But I’d only had another week left on my borrowing time for it, so I needed to be quicker with it.
Not that night, though.
Not with Mum’s voice still faintly audible over the music in my ears.
I couldn’t hear what she was saying anymore, just the rhythm of it—the way her frustration spiked and faded, spiked and faded.
I wondered if Dad was just sitting there on the other end, letting her words roll over him; if his fiancée was sitting across from him at the table, making faces to mock my mum, and Dad was trying to hide his laughter behind tight smiles.
The thought of it coiled my insides.
It was a shudder—those violent ones I sometimes got—that rinsed through me. I’d had the same shudder the month before at school, before I’d ripped a chunk of a boy’s hair out and scratched his face.
Mum had to come pick me up and keep me home for a few days.
I hadn’t done it again.
She’d cried a lot.
The record skipped, and Stevie’s voice stuttered.
I pushed up onto my arm and peeled off the headphones.
Mum’s voice wasn’t shouting anymore, and I couldn’t hear the murmur of my dad’s voice coming from the receiver.
The light that glared around the edges of the door was dimmer now.
I pushed up from the bed and peered out of my bedroom.
Mum was gone.
She might have shouted her goodbye before she left for work. I must’ve been listening to the album longer than it had felt.
Maybe she’d left in a hurry, since her stained tea mug sat on the kitchen counter with all the crumbs from our stale bread that was out of the breadbin.
I dragged myself to the kitchen and started to clean up. It helped Mum. And it helped her be nicer to me again, since she was still angry I’d been suspended from school.
I was drying the dishes when the phone rang.
I looked at the clock—and I knew it’d be Dad calling because it was almost midnight.
I let the call go to the answering machine.
He didn’t leave a message, just hung up with a huff, and I put the dishes away in the cupboards.
I hated their story. I hated that he couldn’t handle living here, that he’d wanted to travel more and see the world and be young again—whatever that meant, because he was like thirty-something and that was ancient. I hated that he’d left us, but mostly that he left Mum.
I hated, hated, hated that he’d met a woman in Canada and stayed there for her, that he’d gotten a good job but didn’t send us more money.
It was because of them that I made the promise to myself.
I would never have kids.
I would never get married.
I would never let a man fool me into thinking he is special, worthy of my attention or love or body or life.
I would never let a man use me—and abandon me.
