Free The Source of All Things by Tracy Ross Page B

him, standing in a corner smiling through his fangs, I knew we were doomed to love.
    I can’t remember who approached whom, but we left the concert and went for a walk. The air outside was warm and fragrant. He asked me about my family, and I lied, telling him my dad was a cop. The impromptu lie sprung up from an unknown inspiration. Was it wishful thinking or the reverse?
    In the humid summer, which evolved into the worst season of my life, Reed was a heady, heart-throbbing distraction. We exchanged phone numbers, showed up at the same downtown outdoor dance parties, and clung to our separate groups of friends (mine: girls in thick black eyeliner and black nylons with holes ripped in the knees; his: the chain-smoking, forty-ouncer drinking, skateboard ollie-ing Antichrists). We shared glares and the occasional slam dance.
    I think Reed liked me because, even at thirteen, I knew what“the establishment” was and already hated it. Reed was the opposite of normal: he seemed raw in a way no one I had ever met was brave enough to be. From the first time we met, I saw him as both someone I could once-over and someone who deserved to know the darkest, most complicated parts of me. He didn’t know it, but he was about to become central to my survival, because he gave me something positive to focus on.
    The same couldn’t be said for Dad, who had recently begun openly preying on me. Even as he felt me pulling away from him, he pried open the blinds of my bedroom and stood in the backyard barely hiding the fact that he was watching me undress. I tried sleeping in my street clothes, but he insisted that I change out of them at night. Though it had been a year since I’d stopped asking him to tickle my back, he came into my room while I was on the verge of sleeping, and staying until after I had dozed off. Sometimes I would wake up and see him hovering over me, like he was on his way to lying down or had already done so and was just getting up. Seeing the wide, staring whites of my eyes, he’d quickly pull up the covers, saying “You’re okay, sis. I’m here. You called out for me in your sleep.”
    I wanted to tell my mom that something terrible was happening, but I always backed off just short of speaking. Dad’s threatening looks would stop me in my tracks. Not only that, no matter how hard I squeezed my brain muscle to remember, I couldn’t conjure up a clear picture of exactly what Dad was doing to my body all those nights. It would be years before I discovered how far he was going to molest me without repercussion. But at nearly fourteen, I knew only one thing for certain: now he also wanted to fondle me in broad daylight.
    He had started a new job at Intermountain Gas Company, selling natural gas to developers as an alternative to propane, and it allowed him to come home in the middle of the day. During the summer, when I was home from school, he’d slip in the front door, silent, as if he were trying to sneak up on me. With Mom working full-time, Dad had ample opportunity to coax me onto the living room floor and make me tickle his back.
    In a sense, this was nothing new, and perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised by it. As a four- and five-year-old, I had loved grooming Dad. He had always been a willing model, for eye shadow, lipstick, and bright red barrettes. I’d take off his shirt and dress him in my fake feather boas or wrap a sequined cape around his back. I’d brush his hair, then style it with a working blow dryer from my plastic beautician’s kit. Sometimes his dark skin charred, despite the teaspoon of Cherokee Indian in his blood, and he’d ask me to sit on his lower back and scratch the peeling skin on his shoulders. I’d responded willingly, happy to be the one who could relieve him of the discomfort even better than Bactine. I’d rake my fingers across the black patches, looking for a scab or loose corner of skin. When I found