Page 15 of Mischief

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They stop when my father tells them to, not a moment before.

I lie on the kitchen linoleum I grew up on and I breathe in sips because full breaths light my whole side on fire.

My father crouches down to my level with his elbows on his knees, easy, patient, a man with all the time in the world.

"One week," he says softly. "You've got till the end of them to change your mind. Go home, think about your sister in this house, think about how easy I could make all of it. Then you call me and you say yes." He pats my cheek, once, and it's worse than the boots. "You know the way back now. And you know I know the way to you."

He stands. He steps over me like I'm a spill.

"Marit," he says. "Say goodbye to your brother."

I get my one eye open and find her still in the corner, both hands over her mouth, and above her fingers her eyes aren't flat anymore.

They're wide and wet, the little sister I left, drowning right in front of me and not allowed to reach.

I try to say something to her. All that comes out is blood.

She shakes her head, tiny, don't, and I understand it.

Don't make it worse. Don't let him see you care. Caring is what he uses.

Getting up is the hardest thing I've done in years.

My ribs scream when I get a hand under me, and my vision grays at the edges, and halfway up my arm buckles and I nearly go back down into the blood I left on the linoleum.

Nobody helps me.

My father watches with his hands in his pockets like a man waiting on a bus.

But I get one knee under me, and then a foot, and I drag myself up the side of the counter an inch at a time, because there's a sixteen-year-old girl in the corner who's spent years watching this house break everything that walks into it.

I need her to see one person get up off this floor and walk out on his own legs.

When I'm finally standing, swaying, one arm clamped across my ruined side, I look at my sister one more time and I put everything I can't say into it.

I'm coming back. Not for him. For you. Hold on.

I don't know if she reads it.

She's already pulled the flatness back down over her face, gone empty again, gone safe the only way she's got.

Then I walk out of that house on my own feet, because I'll be damned if I crawl out of it, and I get on my bike with a broken body and head to the only place I’ll call home.

The cold rides with me the whole way down.

Every mile that should warm me doesn't.

Every hour the ribs get louder, until breathing is a thing I do around the pain instead of through it.

I stop when I have to, sleep when I can, and somewhere in Georgia I catch my own face in a gas station bathroom mirror and understand there's no version of walking into Tindra's apartment where she doesn't see all of this.

Swollen mouth. Eye gone black and half shut. The way I'm holding myself around the middle.

I'll have to give her something. A story. A lie with enough truth in it to stand up.

And that's the part that guts me worse than the ribs, standing under a buzzing fluorescent light a thousand miles from the kitchen where my father crouched over me like a patient man.