Prap, prap, prap, prap.

Norma scampered up the steps almost tripping over her own gangly legs. She'd climbed the eight floors to her mother's apartment a million times, but now the journey was endless.

Just get to the tub, she told herself.

Get to the tub was the order that drowned out all the other noise and pushed it to the far edges of her mind. There wasn't space or time for anything else. No time to remember what had happened. No time to feel the red hot tears burning down her cheeks or to recognize Mrs. Roselli's voice as she cocked her head into the hallway to ask why the hell Norma was making such a racket marching up those steps. She couldn't see, hear, think, speak or smell anything else. Not now.

Now there was only time to reach apartment 8B, feel the key under the mat, hear the deadbolt snap, and reach the tub.

Norma threw off her shoes and plunged her body into the steaming hot water with her dress still on, suds sloshing to the floor and gathering beneath the clawed feet of her mother's tub.

What was she going to say to her mother?

She could still hear his voice in her ear, threatening to kill her if she told a soul. Could still feel the tightness of his fists and the roughness of his whiskers scraping her skin.

She scrubbed harder. Blood trickled out and clouded the soapy water. She could smell and taste and feel him all over and she feared that he wouldn't go away.

She peeled off her dress. Climbed out of the tub and spread out on the floor. At age 11 Norma was an itty bitty thing, as her mother would say, so small and thin and white that she imagined if anyone had walked into the bathroom just then, they might not have even noticed her lying naked, full moon to the sky, against the equally pale bathroom tile.

It would be roughly 45 minutes before Norma would hear her mother's key turn in the lock and she'd toddle in exhausted from her second job at the laundry, hands calloused but ready to slice and boil and bake a miracle out of their near-empty pantry. Norma would have this mess cleaned up by then.

Laying her cheek against the cool of the linoleum tile, she decided that her mother didn't need this aggravation. She wouldn't tell her anything. She wouldn't tell anyone anything again.