Page 34 of There is No Devil

He puts his finger in his mouth and wets it with a loud pop. Then he jams it in my ear.

That’s what makes me snap.

I leap out of my chair, already screaming at him, “DON’T YOU FUCKING TOUCH ME! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOUUUUUUUUU!”

My scream is cut off by Randall’s hand hitting my ear in a slap that sends me flying into the wall just like he did to my mother at their wedding breakfast.

He hits me so hard that I black out. When I sit up, shaking my head, all I can hear is a muffled thunder with a high whine on top of it.

I must have been out a minute because Randall is staring at me with vague alarm, like he was just wondering how deep he’ll have to bury my body in his garden.

“Stop hamming it up,” he grunts, as I grip the edge of the table and attempt to stand.

My head throbs. There’s a sharp pain on the left side of my neck. Wetness, too. I touch my ear. My fingertips come away bright with blood.

Oh my god. If he made me deaf, I’ll fucking kill him.

No, I’ll kill myself. I can’t live without music. It’s all I have.

At that moment, I hear my mother’s key scratching in the lock. Scratching and scrabbling so long that Randall and I both know how drunk she’ll be before she stumbles through the door.

My mother is no longer as beautiful as she once was. She used to brag how well she held her liquor, how she could party all night long and get up as early as she liked in the morning, with hardly a headache.

Time is catching up with her at last. A tube of fat runs around her once-slim waist, stretching the tight dress. Dark circles shadow her eyes. Her hair is no longer long and shining, but frazzled from constant changes in color and length.

She stares at us blearily, the strap of her dress slipping down one shoulder.

“You ate without me?” she says, her voice mushy and loose.

Either she doesn’t notice the blood on my hand, or she’s choosing to ignore it.

Randall’s piggy eyes flit between me and her, as if trying to decide whether to transfer his rage to a new subject.

My mother must intuit the same thing—she sidles up to him, laying a hand on his bicep, looking up into his face and batting her long false eyelashes.

“Should we go upstairs?” she slurs.

I see the struggle on Randall’s face—the offer of sex battling with his undrained rage.

“In a minute,” he says. Then, turning to me, “Get my belt.”

This is so outrageous that I gape at him. He already took my iPod and slammed me into the wall. There’s no way I deserve a whipping on top of that.

Through stiff lips, I say, “You can’t do that anymore. The gym teacher said.”

“The gym teacher said,”Randall mimics me in a baby voice. He points one sausage-like finger in my face. “FUCK your teachers.”

My mother makes a small sound from behind closed lips.

This wouldn’t be her first visit from CPS. Or even her fifth. They’ve been called to our various apartments many times over the years. The end result was a couple of weeks where I had lunch packed for school and somewhat cleaner clothes. Only once was she subjected to drug tests—that made her angrier than anything. We moved again, and our harried social worker never reappeared.

“We don’t want trouble,” she murmurs to Randall.

It’s so rare for my mother to stand up for me that for a moment I feel a slight flush of warmth, the last vestige of an affection that once dominated my entire life. She was everything to me, my only family and my only friend.

Then she says, “Punish her some other way.”

And I remember that I fucking loath her.

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