Fic a Week 2 - Everything Monstrous
Mar. 28th, 2009 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pauraque_bkThis story was based on a dream I had, and incorporates many elements of my personal life that I have often said I would never write fiction about.
++
Everything Monstrous
He is driving her to school. The rain is steady; the sky is bright white. The chill comes hard off the fogged windows, and she slumps back in the seat, her backpack resting heavy on her feet. Triangular dark shapes in the windshield above the defrosters.
She smells the car heat, and Michael's showered hair, still damp. His eyes are heavy behind his glasses.
Closer, block by block. She breaks it down into smaller and smaller pieces. When it's dry and she can take her bike, she can draw it out longer, she can have time to think, and she doesn't have to get up so early, her stomach doesn't churn so much.
They idle at the stoplight by the fire station.
"I don't feel good," Ellie says.
Michael rubs something out of the corner of his eye. "Neither do I," he murmurs.
They are passing the paint store; the gutters are blocked up with dead leaves and flooding up onto the sidewalk.
"Are you really sick?" he says, glancing at her.
"Maybe." Her stomach is wavering. "I don't want to go to school."
"Why not?"
She picks at the glove box in front of her, opening and closing it. "Just. People being dumb. Stupid shit."
His mouth twists a little. "Please don't say shit."
"You say shit all the time." She looks to him for his reaction – a little nervous, a little challenging.
He hesitates before he answers, his brows knit.
"That's not a reason," he says sadly.
She turns and stares ahead at the road. "I'll just say fuck instead."
He looks at her sidelong, pained. "Ellie, please."
A pause that lasts a block or two.
"I don't say shit *all* the time," he says.
Ellie is smiling despite herself. "You always do when you realize you forgot something. And when you die in Mario."
He makes a brief little shrug with his hands and then rests them back on the wheel. "Well, come on, Mario..."
She grins, but they have turned onto the frontage road, and in a moment they are there, and the car draws to a stop.
"If it's still raining I'll come get you at the library, okay?" says Michael.
"Yeah," Ellie says, and slides out of the car, dragging her backpack.
He drives away, and she is alone at the top of the hill, the rain pattering lightly on her umbrella. She picks her way through the muddy grass. It is quiet now, she doesn't have a class until 8:30, and no one will get here until a few minutes before that.
It isn't raining too hard anymore, and she wanders around the slick and empty PE yard, stepping on and off the planters. She can hear the band practicing on the other side of the wall, muffled chords like distant trains.
The geese have settled onto the running field now, still and dreary. Steam rises off the heat of them, a thicker fog in the cold.
Band gets out. She can hear the rattle of chairs and a floodbreak of voices, and her shoulders bunch up; she walks reluctantly towards the buildings.
Lynna comes down and walks beside her towards math class, carrying her flute. Her thick hair is still shower-damp and tangled.
"You should have seen it," Lynna says. "They were totally flirting with each other. Oh my god, it was so obvious."
Ellie smiles a little. "David and...?"
"Sh-shh, don't say it," Lynna giggles. "You know who. They're so gay for each other, it's so obvious. I can't even pay attention because I'm just always looking back at them trying to see--"
Lynna stumbles-- no, is pushed, is slammed into, Carlos ramming into her shoulder and walking on hard.
"Oh my god, what is your problem?" Lynna says, flushing half-hysterical.
"Oh my god!" parrots Carlos and cups his hand around his mouth: "Dykes!" Laughter bounces around the hall.
*
The rain keeps everyone restless and indoors. PE is in the gym but they still have to dress. Ellie changes clothes as fast as she can, hunched tight against the locker. Lynna is slower, but she is wearing a bra, and does not have to take it off. Moles and pimples on her shoulders.
"Chickpeas," hisses someone from Ellie's left, but she does not look; she stares at the pattern of the metal on the inside of the locker.
"You should get a bra," Lynna whispers as they walk out of the locker room.
