Dark Notes

But Daddy’s gone, and all that’s left circulating through the house is the musty, sputtering coughs from the window units.

I bend over the mattress, straining to see Mom’s cropped hair in the shadows. Instead, I’m met with the bitter stink of beer and weed. Of course. Well, at least she’s alone. I have no interest in meeting the man-of-the-month she’s been shacking up with.

Should I wake her? Instinct tells me not to, but dammit, I ache to feel her arms around me.

“Mom?” I whisper.

The lump shifts, and a deep groan rumbles from the blankets. A man’s groan, one I know with horrifying intimacy.

A chill grips my spine as I scramble backward. Why is my brother’s best friend in Mom’s bed?

Lorenzo’s thick arm swings up, and his hand catches the back of my neck, pulling me toward him.

I drop the bread in my attempt to push away, but he’s stronger, meaner, and never responds to No.

“No,” I say anyway, fear amplifying my voice, my pulse roaring past my ears. “Stop it!”

He wrestles me to the bed, shoving me face-down beneath his sweaty body. Hot beer breath smothers me. Then his weight, his hands…oh God, his erection. He jabs my ass with it, rucking up my skirt, his heavy panting scraping my ears.

“Get off me!” I thrash wildly, my fingers clawing at the blankets, taking me nowhere. “I don’t want this. Please, don’t—”

His palm slaps over my mouth, shutting me up as his strength confines my movements.

My body grows cold, numb, collapsing like a dead thing, separating from my headspace. I let myself slip away, my concentration on the safety in what I know, what I love, as I wrap my entire being with dark atmosphere, light strokes of piano keys, atonal rhythm. Scriabin’s Sonata No.9. I see my fingers walking through the piano piece, hear the haunting melody, and feel each quivering note pulling me further into the black mass. Away from the bedroom. Away from my body. Away from Lorenzo.

A hand snakes under my chest, squeezing my breast, pulling on my shirt, but I’m lost in the dissonant notes, recreating them with care, distracting my thoughts. He can’t hurt me. Not here with my music. Never again.

He shifts, shoving his hand between my butt cheeks, inside my panties, probing roughly at the hole in back that he always makes bleed.

The sonata shatters in my mind, and I try to reassemble the chords. But his fingers are relentless, forcing me to endure his touch, his palm muffling my scream. I gasp for air and frantically kick my legs near the bedside table. My foot collides with the lamp and sends it crashing to the floor.

Lorenzo freezes, his hand tightening on my mouth.

Loud banging vibrates the wall by my head, a fist pounding in Shane’s room. My blood runs cold.

“Ivory!” Shane’s voice booms through the wall. “Fucking woke me up, you worthless fucking cunt!”

Lorenzo leaps off me and backs into the beam of light from the kitchen doorway. Tribal tattoos blacken his chest, and baggy sweatpants hang from his narrow hips. An unassuming person might consider his beefed-up physique and strong Latino features attractive. But appearances are just the skin of the soul, and his soul is rotten.

I roll off the bed, shove down my skirt, and grab the wrapped bread from the floor. To reach the front door, I have to pass through Shane’s room then the parlor. Maybe he hasn’t crawled out of bed yet.

With a trembling pulse, I dart into the pitch-black cavern of Shane’s room and— Oomph! I slam into his bare chest.

Expecting his reaction, I swerve out of the path of his first swing, only to expose my cheek to the hard slap of his other hand. The impact sends me back into Mom’s room, and he stays with me, his eyes drooping in a haze of alcohol and drugs.

To think, he used to look like Daddy. But that was before… Every day, Shane’s blond hairline recedes farther, his cheeks sink deeper into his pasty face, and his belly hangs lower over those ridiculous workout shorts.

He hasn’t worked out since he went AWOL from the Marines four years ago. The year our lives went to shit.

“Why. The. Fuck…” Shane says, shoving his face in mine, “are you waking up the goddamn house at five in the fucking morning?”

Technically, it’s almost six o’clock, and I have a quick stop to make before the forty-five-minute commute.

“I have school, dickhead.” I straighten my spine, standing taller, despite the awful fear souring my stomach. “What you should be asking is why Lorenzo is sleeping in Mom’s bed, why he puts his hands on me, and why I was screaming for him to stop.”

I follow Shane’s focus to his friend. Faded ink scrawls up the sides of Lorenzo’s face, indiscernible beneath the dark shadow of his sideburns. But the fresh tattoo on his throat burns as bold and black as his eyes. Destroy, it says. The way he’s glaring at me, it’s a promise.