Mirror Image

She was exhausted by the time she turned off the lamps, but when an hour went by and she still hadn’t fallen asleep, she got out of bed and left her room.

* * *

Fancy decided to enter through the kitchen in case her grandfather had set up an ambush in the living room. She unlocked the door, disengaged the alarm system, and quietly reset it.

“Who’s that? Fancy?”

Fancy nearly jumped out of her skin. “Jesus Christ, Aunt Carole! You scared the living shit out of me!” She reached for the light switch.

“Oh, my God.” Avery sprang from her chair at the kitchen table and turned Fancy’s face up toward the light. “What happened to you?” She grimaced as she examined the girl’s swollen eye and bleeding lip.

“Maybe you can lend me your plastic surgeon,” Fancy quipped before she discovered that it hurt to smile. Touching the bleeding cut with the tip of her tongue, she disengaged herself from her aunt. “I’ll be all right.” She moved to the refrigerator, took out a carton of milk, and poured herself a glass.

“Shouldn’t you see a doctor? Do you want me to drive you to the emergency room?”

“Hell, no. And would you please keep your voice down? I don’t want Grandma and Grandpa to see this. I’d never hear the end of it.”

“What happened?”

“Well, it was like this.” She scraped the cream filling out of an Oreo with her lower front teeth. “I went to this shit-kicker’s dance hall. The place was swinging. Friday night, you know—payday. Everybody was in a party mood. There was this one guy with a really cute ass.” She ate the two disks of chocolate cookie and dug into the ceramic jar for another.

“He took me to a motel. We drank some beer and smoked some grass. He got a little too sublime, I guess, because when we got down to business, he couldn’t get it up. Naturally, he took it out on me.” As she summed up the tale, she dusted her hands of cookie crumbs and reached for the glass of milk.

“He hit you?”

Fancy gaped at her, then gave a semblance of a laugh. “ ‘He hit you?’ ” she mimicked. “What the hell do you think? Of course he hit me.”

“You could have been seriously hurt, Fancy.”

“I can’t believe this,” she said, rolling her eyes ceilingward in disbelief. “You always enjoyed hearing about my romantic interludes, said they gave you a vicarious thrill, whatever the hell that means.”

“I’d hardly classify getting hit in the face romantic. Did he tie you up, too?”

Fancy followed her aunt’s gaze down to the red circles around each of her wrists. “Yeah,” she answered bitterly, “the bastard tied my hands together.” Carole didn’t have to know that the “bastard” she referred to wasn’t the drunken, impotent cowboy.

“You’re crazy to go to a motel room with a stranger like that, Fancy.”

“I’m crazy? You’re the one stuffing ice cubes in a Baggie.”

“For your eye.”

Fancy slapped away the makeshift ice pack. “Don’t do me any favors, okay?”

“Your eye is turning black and blue. It’s about to swell shut. Do you want your parents to see it like that and have to tell them the story you just told me?”

Irritably, Fancy snatched up the ice pack and held it against her eye. She knew her aunt was right.

“Do you want some peroxide for your lip? An aspirin? Something for the pain?”

“I had enough beer and grass to dull the pain.”

Fancy was confused. Why was Carole being so nice to her? Since coming home from that luxury palace of a clinic, she had been freaking weird. She didn’t yell at the kid anymore. She looked for things to do instead of sitting on her ass all day. She actually seemed to like Uncle Tate again.

Fancy had always considered Carole stupid for playing Russian roulette with her marriage. Uncle Tate was good-looking. All the girls she knew drooled over him. If her instincts in this field were any good, and she believed them to be excellent, he’d be terrific in bed.

She wished she had somebody who loved her as much as Uncle Tate had loved Carole when they had first gotten married. He’d treated her like a queen. She had been a fool to throw that away. Maybe she had reached that conclusion herself and was trying to win him back.

Fat chance, Fancy thought derisively. Once you crossed Uncle Tate, you were on his shit list for life.