"I don't want to ask my dad," Ellie says stiffly. "And I don't have anything to put in one anyway."
"You're gonna have to sometime. Or I could ask my mom."
Ellie shrugs and shakes her head.
*
In the lunchroom it is cramped and the din is smothering, but there is nowhere to escape to. They pick at the inedible orange burritos. Ellie peels some of the top layer off the soggy tortilla. Lynna is talking to her but she is not really listening, she just nods once in a while. Once some girls come bother them, ask Ellie if she is anorexic, and Lynna why she is so fat if she doesn't eat. It is not the first time; Lynna threatens to tell, which makes them laugh. Ellie just doesn't answer. Nothing helps, nothing changes it.
They leave eventually and Ellie feels pinched and tight in her skin, her knobby knees pressed together as Lynna talks mournfully beside her.
*
It is raining heavily again by the time school is out, so Ellie goes to the library to wait. She enters cautiously at first, but there is no one here at this time but the ESL kids being tutored. Kids she doesn't know the names of, still wearing their neon bright jackets and plastic backpacks with cartoon characters no one knows.
She reads for a while but gets bored, she walks up and down the shelves running her fingertips along the crinkly-plastic spines until the librarian starts giving her funny looks.
Michael comes at 5:30. The heavy door comes open with a loud click, making the ESL kids turn and look.
He cringes and mouths "sorry" to them; Ellie picks up her backpack and comes to him. His hair and jacket are wet and he is breathless.
"I forgot my umbrella at work," he says as they get outside, beneath the awning.
She gives him hers, and he holds it over both of them as they walk up through the muddy grass.
As they are riding home she turns on the radio, hoping they can sing along. She likes to sing with him, but not by herself; her voice sounds too high and thin in her own head. Michael does not sing today. He is slumping back in his seat and driving with his fingertips resting on the bottom of the wheel.
The rain does not let up, but there is a break in the clouds; she reaches up and puts down the visor. The sun glares in as they drive, and flickers off Michael's wedding ring.
*
She does not do her homework. She sits in her room and pretends to, even taking out her math and history books, though the door is closed and he never comes in without knocking. She reads a book, rather bored. It would almost be easier to just do the work, and it's not that she can't do it, she just...
She reads.
When it has been long enough, she comes out; he is watching TV. No, he isn't looking at the TV, but it's on and the remote is in his lap. His legs are stretched out on the couch and arms crossed, looking absent. His bare feet are propped up on the armrest, his shoes and socks discarded on the floor.
"I'm hungry," she says.
He blinks and looks over at her. "What do you want to eat?"
"What is there?"
He draws a breath and rubs his face with both hands. "Same as always."
"Can you make me an egg in a frame?"
He gets up slowly, dragging. Pads past her into the kitchen. "Aren't you getting a little old for that?"
She scratches her elbow. "You eat it too."
"Well, maybe it just needs a more mature name." His voice is muffled as he leans down into the refrigerator.
"Mister egg in a frame," she says.
He laughs exhaustedly, leaning against the fridge door, his head down and hair falling in his face.
He butters the bread, he uses an inverted glass to cut the hole. Sizzling pan and he cracks the egg in.
It is not the same as Mom made it, but she doesn't tell him that.
*
At night, in her room, she looks at herself naked in the mirror. A scathing eye on her own white skin, so paper white that they ask her sometimes if she is an albino. She runs her finger along the edge of her flat non-breast; her nipples are sore and softly protruding.
He never makes her get her hair cut, so it has grown longer and wilder, with split ends. Once, a year ago, she tried to cut the ends herself, but it didn't come out even and they asked her if she was too poor to get her hair cut right. He doesn't make her do that, or tell her to brush her teeth. He probably thinks she is old enough to do it herself, and she is ashamed.
