“It won’t. I can’t—” Carrie takes a deep breath. “I’m going to leave.”
“Don’t go,” I automatically say, and then I realize that she means she’s going togogo. Not just from my house, but from her house too.
“I have to. He’ll kill me if I don’t.” Her voice sounds rough and I can tell she’s been crying.
“He’ll kill you if you go,” I say.
And it sounds cruel, but it’s the truth. She ran away before and her skin was purple for a week. If she leaves again and he finds her, he’ll hurt her more than that. I just know it. I can tell from the way he looks at her.
“I’m working on something,” I say. And I am. I have been. I wasn’t planning on telling her for a little longer. I’m only fourteen. But by the time I’m fifteen, or even sixteen, I’ll be a man, and then I will be able to stop Carrie’s dad from hurting her.
“What is it?” she asks, but she doesn’t look at me.
I stand up and I lift up my shirt. I pull it over my head and she stares at me blankly. I flex my arms and I grin, from ear to ear, like my mom says sometimes.
“I’ve been working out,” I say proudly. “I’m getting muscles so that I can stop him. Soon I’ll be strong enough. Just you wait and see.”
Because everyone on our street knows that Carrie’s dad hits her. And that her mom is a drunk. Everyone knows that Carrie’s house is a bad place. None of the kids play near there, because you can sense the evil in it. It’s not just the dirty windows and the peeling paint, or the porch swing that squeaks in the wind. It’s something else. Something unexplainable.
Maybe it’s the men that frequent the house. They don’t look like good people. That’s what my mom always said. I’ve had the same feeling about our house, I want to say.
Carrie smiles at me. I can see from her face that it hurts to smile, because she winces and a fresh drop of blood drips out of the cut on her lip. She stands up and places a hand on my chest. “You’re too good for me, Ethan Cowells.”
“I’m not!” I say. “I’m not, Carrie.” And I mean it too.
She smiles and her hand moves to my face. She strokes her palm along my jawline. There is soft hair growing there now. ‘You’re becoming a man’, my mom said. ‘I’ll show you how to shave,’ my dad said.
“You’re too good for me.” She says it again, but her eyes are far away. “Can I have some orange juice?” she asks, and I say yes and then we go to the kitchen and I pour her a glass, and she says she has to go. She sees I’m disappointed and she lets me touch her breasts before she goes.
“So long, cowboy,” she says as she leaves through the back door.
The door shuts behind her, and I stand at the kitchen window and I follow her with my eyes all the way back home. She stands in front of her own back door for several minutes and I will her to go inside, to not run away again, but after five and a half minutes she turns and walks away from the door.
And I’m left wondering, not for the first time, if I will ever see her again.
