After Frankie had vanished, Sally had gradually become more and more involved with a new guy, Boska. Boska was some kind of shadowy supplier to dealers, so he had no problem satisfying Sally’s needs. More often than not he spent the night.
Boska was a big man, thick-boned and barrel-chested. He rode a Harley and had a scraggly beard. He hung out with other bikers and sometimes brought them to parties at the trailer. They were the scariest guys Angela had ever seen, but it was Boska who made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
Angela would shut herself in her bedroom when there was anyone other than her mother in the trailer. One night, Boska broke the door so it wouldn’t latch anymore. Then, when her mother was sleeping, he would come in, sit on her bed, and ask her stupid questions, like how she was doing in school or what she wanted to be when she grew up. All the while he leered at her. Boska scared her to down into her marrow.
With her now-ample supply of drugs, Sally was out of it much of the time. She would be up for days, strung out on meth; then she’d smoke pot for hours to bring herself down so she could sleep. Those periods were less like sleep and more like a coma.
It was during those periods of her mother’s comatose sleep that Boska came into her room and the serious abuse began.
Sally’s continual quest for oblivion had earned her badges of scabs. The teeth she had left were rotten. Her eyes were bloodshot and ringed with red. Her once-beautiful face looked like badly crinkled paper plastered down over a skull.
Even though Sally was only in her midthirties, she was used up.
Angela, on the other hand, was maturing into a leggy young woman blossoming with the femininity her mother had lost.
Sally was an easy lay, but Boska preferred Angela. Each encounter was accompanied by threats of what would happen to her if she didn’t keep her mouth shut. Angela was so afraid of Boska that she often lost her voice when he asked her questions. When he smacked her, she could only get out the words she knew he wanted to hear.
In order to stay alive, she submitted to him.
With no one to protect her and no way to escape her new hell, Angela learned to survive those encounters in her bedroom by letting her mind go to another place. What Boska was doing to her dimmed into insignificance. She wasn’t there. She was gone.
While Boska was on top of her and her mind was in another place, she was nearly as comatose as her mother.
When Boska was finished, the threats at knifepoint, and on occasion gunpoint, brought her back from that distant peace and scared her witless. She knew that if she angered him, he wouldn’t hesitate to slash her face, or cut her throat. He promised her a face full of acid if she ever crossed him.
One time when she did say something snotty to him as he was zipping up his pants, he said that if she ever smart-mouthed him again he would give her as a gift to the motorcycle gang that sold drugs for him. She could see in his eyes that he was not making idle threats.
After he left her room and then went to sleep with Sally, Angela would tremble for hours, unable to go to sleep, knowing that there was nothing she could do about it, no one who could help her, and that there would be more to come.
Her fear of Boska kept her from telling anyone at school about the things he did to her. She also knew that Mr. Ericsson wouldn’t be inclined to believe her, and would be even less inclined to help her. She was quite sure that Mr. Ericsson would be pleased to hear that she was getting what was coming to her.
She knew the police wouldn’t help her—Boska had been arrested dozens of times for all kinds of things and he always got out. He was released for time served, the charges were dropped, the charges were reduced to a misdemeanor, or he received probation. He never went to jail for the things he did. He always got away with it. She knew that if she went to the police, Boska would get out, and then when he had her alone she would pay the price for snitching. As far as Angela was concerned, the law was meaningless.
It all left Angela feeling totally alone and helpless. Frankie had been once, but Boska seemed perpetually aroused. He was an ever-present threat.
At one point she began to spend nights sleeping in hidden places in alleys, or in bushes behind other trailers, shivering in the cold but glad to be alone. One day when she came home from school, Boska grabbed her hair in his big fist and warned her that if she didn’t stay at home at night he’d come looking for her, and she sure as hell wouldn’t like what would happen to her when he found her.
After that, Angela stayed at home where he would have ready access to her. Her mother wouldn’t help her, the school wouldn’t help her, and the law wouldn’t protect her. There was nothing she could do but endure it while her mind drifted away to distant places.
She knew that the worst thing in the world would be to get pregnant, so she started on the pill. She got a supply each month from a women’s health clinic in a run-down rented storefront. She had just turned fifteen, and they thought she was too young to have sex, so at first they turned her down. She asked them if they thought she was old enough to have a baby. They relented and let her start on the pill.
Because they knew that some girls had difficult, and even dangerous, situations at home, it was their policy not to call the parents if the underage girl asked them not to. Angela asked them not to.
She seriously doubted that her mother would care if she thought Angela was screwing boys, but Angela knew she would be blamed if she told her mother the truth. She knew it was all too likely to blow up into a screaming fit. Sally would say that Angela had asked for it, and then, when her mother was out of it, Boska would do his worst to her for saying something.
Angela wasn’t sure she cared if he killed her, as long as it was quick, but she feared his threat of acid in her face.
She was relieved when the women’s clinic agreed to provide her with the pill and confidentiality.
After the money from the sale of her grandparents’ house ran out, Angela often became the unspoken source of payment for her mother’s drugs, so she knew that her mother would have a vested interest in looking the other way. If the men got what they wanted, Sally got what she wanted. That was all there was to it. Oftentimes Boska was the gatekeeper for which men could have her in exchange for what Sally received. He told Angela that he was protecting her from the guys who had diseases.
More days than she could count, Angela walked to school spitting out the taste of semen.
As time went on, she slipped into a deep depression. She felt like a trapped animal. There was no escape from the situation and no hope.
She did as she was told by men she dared not cross. She did as her mother told her as well, shopping for groceries and cooking, taking care of chores around the house, and in general doing her mother’s bidding.
She was the girl in the moon passing silently through the gloomy trailer, at the beck and call of psychopaths.
She knew that the only way the abuse would stop was if she were able to get totally out of her mother’s place. If she had a car, she could drive to her grandparents’ cabin—her cabin—and live there. But it would be nearly a year before she was old enough to get a driver’s license. The fact that she had no money to get a car even then only left her feeling even more hopeless.
She lost all interest in everything. She didn’t care about anything or anyone. She only did the minimum to pass her classes at school. Every person she knew used her for one thing or another. She wanted everyone to leave her alone.