She puts her hands at the tops of her thighs and pulls up a little, opens her vulva. Her labia stick out a little now, and she used to try to tuck them back in the way they were before, thinking she must have stretched them out by touching herself. But she has read now that it's normal. She has read dry foreign words, she has sat in class and looked at line drawings of boys and girls.
Years ago, when she was little, he came out of the walk-in closet naked, not knowing she was there. She saw the pink line of his genitals, she saw the round thing beneath his thick reddish pubic hair that was not a penis.
After that they sat down and Mom told her how some boys didn't have a penis, and how Michael took medicine to help him be a boy.
Michael sat on the end of the bed while Mom talked, nervous with his hands clasped between his knees.
*
When she falls asleep, she dreams. Everything is lurching and brightly-colored, monstrous. Things melt into each other.
Sitting on the grass with him and leaning into his lap, he holds her and strokes her hair, the skin of his hands smells like sunlight. They are fluid together, there is no awkwardness or weight, no pressure on their bodies. She burrows into his neck and they are falling into the soft grass, falling past where the ground would be. The hair of his belly is silky under her hands. She expects to feel his penis, but there is nothing there, a void, and his chest is flowing out black tar, acidburn cancer.
She wakes up falling, and grabs onto the bed. She is afraid for him, and she goes up into the bedroom that was theirs, certain as she climbs the stairs that she is going to see him dead, that she will see his slack bearded face looking strange without his glasses, and that she will be alone.
He is not there.
She half-runs down into the living room, stomach churning and the world spinning out into the empty waste of him never coming back.
He is sitting on the floor in front of the couch playing Halo in the half-dark, the TV flickering over him. He looks up at her in surprise, the blue light making his skin pale.
"What's the matter? You had a bad dream?"
"I don't know." She feels her face getting hot. "I couldn't sleep."
"Well, try... Just lie down, it's better than nothing." He rubs the back of his neck, the controller dangling from his other hand.
*
In the morning he wakes her up and it is nearly still dark, she comes to slowly, her arms and legs ache and her throat is tight. She is cold and feels nauseated. Her mind whispers *morning sickness* and she wonders if there is something awful growing inside her.
It is raining hard again.
In math they have to do something bad, a project in groups, and she is terrified. She and Lynna draw together, but they need four, and there is no one--
"You can be in our group," says Carlos, and they have no choice, she sits down across from him. Carlos and another boy whose name she does not remember.
It is bad. She tries to just go somewhere else, not to say anything, scribbling on the edge of her paper. Carlos talks about her face, her hair. Asks her if she is going to cry today (she hasn't cried in school since third grade). The class is noisy and no one can hear him but their table.
"You know your dad isn't really your dad," says the other boy suddenly.
"He's her stepdad," Lynna says, rolling her eyes. "Duh."
"Duhhh," Carlos echoes, making a retarded face.
The other boy ignores him. "Your dad is really your mom."
Ellie stops. She holds her pencil hard. "What?"
"What does that mean?" giggles Lynna after a moment.
"He's like a fuckin' dyke or something. He just pretended to be a guy so nobody would know. And he got pregnant with you."
"What are you talking about?" says Lynna. "Have you actually seen her stepdad? He has a beard. He's not a girl."
The boy shrugs. "It's probably fake. I heard my parents talking about it. I almost puked just thinking about it."
"Shut up," Ellie says, her face burning.
The boy is looking at her, calm and level. "He got pregnant with you."
"That's gross, stop," says Lynna, uneasy now. Carlos is laughing.
"And you came out through his pussy--"
Ellie shoves her chair back with a loud rough creak that makes everyone look, and she runs, she runs, she finds the nurse's office and realizes she is crying, she can't even explain what is wrong. She thinks she is going to throw up but she can't, she just kneels over the toilet and retches.
She stays there for the rest of the day. They tell her to go back to class but she refuses, she just sits there in the office and listens to them talk about her, and to the sound of the copy machine.
When school is over it is raining again. She can't go to the library, she can't risk who might be there, can't stay in this dangerous place.
