“I’ll miss you,” I whisper.
“Me too.”
“Tell him to meet me at the bend of the road at midnight. Tell him I’ll be there.”
“Okay.”
I spend the day feeling light, feeling alive. I swallow down the morning after pill my mom got for me because she doesn’t want me to get pregnant, even though I’ve never had sex. Not to mention my parents want me to go to this hardcore bible camp over the summer. Because what the hell is wrong with me if I let a boy take my picture naked?
“What good is having children if they are going to humiliate you in front of the entire world?” my mom says. “You bring them up a certain way, you make sacrifices for them, and this is how they repay you. This is how they sully the good name of their parents. This is how innocent girls end up on the internet.”
Except, I don’t think I’m that innocent anymore. My innocence was lost the moment my mother decided to parade me half-naked in front of the world.
They decide to tell the whole town that Abel Adams raped me, and if I deny it, they’ll send me somewhere even worse than bible camp. I can only assume it’s the mental hospital where they give you electric shocks to alter your brain chemistry. I’m guessing my mom has the prescription ready as well. Mrs. Weatherby’s husband is a psychiatrist.
She was the one who set my world on fire. She saw me walking upstairs to Abel’s apartment and decided to babble to everyone she knew. It took her forty minutes to gather everyone and tell my mom.
Forty minutes.
I was only up in Abel’s apartment for forty minutes and it felt like forty days. It felt like forty seconds.
In the evening, I sit beside my parents, pray and eat their food. These are the people who should’ve supported me. These are the people who should’ve listened to me, or at least let me put my clothes back on before dragging me out of my boyfriend’s apartment.
I watch my dad’s hands as he eats the soup. He broke Abel’s camera with them. He punched him with them. His knuckles are swollen and busted. I hope it hurts. I hope it stings the way his desertion stung me.
Once dinner is done, I go upstairs. I count the hours and when it’s time to turn in for the night, my dad comes inside my room. Actually, he doesn’t. He stands at the threshold, like he can’t bear to be in the same room with me.
“I bailed him out. I want you to know that. I’m not your enemy, Evie. You’re my baby. You’re the one thing that I love the most in the world. And that’s why I can’t let him be your downfall.” His eyes are red; tears are stuck to his eyelashes. “Because that’s what’s going to happen if you don’t get out now. That boy will be your downfall. Look what he already made you do. The pictures. The way you were…” He blinks, like I do when I need to get rid of the salty water. “It’s not right. But it’s just the way we love, you and I. I can’t let it happen to you because it happened to me. So tomorrow morning, you’re going to that camp and purging yourself of this… madness.”
I’m his daughter. I can’t watch him cry. It’s in my genetic makeup to hurt for him when he’s sad, even though I want him to hurt. So I get up from the bed and go to him. He’s stiff when I put my arms around and hug him. He doesn’t hug me back.
“I love you, Dad,” I tell him because I won’t see him for a while. Maybe I’ll never see him because if he can’t accept Abel and my love for him, then we’re done.
But do you ever get done with your parents? Do you ever get done with where you come from?
He leaves, probably thinking that tomorrow morning I’ll go to the camp and be his old Evie again.
But old Evie is gone. There is no Evie.
There’s only Abel’s Pixie, and she’ll be gone before the sun comes up and lights up this part of the world where monsters live.
***
The clock strikes midnight and I creep out of my room.
Funnily enough, my parents bought this house when I was born because they needed a bigger place. Before me, they lived in town. Mom didn’t want this house because it was so close to the Adams family. But my dad loved the land, so they bought it. I wonder if it was one of the last arguments he ever won, before his love drowned him.
I skip over the loose floorboards scattered throughout the house and close the door behind me. Compared to the inside, outside is loud. Thunder and lightning and rain. So much rain. The ground has disappeared and all I can see is thick streams of water. Like the entire earth is flooded by the ocean and I have to swim to get across.