Free Lovely Vicious by Sara Wolf Page A

–”
    “I’m not going to listen to your excuses, Kayla! I know them all. I said them all once too for a guy, okay?”
    “I have a hard time believing that,” She says nastily.  
    “Yeah? Believe this!”
    I yank my sleeve up, and Kayla does three things in quick succession – she sees it, understands it, and recoils, flinching away from it. From me.
    I pull my sleeve back down and grab my backpack. I leave the sandwich there. I leave the short triumph over Jack I had there. I leave my secret there, with her.
    The rest of the day is a blurry soup of anger and half held back tears. When I get home, the house is dark. All the windows are closed and the curtains drawn, like usual. The house is sleeping, or that’s what it feels like. I call out for Mom – she didn’t have work or a psychologist’s appointment today, and her car is still in the garage. She should be home. I take the stairs two at a time and freeze when I see into her open room.
    Everything is trashed. The lamp is broken, amber glass shattered across the carpet. Her documents and work canvases are scattered like the scales of a paper snake. She’s ripped some of them to shreds, her bed littered with scraps. Her makeup is dripping off her dresser in ugly, flesh-colored liquid rivers. The mirror in her bathroom is broken, her pill bottle open and the pills clogging the sink. Water overflows from the tub onto the floor, a pool just beginning to form. My heart turns cold, my fingers going numb.
    “Mom?” I shout. “Mom!”
    I check under the bed, her closet, tearing clothes and chairs aside as I look for her. She’s not in the living room, or my room, or the kitchen. I dial her cellphone but it rings upstairs, under her pillow. My mind crowds with images of her beaten, kidnapped, that man holding her by the arm and yanking her back to Nevada, back to where she was miserable –
    I dial Dad frantically. But it only rings twice before I hear the faint sobbing. Mom. I leap after it, following the sound into the garage. She’s curled up in the backseat of the car. I yank the door open and touch her face, her shoulders, inspect her for wounds or cuts.
    “Mom, what the hell happened? Are you okay?”
    “He came,” Mom gasps into my hair, clinging to me like a baby monkey clings to a large one. “He found me.”
    The police take fifteen minutes to get here. They comb the house, interrogate Mom to the point of tears and back again, and all I can do is hold her and snap at them when they get too nosy or invasive. When the sweep of the house is done, one of them pulls me aside.
    “Look, Ms. Blake, you said your mom has a history of mental illness –”
    “She has PTSD.” I correct angrily. “From a recent abusive boyfriend. Not an entire history of fucking mental illness.”
    “I understand –”
    “Do you?” I laugh, half-hysteric.
    “Look, I’m sorry. PTSD can be hell. Shit, some of our guys have it too. Some of our guys have to be let go for it. Fact of the matter is, there’s no male-size footprints in the house, and the locks weren’t forced open. Nothing was stolen. There’s no sign of a two-person struggle in her room, either.”
    “She said she heard him walking downstairs.”
    “It could very well have been a flashback. You said she’s on medication, right?”
    “And seeing a psychologist every week.”
    “Well, I’m sorry, kid, but if she’s doing those things already, there’s not a lot we can do for her.”
    “She’s not crazy! Stop treating her like she is!”
    “I’m not, okay? I’m just stating facts. We can keep a cop outside your house for seventy-two hours, if it makes you feel better, but that’s about it.”
    “Yeah. That’d be good.”
    He pats my shoulder. “Keep your chin up. She’ll get better.”
    I watch his retreating back and murmur;
    “That’s what they all say.”
     
    ***
     
    After Mom’s scare, I sleep in her room on the air mattress every night. I do my homework in there with her as she