Chapter 31
CAIDEN
Seven years old
I used to think about what it would be like to be an animal. Not one of those kittens you see in the calendar at the dentist, or some golden retriever with a bone-shaped name tag. More like a possum, or a rat.
The kind of thing that only comes out after dark and can chew through metal if it needs to. I liked to imagine myself armored up, fur bristled, eyes that glowed.
No one could hurt a possum, not really. You could bash it, trap it, run it right over, but it would still twitch back to life, climb out of the gutter on its idiot little feet.
I told that to my dad once, back when he still paid attention to the things I said.
We were eating breakfast—toast for me, rye on the ragged edge of burned—and I said, “If I could be any animal, I’d be a possum. They’re survivors, even when they look dead.”
He just stared at me for a second, then yanked the plate away and said, “You want to be a fucking rodent, is that it?” He dumped my toast in the sink and turned on the garbage disposal, making sure I watched it suck down the orange crusts and the buttered crumbs.
I didn’t tell him anything after that. Not about the animals, not about the dreams, not about the nights when I woke up certain that something bad was going to happen, and then it did.
I learned about hate before I learned how to spell it. It lived in the walls of our house, thick as insulation, and every night my father poured more of it into me like medicine. If you could get a disease from a person, I think maybe that’s how I caught mine.
He was the kind of big that made everyone else look like a joke.
His friends called him “Bax” in a way that was supposed to sound friendly but always felt like a warning, and he had a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag in the garage, right next to the Snap-On calendar with naked girls getting splashed in motor oil.
The only picture of my mom that survived the divorce was taped above the workbench, but he’d blacked her eyes out with a Sharpie, so she looked like she belonged in a haunted house.
Most nights, he drank. When he started, the rules went all silly-putty: I could stay up as long as I wanted, eat Doritos for dinner, and watch TV with the volume too high.
But drinking made his attention floaty; he’d go quiet for hours, staring at the ceiling or listening to the baseball game on a transistor radio, and then all at once he’d snap awake and notice me again.
“You’re turning into a little pansy,” he’d say. “Your mother made you soft. I’m gonna break that habit.”
The thing about getting hit is you learn to see it coming. The slow wind-up, the way his hand would close around the neck of a glass or a can before it closed around your arm.
I could read his mood the way some animals sense a tornado: in the change of pressure, the static before the blow.
Some days it was just a hard flick to the ear or a pop to the back of the head, but if he was really pissed, he’d grab me by the collar and shake me until my teeth clacked, like maybe he was trying to rattle something useful out of my skull.
Sometimes, if he went too far, he’d show me a kind of mercy: wrap me up tight in his arms, squeeze until I couldn’t breathe, and then let all the air out of me with a long, slow shudder.
He’d say, “You’re my blood, Caiden, you know that? My fucking blood.” Sometimes he’d cry a little when he did it, the kind of tears that burn instead of cool. Then he’d start over like nothing happened.
When mom left, it was the only time I saw him cry, and it was a weird sound. Not sad, not sorry, more like he’d been kicked in the ribs.
After that, the house turned into a new kind of quiet. Not the soft quiet of cartoons and pancakes on Saturday, but the vacuum kind, where every noise echoed, and even the fridge felt like it was waiting for someone to yell at it.
So I learned early: don’t talk, don’t ask, don’t move when you can help it. If you had to cry, do it in the shower with the water on hot so nobody could hear.
School was easier. You could disappear in the herd if you knew how. I kept my head down, did the work, never got picked for anything except sometimes crossing guard, when the teacher was desperate.
I knew the way teachers talked about me: “withdrawn,” “bright but troubled,” “potential, if only…” Language is like a slow leak under the hood—never the whole story, just a drip, drip of something rotten.
The thing you learn about being a kid is that the grownups think their secrets are safe, like a plastic tarp on a crime scene, but all it takes is one walk through the hallway and you know everything you need to: who’s been fighting, who’s fucking, who’s two days late paying the light bill.
I knew about the affairs. I knew about the day my mother left. Knew it was my fault, or at least knew everyone else thought so.
