Yazmin
I guess I shouldn’t have expected much more when I tried to run away from the Scorpions. It seems I’m destined to go from one dangerous situation to the other. I thump the inside of the trunk with my fist, wondering if I can get out. I don’t particularly want to get out, though. This might be a blessing in disguise . . .
The car goes over a bump. My head cracks into something hard, making me groggy. I land with a thump, letting my head fall back, my eyes opening and closing quickly. I try and lean up but I’m in the trunk of a car. How did I forget that? I roll over, burying my face into the darkness. My head pounds and my body aches from lurching down the road.
This might be rock bottom. Lying in the back of this biker’s car, my body and head screaming at me, this really might be rock bottom. If this really is rock bottom, at least that means there’s nowhere to go but up. I laugh bitterly. The might be a blessing in disguise, but climbing down from that tree also might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I shouldn’t have done it. I should’ve jumped and ended it all right there. I laugh again. That bump to the head is making me silly.
I find my mind drifting back to when I was a girl. I remember when I first understood that not having a father was the exception, not the rule. My young playmate who lived in the same apartment building as us didn’t have a father either, so up until kindergarten I thought it was normal. But then I was in kindergarten, sitting in the sandpit trying hard to build a castle which wouldn’t collapse—made difficult by the lack of water—and two girls came stomping over to me. I’ll never understand how people as innocent as children can be so insanely cruel. One girl had a red bow in her hair, I remember. The other was fat, mean-looking.
“I heard you don’t have a daddy,” the red-bow girl said. “No daddy! No daddy!”
“Is that really true?” the mean-looking girl asked. “Don’t you have a daddy?”
“I have a daddy!” For some reason, lying seemed important. I waved my plastic shovel as I spoke. “His name is Charles and he’s a fireman and he’s the biggest strongest man in the world! He’s the bestest man I’ve ever met and—and we go to the seaside together every day!”
The mean-looking girl stood over me, angry for some reason. Maybe she lost her father. I can’t remember. “Don’t tell stupid lies.”
She spit in my face and then the two of them were chanting, “No daddy! No daddy! No daddy!”
I roll onto my back, bringing my hands to my face and massaging my temples. The car pushes on. The memories push on, too.
I remember sitting at my bedroom window, staring down into the street and wondering if every man who walked into the apartment building was my father surprising us. I had this fantasy of a man in a big fancy coat holding a briefcase approaching the building. Then I would go and find Mom and tell her that Daddy was here. She’d laugh and tell me I was being silly, no way was he here, and then the big fancy man in the big fancy coat would knock on the door. When I told him I’d known he was my daddy from the moment I saw him, he’d pat me on the head and call me sweetheart, like I’d seen other girls’ daddies do. We really would go to the seaside together. We really would be inseparable.
It got harder later, when puberty attacked me with its vicious hormones and angry feelings of lust and isolation and pleasure and pain. I remember at fourteen years old when me and my friends sneaked out one Friday night and went to a club. I remember the old man’s cloying hands, the smell of him, how he writhed against me on the dance floor. I remember kissing him and thinking that this would make it all better. Then I remember vomiting violently into a toilet bowl and crying until my eyes burned, telling my friends to get me out of here as quickly as possible. The old man tried to touch me again, so I swung on him and slapped him in the face, wailing, “You’re not my father!”
I lost friends for that. Nobody wanted to be friends with a freak who screamed stuff like that in clubs.
Mom came to get me, a bottle of water in one hand and her car keys in another, her face streaked with tears. Mom was blonde like me, but she dyed her hair red and had a tattoo of a spider on one of her forearms. She was a hard woman, a nurse who worked eighteen-hour shifts, the sort of woman who didn’t take bullshit. But as she stood there, watching me stumble, drunkenly leaning on my friend’s shoulder, she didn’t look hard. She looked broken. She sat me down as gently as she’d sit down a dying girl and made me drink the entire bottle of water. Then she took me to the car, sitting me in the back. I expected her to drive me home, but we just sat there for a while, in total darkness.
“Do you want to talk about something, Yazmin?” Mom asked quietly. “My friends told me what you said to that sick old man. You shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t be here. You’re fourteen.”
“You don’t think I know how old I am?” I hissed. Tears kept sliding down my cheeks and I couldn’t stop them. “Just drive me home, Mom.”
