Antonia's stomach was in knots when she hung up the phone. He had threatened to come multiple times before, but this was the first follow through. She hadn't seen her father in nearly a year. What would they talk about? 'Damn it, Antonia,' she thought to herself, 'You know exactly what he's going to say: Get your shit together.' That's what everyone said to her. Why couldn't she do it? What was going on with her?
Antonia looked at her mother. She wanted to apologize and she wanted to cry, but instead she took a deep breath and walked away, being sure the slam the door when she got outside.
"Toni! Get back here -"
She couldn't look at her, or the cop in the living room. She needed some time by herself.
Why had this year been so much more difficult than the others? She'd always been a bit of trouble maker, but this year felt like a switch got turned on inside her. She couldn't do anything right and everything made her so angry. It had started right around the same time as the dreams. Antonia shook her head and reached into her pocket to grab a cigarette. Her thoughts were reeling, and her head was cloudy. She was a mix of nerves and anger.
"None of this matters, though," she thought to herself as she lit a smoke.
"I'm going to get to meet Sam and Dean."
Antonia had grown up hearing stories about her brothers. They were all her father would talk about when he came to visit. There was always some reason that they couldn't visit, and she had resented her father for this for so long. But she had heard her mother say they were working a case, and that meant that the boys were around. That meant that the boys were going to come visit. She was finally going to meet them, and this thought filled her with joy and fear. What had her father told them about her? Did they think of her as the problem child that she had obviously become? Did Dean know that she still had one of his stuffed animals from when he was a kid? Did Sam know she wore a sweatshirt from Stanford that dad had given her after Sam was accepted? What were they going to be like?
Antonia didn't know, but she did know that this was really happening whether she wanted it to or not. She was not looking forward to the 'talk' with her father, but she did want to meet them, to know about them, to look at them.
She sat down, looking serious and puzzled.
"And to think," She pondered, "...this all came from a fight."
It was the teacher at school who had started the fight. She had said as much to her mother, and for that matter to Officer Sullivan, but that hadn't mattered, not that they had a reason to believe her. She did lie rather frequently, and was quite aware that that impacted her relationships. She continued to do it anyway, though, because she believed that 'a girl ought to be able to have some secrets.' Secrets had always been important to Antonia, probably because so much of her early life had been framed that way. Toni thought back to the fight. She wanted to know what had gone wrong. This was the thing that had set into motion the chain of events that were going to introduce her to her brothers and got her into the trouble of her life with her father. What had happened? What went wrong?
It was lunch time when the art teacher pulled her aside. He asked her some question about getting a permission slip signed, because they were going to have a nude model in next week. She pulled the forged form out of her pocket and handed it to him and had turned away.
"Stop, Toni. This isn't your mother's signature." His voice had changed slightly, and Toni couldn't put her finger on it.
"Of course it is, Mr. Racchio." She had pouted and crossed her arms. She knew the teacher. He wasn't a super sleaze, but he certainly didn't mind working with teenage girls and if she crossed her arms in the right way and heaved her chest a bit this whole situation could be taken care of in a moment.
"Stop it, Toni." His voice was most certainly different now. It was cold, dead, and made Toni uncomfortable.
"Look Racchio, she was working, that's why I signed for her. But if you call her she'll say it was fine. I mean it's just a stu-"
He cut her off: "She was working, huh? She had someone between her legs?"
Antonia was silent. She had known for some time what her mother did for a living, but was pretty sure that no one else at the school did. She felt her blood pressure rise. No matter what she said to her own mother, she wasn't going to let anyone talk about her that way.
"What fucking right..." Her fists clenched into hard balls and she couldn't breathe from the anger.
"Look, sweetheart. The whole world's been there so everyone knows. The point is that she was working, and your father is not in town right now either. Off fighting some ghosts somewhere, huh?"
Toni was confused. Was Mr. Racchio off his rocker? She understood the prostitute comment even if she didn't like it, and she had heard worse in her day. But what was he getting on about her dad?
"Fuck you." Her voice was hard and pointed and without exaggeration. She didn't want this to escalate but if it needed to it would.
"And that's exactly what I paid your mother to do last week. Well... to fuck me of course."
That's when the fight started. Well not exactly. Antonia saw something right before all gears clicked into 'kill mode.' She saw something that she couldn't justify to herself, that she wanted to write off, but just couldn't. Right before she took her first swing, Mr. Racchio's eyes turned black. He smiled and all of his eyes turned black. Toni was sure that she was making it up, but it stuck with her, even after her fist collided with his nose.
This was the fight that put everything in motion. Toni finished her cigarette, but felt no resolution. She decided she wished that none of this was going to happen, and sulked back inside past her mother and Officer Sullivan and stomped loudly up the stairs. She didn't mean to fight the teacher, and she didn't mean to get kicked out of school, and she didn't want to see her father, and she wasn't ready to meet the brothers that she had idolized her entire life.
She wished it were yesterday and that she could get a second chance.