I knew the reason Dad didn’t want me to play with girls, or even talk to them, was because of the stuff he said about Mom. “All women are poison,” he’d tell me, spitting the words like watermelon seeds into the sink. “They’ll ruin you, if you let ’em.”
He told me that so often, I started to believe it.
But then I’d see Amelia Langston in the school hallway, with her lopsided ponytail and Band-Aids all over her knees, and my chest would go soft and stupid inside, like bread left out in the rain.
I knew I was supposed to hate her; my dad talked about her family like they were a disease that crawled under your skin, but every time I saw her, I felt something like shame, and also something like wanting to share a secret.
I had a secret, and even I didn’t want to know it. I wanted to peel it off my skin and leave it somewhere nobody would ever find, but it stuck to me no matter how hard I tried to scrub.
My secret was: I liked watching her.
When she went missing for a week, I thought about her so much it made me sick to my stomach.
I dreamed about her hair in the sun, about her voice echoing in the lunchroom long after she’d gone home. I wanted her to look at me and know exactly what I meant.
My father caught me staring at her once in front of Sweeney’s Deli.
He gripped the back of my shirt and leaned down, his breath sour. “You see that Langston girl, you keep away from her. Trash breeds trash, but her mama’s on a whole other level.”
I could hear his words replay in my head every time I saw her at school: trash breeds trash. It made me feel sick, but also sort of important, like maybe I was someone special, just for knowing it. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, but I never did.
In our house, you didn’t correct the things he said. You just nodded and chewed the words up and swallowed them whole.
Sometimes I’d see Amelia in the cafeteria, pushing peas around her tray with the back end of a pencil.
She ate slowly and watched everything, eyes darting, like she was making a map of the room in her head. I’d watch her from across the table, pretending not to, but every now and then she’d look up, and I’d get hit with this weird, buzzing panic, like I’d been caught shoplifting in my own skin.
I’d look away fast, but my ears would glow, and my fingers would tingle, and for the rest of the day I’d act extra mean just to even it out.
The only thing worse than wanting something is wanting something you’re not supposed to want.
In the dark, under my blanket, I’d punch my pillow over and over, pretending it was her face, then pretend it was my own face, and sometimes I didn’t know which one I wanted to hurt more.
I tried to tell myself she didn’t matter. That she was just another ghost in the hallway, a nothing.
But the truth was, she was the only kid who ever looked at me like I had a real name. She’d catch me staring and not even flinch, like she recognized something in me. Like she was waiting for me to say something first.
I remembered last year when I helped her a few times. Once, when she fell, and I gave her a Band-Aid. I even walked her home that day, just to make sure she made it safely.
I helped her when she showed up at my house, shivering and sad. I wasn’t expecting her, and I don’t think she expected to see me either, but we had a way of running into each other without meaning to.
I never told anyone about the day she showed up at my door.
I don’t think she ever told anyone, either, but I could tell from the way her eyes went slippery when she passed me in the hall that we were both keeping the same fossil in our chests, a secret stuck so deep you’d need a hammer to get it out.
This morning I woke up for school and noticed that my father had not come home yet. That was normal.
That meant breakfast was up to me. I poured stale Cheerios into a plastic bowl and drank the leftover milk straight from the carton. It tasted like the inside of the fridge, which was mostly empty except for a six-pack of beer (two left) and a half-tube of mustard.
I didn't mind. I liked the quiet better than the long speeches or the punches. I was good at mornings like this; better than any grown-up.
I left for school before the sun even finished climbing over the trees. The air was so cold it made my teeth ache, and the soles of my shoes slapped against the sidewalk, echoing down the block.
I walked the whole way without seeing a single other kid, which made me feel like a ghost.
I got to the playground and watched the janitor, Mr. Louie, salt the front steps with a blue scoop. He waved at me, so I waved back, but neither of us said anything.
I liked Mr. Louie because he left me alone, even when I did stuff I shouldn't, like hiding in the mop closet or rearranging the traffic cones into a big circle.
School didn't really start until the bell, but kids always showed up early, hanging around in clumps or fighting over the good swings. I liked to stay at the edge.
If I crouched quietly enough, I could eavesdrop on anyone I wanted. It was like being invisible, with ears.
Today I did that. I found a spot under the slide and just watched.