She walks out into the rain. Freezer-cold creeps up through to the soles of her feet and she realizes her shoes are already getting soaked through, the holes in them... Her head down, hair streaming down around her shoulders. Walking on the curving frontage road, cars roaring past on one side and the chainlink fence dripping water on the other, the overgrown field thick with waist-high brush that grows yellow flowers that look like sourgrass.
By the time she gets home she is soaked and freezing. She can't believe this happened, can't believe there was no other choice, no one to rescue her. She goes into the bathroom and towels herself off, teeth chattering.
When she comes out she realizes there is a message blinking on the phone.
It is the wavering voice of her grandfather, whom Ellie has not seen since she was little, gravelly and heavy-breathed, heavy-jowled.
"Hello, this is George. Claudia's father. I'm calling because we haven't heard from you or Ellie for a few months." Staticky sigh. "And we just wondered how you were doing."
Ellie sits down on the floor and thinks of going to live with her grandparents, of escaping this. Never seeing them again.
Any of them.
She doesn't know what to do now. She goes into the living room and plays Mario for a while; butterflies in her stomach make her mess up and keep missing where she's trying to jump.
"Shit," she says.
At 5:30 the phone rings. She doesn't answer it. She watches a TV show about music from a year before she was born.
At 5:45 Michael's car pulls up, and he runs up the steps and comes in dripping wet and terrified.
"Oh my god," he says when he sees her, falling back against the door. "Oh my god, you scared the shit out of me. Why didn't you wait for me? What were you doing?"
She tries to look cold, but her hands are shaking. "I don't need you to pick me up." And then: "Why are you looking at me like that?"
He is shaking his head in disbelief, struggling out of his jacket. "You-- I don't know what your problem is right now, but you can't-- You can't do that."
"Yes I can," she says. "You're not..." She feels numb, but her eyes are stinging. "You're not my father. You're not my mother. I don't have to do what you say. I remember what it was like before you. Everything was better before you came." It is a lie; her toddler memories are blurred and jerky, like a dream.
But Michael looks so stunned and *shamed*, and she is triumphant. She is disgusted. She stands up and throws the remote on the floor.
"I hate you," she says. "You don't take care of me like Mom did, you never help me. You never cut my hair."
"I-- I thought you were old enough to do it yourself. You never asked me to." His expression of half-panicked dismay, his flop sweat, she can't stand it.
How dare-- How dare *Mom*, flashes into her feverish rage, how dare Mom abandon them, orphans in the wild. Didn't she know what would happen?
"Why did you ever think you could be my father? You're not even a real--"
She stops.
Michael is looking at her and is very still. He...
She starts sobbing, and she walks over to him rubbing her eye with her palm, and puts her arms around him. He holds her, his hands on her back.
"I'm so tired," she says.
He says, "I'm tired too."
*
He makes them macaroni and cheese for dinner. It comes from a box and can't get messed up. Her face still feels stiff from crying.
They sit at the kitchen table, and the narrow sun glares for a minute through the window; it lights across his arms, making the hair there pale red, casting delicate shadows.
"I need you to give me my shot today," he says, dragging his fork around in the bowl and looking at her sidelong, a flicker of apology.
Ellie nods.
Mom gave them to him, before. Ellie had watched her do it, and then he would turn around and she would slide into his arms, and they hugged each other.
In the bathroom, he unzips his jeans and pulls them down enough to expose his hip; he has never taken them all the way down, she has never seen him naked from behind.
Mom taught her to do this. Even when she was supposed to get better. She knew.
Ellie draws it to the line in the syringe, and she wipes his skin with alcohol there, just there.
When she sticks him, he makes the slightest jump, sharp intake of breath. The needle is so big and open. She has to press hard to get the liquid to go, it is so thick, milky white. Michael's breathing is shallow and quiet. The bathtub faucet drips.
The syringe comes to the end, and softly the plastic clicks. She pulls out of him in one quick, smooth gesture. Puts the little bandaid where she made the hole in his skin.
