Scared, I ran to my room and hid under the covers until Dad found me hours later. Mom had stopped screaming by then but never came looking for me.
Dad didn’t believe me when I told him what happened. He said I made it all up because I watched too many cartoons.
He witnessed one of Mom’s breakdowns firsthand not long after.
From then on, the episodes were more and more frequent. Once she was diagnosed, after months of psychiatric evaluations, the real battle began: testing different medications to find a combination that worked, changing them because of side effects, hallucinations, delusions, screams, tears...
I was alone with her for days on end. Dad quickly withdrew from us. He still came home every night, but slept in a separate bedroom from Mom, and fled before we woke up in the morning.
There were weeks when I didn’t see him at all. Days I spent crying under the bed, hungry and scared of the one person I should feel safe with.
I was just a little girl. I didn’t understand that my mother had no control over her delusions, that she didn’t mean to scream or accuse me of doing awful things. She was sick, Dad was absent, and I felt utterly powerless for years.
My home became hell, but it wasn’t always bad.
There were good moments when the doctors found the right meds to keep Mom relatively sane. She was functioning better. The delusions subsided if she remembered to take them on time... until my father realized the potential of her disease.
“Fuckingmove, Blair. You’re running out of time!” He barks the order, shoving me toward my bedroom.
One foot after the next, I move. I pull out one of the many red dresses he bought me for the events I attend on his arm—the only color I’m allowed to wear and the one I despise most.
The dress is tiny: two delicate silver chains acting as shoulder straps and a bit of fabric circling my ribs. It just about covers my ass, so there’s that. It’s ludicrously, inappropriately short. Backless. Deep cleavage.
Most women at my father’s “work” events wear beautiful cocktail dresses, whether long or short. They’re elegant, exquisite, and I... I’m dressed like an expensive hooker. The dress is a gold label, and the soles on my heels are red.
Cheap whores don’t wear Louboutins.
Not even the escorts my father’s associates bring with them tip the scales as far to theexpensiveside as I do.
Shitty consolation, but I grab what I find.
“Wear bling,” Dad’s voice booms. “Lots of bling. This is an important meeting, Blair. You need to do good.”
All these meetings are important. He always tells me I need to do good, or he’ll cut me off. The last time I misbehaved, slapping an old man’s hand away when he squeezed my butt hard enough to leave a bruise, Dad took away my car.
I was sixteen. Untouchable.Illegal.
But inconvenient facts didn’t matter to my father, the great Gideon Fitzpatrick. Consent was a meaningless word while he paraded me around, using my young body to taunt sleazy businessmen, melt their perverted brains, and close lucrative deals while they salivated at my every move.
I rebelled the first few times. I cried, begged, and threatened him with the police, but he quickly found a way to cease my tantrums—as he called them—by confiscating Mom’s meds whenever I caused any trouble.
Watching her succumb to the hallucinations was worse than feeling the heated gazes of much older men roving my body.
I gave up fighting pretty quickly.
Either play along or be played.
Dad prefers option three, one not available to me: playthem. Play everyone. That’s what he does best: manipulates people until they chase the carrot on the stick using any means available, and while that’s not always me, it happens often.
Though not nearly as often as before I turned eighteen. It’s been a while since the last event. A month at least. Enough that I started hoping, yet again, that maybe I’m too old to appease the degenerates he feeds off.
Apparently not.
“Ready,” I say, joining him in the living room, the tight dress rolling up, showing off too much skin. I tug it down every few steps, or else my ass will be on display.
Which is kind of the point.
“Hair down,” Dad clips, looking me over like a piece of meat. “And do your makeup darker. You have one minute.”
