SAVANNAH TAYLOR
With a grunt, I brought the back of my right fist down on the bridge of my attacker’s nose. A split second later, my left hand clawed down the face, scratching the eyes, gouging the nose and cheeks.
Right, left, right, left. Each shot set up my next. Right: leopard’s paw to the throat. Left: straight punch to the bridge of the nose. Right: roundhouse to the temple.
And then my bedroom door swung open, taking with it the mirror—and my own reflection, which I’d been pretending was my attacker.
As soon as the door started moving, my face heated up. Worse yet, it wasn’t my mom on the other side. That already would have been super embarrassing. It was Tim, my mom’s boyfriend.
He hadn’t even knocked.
“Hey, Karate Kid! Sweep the leg!” With a smirk, he sliced his hands through the air, accompanied by cartoon sound effects. “Choo! Choo!” He was wearing a brown Carhartt jacket over dark blue coveralls. One of his work boots kicked an imaginary target in midair.
Dropping my hands, I turned away. A second ago, I’d felt so fierce. Now I just felt like an idiot.
I was mad at myself for being caught by Tim. The fact that I was still in my pajamas made me feel even more stupid. My face got hot, which meant that my pale skin was betraying my feelings.
Saying nothing, I picked my library book about Bruce Lee off the floor next to my bed and slid it into my backpack. I’d checked it out in the hope it would teach me some cool kung fu techniques, but it was mostly about philosophy.
Reminding Tim that I was taking kung fu, not karate, would just prolong things. It was actually his face I’d been imagining while attacking my own reflection. He was my least favorite of all the guys my mom had ever lived with.
Tim finally stopped making sound effects and karate chops. “Do you really think any of those moves would work in real life?” He took a step closer. “You’re just fooling yourself taking those stupid classes. If some dude really wanted to hurt you, you’d be toast.”
Don’t respond, don’t respond, I reminded myself as I grabbed a sweater and jeans from my closet.
He switched gears. “Your mom’s taking me to work today. So make sure you lock up when you leave the house.”
Tim’s “classic” Camaro had broken down. Again. It was kind of ironic, given that he was a mechanic. Normally my mom was still asleep when I left for school. She worked swing shift as a CNA at a nursing home.
“Okay,” I said, still not meeting his eyes.
After making a sound that was halfway between a snort and a grumble, Tim finally left. I heard the bathroom door close. There went my chance of a shower.
The first thing I did was lock my door, the way I should have earlier. As I got dressed, I fumed. Bruce Lee said that to survive you had to bend, I reminded myself as I pushed my feet into my black-and-white-checked Vans.
In the kitchen, my mom was loading the dishwasher. Tim always left his dishes wherever he finished eating—the dining room table, the arm of the couch, even the bathroom counter. He must have dealt with his own dishes before we moved in, but now it seemed to be “women’s work.”
“Good morning,” Mom said with no conviction. Maybe she was finally starting to sour on Tim.
“You must be tired.” I poured myself a bowl of Life cereal and sat down on one of the two black kitchen stools.
“I can take a nap later if I need to.” As she put a mixing bowl in the back of the dishwasher, her sleeve rode up her arm.
I pointed at a spot on her wrist between tattoos. “Mom, what’s that?”
She hastily pulled down her sleeve. “Nothing.”
“That’s not nothing. Those look like bruises.” Four round dark dots in a row, each the size of a fingerprint. Someone had grabbed her wrist, and it wasn’t too hard to guess who it was. Even though I sometimes had the same marks, at least mine were from escaping practice wrist grabs in kung fu. Not from the real thing.
She forced a smile. “He didn’t mean to. And he said he was sorry.”
“You can’t let him treat—” I stopped midsentence as Tim walked into the room.
“What are you girls talking about?” He looked from my mom to me and back again.
“Nothing,” Mom said. At the same time, I said, “What to make for dinner tonight.”
“None of that vegetarian crap. I need real protein. Something with meat.” Tim’s grin was flat. “Come on, Lorraine, let’s go.”
After they left, my stomach was churning too much to let me finish my cereal. My mom refused to see how bad things were. And even when her eyes were finally opened, she would just do what she always did when things went sour: meet some new guy online and then jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. Using a profile photo that was nearly as old as me, Mom had met and fallen in “love” with men all over the United States and then moved in with them sight unseen. Before Tim in Portland, Oregon, we had lived with Garrett in Houston, Texas; Adam in Hebron, Nebraska; Brandon in Brookings, South Dakota; and Paul in Saint Charles, Missouri. And before them were five or six other guys and places I’d already forgotten about.
Pretty soon there would be another move to be with another man who would invariably turn out to have lied about himself and his life, in ways both big and small.
Before we moved here, Tim told her that he owned the auto body shop he only worked at. The house was half the size he’d said it was. I was pretty sure he had even claimed a few extra inches of height in their conversations.
He and my mom had managed to make it work for seven months. That was practically a record. But their arguments were getting more frequent. Which meant it was probably time for a change.
The thing was, I liked Portland. You could be yourself here, and people appreciated that. Portlanders took pride in the Unipiper, a guy who wore a Darth Vader mask and rode a unicycle while playing the bagpipes. Vegans, Wiccans, transgender people, recumbent bike riders, stand up paddle boarders, people walking their pet goats, guys with elaborate beards, girls who didn’t shave their legs or pits, guys wearing utility kilts, people with rainbow hair, tattooed hipsters with huge gauges stretching out their earlobes—people who would have been mocked in many of the towns I’d lived in—were celebrated here.
And despite Portland’s reputation, it didn’t even rain that much.
As I locked the door and set out for school, I did the math again. In one year and seven months, I would be eighteen. Old enough, in the eyes of the law, to live on my own.
SIR
My hands were slick on the steering wheel. My foot hovered over the accelerator of the old blue Chrysler New Yorker, my chosen vehicle for the day. I was going less than five miles an hour, but I didn’t touch the pedal. Outside it was close to freezing. I left the defrost button alone, even though I could barely see out the windows. The fogged glass provided cover. I had rubbed a small section of the windshield clear, enough to see straight ahead.
Just enough to focus on the girl about a block ahead of me. She had straight brown hair and wore jeans and a bright blue puffer coat. She glanced over her shoulder. When she saw the car, her eyes narrowed. Turning back, she started walking faster, nearly scurrying.
My own heart sped up. Humans are built to hunt. Like any predator, when they see the prey start to run, they want to give chase.