I walk home as quickly as I can: it's quickly getting dark. It seems lime the days get progressively shorter, colder, and darker with each week that passes.
I feel like I'm drowning in self-hatred. Everyone at school already thinks that I'm weird, and now, on top of being ugly and strange, I have made myself an emotional wreck. It's been so long since I've lost control of my emotions like that, and it's as if I'm a little child again, unable to curb her feelings.
Yet there comes a time when I have been through enough that I just don't really care all that much anymore how people see me, and I've just about reached that point. I haven't eaten breakfast, since there was nothing in the house but booze when I woke up, or lunch, since I was busy in Mackey's office trying to convince him that I gotten into a fight in an alleyway when someone took my backpack on my way home (he didn't buy it, obviously). I am unlikely to eat dinner (though I managed to steal some tuna fish sandwiches a gas station for my siblings). I am so hungry that I feel as if I could shrivel inside myself and fade, though that could also be because of the embarrassment of my extreme overreaction. So Kenny had been drinking all day. It was none of my business what he did. So he smelled like stale clothes and women's cheap perfume and hard liquor. So do half the men in South Park after nearly every Saturday. It didn't fucking matter. It shouldn't fucking matter.
My house is essentially a single-story flat; it has a porch with rotten floorboards that snap when you step on them too hard and a screen door that has so many holes in it slightly resembles a beehive of sorts. Most of the windows have broken panes. The pale yellow paint is peeling. Some of the shingles are hanging off their hinges. It looks almost like no one is living there. Underneath a thin layer of frost, the grass is almost half a foot long, and so dead it's nearly white; my three year old sister, Cayenne, is sitting on the front lawn, playing with her plush dog, Snuffy. My mom tells me she looks a lot like me, but Cayenne is much prettier than I could ever hope to be. Her eyes are huge and blue and clear and untainted by sadness; her skin is clear and unmarked by any of the imperfections on mine (be they freckles or bruises); her hair has never been cut, so it's tangled and auburn and almost touches the seat of her pants, but it's beautiful despite this.
Cayenne is so named because when my mom was pregnant with her, she ate everything with cayenne pepper. I remember, when my father was passed out on the couch, my brother was smoking weed, and she was lying in bed so weak she could hardly move, making her plates of chopped pickles drowned in the stuff, cans of Mountain Dew with about five shakes of it, bowls and bowls of chocolate ice cream with almost a whole carton of the stuff mixed in. Cayenne is a bright spot in my life. I bring food home for both my chronically depressed, chain-smoking brother and her, but, when I give the stuff to her, I feel almost like a mom, providing for her baby.
Because she sort of is my baby. She sees me, immediately breaks into such a smile that one would think she hasn't seen me for years, and sprints up to me with Snuffy held by the scrap of one ear. "Tin-tin-tin-tin-tin!"
I drop my backpack and scoop her up, twirling her around until she squeals. "Hey, baby girl. Who's Tin-tin?"
She jabs a stubby finger into my chest. "Tin-tin."
Apparently now I'm Tin-tin. There have been worse nicknames. I pick up my backpack and, trying to conceal any fear or trepidation I might feel about what will happen tonight, I slide through the screen door and into the place that is my greatest haven and fear at once.
My mother—who looks far too thin and old—is sitting on our living room couch in a faded pink bathrobe, twisting her frail hands a little. My father is pouring himself a scotch.
I will be the first person to admit that my father does not look like someone who drinks and beats his family. My mother must have thought the same thing when she married him.
He is very tall, and, objectively, very handsome to someone who has not seen him with his fist pulled back behind him, with snarling lips and gleaming eyes. He's got brown hair that's just beginning to go grey, bright green eyes, and a gaunt, symmetrical face. Back in the day, my mother and he were probably the dream couple: she was beautiful then, with curly blonde hair and a heart-shaped face.
She told me about them back then, only once, when she was braiding my hair after he had hit me so hard in the stomach that I passed out. She said that, on the night he proposed, they watched the horror flick Eraserhead and she was so scared that she ended up throwing up in the bathroom, and he had gotten down on one knee next to her while she was doubled over by the toilet and got out a ring he had gotten through pawning off his coin collection. "Well, honey," she told me, "isn't that just a right beautiful love story?"
She is a sweet, sweet woman, but she was never cut out for being a mother.
I don't take off my parka. We don't have any sort of heating or conditioning system. Neither of them acknowledge us, which relieves me immensely, and I take my chance while it is available to hurry down the hall (as quickly as I can while holding Cayenne) and out of the dangerous sight of my father.
