Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(28)

This is me, he says, motioning to the blue car you already know is his.

He opens the rear-left door and asks you to slide in. He slides in after you. It’s dark in the car in this covered lot, but right away you see a figure in the driver’s seat, the side of a face—it’s Gil. Hey princess, he says, but he doesn’t turn his head around. He doesn’t even look at you. He smacks a button that locks all the doors in a quick thwack. He moves his right hand around the seat, toward Chad. Chad gives him five.

You say nothing.

Chad leans in with his eyes open, staring at you. You can’t believe a man is this close to your face. He tells you to open your mouth. You do. You feel his tongue on your tongue, and you feel like you might choke. You like this feeling. So this is a kiss. You don’t know what to do with your hands, so you sit on them. Chad moans as he circles his tongue—it’s that same laugh-cry sound from the phone. He pulls away. Show me, he says, as he lifts your T-shirt to your neck. Flowers, how cute, he says, as he yanks down the cup of your bra. In this moment, you are humiliated. Your bra has shape, but your breasts do not. Your breasts are nothing but swollen, sore nipples—puffed and pink as erasers. There is nothing else but that. Still, he takes them into his mouth, the left and then the right, and calls you so sweet, sexy, and says, Is that what you’ve been keeping from me?

You say nothing.

Chad pulls your shaking hand out from under your jeans. For a moment, you consider reaching for the handle of the door, but he catches your hand in his, wraps your raw fingers around his cock. You don’t know when he unzipped his pants, when it appeared, but it’s there, twitching. You have never seen anything like it before, this strange organ, the palest skin. He moves his hand and your hand with it. You are surprised that the skin moves, that it’s not a solid thing. With his other hand, he takes your hair in his fist, pushes your head down, tells you to be good. You have no idea what you’re doing, but you do your best to breathe. He says, Cut that shit with the teeth. Open up. You do your best to be good. He pushes your head all the way down to finish, and tears splash from your eyes onto his boxers. He opens the car door, says, I’m going shopping, and Gil gets out of the front seat, comes to meet you in the back. You had forgotten he was even there all this time; you had forgotten the world. His cock is already out, there is no kissing or touching; there are no words. It is larger than Chad’s, the size of your forearm. It smells like chlorine. He is more forceful with you, squeezing your wrists in his big hands, clearing your pulse. He pushes and pulls your hair like a fast, violent knock on a door until the rot of him glugs down your throat, until you are coughing, crying, until you have bitten your lip so hard it’s bleeding.

He calls Chad on his flip phone. Come back to the car, he says, and snaps it shut.

Chad opens the driver seat door. He turns the music up. Chris Carrabba.

They high-five again.

You can’t just get out of the car like this, Princess, says Chad. It’ll look weird.

They drive you around the loop of the mall, drop you off on the side of the road. Thanks, Cherry Top! says Chad.

You say nothing.

You don’t for years.



In the fifteen years since high school, Chad has been arrested for petit theft, grand theft, drug possession, assault, simple battery, battery of a law enforcement officer, burglary with assault, battery with prior offenses, multiple violations of parole, and has been declared a “Habitual Felony Offender” by Broward County. He has attempted suicide three times, overdosed twice, and spent three and a half years in state prison. He spent years in a homeless shelter. Once, in prison, he was strapped naked to a steel bunk and shit himself. The correctional officers dragged his soiled body around the grounds of the prison, hosing him off, humiliating him, scraping his body pink as a gumdrop.

Gil is an attorney in Boca Raton. He represents victims of sexual violence and harassment. He married his high school sweetheart—the eighteen-year-old classmate and girlfriend, you learn, that he’d had the whole time.

These are some of the things Chad is telling you now, on the Internet. They all check out. With a simple Google search, you’re able to scroll through Chad’s mug shots over the years. You find his Twitter, his dating profile, the racial slurs and flat-Earth conspiracy theories he has posted online. Still, it is difficult to think about him as more than a ghost, as a real person in the present world.

He has two injunctions of protection against him—one for stalking, one for repeated violence—but you don’t know that yet. Just last year, after he was released from prison, Beth filed the first restraining order against him. He reached out to her for forgiveness, she will later confirm, and things got ugly from there. Another girl, a minor, filed an injunction soon after. When this essay is published one year after you write it in that New Hampshire artist colony, you will file the third.



You walk along the side of the road, back toward the mall. Maybe, you think, this is what adults do when they feel the feels of love. Maybe they share their girls; maybe it’s quick, forceful; maybe it happens just like that.

It’s not even one o’clock. Winter in Florida. You push open the mall door and feel the suck of the air conditioner. You are nervous to be seen—you are absolutely not allowed to be inside a mall, or anywhere, alone.

You walk in and out of cosmetic stores. In the track-lit mirror, you look different. Your eye makeup is smudged like a bruise; your cheeks are flushed; your hair is no longer straight or smooth. Worst of all, your lips. Your lips are at least three times their regular size, raw and shiny, purple and inflamed from the teeth. Whose teeth? Whose bite marks? You can’t be sure now.