"All done," she says.
.
++
Everything Monstrous
He is driving her to school. The rain is steady; the sky is bright white. The chill comes hard off the fogged windows, and she slumps back in the seat, her backpack resting heavy on her feet. Triangular dark shapes in the windshield above the defrosters.
She smells the car heat, and Michael's showered hair, still damp. His eyes are heavy behind his glasses.
Closer, block by block. She breaks it down into smaller and smaller pieces. When it's dry and she can take her bike, she can draw it out longer, she can have time to think, and she doesn't have to get up so early, her stomach doesn't churn so much.
They idle at the stoplight by the fire station.
"I don't feel good," Ellie says.
Michael rubs something out of the corner of his eye. "Neither do I," he murmurs.
They are passing the paint store; the gutters are blocked up with dead leaves and flooding up onto the sidewalk.
"Are you really sick?" he says, glancing at her.
"Maybe." Her stomach is wavering. "I don't want to go to school."
"Why not?"
She picks at the glove box in front of her, opening and closing it. "Just. People being dumb. Stupid shit."
His mouth twists a little. "Please don't say shit."
"You say shit all the time." She looks to him for his reaction – a little nervous, a little challenging.
He hesitates before he answers, his brows knit.
"That's not a reason," he says sadly.
She turns and stares ahead at the road. "I'll just say fuck instead."
He looks at her sidelong, pained. "Ellie, please."
A pause that lasts a block or two.
"I don't say shit *all* the time," he says.
Ellie is smiling despite herself. "You always do when you realize you forgot something. And when you die in Mario."
He makes a brief little shrug with his hands and then rests them back on the wheel. "Well, come on, Mario..."
She grins, but they have turned onto the frontage road, and in a moment they are there, and the car draws to a stop.
"If it's still raining I'll come get you at the library, okay?" says Michael.
"Yeah," Ellie says, and slides out of the car, dragging her backpack.
He drives away, and she is alone at the top of the hill, the rain pattering lightly on her umbrella. She picks her way through the muddy grass. It is quiet now, she doesn't have a class until 8:30, and no one will get here until a few minutes before that.
It isn't raining too hard anymore, and she wanders around the slick and empty PE yard, stepping on and off the planters. She can hear the band practicing on the other side of the wall, muffled chords like distant trains.
The geese have settled onto the running field now, still and dreary. Steam rises off the heat of them, a thicker fog in the cold.
Band gets out. She can hear the rattle of chairs and a floodbreak of voices, and her shoulders bunch up; she walks reluctantly towards the buildings.
Lynna comes down and walks beside her towards math class, carrying her flute. Her thick hair is still shower-damp and tangled.
"You should have seen it," Lynna says. "They were totally flirting with each other. Oh my god, it was so obvious."
Ellie smiles a little. "David and...?"
"Sh-shh, don't say it," Lynna giggles. "You know who. They're so gay for each other, it's so obvious. I can't even pay attention because I'm just always looking back at them trying to see--"
Lynna stumbles-- no, is pushed, is slammed into, Carlos ramming into her shoulder and walking on hard.
"Oh my god, what is your problem?" Lynna says, flushing half-hysterical.
"Oh my god!" parrots Carlos and cups his hand around his mouth: "Dykes!" Laughter bounces around the hall.
*
The rain keeps everyone restless and indoors. PE is in the gym but they still have to dress. Ellie changes clothes as fast as she can, hunched tight against the locker. Lynna is slower, but she is wearing a bra, and does not have to take it off. Moles and pimples on her shoulders.
"Chickpeas," hisses someone from Ellie's left, but she does not look; she stares at the pattern of the metal on the inside of the locker.
"You should get a bra," Lynna whispers as they walk out of the locker room.
"I don't want to ask my dad," Ellie says stiffly. "And I don't have anything to put in one anyway."