The first door is my brother's. Inside his room, I hear his voice and a girl's. It still smells like meth; it always does. I slip a sandwich under the small crack between the bottom of the door and the floor, squashing it a little. He won't mind. He's usually so hungry he'll eat anything that's considered edible and is at least half dead.
My room is the last one at the end of the hall. It's also the coldest.
Still, I like it. It's very clean and sparse: the only pieces of furniture are an old wrought iron bed with a nearly collapsed mattress, my wooden desk, and my wooden chair. I don't have many clothes, so I typically just stack them in a corner.
My father has never beaten me in there, so I feel safe there.
Setting Cayenne down on my bed, I hand her the final tuna sandwich, which she gobbles up instantly, and sit down to start on my homework. "Play quietly, okay?" I ask her.
"Kay, Tin-tin." I have to figure out where she got the Tin-tin thing at some point, or it might drive me crazy.
Midnight. I'm almost done with my college Calculus homework, which concerned rotational volumes, which I'm still fairly certain I don't understand at all, when the phone rings. I hear my father answer it, and, after a few minutes, there are screams and stomps down at the end of the hall, from what seems to be the area around the bathroom. And I had almost hoped it wouldn't happen tonight.
I know I have to act quickly. Cayenne has fallen asleep on my bed. I scoop her up quickly, not caring if I wake her, and shove her under my bed just as my father bursts into my room, shaking the house. He's holding my bruise cream in one hand and a small glass jaw in the other.
"So, he" he screams at me, "you've become a slut at last."
"Dad?"
"A boy just called asking if you were there. A boy. At this hour."
A boy. I'm suddenly very, very frightened. He doesn't even need a reason to beat me, and now that he has one… "Who, Dad? I don't really know any guys, I've told you before."
"Then who is KENNY?"
Kenny. For the love of all that is holy. "Kenny is just a guy I tutor. He's probably still doing homework, and wanted help or something."
"No, little slut, he wanted to apologize. Said he couldn't sleep."
No. "Dad, please, it wasn't-"
"AND…" He brandishing the bruise cream at me. "What is this?" He thunders. "WHAT is THIS?"
"Bruise cream, dad. People…were starting to-"
"You're fucking ashamed of me, huh? Trying to hide it? Trying to fucking hide what you deserve, you bitch? You little slut? You fucking idiot? What, you think some cream is going to make you pretty? Huh? Huh?"
"No, dad-"
"Shut the fuck up. Just shut the fuck up. Fuck. Fuck." He paces the room for a minute. I stand frozen to my spot by the bed. Don't let Cayenne make a sound oh God if you even fucking exist please just keep her quiet until this is done.
It seems like an eternity and then something flies by my face and shatters on the wall behind me. It was his glass.
And then he's in my face breathing the scent of stale clothes and women's cheap perfume and hard liquor and this is why it upset my so much to smell it on Kenny. "Guess I'll just have to make sure they don't see your bruises anymore, then."
He is strong and suddenly I am on the wooden floor which is incredibly hard and he is above me, pouring the bruise cream into one hand, and then he rams it into my face and it is cold and slimy and he smears it over, screaming, "Now they won't see! Now you can be beautiful!" He's laughs are like a dog's barking. I am suffocating on it. I am swallowing it.
The hand with the wedding ring is the one he uses to hit the most because it hurts the most. He digs it deep into my stomach and just keeps going.
I have no measure of how long these things last. All I know is that it hurts everywhere and I am crying and he is not touching my face or neck and everything is dark and cold.
I throw up yellow liquid that burns my throat, and he stops hitting me. He's red faced and panting and wide-eyed. We stare at each other for a minute, then he stands up. "Now they won't see them anymore, bitch. And now you're too bruised up for this Kenny asshole to be fucking you anymore."
He leaves.
The house is quiet and very still. The silence rings in my ears after the angry pandemonium of a few seconds prior. Then Cayenne crawls out from beneath my bed, and lays next to me on the ground, where I'm sprawled in a fetal position. "Tin-tin?" She whispers.
"I'm here, baby girl."
"Can I sleep in your room tonight?"
"Of course you can, sweetheart." I try to push myself off the floor, and my right arm collapses under me, sending a burst of fire up my shoulder; I must have sprained it, or something along those lines. "But I think I might have to stay on the floor tonight, sweet pea. You can climb on my bed if you want."
She doesn't move, except to snuggle into my arms and mimic Snuffy licking away the tears that still remain on my cheeks.
I thank God for the existence of cayenne pepper.