Pretty soon, the kids at school were frightened of me. Rumors followed me everywhere. People said I was a drug dealer. An addict. A witch who sacrificed chickens in her backyard. A whore who’d slept with everyone at school. None of it was true, but who cares about truth in high school? A mysterious burner account messaged me on AIM to call me an intense, annoying psycho, and I replied, “What do you mean, annoying? Tell me what the fuck annoying even is.” But they just typed, “ROFL lololol ok bitch u funny” and logged off. So instead of trying to convince everyone I was normal, I leaned into my freakishness, doubled down on my fury.
In his adult circles, my father wasn’t faring much better. His small handful of friends had distanced themselves from him because he couldn’t stop complaining about his shitty ex-wife.
Soon, my father and I found ourselves alone in this world, and our simmering hatred had nowhere to go but toward each other.
CHAPTER 5
The first night my father told me I was just like my mother, he uncorked a lifetime of rage. It had only been two months since she’d left. Sometimes I thought I could still hear her screaming my name. I’d stand up and whip around in the schoolyard during lunch, looking for her in a panic, afraid she was coming for me.
I would not tolerate this accusation from him. “Fuck you to hell and back,” I screamed at my father, “I am nothing like her. You know what she did to me. You know what she did to us. She tortured me my entire life and you never protected me from it and now you dare…you DARE to compare me to her. Who is the one who takes care of your pathetic, sorry ass now?”
“Oh,” my father replied. “Now I see why your mother hates you. I get why she left.”
“Well, if you don’t want me, fine,” I spat, and I ran. I slammed my feet into my Vans, threw open the front door, and sprinted. I didn’t care if I didn’t have any money or food or a coat; I’d figure it out, I’d go someplace, I’d find someone. I was a kid. People take care of kids. They’re supposed to. One foot in front of the other. Here was one thing I knew how to do.
He tried to follow me. I heard him yelling, “Wait, come back, stop!” but my legs were slingshots, my head was clear, the fall air was brisk, and when it entered my lungs, I became the night. I was sure I could disappear.
And then I heard him scream. A shrill, guttural wail. And then: “MY FOOT! MY FOOT! I CUT UP MY FOOT!” He’d run across the asphalt barefoot.
I ran for a half a block more, maybe. But it didn’t take long for me to slow, then stop. I stood there for a minute, looking toward the far end of the block, the cars passing on the main road. Our block always smelled of desert grass and warm pavement. An indigo dusk settled itself behind the tops of the palm trees lining the street. It would be dark soon. Where was I really going to go?
He was still making little whimpering noises. I walked back. He was gripping his foot with both hands, squeezing it desperately. Back home, I helped him up the stairs to the bathroom. He sat on the floor. “There’s so much blood,” he moaned. I got the Neosporin and asked him to move his hands. He did, sucking in his breath. I looked. The cut in his foot was smaller than a pencil eraser. It had barely broken the skin. It was not bleeding. I stared at him and waited. I tried to make him look at me. He didn’t. I threw the Neosporin at his head, went to my room, and slammed the door. I took a hunting knife and sliced open a large red gash on the pad of my thumb. I didn’t flinch.
* * *
—
By the middle of my sophomore year, I saw my dad maybe three nights a week. The other nights he spent at his new girlfriend’s house. But that’s not what he called her. “My friend,” he said. “This is my friend’s car I’m borrowing.” “It’s my friend’s kids I’m watching.” As if he just had a best buddy with whom he had fun pajama popcorn sleepovers every night. He knew I didn’t want him to date. I’d told him I was still too traumatized and couldn’t handle another mother figure in my life right now. So his solution was to keep us separate and divide his life: one half with me, and one with her. He felt like he got everything he wanted. I felt like I was being abandoned again. When he first started disappearing, I started disappearing, too. I stopped eating and dropped to ninety-five pounds. But in time, I came to terms with the fact that it wasn’t him and me against the world anymore. It was me, alone.
* * *
—
The day that marked the beginning of the end was outstandingly sunny. I was sixteen, about to start my senior year, and he was driving us home. I can’t remember what we were arguing about, but I knew things had escalated to a dangerous place when his eyes went wild. He sweated. The car engine revved faster and faster.
“Don’t do this,” I warned, but he just laughed, the pitch of it rising eerily.
“It’s too late, it’s too laaate,” he said in a singsong voice. He blew past one stop sign. Two.
I knew how this went. The first time he’d done it, I was ten years old. My parents had a fight at New Sam Kee, and my mother left the restaurant and walked me home out of spite. My father pulled up alongside us and screamed, “GET IN OR I’LL KILL YOU!” His voice was savage and distorted, his eyes like ping-pong balls in their sockets. “Go,” my mother whispered, reluctantly setting me in the car, and before I could close the door, he floored it, sixty-five in a school zone.
“We’re going to die. We’re going to die. I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to kill you with me. I can’t do this anymore,” he said in a voice nothing like his own. A small part of me was irritated by the drama of it—like the voice was something he stole from a movie.
“Please, Daddy,” I wailed, but he screamed at me to shut up and then swerved into oncoming traffic. A symphony of horns announced my death. But at the last minute, he swerved back and then stomped on the pedals—left, right, left, right, stop, go, until my head dove forward and then slammed back against the seat.
I went through everyone just in case: Allah, Buddha, Jesus. Then I asked Jesus’s forgiveness for cycling through so many gods, because obviously there’s only one, but you understand, right, Jesus? I put my hands up rigidly. Maybe if the car flipped, I could push myself off the ceiling, protect my head. But wait, don’t they say that babies don’t die after they fall from heights because they’re relaxed? Should I relax? Should I jump out? Should I scream? Isn’t death, too, a problem I can solve?
We got home safely, but I never forgot that look on his face, that shuddery voice. I was disturbed to see it again after the divorce.
* * *
—
My father didn’t hit me once after my mother left, but he was a fan of car terrorism. Whenever we fought while driving, he’d start sweating and shaking, breathing heavily until the car windows fogged up. Then he’d blow stoplights, brake so hard my seatbelt choked my breath, careen near the edges of cliffs, all while laughing maniacally. “It’s time for both of us to die,” he’d sing, smiling. “I’m going to kill myself because I’m tired of this life, and you’re a fucking bitch so you’re coming, too.” He almost killed us a dozen times; each time, I’d beg and plead and placate him, feeding him reasons why we needed to live. Still, the incidents kept happening. First occasionally, then once every couple of months. Then more frequently.