"You're gonna have to sometime. Or I could ask my mom."
Ellie shrugs and shakes her head.
*
In the lunchroom it is cramped and the din is smothering, but there is nowhere to escape to. They pick at the inedible orange burritos. Ellie peels some of the top layer off the soggy tortilla. Lynna is talking to her but she is not really listening, she just nods once in a while. Once some girls come bother them, ask Ellie if she is anorexic, and Lynna why she is so fat if she doesn't eat. It is not the first time; Lynna threatens to tell, which makes them laugh. Ellie just doesn't answer. Nothing helps, nothing changes it.
They leave eventually and Ellie feels pinched and tight in her skin, her knobby knees pressed together as Lynna talks mournfully beside her.
*
It is raining heavily again by the time school is out, so Ellie goes to the library to wait. She enters cautiously at first, but there is no one here at this time but the ESL kids being tutored. Kids she doesn't know the names of, still wearing their neon bright jackets and plastic backpacks with cartoon characters no one knows.
She reads for a while but gets bored, she walks up and down the shelves running her fingertips along the crinkly-plastic spines until the librarian starts giving her funny looks.
Michael comes at 5:30. The heavy door comes open with a loud click, making the ESL kids turn and look.
He cringes and mouths "sorry" to them; Ellie picks up her backpack and comes to him. His hair and jacket are wet and he is breathless.
"I forgot my umbrella at work," he says as they get outside, beneath the awning.
She gives him hers, and he holds it over both of them as they walk up through the muddy grass.
As they are riding home she turns on the radio, hoping they can sing along. She likes to sing with him, but not by herself; her voice sounds too high and thin in her own head. Michael does not sing today. He is slumping back in his seat and driving with his fingertips resting on the bottom of the wheel.
The rain does not let up, but there is a break in the clouds; she reaches up and puts down the visor. The sun glares in as they drive, and flickers off Michael's wedding ring.
*
She does not do her homework. She sits in her room and pretends to, even taking out her math and history books, though the door is closed and he never comes in without knocking. She reads a book, rather bored. It would almost be easier to just do the work, and it's not that she can't do it, she just...
She reads.
When it has been long enough, she comes out; he is watching TV. No, he isn't looking at the TV, but it's on and the remote is in his lap. His legs are stretched out on the couch and arms crossed, looking absent. His bare feet are propped up on the armrest, his shoes and socks discarded on the floor.
"I'm hungry," she says.
He blinks and looks over at her. "What do you want to eat?"
"What is there?"
He draws a breath and rubs his face with both hands. "Same as always."
"Can you make me an egg in a frame?"
He gets up slowly, dragging. Pads past her into the kitchen. "Aren't you getting a little old for that?"
She scratches her elbow. "You eat it too."
"Well, maybe it just needs a more mature name." His voice is muffled as he leans down into the refrigerator.
"Mister egg in a frame," she says.
He laughs exhaustedly, leaning against the fridge door, his head down and hair falling in his face.
He butters the bread, he uses an inverted glass to cut the hole. Sizzling pan and he cracks the egg in.
It is not the same as Mom made it, but she doesn't tell him that.
*
At night, in her room, she looks at herself naked in the mirror. A scathing eye on her own white skin, so paper white that they ask her sometimes if she is an albino. She runs her finger along the edge of her flat non-breast; her nipples are sore and softly protruding.
He never makes her get her hair cut, so it has grown longer and wilder, with split ends. Once, a year ago, she tried to cut the ends herself, but it didn't come out even and they asked her if she was too poor to get her hair cut right. He doesn't make her do that, or tell her to brush her teeth. He probably thinks she is old enough to do it herself, and she is ashamed.
She puts her hands at the tops of her thighs and pulls up a little, opens her vulva. Her labia stick out a little now, and she used to try to tuck them back in the way they were before, thinking she must have stretched them out by touching herself. But she has read now that it's normal. She has read dry foreign words, she has sat in class and looked at line drawings of boys and girls.
