up, I was wasting precious seconds getting my bra on. No time to change out of my sleep shorts. I simply pulled the dress I’d picked out Monday night on over my head.

  Barefoot, I padded down the stairs, nearly tripping twice, clutching the railing to stop me from falling. Last thing I needed was a twisted ankle.

  Even only taking the time to grab the cloth sacks I’d left in the hall closet, I barely got in before he had gotten out of the driveway, opening the door and jumping in, careful not to crush my feet under the moving wheels in the pre-dawn light.

  My father’s truck was white, with the logo of his business - “LOWE INC: SERVICE THAT CARES” - on both doors and the back panel. He said that that truck was how he showed his face to the world, and he was fanatical about it.

  Every Monday morning, he took it to a professional car wash, and every Thursday, he got a drive-through touch-up when he got gas. Every night, no matter how late he got home, when I heard the garage door open, I had to head down and clean out the inside.

  Once, I’d tried to skip the daily vacuuming, and he’d beaten me with the cord until I bled.

  I shivered.

  I hated that truck.

  Even when we pulled up to campus after a silent drive, it felt like a trick.

  My day started three hours before any of the buildings opened, and got worse from there.

  There was nowhere I could sit and curl up to doze. I’d been planning to do that in the library. I should have realized that it didn’t open until nine.

  One small building did open at eight, but when I filed in with the rest of the students who had congregated with bleary eyes, I realized quickly that this was where they shoved early-morning classes, so they only had to open one building.

  No open offices, no student lounges, no vending machines.

  Since it had been two hours and I’d already drunk my bottle of water, I did at least get to refill it at a water fountain and have a pee, but when I was done, I left. All of the classrooms were in use. I had started to get funny looks.

  So, back outside, to the chilly brick benches that made my butt go numb.

  I had eaten half my food, I hadn’t gotten anything done - too little light, at first, then, too damn uncomfortable - and I still had ten hours left on campus.

  Maybe my father didn’t have to do anything extra to make this totally miserable. I bet he knew it, too.

  If he were the type of father that he pretended to be, he would have looped back after his first calls and dropped me off on campus at nine or ten, instead of before six o’clock in the fucking morning. He had plenty of time, he went back to the house regularly to get high or have a nap or just check in on me.

  By the time I got to the writing center, my feet were sore, my stomach was grumbling, and a nice headache was starting behind my eyes.

  I waited around ten minutes, filled up my water again. I didn’t want to march into there at the stroke of nine, that wasn’t the way to get professors to like you.

  When I walked in and made a quick scan of the room, I realized I had made a big fucking mistake.

  None of the people in there, behind desks, sitting on couches, were any older than me.

  I should have known that a community college wouldn’t have the money to pay professors to show up for hours.

  Just… students.

  Other students.

  I wanted to turn and get the hell out of there, but my feet were locked in place. The muscles of my legs, tight and screaming, seemed to be telling me ‘we waited hours for this, we’re not going nowhere.’

  Not even my legs knew any proper grammar. I was so doomed.

  I should just drop out now.

  A guy with curly light hair nudged the girl sitting next to him on the couch, and she looked up, finding me immediately and grinning cheerfully. As she hopped up from the couch, her purple shirt came untucked from her jeans, falling in loose folds around her slender waist. She adjusted it as she walked over to me, waving one hand in a cheerful, friendly way that I wished I could match.

  “Here for writing help?” she asked.

  I managed a small nod.

  “Paper due? Or just being proactive?”

  “Paper due,” I admitted. “Tomorrow.”

  She laughed out loud. “At least it wasn’t due yesterday! That’s what I’m used to hearing.”

  I hesitated, looking down.

  This girl’s hands weren’t cold and chapped like mine. They were smooth and unlined, just slightly plump. Her nails were very clean. Not long, not painted, but they caught the light and had nothing to hide.

  This was what my professors had told me to do, though.

  This was what they thought would help.

  “I can’t really write,” I said. “My professors keep saying that if they sat down and talk to me, they could give me a passing grade, but my essays are…”

  “Not as eloquent?” the girl asked.

  I nodded.

  Sure. Eloquent. Because that was a word people actually used.

  “Okay, we have study rooms in the back. Will you print out your paper and then meet be back here?”

  “Oh, u
m, one second,” I said. I put my lime green backpack on the desk and opened the biggest pocket, careful to hold the zipper in just the right way so the teeth actually fit together, and stop the zip before the duct tape. That gave me just enough space to pull out the pages, only a little creased, stapled together.

  “It’s supposed to be four pages,” I said, miserably.

  “Okay, cool, looks like you have plenty to work with,” she said, flipping through the sheets. “There’s, what, a dozen pages?”

  I nodded.

  Sometimes I hoped that if I couldn’t prove to my professors I was actually trying any other way, I could hammer it home with sheer length.

  The other girl - Miranda - waved me along ahead of her and herded me through to a little room like a sheepdog puppy. I almost ran into three different people and a coffee machine, turning quickly at her direction.

  The little room was stark. Not quite a bare bulb and dust, but only a little more.

  “Okay, so, let’s get started,” she said. “Want me to read over it with you, or without you?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. “Which do you think is better?”

  “Let’s try together!” she said. “If that’s not working for you, we can switch back the other way!”

  She was one of the most enthusiastic people I’d ever met. Would she ever settle down? How did she sleep?

  We hadn’t even gotten three lines in when she put the paper down.

  “Okay, please don’t take this the wrong way, but have you ever… learned grammar?” she said. “Shit, that wasn’t tactful. Has anyone ever taught you…”

  She trailed off.

