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“Will you tell that cunt to shut her f*cking mouth?” Vic cried, almost screamed.

When her father spoke again, his voice was harder. “I will not. And considering you beat her up the last time you were here—”

“The f*ck!”

“—and never apologized—”

“I never touched that brainless bitch.”

“—okay. I’m going. This conversation is finished. You’n spend the f*cking night in the rain as far as I’m concerned.”

“You chose her over me,” Vic said. “You chose her. Fuck you, Dad. Get your rest so you’re ready to blow things up tomorrow. It’s what you do best.”

She hung up.

Vic wondered if she could sleep on a bench in the train station but by two in the morning knew she couldn’t. It was too cold. She considered calling her mother collect, asking her to send a cab, but the thought of asking for her help was unbearable, so she walked





Home


SHE DID NOT EVEN TRY THE FRONT DOOR, BELIEVING THAT IT WOULD be bolted shut. Her own bedroom window was ten feet off the ground, not to mention locked. The windows out back were locked, too, as was the sliding glass door. But there was a basement window that wouldn’t lock, wouldn’t even close all the way. It had been open a quarter of an inch for six years.

Vic found a pair of rusting hedge shears and used them to slice away the screen, then pushed the window back and wiggled in through the long, wide slot.

The basement was a large, unfinished room with pipes running across the ceiling. The washer and dryer were at one end of the room, by the stairs, and the boiler was at the other end. The rest was a mess of boxes, garbage bags stuffed full of Vic’s old clothes, and a tartan easy chair with a crappy framed watercolor of a covered bridge propped up on the seat. Vic vaguely remembered painting it back in junior high. It was ugly as f*ck. No sense of perspective. She amused herself by using a Sharpie to draw a flock of flying pricks in the sky, then chucked it and pushed down the back of the easy chair so it almost made a bed. She found a change of clothes in the dryer. She wanted to dry her sneakers but knew that the clunk-te-clunk would bring her mother, so she just set them on the bottom step.

She found some puffy winter coats in a garbage bag, curled up in the chair, and pulled them over her. The chair wouldn’t flatten all the way, and she didn’t imagine she could sleep, kinked up like she was, but at some point she closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, the sky was a slice of brilliant blue outside the long slot of the window.

What woke her was the sound of feet thumping overhead and her mother’s agitated voice. She was on the phone in the kitchen. Vic could tell from the way she was pacing.

“I did call the police, Chris,” she said. “They told me she’ll come home when she’s ready.” And then she said, “No! No, they won’t, because she’s not a missing child. She’s seventeen f*cking years old, Chris. They won’t even call her a runaway at seventeen.”

Vic was about to climb out of her seat and go upstairs—and then she thought, Fuck her. Fuck the both of them. And eased back into the chair.

In the moment of decision, she knew it was the wrong thing to do, a terrible thing to do, to hide down here while her mother went out of her head with panic upstairs. But then it was a terrible thing to search your daughter’s room, read her diary, take things she had paid for herself. And if Vic did a little Ecstasy now and then, that was her parents’ fault, too, for getting divorced. It was her father’s fault for hitting her mother. She knew now that he had done that. She had not forgotten seeing him rinsing his knuckles in the sink. Even if the mouthy, judgmental bitch did have it coming. Vic wished she had some X now. There was a tab of it in her backpack, zipped into her pencil case, but that was upstairs. She wondered if her mother would go out looking for her.

“But you’re not raising her, Chris! I am! I’m doing it all by myself!” Linda almost screamed, and Vic heard tears in her voice and did, for a moment, almost reconsider. And again held back. It was as if the sleet of the night before had been absorbed through her skin, into her blood, and made her somehow colder. She longed for that, for a coldness inside, a perfect, icy stillness—a chill that would numb all the bad feelings, flash-freeze all the bad thoughts.

You wanted me to get lost, and so I did, Vic thought.

Her mother slammed the phone down, picked it up, slammed it again.

Vic curled under the jackets and snuggled up.

In five minutes she was asleep again.





The Basement


NEXT SHE WOKE, IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON AND THE HOUSE WAS empty. She knew the moment she opened her eyes, knew by the quality of the stillness. Her mother could not bear a perfectly silent house. When Linda slept, she ran a fan. When Linda was awake, she ran the TV or her mouth.

Vic peeled herself from the chair, crossed the room, and stood on a box to look out the window that faced the front of the house. Her mother’s rusty shitbox Datsun wasn’t there. Vic felt a nasty pulse of excitement, hoped Linda was driving frantically around Haverhill, looking for her, at the mall, down side streets, at the houses of her friends.

I could be dead, she thought in a hollow, portentous voice. Raped and left for dead down by the river, and it would be all your fault, you domineering bitch. Vic had a headful of words like “domineering” and “portentous.” She might only be pulling C’s in school, but she read Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. H. Auden and was light-years smarter than both her parents, and she knew it.