“You ought to go,” Katie mumbled.
“I’ll see you home.”
“No. My dad already thinks badly of you on account of being Clyde’s boy. Here I am, welt on my face, no panties, bleeding between my legs, and smelling of liquor. I don’t want to go home like this. I’ll go to Samantha’s house and clean up. Her mom works ’til seven.”
“Your wrist is broken.”
“I’ll go to the emergency room after I clean up-say I took a spill on my bike. I need to clean up. I don’t want to walk in looking like a…” She paused. She couldn’t get the word out. “No one has to know.”
Daniel restrained his surprise. He simply asked, “You’re not pressing charges?”
Her eyes locked with his. “ No one will ever know.”
“Katie, what about the next girl Josh…”
“GODDAMN IT, DANNY!”
“Okay. Okay.”
They walked in silence until they came to the fork that split their destinations.
“You know I don’t have feelings for you the way you want me to,” Katie said.
“Yeah.”
“I do love you, though. More today than ever. You’re a true friend. You’re my hero.”
Before Daniel could think of a response, Katie kissed him on the mouth. It was warm and lasting, or appeared to be. She tasted his lips before pulling away.
She moved on and never looked back. Daniel had the strangest sensation that he’d never see her again.
5
Daniel sprinted up to his room. He filled his backpack with underwear, some shirts, an extra pair of jeans, his toothbrush, and his copy of We Can Build You by Phillip K. Dick, which he had just started. In a tin that came with his X-Men trading cards, he pulled out seventy-eight dollars that he’d managed to hide from the step-monster. After his statement to the sheriff, they would likely place him in a temporary foster home. The thought scared him, but how much worse than Clyde could things actually get?
He crammed his duffel bag with some more clothes and as many course textbooks as he could. It was only three years until graduation. Then he could go anywhere, do anything, including the Navy or college on the West Coast, away from Rita, Clyde, Conklin, Adrian, Katie, and the state of Maryland. Three years until the rest of his life began. He would see it through, all aces.
From his pin collection, he chose the Green Lantern logo pin. He wanted to take everything, but space would be limited in foster care, and young couples were never in the market to adopt a thirteen-year-old. He looked around his room and wondered how much of his stuff he could reclaim one day. His library, his comic book collection, his clothes-it could be replaced. The only precious item was a Gil Kane original Green Lantern pencil sketch, which he had framed and hung on the wall. He wrapped it in a T-shirt and gingerly placed it in the duffel bag.
The hallway floorboards creaked outside his room, and he froze.
“Where are you going?” Rita asked.
“Away.” Daniel resumed packing.
“Away where?”
“You told me not to came back if I walked out the door. So I’m out of here.”
“To live where? What are you going to do?”
“Katie said I could stay at her house. I need time away from here.”
“You’re going to the sheriff, aren’t you? You’re going to lie. You’re going to screw your family.”
The family was screwed already. Denial was Rita’s way of coping with her life. Daniel was just collateral damage-expendable. This made him angry.
“Lie? I lied earlier today to protect this freak show of a life,” Daniel said. “You never lifted a finger to help me. Now I’m telling the truth.”
“You ungrateful little bastard,” Rita continued. “You don’t know anything. How much we’ve sacrificed for you… I’ve sacrificed for you. Do you know how much easier it would have been for me to find a husband if I didn’t have a brat clinging to my skirt? I kept you even after John died. That’s right, you little shit. I’m not your real mother. John wanted a family, but he couldn’t have kids. So we adopted you. Then he died and left me stuck with you.”
Daniel was shocked. Not at the news, which he’d known for years thanks to Clyde’s drunken rants, but the manner in which Rita chose to tell him. Like Clyde, she tried to poison his link to John Hauer, the only father he had ever known. Nothing of John endured in her anymore. Her transformation was complete-she was Clyde’s handiwork, body and soul. So, Rita wanted to play the “truth” game. The truth shall set you free, he thought.
“I saw Clyde earlier,” Daniel said. “He was having sex with that woman from the hospital in the cab of her pickup. Turns out she’s Principal Conklin’s daughter. I think they’ve been friends for a while.”
Rita’s fists were balled. She filled the exit with her enraged presence. Daniel recognized a new crossroad in his life. One where Rita would start pounding on him, too, if he stuck around. More than just unwilling to let her hide reality from herself any longer, he challenged her place in the hierarchy, such as it was. Daniel was coming into his own, butting heads with the top, and she would either have to find some way to reclaim her station or yield to him. He felt sorry for her. She was a victim, a creation of Clyde Knoffler’s, but he could no longer submit to her skewed view of the world.
“I’m tired, Mom. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be a punching bag. I can’t keep getting slammed for doing the right thing. This family is killing me, and I want out.”
Rita walked up to Daniel and tried to slap him, but he grabbed her wrist and twisted until she was off balance, then he pushed her away. She lost her balance and hit her head on the bureau on the way down. She was dazed. A wave of guilt suddenly hit him. Daniel tried to help her up but she batted his hand away. He gave up, grabbed his bags, and walked out.
Descending the stairs, he stopped halfway just as Clyde wobbled in through the front door.
“Where the hell are you going?” Clyde said. His breath preceded him.
Clyde only ever returned home early to get money or beat his family. The fear that had paralyzed Daniel in the past, however, was kept in check this time. His decision to leave, to let loose the pretense of this family and all the chains that bound him to this existence, spurred him to new possibilities. The start of a new chapter in his story brought with it new reactions to old stimuli. Clyde no longer dictated the narrative. Cowering in fear in the face of his stepfather’s wrath was an archaic response. If anything, catching Clyde in a crude act of adultery, in its prosaic glory, emphasized the man’s base character. No one who spent the majority of his life staggering and stumbling as his primary mode of mobility could be the threat Daniel had envisioned him. Even Clyde was vulnerable.
Looking down on him from the middle of the stairs, Daniel said, “I’m out of here. That’s what you wanted, right? You don’t have to look at my ugly face anymore.”
“Just like that? You think you can leave?”
“Yeah. Just like that.”
“Think you can just leave and stick us with the bill for your lawsuit? That’s right, I heard all about it. Uh-uh. No way.”
“All the money we’re paying out, the school desks, my expulsion, the lawsuit, it’s all because you stuck your dick into Principal Conklin’s daughter.”
Clyde looked around nervously. “Shut your mouth, boy. You say one word about that to anyone and I’ll kill you.”
“Mom knows, but she’s too beaten down to ever divorce your ass.”
Clyde ascended the stairs with clenched fists. “You little shit…”
Daniel slammed him square in the face with his bag full of texts and sent the man reeling backward, grasping for the banister but too drunk to find it. Clyde landed on his back on the edge of the first stair and floor. Sprays of spit shot from his mouth as he yowled.
“I’m gonna rip you apart, you piece of shit,” Clyde bellowed. “And not gentle, like before!”
Daniel jumped from the middle stair and landed on his stepfather’s breadbasket. He heard a rib crack, and Clyde vomited the contents of his stomach over his own face. He choked on his own puke as Daniel leaped off him and made for the exit, but not before a hand grabbed his ankle, causing him to fall into the door headfirst. Daniel saw spots and struggled not to black out.