  I noticed that some of her over-the-top manner seemed to have switched off.

  “No,” I said. “One year in high school, my English teacher burst into tears and walked out. We had a sub the rest of the year. I was the only one to pass the end-of-year test, and… it was barely.”

  “Shit,” she said.

  She settled back in her chair, relaxing a bit.

  “Okay, you aren’t going to report me if I’m not a chipper little chipmunk, right?”

  “No way,” I said.

  “Sweet. My boss is nuts for cheerfulness.”

  “Oh, thank God,” I said.

  The perfect clean nails and glowing shampoo-commercial hair were bad enough, her glassy smiles had had me about ready to run. Miranda disappeared for a minute and came back with a small whiteboard and a bunch of markers.

  She wrote THEY’RE / THERE / THEIR on the board in big red letters.

  “Let’s start here,” she said. “We’ll talk about the difference and then go through and fix your paper together. Just that part. Rome wasn't built in a day.”

  We spent so long bent over my paper with a red pencil that I was almost late to my first class. I had to jam all of my stuff into my backpack so fast I almost tore some of the pages. Miranda grabbed a notecard and wrote down her number, thrusting it at me.

  “We’re not done,” she said. “You did an awesome job, but we haven’t even talked about actually structuring a paper, okay? Can you come back tomorrow?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t have time to talk about it.

  “Can you text me? Summer session is short, it moves fast.”

  I nodded.

  “WILL you text me?” she demanded. “Don’t wuss out, okay? This has been way more fun than talking to people freaking out because they made an A- instead of an A+. This is what I though I was signing up to actually do. Give me your number, or swear to text me.”

  “I swear,” I got out. “Gotta run, sorry.”

  Between my next classes, I had forty minutes. It took twenty minutes thinking about what I could say before I just sent her a message thanking her for her help. She almost immediately replied, asking what my schedule was and when I could meet her again. How could I tell someone like that that I was only allowed on campus when my father said?

  “I’m not sure,” I texted. “Full schedule. Sorry. Maybe Thursday?”

  “See you then, if we can.”

  Nothing from the rest of the day could prepare me for the fear I felt when I walked to my father's truck in the twilight after my classes.

  He'd honked, even though I was standing up from a bench ten feet away and walking over. I glanced around, hoping that none of my classmates – or, worse, professors – were around to witness that. He did it every time, even if he pulled up right where I was standing, waiting patiently for him. The rudeness of it always mortified me and the thoughtless arrogance usually gave rise to a dull anger inside my belly.

  He called me like a dog. He knew I'd come.

  That night, there was no room for anger.

  A hot dry knot of fear twisted up my insides and left my mouth parched as paper.

  My father didn't give me a chance to get buckled before he was driving off again, as I wrestled with my seatbelt and bag.

  Sitting bolt upright on the uncomfortable seat, my bag clutched on her lap in her white-knuckled hands, I didn't speak. I watched the lights of the town go past as I stared out the window, trying not to cry where he could see me.

  This was going to be bad.

  I knew it would be.

  It had to be, with all the glee on my father's face. He had to be getting something big out of it.

  The only line he'd never crossed was that he'd never raped me himself. Never seem to get any particular satisfaction about it. Maybe it would make more sense if he did. He just... didn't care if it happened to me, as long as he'd been paid – in cash, in drugs, in power – for it.

  That was my use to him. I kept his house tidy, I made him look respectable, I took care of my sisters so he didn't have to spend more than ten minutes at once with them... and, at the end of the day, he knew plenty of men who would pay to get half an hour alone with a teenage girl.

  Truly, I was a multi-purpose investment.

  Unfortunately for him, getting to fuck an eighteen-year-old wasn't as exciting to his buddies. They liked them younger. He'd had to find new people who might want a casual whore.

  He hadn't seemed so excited for me to do something since the last time he'd dragged me out. It had almost landed me in the hospital.

  It probably should have.

  We went out past the town, past the quiet suburb where we lived, past the last few houses.

  Into the dark forest.

  He hadn't mentioned a job out that way in months, but it wasn't like he confided in me, or anyone else. I only heard about his work when he was angry or when Kandy was there to impress.

  I couldn't hold back a shudder and I heard him chuckle from the other side of the truck's bench seat.

  For one brief moment, the hatred outweighed the fear, rose up in a black swell that almost choked me, and I had to pull it back, tamp it down, sit on it and never let it out.

  He didn't put on his turn signal, hardly tapped on the brakes, as he took a sudden right turn into a gravel drive, taking it quickly enough to send rocks flying away from his tires and slam me into the window.

  “Shouldn't sit with that stick up your ass,” he said as I winced. “Relax a little one of these days and that won't happen.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get out of the truck,” he said.

  “But – where? I can't see any houses.”

  “Yep. I've gotta get back. Start walking.”

  "What am I supposed to do?"

  "Whatever Beast tells you. It's not rocket science. He'll probably just want you to suck his dick and spread your legs."

  I didn't say anything, only opened the door and slid out, careful never to let my bag go for a minute. The rough canvas under my fingers was almost comforting.

  What had been twilight on the lamp-lit campus when he picked me up was truly dark here under the trees. They stretched up over me, black and grey and ominous, a thick forest where anything could hide. When my father's truck backed onto the main road and growled away into the night, the only light I had was
my cell phone, and it barely let me see where to put down my feet.

  A scream tried to climb out of me and I tamped it down, to rest with the rest of the hatred and fear and anger I could never show.

  My only choice was to keep walking, and so I put one foot in front of another.