Bleeding, aching, bruised, possibly concussed, Ella nods and chuckles to herself, a mad, half-sobbing sound.
Some kids at her school have leaked nudes, which spread like wildfire. But if she knows how things work, soon everyone is going to see firsthand what their golden boy did to her.
8.
David was asleep when Chelsea got home from the spa that night, and he was already gone when she woke up the next day. She’s fairly certain she recalls him tugging the blanket off her face early that morning, like he was trying to check on her results, but she also recalls savagely yanking it back into place and growling at him. Even asleep, she’d made her peace with what had to be done.
Or so she thought.
She read somewhere that it takes, on average, seven tries for a woman to escape domestic violence. That was embarrassing, in her opinion. You just had to get up and leave.
Until it was her turn.
Chelsea went through seven tries in the first day alone. When she saw David’s Post-it requesting steak for dinner and contemplated serving him Publix sandwiches instead. When he came home and told her she looked like shit and the injections weren’t working, she wanted to point out how badly his hairline was receding behind his hair plugs. When he asked her why she didn’t dust the fucking chandelier, she envisioned snipping through the chains and dropping it on his head.
But she didn’t do any of those things. Instead, she made steak—perfectly cooked. She told him he looked handsome and she wore his favorite lingerie. And she dusted the chandelier.
A week passed like that, with Chelsea on her very best behavior, smiling and subservient and painted and plucked, terrified that he would somehow sense her intentions, smell her rage, see the clenched teeth behind her red-glossed lips. And it worked: For that whole week, nothing bad happened. Their life felt as beautiful as the pictures in the calendar. Everyone smiled and laughed and behaved.
And then Olaf pissed on David’s favorite shoes, and Chelsea ended up unconscious on the couch. The moment she opens her eyes to find Brooklyn standing over her, asking what’s wrong, she knows she has to act.
It has to happen now.
And once it starts, there will be no turning back, no chickening out.
As she moves through her afternoon, Chelsea takes joy in all the small, petty ways she can annoy her husband. For once, the rules are off—or flipped. When he clicks the button to open the garage door, he’ll find her minivan parked in his spot. She does that sometimes, when she comes in from the store during a rainstorm, and he says he understands, but she knows he doesn’t. He has the nicer car, so therefore he gets to park in the garage. The other side is for their golf cart, obviously, but her minivan doesn’t need protection from the elements like his Lexus does. Today there is no rain; she just rolled on in until her hood kissed the tire of David’s road bike where it hangs from its hook.
He prefers it when all of his girls hear the garage door opening and greet him with cheerful smiles. But today, no one comes—they’re all curled up together, watching a movie in the big bed. Even Ella, usually so standoffish lately, is snuggled under the blanket. Some idiot in the school parking lot almost backed into her, and she dove out of the way and got all busted up, so the poor girl seems happy enough to wear one of Chelsea’s fancy face masks and hide in the dark, even if she’s not thrilled with the movie selection.
Chelsea hears David slam the door, curse, take off his shoes, and toss them on the rack. She smiles to herself; she stepped in one of Olaf’s badly placed hallway poops and the brown smears she didn’t clean off the white kitchen tile will infuriate her husband. He sighs, loudly, like an upset child, and she stifles a giggle.
In the kitchen proper, she knows he’ll find a cold pizza box open on the counter, a sink full of dirty dishes, and the remnants of one of Brooklyn’s DIY projects all over the counter, glitter and googly eyes confronting him instead of the spotless kitchen he demands.
“Hello?” he calls, voice dripping annoyance. “Anybody home? Were we robbed?”
“We’re in here,” Chelsea calls from the bed, although she doesn’t hurry to the kitchen, like he’d prefer. “Watching a movie.”
His footsteps are a warning, hard and slow, timeless as the minotaur hunting his maze. Olaf scampers off the bed and runs, whimpering and pissing himself, for Brooklyn’s closet. But for once, Chelsea isn’t scared of her husband. Let him come. Her blood is humming for this.
When he appears in the bedroom door, he’s a furious shadow. Chelsea smiles at him from their bed, snuggled up with her girls in a puddle of pillows and blankets, all three in their pajamas in broad daylight. Ella stiffens beside her, having realized too late that trouble is brewing, but Brooklyn looks up and grins, showing gaps in her teeth.
“Hi, Daddy!” she calls, utterly unaware that his jaw is grinding with rage. “We ordered pizza. And a movie! It’s about bears.”
Ella says, “Hi, Dad,” but she doesn’t smile or wave, and no one gets out of bed. Chelsea smiles, too, but they’re all wearing those green clay masks that David hates, so it’s not like he wants his dutiful kiss.
“Hi, honey. How was work?” she asks, perky as hell.
“Work was fine,” he snaps. “But the house isn’t much to come home to. Are you sick or something?”
She shakes her head. “Nope. We just decided to have a lazy night. You can heat up some pizza in the microwave. Or eat yesterday’s leftovers. It’s nice to be lazy, every now and then.” The girls are on either side of her, and she gives them a squeeze. Brooklyn giggles and hugs her back, but Ella just watches her father, tense and wary as a cat. She’s a sharp kid, even if she doesn’t really open up to Chelsea anymore, and she just realized that all the ingredients for a bad night are simmering.
“Lazy,” David muses. “Huh. Wish I could do that. But some of us have to work.”
“Is Daddy mad?” Brooklyn whispers, but of course he hears it.
Chelsea kisses the top of her head. “Oh, Daddy just needs to relax. Let’s get back to our movie.”
“I need to do what—?”
And then Chelsea hits PLAY and the room fills with the sound of yodeling bears.
It takes everything she has to keep a straight face. Her stern, angry husband has been interrupted by yodeling.
By yodeling. Fucking. Bears.