Please don’t let her have found it, I pray silently, crazily, to nothing in particular.
Gods don’t exist for girls like me.
No higher power takes care of us.
No one watches over us except, if we’re lucky, other girls like us.
I find the corner of the carpet that I tuck down so neatly each time, now folded back, left sloppily open. I still reach inside, my brain refusing to accept what my eyes are telling it. My fingers touch nothing but the raw, cheap particleboard under the carpet.
Something rises inside me, a wall of despair so thick no amount of hope or healing, making my own family or healing someone else’s, can withstand it.
Hope is a curse.
Healing won’t get me out of this town.
Friends are temporary, a distraction from what’s real, what’s important.
Determination to heal Faulkner can get me through another semester at Willow Heights, but not this.
I shoot to my feet, stumbling out of the closet like a drunken person, barreling across the hall and into my mother’s room.
“Mom,” I scream. “Where’s my money?”
She whirls from where she’s been pacing. “Your money?” she demands, a cruel smile twisting her lips. “You little thief. You’ve been hiding that money all this time while I fed you and kept a roof over your head!”
“It’s my money, Mom,” I say, my volume rising in desperation. “I earned that money. I fed you. My friend kept a roof over both our heads for the past six months.”
“You ungrateful little brat,” she says. “I busted my ass working to keep you taken care of for eighteen years, and all you can say is that your boyfriend paid the bills for six months? While you stole and hid money from me, your own mother?”
“Mom,” I say, wrestling to control myself. “I never stole a penny from you. Now give me back my stash.”
“You didn’t?” she asks with an incredulous snort. “It’s stealing to hold out on me, keeping all that for yourself, while I could barely pay the bills. It’s stealing to let me buy all the shit we need while you had the money all along!”
“It’smymoney,” I say again. “You have no right to take it without asking. I’ve paid plenty of bills in the past few years.”
“What about before that?” she demands. “What about for the fourteen or fifteen years when I worked myself to death for you, and you didn’t contribute a dime? You think that shit was free? You think the bills just magically appeared when you started making money?”
“I was achild.”
“I never asked for a child,” she snaps, wheeling around to pace the room, her gait unsteady and frenetic.
I take a breath, trying to calm down and keep my voice from shaking. “I didn’t ask for you to be my mom,” I say. “But here we are.”
“I didn’t ask for you to come along and ruin my life,” she fumes, wheeling on me. “I didn’t ask for a kid to get in the way, to keep me from doing what I wanted with my own life. Hell, if it weren’t for you, I could have made it good with a Darling, too. You think you’re all that because some rich guy paid attention to you, but you’re nothing special. I could have done it, too, if you hadn’t come along and fucked it all up.”
“You did plenty of fucking up, too,” I snap back at her. “Now give me back my money, Mom.”
I’m too mad, too broken, to think of any other argument. It’s mine. The unfairness makes me want to scream. The injustice of it all hits me, of her taking what I worked for years to save, just to have something, anything, while paying for food and bills and living on nothing but hope some weeks, the dream of getting out of this town the only thing keeping me going when she was out bingeing away her paycheck.
“You ain’t stopped screwing me over since the day you were born,” she says, stopping to light a half-smoked cigarette from the ashtray on her dresser. “You was always a selfish little bitch. I shouldn’t even be surprised that you’d be happy to watch me work myself to death while you sucked me dry and kept your own good-time fund right under my nose.”
“I worked for that,” I hurl back at her. “It’s not my fault you have a drug problem. It’s not my fault you spent all your money. Your good-time fund is your regular fucking paycheck. Why do you think I pay the bills? I busted my ass for that, and you can’t just take it.”
“Just ask your Darling to bail you out,” she says. “Or that other one, the football player. I’m sure he’s good for a few thousand.”
“That money wasn’t from them.”
The desperation welling inside me almost brings tears to my eyes. I can’t explain to her that having something of my own matters, that the fact that I earned that money and didn’t take it like some charity case matters. It matters to me. I’ve been saving that for years, forgoing a social life to work every Friday and Saturday night to put something into my fund to get out of this town on my own two feet.