“He still hasn’t apologized for making you cry, Kayla!”

“He makes me cry all the f**king time, okay? I’ve kind of cried on the daily into my pillow about him for six years now!”

“Even more reason to kick his ass!”

“This isn’t second grade anymore, Isis!” Kayla snaps. “Biting and kicking isn’t ladylike, and it’s not gonna get you anywhere with any guys, either.”

“Maybe I don’t wanna f**king get with any guys!” My voice is so loud it’s drawing attention. “Maybe all guys are scumbags! Maybe I’m the only one who apparently can think clearly anymore and see an ass**le for who he really is!”

“He’s not an ass**le –”

“I’m not going to listen to your excuses, Kayla! I know them all. I said them all once too for a guy, okay?”

“I have a hard time believing that,” She says nastily.

“Yeah? Believe this!”

I yank my sleeve up, and Kayla does three things in quick succession – she sees it, understands it, and recoils, flinching away from it. From me.

I pull my sleeve back down and grab my backpack. I leave the sandwich there. I leave the short triumph over Jack I had there. I leave my secret there, with her.

The rest of the day is a blurry soup of anger and half held back tears. When I get home, the house is dark. All the windows are closed and the curtains drawn, like usual. The house is sleeping, or that’s what it feels like. I call out for Mom – she didn’t have work or a psychologist’s appointment today, and her car is still in the garage. She should be home. I take the stairs two at a time and freeze when I see into her open room.

Everything is trashed. The lamp is broken, amber glass shattered across the carpet. Her documents and work canvases are scattered like the scales of a paper snake. She’s ripped some of them to shreds, her bed littered with scraps. Her makeup is dripping off her dresser in ugly, flesh-colored liquid rivers. The mirror in her bathroom is broken, her pill bottle open and the pills clogging the sink. Water overflows from the tub onto the floor, a pool just beginning to form. My heart turns cold, my fingers going numb.

“Mom?” I shout. “Mom!”

I check under the bed, her closet, tearing clothes and chairs aside as I look for her. She’s not in the living room, or my room, or the kitchen. I dial her cellphone but it rings upstairs, under her pillow. My mind crowds with images of her beaten, kidnapped, that man holding her by the arm and yanking her back to Nevada, back to where she was miserable –

I dial Dad frantically. But it only rings twice before I hear the faint sobbing. Mom. I leap after it, following the sound into the garage. She’s curled up in the backseat of the car. I yank the door open and touch her face, her shoulders, inspect her for wounds or cuts.

“Mom, what the hell happened? Are you okay?”

“He came,” Mom gasps into my hair, clinging to me like a baby monkey clings to a large one. “He found me.”

The police take fifteen minutes to get here. They comb the house, interrogate Mom to the point of tears and back again, and all I can do is hold her and snap at them when they get too nosy or invasive. When the sweep of the house is done, one of them pulls me aside.

“Look, Ms. Blake, you said your mom has a history of mental illness –”

“She has PTSD.” I correct angrily. “From a recent abusive boyfriend. Not an entire history of f**king mental illness.”

“I understand –”

“Do you?” I laugh, half-hysteric.

“Look, I’m sorry. PTSD can be hell. Shit, some of our guys have it too. Some of our guys have to be let go for it. Fact of the matter is, there’s no male-size footprints in the house, and the locks weren’t forced open. Nothing was stolen. There’s no sign of a two-person struggle in her room, either.”

“She said she heard him walking downstairs.”

“It could very well have been a flashback. You said she’s on medication, right?”

“And seeing a psychologist every week.”

“Well, I’m sorry, kid, but if she’s doing those things already, there’s not a lot we can do for her.”

“She’s not crazy! Stop treating her like she is!”

“I’m not, okay? I’m just stating facts. We can keep a cop outside your house for seventy-two hours, if it makes you feel better, but that’s about it.”

“Yeah. That’d be good.”

He pats my shoulder. “Keep your chin up. She’ll get better.”

I watch his retreating back and murmur;

“That’s what they all say.”

***

After Mom’s scare, I sleep in her room on the air mattress every night. I do my homework in there with her as she reads or naps. We eat meals upstairs, since she can’t bring herself to go downstairs for more than a few minutes at a time. My own room starts to look weird and foreign when I walk in – like I’m a stranger in it. The cop outside helps. When she gets jumpy in the middle of the night, I point out her window to the cop car sitting under the streetlight, and she relaxes and manages to get some sleep. I don’t. I stay awake, listening for the sounds of the heavy footsteps. Waiting. Praying. Praying that the bastard comes in and gives me an excuse to slit his throat.

I wait and I pray and I thank any god who’s listening. Nameless might’ve f**ked me over, but he didn’t mess me up as much as that guy did to Mom. My thing is nothing compared to hers. It doesn’t even deserve to be called a thing in light of what happened to Mom. To what happens to women everywhere, every day.

I call the office at school and Mom tells them I’m sick when I’m not. She calls her work and uses all her sick days, but by Friday she’s improved enough to go in. Or so she says. I don’t believe her, but I try to. If I believe, maybe that’ll make it more real.

Fridays at school are always good days, but today it’s just shitcake on a shitpie sandwich. Every part of me feels like I’m rotting from the inside out – I’ve gotten barely any sleep and I can’t focus on the work I have to catch up on. All I can think about is Mom – if she’s alright at work, if she’s coping okay, if she’ll remember to eat the lunch I made her. All thoughts of the war with Jack Hunter fly out the window. I’ve got no tactics, no urge to show him up. No nothing. I’m drained, and tired. And done.

Kayla nervously approaches me at recess. She clears her throat and I sit up from my place on the grass.

“Hi,” she starts.

“Hey.”

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to get some sleep.”

“Oh. Didn’t sleep well?”

“For a couple nights,” I agree. “It’s just, you know. Insomnia crap. Typical wacky teenage circadian rhythms.”

“You were absent.”

“Yeah. I was sick.”

“Oh.” She bites her lip and looks at her shoes before she blurts; “I’m really sorry. For what I said earlier this week. About you, and things. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“S’cool. I’ve been pretty mean to you too, lately.”

“Nu-uh!”

“I’ve been insensitive. About Jack, and how you like him. I’m sorry.”