TEN
Even though Frankie was no longer around, Angela did her best to avoid being at home. She feared that one of the other weirdos would rape her. Some of them were scary guys and she didn’t like the way they increasingly leered at her. She knew what they wanted. They wanted the same thing Frankie had wanted.
While a few of the other guys who hung around had been reasonably decent, most, like Sally’s new boyfriend, a biker named Boska, were just plain psychos.
Worse, they frequently became violent when they drank. When Boska was drunk he sometimes argued with Angela’s mother, and then ended up beating her. That was always a frightening experience for Angela. After he was finished with Sally he would storm out. Angela would clean her mother up and put antibiotic and bandages on cuts. Her mother always refused to call the police. She said it was her fault, that Boska was a good man; then she would do a line or smoke some meth that he’d left for her.
More than once there were bloody fights between men drinking at their house. Those fights often spilled out into the street in front of their trailer. People would stand around and watch, but rarely try to break it up. Once it involved knives and one man was stabbed. It wasn’t uncommon for the police to be called by neighbors.
Angela spent as much time as possible staying with her grandparents. They were everything her mother wasn’t. They were protective, reasonable, safe.
When she was at home and there were people there partying, Angela went out as much as possible, walking the streets, wandering through stores, or sitting in secluded alleys watching the stars and the winos. Fortunately, her legs were getting long and she could easily outrun them if she had to.
Thankfully, sometimes her mother and her friends went out for the night. When they did, Angela did laundry, emptied ashtrays, picked up beer cans, and collected used needles. Sometimes they would be gone for a few days, leaving Angela to wonder if she would ever see her mother again, but she always returned, looking wasted.
After Frankie, Angela was thankfully with her grandparents as often as possible. Angela’s grandmother said she didn’t like Angela in the house when Sally was using drugs. Of course, since her mother was an addict, that was most of the time. Her mother was rarely sober for long. When she was, she was a bitch on wheels—argumentative and combative.
Sally didn’t especially like Angela staying with her parents. She viewed it as her parents’ direct denunciation of her and her way of life. When she was sober enough she would insist Angela stay home on school nights. Angela knew that it was out of spite.
Her grandparents talked about taking guardianship and having Angela live with them permanently. With as often as the police had been to the trailer, and as often as Sally had been arrested and Angela handed over to her grandparents until she sobered up or bonded out, Sally was certainly on shaky ground with Child Protective Services. Angela was excited about the idea of living with her grandparents permanently. Being with them made her fears evaporate.
She dearly loved Gabriella and she idolized Vito. After he was dressed in the morning but still in his stocking feet, he would let her come with him into the bathroom to watch him shave. It fascinated her the way he went about it, the way he spread on lather, the careful, measured way he stroked his jaw with the razor, the way he followed the same pattern every time.
Sometimes he would tell her funny stories about his job from before he’d retired. When he was done shaving he would splash on a little aftershave. Angela loved the way it smelled. It smelled like Grandpa and no one else.
She would then follow him into the bedroom and watch while he put on the big, heavy work boots with lugged soles that he always wore. She loved those boots, because they were part of who he was. They were the boots of someone who was strong and trustworthy.
Sometimes she would race into the bedroom ahead of him, slip her feet—shoes and all—into those big work boots, and clomp around the room, putting on a show, imitating him, making him laugh. He would sometimes tickle her to get them back, telling her never to grow up. Angela couldn’t imagine why her mother rolled her eyes when she mentioned Grandpa or Grandma.
One day they took her to a thrift store to get some clothes to wear at the cabin when they went fishing or climbing the surrounding mountains. While wandering the store, Angela spotted a pair of hardly used boots almost exactly like her grandfather’s. To her surprise, they were only a little big, but they fit her close enough to wear. She wanted those boots more than anything. Her grandmother told her they weren’t good shoes for a pretty young lady. Angela said they were perfect for the woods and the mountains. Her grandmother instead kept her busy looking for jeans and shirts and sweaters for school.
But before leaving the store, on their way to the checkout, Vito smiled at Gabriella and picked up the boots.
Angela took to wearing those boots all the time, not just at the cabin, which meant she wore them to school. The other girls made fun of her for wearing work boots rather than feminine shoes. Angela didn’t care what they said or what they thought of her. She wore them because she liked them. She thought that a short skirt went well with the boots.
They weren’t only good for wearing in the woods, they were good for walking home from school in bad weather. They became part of her the way her grandfather’s boots were part of him.
Besides the boots and not dressing like the other kids, Angela didn’t act like them. She didn’t think like them. She didn’t care about the childish things they cared about.
When she refused the drugs and alcohol the other kids were starting to get into, it made her the object of ridicule. Her mother had probably started out like them. Angela had seen firsthand how that had turned out and wanted no part of it.
She had more important things in her life. She had her grandparents and their cabin. She had woods trails to hike, and mountains to climb. She had lakes to fish. Sometimes there was nothing better than skipping rocks across a glassy lake.
The other girls at school often called her a freak, among other things. When it came right down to it, she couldn’t really argue with them. She was the offspring of freaks. She had been born a freak. She didn’t like being called names but she saw no point in getting into a fight over it. The other girls were even more annoyed when Angela didn’t respond to their taunts than Angela was at being called the names.
Because she was so obviously different in ways they couldn’t exactly put their finger on, the other kids were wary of her, so it rarely went beyond name calling. On a couple of occasions another girl, emboldened by her friends, would start a fight. If they pulled at her clothes, Angela smacked them. If they slapped her once, Angela punched them on the arm three times. If they pulled her hair, she knocked them down. But it never got to the point of anyone getting hurt, mostly because that was enough to stop them, and if they stopped, Angela stopped.
Such encounters only added to the word around school that you didn’t want to make Angela angry. The reason, though, that girls called her names and picked on her was more and more a matter of them being jealous of her looks and because the boys they liked were beginning to pay a lot of attention to Angela. She ignored the boys the same as she ignored the girls, but that didn’t stop them from being interested. In fact, it only seemed to make them more interested. At least they didn’t call her names.
One day when she was going home from school, three girls several grades above her stopped her in the parking lot of the liquor store she had to pass by on her way to the trailer park. These were not the ordinary girls she was used to dealing with, not her classmates who snickered at her, or whispered names, or even yanked her hair as they ran by.
These three were at least a head taller than Angela, and wider. She recognized them as the popular girls the jocks at school liked. They had perfect clothes and perfect hair and perfect nails. They laughed at Angela, called her trailer trash, and pointed at the work boots she was wearing. The boots that were like her grandfather’s.
Angela didn’t much care if they laughed at her—she was used to that—and she certainly didn’t want to get into a fight with girls who were so much bigger than her. She kept her head down and tried to get past by walking around them.
As she did, the tallest girl stepped in and slammed an unexpected punch into Angela’s gut.
It wasn’t the typical girl punch Angela was used to. It was a full-force hook by a strong older girl who meant to hurt her.
The blow staggered Angela back. She spiraled down to the grimy asphalt, doubled over in pain. Mouth open wide, she gasped for air but couldn’t get her breath. And then, holding herself up with one hand, as the world spun around her, she vomited. All the while they laughed at her and called her a freak.
Then the girl who had punched her kicked her in the side. She yelled out to the other two, “Mess her up good!”
Something inside snapped. Angela spun as she came up, whipping her leg around, and hard as she could landed a boot in the face of the girl who had hit her. She could feel bone break. Blood sprayed across the other two girls.
The big girl went down hard. She was out.
The other two bent down to the unconscious girl lying there on the crumbling asphalt, among the cigarette butts and trash. As they screamed and cried hysterically, Angela simply brushed herself off and went home.