Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [121]
The first time my stepfather crawled into bed with me he said it was a mistake. He explained this to me over breakfast the next morning, clutching his coffee cup, looking straight into my eyes. “Sometimes, when I’m coming in late, your mom makes up that pullout bed for me. When I saw the bed made up, that’s what I thought. I didn’t even notice you there.” He smiled. His teeth were worse than Raine’s had gotten. “Skinny little thing like you.”
Phil was a lean, bald man with crinkles in the corners of his muddy brown eyes. He smelled like the tobacco he chewed, and when he came home after ten days away, he pushed his daughters away like they were pigs swarming at a trough. Run upstairs now. Let Daddy talk to your big sister, he’d say, with his eyes moving over me, like I was another cheap piece of furniture filling his living room, something he’d bought and paid for.
The second time he slapped his hand over my mouth and ripped off my panties before I kneed him in the stomach and wriggled away. Standing on the edge of the bed, panting, my nose running, and my knee bruised from the metal bar on the side of the bed, I’d yelled at him, loud enough that there was no way my mother could not have heard: If you touch me again, you fucking bastard, I swear to God I’ll cut it off. He’d rolled off me and staggered away, clutching himself. Raine never came to my rescue. She never came at all.
The next morning, my mother, holding her cigarettes in one hand and her lighter in the other, sat me down at the breakfast table and mumbled, “I don’t think this is going to work.”
I sat there, hardly believing what I was hearing. I’d told her what had happened, but she didn’t believe me . . . or, worse, maybe she did believe me, and she was taking his side anyhow.
“Phil’s got a bad temper, but I know he didn’t mean anything.”
My voice sounded like it was coming from outer space. “He put his hand down my underpants. I’m pretty sure he knew what that meant.”
Raine winced, then lit a cigarette. “He got confused,” she said weakly. Then she glared at me. “And it’s not like he asked for another kid. A teenager, for God’s sake. He’s got his hands full, you know.”
“So where am I supposed to go?”
She didn’t answer. I got to my feet, picked up my bookbag, then pulled my suitcase out of the closet and started to fill it with the few things I’d brought with me from Ohio. Stop me, I thought. Tell me you love me, tell me to stay. She didn’t. Instead, she gave me the keys to her car, an ancient Tercel. “Maybe you can stay with some friends for a while. Like a sleepover.” I didn’t tell her that sleepovers were for little girls; that I hadn’t been at New London High School long enough to make any friends, and I couldn’t go back to Toledo. How could I tell people that my own mother hadn’t wanted me, that, between the two of us, she’d chosen Phil?
I spent three nights at the Days Inn and then, realizing that I couldn’t pay for a fourth night, I started sleeping in Raine’s car, which I parked in the far reaches of the high school’s lot. I’d catch a few fitful hours of rest each night curled under piles of clothing in the backseat, praying that no one would find me. Salvation arrived just before Thanksgiving, in my theater class.
I’d signed up for theater because I’d loved it back home, where my voice and my looks had gotten me plum parts in every musical. In New London, the teacher was Mrs. Rusk, a sixty-year-old battle-axe with dyed red hair and the requisite complement of oversized gestures and affectations, but she’d taken medical leave in late October after her breast cancer came back. She left, bidding us a teary farewell and quoting King Lear’s speech to his daughters, on a Friday. On Monday morning, after Raine had kicked me out, I took my seat in the school’s theater and sat, transfixed, as a man stepped out of the wings and onto the stage, then beckoned for us to join him.
“Might as well get comfortable up here,” he said. “Names?” We went around