“Why did you say those things to that old man, Yazmin? Explain it to me.”
“Why do you think?” I blurted, getting angrier by the second. “All my life I’ve watched my friends with their dads, or listened to them talk about their dads. ‘We went here, we did this. My dad would never let anybody hurt me. I brought my boyfriend home and my dad freaked. I can’t stay out late. My dad would go crazy.’ Over and over, Mom, over and over! And where’s my dad, huh? Where is he? You know I used to stare out the window waiting for him to come home. But he’s never going to come home, is he?”
Mom sighed, resting her forehead against the steering wheel. “I don’t want to talk about this,” she said.
“You never want to talk about it!” I snarled. “You just want to go to work and pretend that everything is okay. You’d prefer if I was a machine, something you could turn on when you got home and turn off when you had to leave. You don’t care what’s going on inside of me. You just care about what I do.”
“That’s not fair, and it’s not true,” Mom said.
“Where is he, then?” I sat up, leaning through the front seats so that I could look into her face. “Tell me that. Where is my dad?”
“I don’t know where he is,” Mom said. But I could tell she was lying.
I started to scream, punching the back of the chair, screaming until my voice box hurt and my voice cracked. I screamed until I was crying and the screaming stopped. Mom wrapped her arms around me, burying my face in her blouse, my tears soaking through like acid.
I swallow, sick, as the car makes a wide loop around a roundabout, making me feel like I’m on a roller-coaster. My head isn’t aching as badly now. Nothing serious.
But still the memories come.
I remember when Mom finally told me who Dad was. She sat me down like she was about to tell me she had cancer or something and then explained it all to me. She explained that my father was the leader of a vicious group of bikers and that she’d borrowed money from him. “He’s a mean man, Yazmin,” she said. “He’s a very mean man. But he has a code, too. His own code. He’d never hurt you.”
“What about you, Mom?” I had never seen her so scared. It was infectious, her fear transferring to me. “Would he hurt you?”
She just smiled at me, a shaky smile which held no confidence. “Let me make some coffee.” She jumped to her feet without answering.
As the car speeds up, the final memory hits me, the one which returns to me again and again, the one which makes me feel rotten and pathetic for ever dreaming I could form a bond with my father. I was coming home in the early hours of the morning after being at a bar, tipsy, singing with my arm over my friend’s shoulder. Her name was Daisy and she wasn’t a close friend, just one of those women who liked to get wasted every now and then. We said our goodbyes and she went on her way, leaving me to walk up the stairs to our apartment. I’ll always be glad the elevator was broken that night. It meant I didn’t see it any sooner.
The bed was soaked through with blood, Mom’s corpse lying on it twisted and bent out of shape. She had been beaten savagely with a baseball bat and left like a piece of meat on the bed. I approached her numbly at first, my brain not accepting what my eyes were telling them. The human mind is a tricky thing, I learned that night. I saw Mom—those were her eyes and her face and her dyed red hair and her tattooed arm—and yet my mind did whatever it could to turn the shape into something else. It was an animal, or a patterned blanket, or I was drunk and hallucinating. Only after holding her hand and looking directly into her eyes did I know.
I bite down, fighting off tears. The car is slowing down now. I can’t believe I ever went to Dad. I can’t believe I was ever so stupid. Maybe the girl sitting at the window or the teenager coming onto older guys would go to him despite what he did, but a fully-grown woman should know better. Even if Mom gave me that speech about his code and honor, I should’ve known better, because Dad doesn’t have honor, even a twisted personal kind. Dad is a piece of shit who wants to sell me to some old man. Dad doesn’t give a damn about me. All those dreams of a perfect father I had as a girl were just that, dreams. So getting taken by the Smoking Vipers is a blessing in disguise because I will make it a blessing in disguise. I will feed them information, and I will help take down the Scorpions. I will avenge my mom’s death.
I think of Dad, sitting there in his office with his weasel’s face looking down at his figures and tables. I think of Dad roaring and throwing the computer across the room when he sees those figures getting smaller, those tables getting less complicated. I think of myself, a scared little girl in a woman’s body going to a depraved father.
I hate that woman. I hate her down to her core. She betrayed Mom and she betrayed herself. She sat in that clubhouse, going for runs and waiting for something to happen to her.
Now I’ll make something happen myself. I won’t wait anymore.
I’ll play the Vipers’ little game, and I’ll play it to win.