The first time I wore lip gloss, Shawn said I was a whore. I was in my bedroom, standing in front of my mirror, trying it out, when Shawn appeared in the doorway. He said it like a joke but I wiped the color from my lips anyway. Later that night, at the theater, when I noticed Charles staring at Sadie, I reapplied it and saw Shawn’s expression twist. The drive home that night was tense. The temperature outside had fallen well below zero. I said I was cold and Shawn moved to turn up the heat. Then he paused, laughed to himself, and rolled all the windows down. The January wind hit me like a bucket of ice. I tried to roll up my window, but he’d put on the child lock. I asked him to roll it up. “I’m cold,” I kept saying, “I’m really, really cold.” He just laughed. He drove all twelve miles like that, cackling as if it were a game, as if we were both in on it, as if my teeth weren’t clattering.
I thought things would get better when Shawn dumped Sadie—I suppose I’d convinced myself that it was her fault, the things he did, and that without her he would be different. After Sadie, he took up with an old girlfriend, Erin. She was older, less willing to play his games, and at first it seemed I was right, that he was doing better.
Then Charles asked Sadie to dinner, Sadie said yes, and Shawn heard about it. I was working late at Randy’s that night when Shawn turned up, frothing at the mouth. I left with him, thinking I could calm him, but I couldn’t. He drove around town for two hours, searching for Charles’s Jeep, cursing and swearing that when he found that bastard he was “gonna give him a new face.” I sat in the passenger seat of his truck, listening to the engine rev as it guzzled diesel, watching the yellow lines disappear beneath the hood. I thought of my brother as he had been, as I remembered him, as I wanted to remember him. I thought of Albuquerque and Los Angeles, and of the miles of lost interstate in between.
A pistol lay on the seat between us, and when he wasn’t shifting gears, Shawn picked it up and caressed it, sometimes spinning it over his index like a gunslinger before laying it back on the seat, where light from passing cars glinted off the steel barrel.
* * *
—
I AWOKE WITH NEEDLES in my brain. Thousands of them, biting, blocking out everything. Then they disappeared for one dizzying moment and I got my bearings.
It was morning, early; amber sunlight poured in through my bedroom window. I was standing but not on my own strength. Two hands were gripping my throat, and they’d been shaking me. The needles, that was my brain crashing into my skull. I had only a few seconds to wonder why before the needles returned, shredding my thoughts. My eyes were open but I saw only white flashes. A few sounds made it through to me.
“SLUT!”
“WHORE!”
Then another sound. Mother. She was crying. “Stop! You’re killing her! Stop!”
She must have grabbed him because I felt his body twist. I fell to the floor. When I opened my eyes, Mother and Shawn were facing each other, Mother wearing only a tattered bathrobe.
I was yanked to my feet. Shawn grasped a fistful of my hair—using the same method as before, catching the clump near my scalp so he could maneuver me—and dragged me into the hallway. My head was pressed into his chest. All I could see were bits of carpet flying past my tripping feet. My head pounded, I had trouble breathing, but I was starting to understand what was happening. Then there were tears in my eyes.
From the pain, I thought.
“Now the bitch cries,” Shawn said. “Why? Because someone sees you for the slut you are?”
I tried to look at him, to search his face for my brother, but he shoved my head toward the ground and I fell. I scrambled away, then pulled myself upright. The kitchen was spinning; strange flecks of pink and yellow drifted before my eyes.
Mother was sobbing, clawing at her hair.
“I see you for what you are,” Shawn said. His eyes were wild. “You pretend to be saintly and churchish. But I see you. I see how you prance around with Charles like a prostitute.” He turned to Mother to observe the effect of his words on her. She had collapsed at the kitchen table.
“She does not,” Mother whispered.
Shawn was still turned toward her. He said she had no idea of the lies I told, how I’d fooled her, how I played the good girl at home but in town I was a lying whore. I inched toward the back door.
Mother told me to take her car and go. Shawn turned to me. “You’ll be needing these,” he said, holding up Mother’s keys.
“She’s not going anywhere until she admits she’s a whore,” Shawn said.