Years ago, when she was little, he came out of the walk-in closet naked, not knowing she was there. She saw the pink line of his genitals, she saw the round thing beneath his thick reddish pubic hair that was not a penis.
After that they sat down and Mom told her how some boys didn't have a penis, and how Michael took medicine to help him be a boy.
Michael sat on the end of the bed while Mom talked, nervous with his hands clasped between his knees.
*
When she falls asleep, she dreams. Everything is lurching and brightly-colored, monstrous. Things melt into each other.
Sitting on the grass with him and leaning into his lap, he holds her and strokes her hair, the skin of his hands smells like sunlight. They are fluid together, there is no awkwardness or weight, no pressure on their bodies. She burrows into his neck and they are falling into the soft grass, falling past where the ground would be. The hair of his belly is silky under her hands. She expects to feel his penis, but there is nothing there, a void, and his chest is flowing out black tar, acidburn cancer.
She wakes up falling, and grabs onto the bed. She is afraid for him, and she goes up into the bedroom that was theirs, certain as she climbs the stairs that she is going to see him dead, that she will see his slack bearded face looking strange without his glasses, and that she will be alone.
He is not there.
She half-runs down into the living room, stomach churning and the world spinning out into the empty waste of him never coming back.
He is sitting on the floor in front of the couch playing Halo in the half-dark, the TV flickering over him. He looks up at her in surprise, the blue light making his skin pale.
"What's the matter? You had a bad dream?"
"I don't know." She feels her face getting hot. "I couldn't sleep."
"Well, try... Just lie down, it's better than nothing." He rubs the back of his neck, the controller dangling from his other hand.
*
In the morning he wakes her up and it is nearly still dark, she comes to slowly, her arms and legs ache and her throat is tight. She is cold and feels nauseated. Her mind whispers *morning sickness* and she wonders if there is something awful growing inside her.
It is raining hard again.
In math they have to do something bad, a project in groups, and she is terrified. She and Lynna draw together, but they need four, and there is no one--
"You can be in our group," says Carlos, and they have no choice, she sits down across from him. Carlos and another boy whose name she does not remember.
It is bad. She tries to just go somewhere else, not to say anything, scribbling on the edge of her paper. Carlos talks about her face, her hair. Asks her if she is going to cry today (she hasn't cried in school since third grade). The class is noisy and no one can hear him but their table.
"You know your dad isn't really your dad," says the other boy suddenly.
"He's her stepdad," Lynna says, rolling her eyes. "Duh."
"Duhhh," Carlos echoes, making a retarded face.
The other boy ignores him. "Your dad is really your mom."
Ellie stops. She holds her pencil hard. "What?"
"What does that mean?" giggles Lynna after a moment.
"He's like a fuckin' dyke or something. He just pretended to be a guy so nobody would know. And he got pregnant with you."
"What are you talking about?" says Lynna. "Have you actually seen her stepdad? He has a beard. He's not a girl."
The boy shrugs. "It's probably fake. I heard my parents talking about it. I almost puked just thinking about it."
"Shut up," Ellie says, her face burning.
The boy is looking at her, calm and level. "He got pregnant with you."
"That's gross, stop," says Lynna, uneasy now. Carlos is laughing.
"And you came out through his pussy--"
Ellie shoves her chair back with a loud rough creak that makes everyone look, and she runs, she runs, she finds the nurse's office and realizes she is crying, she can't even explain what is wrong. She thinks she is going to throw up but she can't, she just kneels over the toilet and retches.
She stays there for the rest of the day. They tell her to go back to class but she refuses, she just sits there in the office and listens to them talk about her, and to the sound of the copy machine.
When school is over it is raining again. She can't go to the library, she can't risk who might be there, can't stay in this dangerous place.
