Chapter 4 Steffani
The cigarette’s still burning on the table.
A thin wisp of smoke billows up, like creamer dribbled into a cup of coffee. The toilet flushes, and my new roommate—Gina, Gigi, Gee-something—steps out of the bathroom. She’s silent, staring at her still-damp hands, and, for a moment, I wonder if we’ll pretend nothing happened.
“Did you let him into the apartment?”
So much for that misguided hope. I shake my head.
“So, he broke in?”
“Yeah.”
“He the one who did that to you?”
She points to where my T-shirt’s slipped off my shoulder; I tug the fabric back up. I don’t answer, because what’s the point? We both know where this conversation’s headed. Or maybe she doesn’t, but I’ve pinballed around enough foster homes to know what comes next.
“How’d he get in here?”
“He’s really good at picking locks.”
“Jesus.” She rubs her palm across her forehead. “I can’t have someone breaking into my apartment.”
My apartment. Not our apartment.
“Do you wanna call the police?” she asks, then course-corrects. “We should call the police. That man should be locked up.”
“Sure.”
“But.” She screws up her mouth like the next words coming out are gonna taste bad, and she knows it. “I can’t have someone breaking in here. I can’t feel unsafe in my own home.”
I almost laugh. Fuck me, that must be nice. Having the choice to feel safe in your own home, having the choice to feel safe anywhere.
“I know a battered women’s shelter.” She starts rifling through one of the sideboard drawers, digging around in the shit someone accumulates when they’re able to stay in one place for more than a few months at a time.
I’ve never had a drawer of random shit like that—with spare chip clips and sticky-note pads and pens with the names of insurance companies printed on the sides.
I think that’s when you know you’ve made it.
When you have a shit drawer of your very own.
Her hand emerges with a business card. “It’s not too far from here. I’ll tell you what, you go to the women’s shelter and call the police. And when that man’s locked up in jail, you can come back here. I’ll keep your room open for the rest of the month, okay?”
I love how she says that: when that man’s locked up.
Like it’s a foregone conclusion, and all that’s standing between him and a prison cell is my statement to the police.
Not like I haven’t made a hundred—no, screw that, a thousand—of those before.
Not like I haven’t stood in the courtroom while the judge handed down a sentence of forty-five days, plus community service and counseling. Whoopty-fucking-doo.
“Yeah, sure,” I say, grabbing my backpack from the hall closet.
She comes close and offers me the business card like it’s a golden ticket.
I take it so as not to make her feel bad, but as she heads into her bedroom, I wonder why I did.
She should feel bad. She’s kicking someone to the curb who has a maniac breathing down her neck.
I knead my fingers against the welts hidden under my ponytail. For a moment, they burn just as hot as they did the afternoon he put them there. The phantom smell of broiling flesh hits my nostrils.
“You get back home,” he said to me tonight. “No more of this running around. You get back home, where you belong.”
I lug the backpack to my room and start packing clothes that only got unpacked a few days ago.
T-shirts get folded, jeans get rolled up, my spare set of sneakers gets stuffed into a plastic bag.
I don’t own much; it doesn’t take long to erase all traces of me from the apartment.
The papers strewn across the desk, the ones I’d been filling out to enroll in a late-night GED program, get tossed in the garbage.
I don’t know what I was thinking, picking those up.
Eighteen years old, and it’s time to resign myself to the fact that I’ll never finish my high school education.
He’ll never let me.
A postcard is taped to the wall: an aerial shot of a bridge stretching across brackish water.
The corners are crumpled, and a coffee ring marks where one of my foster parents (one of the not-so-good ones) set his drink.
I gingerly remove it from the wall, scrape off the tape residue with my fingernail, and zip it into the front compartment of my backpack.
When I return to the living room, Gee-something’s waiting for me. “Here,” she says, holding out a wad of twenty-dollar bills. It’s the rent I paid her last weekend. “It wouldn’t be fair to keep your money since you’ve only been here a few days.”
She doesn’t say what we’re both thinking: And since I’m throwing you out.
I reach for the bills, but she pulls them out of my grasp.
“Who is he?”
Her expression’s full of concern. She probably wants to know, so when she sees me on the nightly news a few weeks from now, she can tell the police who did it.
I snatch the bills and stuff them into my pocket.
“My dad.”
Then I head into the kitchen, unlock the window, and push it open as far as it can go.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“He’s probably still downstairs.” I’m willing to bet that blue Ford Taurus is parked across the street. How many times have I looked out the window at school and found him waiting in the parking lot? Or across from the roller rink during a friend’s birthday party?
He always knows where I am.
I remove the portable fire escape ladder that I’ve been dragging around since freshman year from my backpack, hook it to the windowsill, and release the rungs so they topple down the side of the building. Then I toss my backpack out, flinching as it hits the ground with a dull thud.
“You’re going to the women’s shelter, right?” Gee-something asks, staring wide-eyed at the ladder.
“Sure.”
And with that, I haul myself over the edge.
The rope twists awkwardly, and I’m reminded of those games at street fairs: climb the rope ladder, win a prize.
Except the game’s rigged. The ladder’s connected to one point at both ends, so you think you’re climbing a ladder when you’re really crawling along a tightrope.
You’re going to fall.
Every fucking time.
I manage to hand-over-hand my way down, jumping the last few feet onto the grass.
I motion for Gee-something to toss the ladder down, and she does.
She starts to whisper-shout something, but I make another signal—this one indicating that she should shut the fuck up, for the love of god.
I find my backpack and hoist it onto my shoulders.
The backyard leads into a narrow stretch of woods, and I begin walking that way.
It’s a warm night; it doesn’t take long for patches of sweat to form under my arms. The backpack straps chafe the exposed skin on my shoulders, and I reach up to readjust my T-shirt.
The woods thin out, and a road appears. I take a map out of my backpack and search for the nearest highway.
Not too far from here. I peek out from between the elms, scanning both ways for the blue Ford Taurus, and when I’m confident my dad’s not lying in wait, slip out onto the road and start walking.
Washington.
That’s the end of the line.
In the distance, the two sides of the road draw together to a single point.
Our art teacher called it the vanishing point.
I always liked that: the vanishing point.
It’s an optical illusion because parallel lines will never cross, but I like the thought of running fast enough, far enough, that you can reach the little dot where the impossible happens.
And you disappear.