The next day, Phoebe proclaimed to her father that she hadn’t been cursed, that the power didn’t work for her. She only knew for certain that she hadn’t meant to and vowed that she never would again. She didn’t like feeling helpless, needing protection, but the thought of killing another sad, frightened person felt far more burdensome than relying on her father.
Phoebe had always considered herself an easy kid. Independent. Self-sufficient. She tried to act responsibly and respectfully and rarely felt any need to rebel. Looking back on her childhood—before the stark line demarcated by the Curse, before her mother had fallen dead on the kitchen floor, before the world had collapsed under the weight of random, trivial murder—she could see that her father had always played the role of the child in the family. Sometimes she resented him for stealing her chance at a rebellious youth.
Her clearest memories of her mother were of rolling eyes and lowered tones, commiserations about Phoebe’s dad’s latest oversight—forgetting to make her lunch or leaving her at school until the vice principal called to remind him. With a prod from her mom, Phoebe would nod and absolve him—she the parent, he the child—as he apologetically blamed his lapse on some new passion, some project of unexplained urgency that would inevitably lead to a half-finished garden shed or books strewn throughout the living room because, this week, organizing by genre made so much more sense than by author.
In contrast to her dad, and probably mainly to set herself apart from him, Phoebe took pride in keeping her shit together. She got decent grades, had a few BFFs in a crowd of acquaintances, and didn’t get bullied. She might complain about her Super-mom and flaky dad, but she had it better than a lot of kids. After barfing once at a party, she stubbornly avoided alcohol and drugs, but didn’t judge those who partook. Phoebe considered herself boring, and maybe a bit naive, but that felt right to her.
One summer, she and her two best friends made a game of shoplifting at the big indoor mall—competing for who could get out of the store with the largest or most expensive item. She didn’t ever win, mostly nabbing bracelets and earrings, before the game abruptly ended forever when one of the other girls didn’t come back to the food court. They found out later that she’d been grabbed by a department store security guard. This stopped her cold, not only because it transformed what she’d considered a kind of harmless sport into a bona-fide criminal activity, but also because Phoebe wasn’t sure if she would have been as cool under pressure as her friend had been. Having never actually experienced an authoritarian smack-down, she gave herself even odds of completely spilling the beans on their vacation shenanigans instead of claiming to have come to the mall alone to steal for the first time as her friend had done.
After her mom died, after the Curse descended on the world, things went loose faster than she could imagine. Just a night or too after it all started, the circle at the center of their cul-de-sac became a bonfire while unfamiliar voices shouted in belligerent celebration to a chorus of glass bottles shattering on concrete. The noise continued, punctuated by intermittent shrieks—of fear or delight, she didn’t know—until finally hushed by the glow of dawn. That morning, her dad packed up a duffel and they hiked away, joining a long line of others staring at the feet in front of them as they marched into the city.
The hours dragged like days and the weeks passed like hours. Walking took forever, particularly once they left the Parade, which they did after only a week or so, after her dad chased off the umpteenth sleazebag that scooted too close and whispered some sick-breathed proposition into Phoebe’s hair. On their own, they continually sidetracked, ducking away into the bushes or behind a fence every couple of blocks because her dad sensed people or heard the crows call a certain way. His intuition was usually correct, but that didn’t mean she didn’t resent having to run and hide every three minutes.
Protecting her from unwanted advances appeared to be her dad’s highest purpose at that point, which, annoying as it was, suited her just fine. So long as he didn’t talk to her about it.
Phoebe had talked with her mom about sex, but never her dad. She certainly wasn’t going to engage with him about it now. Before everything went south, Phoebe had acquired enough experience to know how boys were built and how eager and persistent they could be. She and her friends had watched some internet porn and pretended it was boring and Phoebe had briefly engaged in some not-quite-sexting—until she blocked the guy after he flooded her phone with pics of his junk and demanded reciprocation. In her only ‘relationship,’ between freshman and sophomore year, she’d worked up the courage for a couple of midnight movie groping sessions before the summer ended. Later that year, she even asked a guy from her host family on a choir trip to teach her how to give a blow job—a lesson that, to his obvious delight, she thoroughly enjoyed. But she was still a virgin when the Curse descended on the world.
She dealt with that particular innocence within a week. She felt like she had to, in an urgent and serious way that she didn’t really understand. There was a boy she’d had a crush on for months—they made a habit of catching each other’s gaze in math class to exchange eye-rolls at Mr. Babani’s endless droning. The guy even walked with her down the hall a couple of times.
Five days after the Curse appeared, just as most everyone was realizing how it worked, she snuck out and trekked two miles to his house. She threw rocks at his bedroom window until he peered out, then climbed up the trellis. The sex was fast and frantic and they cried as they fumbled and fucked and didn’t look at each other’s faces, but it was also important and necessary. She never saw him again. She still didn’t know if he survived.
Not long after that, her dad went into full commando mode and transformed into her one-man security and surveillance team with the singular mission of keeping her safe and alive. Just in time, as far as she was concerned.
After breaking off on their own, they occasionally met a family or a couple and traveled with them for a while, but inevitably someone would panic, and that usually meant someone died. Her dad made sure it wasn’t her, which meant that he killed a lot of folks, sometimes with his eyes and sometimes with an old baseball bat that he’d spiked with nails like some crazy medieval mace. The lucky ones he just chased off by swinging his stick and yelling like an angry dog.
The gangs were the worst. Always men, usually boys about her age, that would whoop and howl and circle them, bobbing in and out in a kind of violent hokey pokey, trying to isolate her from her dad. He taught her some self-defense—nothing formal, just sudden punches to the throat and a quick knee or shin to the balls—and she made good use of it a few times in advance of her dad’s berserker routine.
By all rights, Phoebe should have been horrified, even driven to tears by the mayhem they encountered on a daily basis, but mostly she just felt tired. Tired and thoroughly done with people. She would be happy to never see another human being. Even her dad. Sometimes especially her dad. Not that she didn’t appreciate him, but his presence oppressed her. He constantly checked on her, cautioning or advising or telling her to shush because of some strange sound or silence. She just wanted to be alone, stare at the sky, maybe read, but mostly sleep. She’d give anything to really sleep.