She walks out into the rain. Freezer-cold creeps up through to the soles of her feet and she realizes her shoes are already getting soaked through, the holes in them... Her head down, hair streaming down around her shoulders. Walking on the curving frontage road, cars roaring past on one side and the chainlink fence dripping water on the other, the overgrown field thick with waist-high brush that grows yellow flowers that look like sourgrass.
By the time she gets home she is soaked and freezing. She can't believe this happened, can't believe there was no other choice, no one to rescue her. She goes into the bathroom and towels herself off, teeth chattering.
When she comes out she realizes there is a message blinking on the phone.
It is the wavering voice of her grandfather, whom Ellie has not seen since she was little, gravelly and heavy-breathed, heavy-jowled.
"Hello, this is George. Claudia's father. I'm calling because we haven't heard from you or Ellie for a few months." Staticky sigh. "And we just wondered how you were doing."
Ellie sits down on the floor and thinks of going to live with her grandparents, of escaping this. Never seeing them again.
Any of them.
She doesn't know what to do now. She goes into the living room and plays Mario for a while; butterflies in her stomach make her mess up and keep missing where she's trying to jump.
"Shit," she says.
At 5:30 the phone rings. She doesn't answer it. She watches a TV show about music from a year before she was born.
At 5:45 Michael's car pulls up, and he runs up the steps and comes in dripping wet and terrified.
"Oh my god," he says when he sees her, falling back against the door. "Oh my god, you scared the shit out of me. Why didn't you wait for me? What were you doing?"
She tries to look cold, but her hands are shaking. "I don't need you to pick me up." And then: "Why are you looking at me like that?"
He is shaking his head in disbelief, struggling out of his jacket. "You-- I don't know what your problem is right now, but you can't-- You can't do that."
"Yes I can," she says. "You're not..." She feels numb, but her eyes are stinging. "You're not my father. You're not my mother. I don't have to do what you say. I remember what it was like before you. Everything was better before you came." It is a lie; her toddler memories are blurred and jerky, like a dream.
But Michael looks so stunned and *shamed*, and she is triumphant. She is disgusted. She stands up and throws the remote on the floor.
"I hate you," she says. "You don't take care of me like Mom did, you never help me. You never cut my hair."
"I-- I thought you were old enough to do it yourself. You never asked me to." His expression of half-panicked dismay, his flop sweat, she can't stand it.
How dare-- How dare *Mom*, flashes into her feverish rage, how dare Mom abandon them, orphans in the wild. Didn't she know what would happen?
"Why did you ever think you could be my father? You're not even a real--"
She stops.
Michael is looking at her and is very still. He...
She starts sobbing, and she walks over to him rubbing her eye with her palm, and puts her arms around him. He holds her, his hands on her back.
"I'm so tired," she says.
He says, "I'm tired too."
*
He makes them macaroni and cheese for dinner. It comes from a box and can't get messed up. Her face still feels stiff from crying.
They sit at the kitchen table, and the narrow sun glares for a minute through the window; it lights across his arms, making the hair there pale red, casting delicate shadows.
"I need you to give me my shot today," he says, dragging his fork around in the bowl and looking at her sidelong, a flicker of apology.
Ellie nods.
Mom gave them to him, before. Ellie had watched her do it, and then he would turn around and she would slide into his arms, and they hugged each other.
In the bathroom, he unzips his jeans and pulls them down enough to expose his hip; he has never taken them all the way down, she has never seen him naked from behind.
Mom taught her to do this. Even when she was supposed to get better. She knew.
Ellie draws it to the line in the syringe, and she wipes his skin with alcohol there, just there.
When she sticks him, he makes the slightest jump, sharp intake of breath. The needle is so big and open. She has to press hard to get the liquid to go, it is so thick, milky white. Michael's breathing is shallow and quiet. The bathtub faucet drips.
The syringe comes to the end, and softly the plastic clicks. She pulls out of him in one quick, smooth gesture. Puts the little bandaid where she made the hole in his skin.
"All done," she says.
.
