24
Not Even You
Colleen
Colleen should’ve looked out the peephole first.
Summer air blew through the apartment’s open door, heating her face.
The man standing outside Colleen’s door was stocky and older. Iron gray shot through his short beard and buzz-cut hair. He squinted at her, examining everything from her muscle tone to the jammies she was wearing, and the tiny muscles around his nose tensed. He demanded, “What happened to you?”
“Dad?”Colleen hadn’t seen him in over a year, ever since that last fight when he’d pointed to the door of their house, his teeth bared in rage while her mother stared at the floor, and Colleen had chosen the door over begging for forgiveness again. “What are you doing here?”
Her father said, “I came to get you. You haven’t logged on to any of your internet places for three days. Your mother thinks you’re dead or kidnapped by the human traffickers.”
“Well, I’m not dead.” No contact for several years, and then he shows up at her door,angry?“I can’t believe you’re here, andwhat do you meanI haven’t logged on to my internet forums? Are youspyingon me?”
Her father pushed past her and walked into the room of her apartment. “After you broke the family, your mother insisted we keep tabs on you. Mace figured out where you were logging in on the internet and set up accounts so we could keep an eye on what you were doing.” He pointed at Tristan, who was sitting up in the bed and had run his fingers through his dark hair. She was glad to see he was wearing a tee-shirt, which was blue and hadShine Industrieswritten across his broad chest. “Who is thisman?Why do you have amanin your apartment?”
Tristan stared at her father but didn’t say anything.
Colleen closed the door. The neighbors didn’t need to hear them arguing, and the air conditioning was getting out.
“Never mind him.” This was crazy. Her brother Mace didn’t even have social media accounts. There was no way he had the computer savvy to put a key-logger program on her computer or follow her around the internet. “What do you mean, you set up accounts to keep an eye on me? Mace couldn’t have hacked my accounts.”
Her father shrugged. “You used your mother’s laptop to go to your places when you were home that last time. Mace just looked up where you’d been.”
Colleen must not have cleared the browser history when she’d used her mother’s laptop because it was sitting in the kitchen and she’d been standing right there, the rookiest of rookie mistakes. “You shouldn’t have done that. That’s intrusive. That’sspyingon me.”
“Well, we couldn’t let you just go off. We knew you’d screw up and have to come crawling back eventually. I can’t believe you chose the usernameQueenMod.You always thought you were better than us and never knew your place.”
Colleen couldn’t look at him anymore and stared at her fingers that were climbing over each other in panic. “I couldn’t think of a name when I joined the board, and they asked what my favorite classic rock band was.”
Her voice sounded small.
Her father jabbed a finger in the air toward Tristan again. “Have you turned into a slut? This isn’t how your mother and I raised you, having a man in your apartment overnight.”
Shame clouded around her. “No, I’m not that.”
“I’ll bet you aren’t even going to that church we picked out for you while you were in college, are you? The minister started calling us after your first year, asking why you weren’t in church and why you hadn’t made a pledge for that year.”
Everything was wrong. Colleen’s shoulders hunched as the weight of her father’s words settled on her. “I didn’t like that church.”
“If you hadn’t stopped going to church, maybe you wouldn’t be such a slut that I walk in and find a man has been sleeping with you in your apartment overnight. Are you still a virgin? Are you still a virgin beforeGod?Where’s your purity ring? I paid forty dollars for that. Where is the purity ringthat I gave youwhen you pledged your virginity to me until I gave you in holy matrimony to your husband?”
Words and ideas and vows jumbled up in Colleen’s head, and what had seemed like good arguments now wouldn’t organize themselves in her mind. She muttered, “Virginity is a construct. A man’s penis doesn’t have the power to change who I am or what I’m worth as a person.”
But she didn’t say it very loudly, and she didn’t think her father had heard her because his voice rose as he pointed at Tristan. “I can’t believe thatI come hereand you have fallen so far that you havea manin your apartment.Pack up your things.You’ve proven that you can’t handle life away from home. Your mother was right all along when she said you shouldn’t go off to college. She said that if you left home, you’d turn into an embarrassment for the family. Andlook at this place.You’re living in a hole with a mattress on the floor. You havenothing,and you’ve donenothingwith your life. You need to come home with me. We’ll get you straightened out.”
Colleen’s hands cramped from hanging onto each other so tightly. When she looked at the situation through her father’s eyes and saw her tiny apartment and Tristan sitting on her bed because they’d woken up together, she was a failure and a disgrace. She’d rejected everything that was important to her family and thrown it back in their faces.
Her father continued,“You’re a disappointment.I always knew you wouldn’t be able to get along by yourself. You need to come home because we haveprovidedfor you with the feed store. If you come home with me now and apologize toeveryoneyou’ve wronged—me, your mother, your brothers, and Pastor Williams—then you can take over running the feed store for us so your mother and I can retire.”
Colleen had heard his words dozens of times in different orders and different contexts, and her future closed around her and clicked shut.
He said, “It’sa good thingyour mother and I are going to provide for you, what with running the feed store for us, and you can live in our house and take care of us as we get older. I mean,look at you.You’reworthless.”
“Are you going to pay me to run your store?” she asked.
