When it was time to leave, Girl invited Aidan to come home with her. Girl, Cindy, and Aidan took a cab back to Father’s condo, but she had forgotten her key and they had to knock until Father let them in. Normally Father wasn’t there, so Girl had gotten lucky. She didn’t have any money left for cab fare to go to someone else’s house.
“Is Aidan spending the night?” Father asked in front of both of her friends. Girl had sobered up some and didn’t want Aidan to sleep over now, but she was on the spot. “Yeah,” she said, and that was that. Too late to back out. Girl had twin beds in her room—Cindy fell asleep in one, and she and Aidan shared the other. They had sex because that was what she was supposed to do, after inviting him over. All night, Girl had to keep getting up to pee. She was exhausted, but Father woke them all up at nine and told her she had to go to church, whether she wanted to or not. He dropped Aidan at the bus stop on their way, but drove Cindy home. Girl had assumed that he would drive Aidan home, too, but Father had refused. Girl wasn’t sure why, but it embarrassed her. She didn’t think Father was racist, but he always drove her white friends home. Maybe they were just running late. After that, Girl and Aidan said “hi” to each other in the halls, but neither of them wanted more.
A few months later Father had to go to an out-of-town conference. Girl’s new boyfriend, Bradley, was over at her house when Father got home from work. Bradley was nineteen, and what they called a “second-year senior,” a nice way to say that he had failed a grade. He had platinum blond hair down to the middle of his back, and he styled it with a curling iron and sprayed it with Aqua Net aerosol hair spray, the same brand Girl used. He didn’t have a car and rode the school bus with Girl. He didn’t have a job, but he played the guitar. Mother wouldn’t let her date anyone over the age of eighteen, and Stepmother would never have approved of an unemployed boy with no college plans. Father liked him a lot, as he did all of her boyfriends. Not only did he like the reassurance that she wasn’t gay, but he just seemed to like males more than females in general. The only weird thing was that he insisted that Girl’s friends call him Dr. L, unlike her mother, who was on a first-name basis with everyone.
“So, Bradley, I have to go out of town for a week. Would you like to stay here with Girl while I’m gone? That way she won’t be lonely,” Father said.
“Sure, Dr. L.” Bradley never said much, but he smiled a lot. Girl didn’t let on that she wasn’t ready to have sex with him or have him spend the night. She just went with the flow, and tried not to feel like Father was giving her as a gift to this teenaged boy in an effort to get Bradley to like him. She didn’t understand Father’s guilt over leaving her alone, either. Wasn’t she alone every night anyway? How was this different besides not having to dress as fast as she could so that her father wouldn’t walk in on her changing in the morning?
george
More than anything, Girl wanted a dog. Her father had a husky, Chuckchi, but the dog wasn’t allowed in the house. Chuckchi slept outside on a long chain attached to a dog house Father had built himself. When he went to work every morning, he unlocked the padlock that connected the chain to the dog collar and brought the dog to work, where he hooked her up again outside his office window. Every day after work he took Chuckchi for a run in the park. Most of the time, Girl wasn’t invited to come along. She hated that dog.
Father didn’t own a television set, so when he was at Daisy’s house (they had moved into the same condominium complex and lived across the street from each other) Girl read books and talked on the phone. She slept holding the cordless phone like a teddy bear, in case anyone called in the middle of the night. That year she was into horror stories—Stephen King and Dean Koontz and stories of alien abductions and true-life crime. She didn’t miss the television—she had never watched much after she outgrew cartoons—but after she closed her paperback, the condo filled with creaking noises and big, scary shadows.
Girl heard a noise, and worked up her courage to get out of bed. It was probably the heat kicking on, she told herself … but what if someone or something was there? She was all alone, so she made herself get up and walk downstairs past the curtainless windows—was someone watching from the bushes? She locked the sliding back door and flipped the deadlock on the steel front door, then ran back to bed as quickly as she could.
But what if someone was already inside and she just locked them in with her? Her bedroom window was large plate glass, with only narrow crank-out windows on the sides. Could she get a window cranked open and jump out, landing on the dog house without breaking a leg? Better to unlock the front door, so she could get out
