Awakenings (26 page)

“You can’t even convince your best friend,” Daniel said, motioning to the distant dot that was Todd.

“She wanted it. She got all funny
after
it happened.”

“LIAR!” Katie bolted forward from her human shield, scratching and clawing at Josh. “GODDAMN LIAR!”

Shit,
Daniel thought.

3

The five-fingered gash across Josh’s face enraged him. He grabbed Katie’s wrists and threw her to the ground into a pile of beer bottles. Daniel picked up a stray bottle by his foot and hit Josh square in the forehead with a solid throw. The jock staggered back, tripped on another empty and landed hard on his back. Daniel grabbed his friend’s arm and pulled her out of the dugout. He dragged her toward his bike as she struggled to lunge at Josh. She had lost all sense about the reality of fighting a big, angry, dumb jock. Daniel shook her by the shoulders.

“Stop it, Katie! I know you’re mad, but he’s going to cream us when he gets up.”

The sound of bottles rattling signaled the jock regaining his feet. Something about the look in Josh’s eye snapped the girl from her fit; perhaps it was the same gleam of bad judgment with which he stole her virginity. Josh looked resolved to undertake new sins. It was time to go.

Daniel peddled for two toward the field exit. The dirt was terrible for traction, but he didn’t dare look back. He turned right at the exit on a course for the better side of town, riding along the first-base line. Daniel barely registered that Josh had climbed over the chain-link fence ahead of him when all of a sudden he landed on them hard and knocked them down. Katie rolled into the street. Daniel was pinned, the bike frame cutting into his leg from his assailant’s weight. His rib was on fire. A fist smashed his nose; pain swimming across a web of nerves. Another one hit him in the jaw. He saw spots before his eyes. Katie rammed Josh with her whole body and knocked him back. Daniel slid out from under the bike, trying not to pass out. His bandaged rib protested any further action. He staggered to his feet just as Josh grabbed Katie’s wrist and twisted. There was a horrifying crack. She screamed. He clipped her in the cheek with a right jab and she crumpled to the ground like a rag doll.

Daniel was furious, angrier than he’d ever been in his life. Josh blocked his punch and returned a solid jab to the gut. The jock grabbed Daniel by the top of his shirt and almost lifted him off the ground as he shoved him back onto the hood of a parked Dodge Ram. Daniel struggled, but his assailant’s arms were birch-tree thick.

“I am not going to jail for raping no one!” Josh shouted. “Especially for your little tramp girlfriend.” Then, Josh stopped punching him and looked into the cab of the pickup.

Daniel looked, too, and saw a bare leg in a white lady’s pump straddled over the steering wheel. The other leg lay over the headrest of the driver’s seat. A well-manicured woman’s hand gripped the passenger-side dashboard. And above the horizon of the dashboard were two pair of eyes looking straight at him. One of those pairs was Clyde’s.

“Oh, crap.”

4

She was the same woman Clyde had met in the hospital earlier. She struggled to put her tits back in her bra even as Clyde buckled his pants. Josh had stopped hitting Daniel, and hovered over him with a gaping mouth, confused by the distraction. Clyde looked incensed, which Daniel knew to be his default face.

“Shit,” Josh said.

“Worse than that,” Daniel responded. “That’s my stepdad … ex-Marine.”

Josh let Daniel go and backed up a few steps before turning and running off.
What a pussy,
Daniel thought. He rushed over to Katie, who was still out cold, and patted her face. She had a dark purple bruise where Josh hit her.
Even with welts, she is beautiful,
he thought.

“Katie, wake up,” he whispered in her ear.

Clyde got out of the truck. “What the hell are you doing here, boy?”

The day’s events had yet to catch up with Daniel’s stepfather, but the boy realized catching Clyde in his extracurricular activity was enough to warrant a beating. Clyde wasn’t stupid or drunk enough to do it in the middle of the street, in front of Daniel’s friend whose father had some influence in the town … at least he hoped. He realized how silly he was earlier thinking that Clyde had attacked Katie. If she would only wake up.

“Katie,” he repeated, tapping the back of her wrist lightly.

“Boy…”

“You know, Clyde,” Daniel said, trying to keep the fear from his voice, “most dads would be proud to see their kid hold their own against someone bigger and older than they are.”

“First off, runt, you wasn’t holding your own. You were getting the shit kicked out of you. Second, you ain’t
my
kid.”

Katie groaned. She stirred, then opened her eyes. Clyde stood his ground. The woman staggered from the truck and joined them. They were both two sheets to the wind and would be adding a third before calling it a night. Daniel turned cold as he read the hospital name tag on her blouse:
Conklin.
That’s why she looked familiar. He’d seen her in a photo in the principal’s office. Clyde was banging Conklin’s daughter.

The principal’s animus toward him took on new dimensions. Clyde’s actions, his lusts, greed, and poor character even polluted Daniel’s sanctuary at school, the one place he had never had to worry about his stepfather. His collection of havens was shrinking. Clyde was his bane in an almost biblical sense. A new chapter had to be written for any possible future to exist. For the first time, Daniel feared Clyde less than the prospect of extricating him from his life. He should have ratted the bastard out to the sheriff earlier. It wasn’t too late to go back and lodge that formal complaint. Rita would have to live with the consequences of her own lies. Penny would have to endure a house full of strangers. Daniel had had enough.

He helped Katie to her feet. She leaned on him for support, favoring her uninjured arm. “I’m going to take Katie home,” he told his stepfather.

He picked up his bike and wheeled it by the handlebar while supporting Katie with the other arm. Daniel held his breath as they inched away. It felt like they were backing out of a lion’s cage. Daniel hoped Clyde’s lust for Conklin’s brat was greater than the taste for his blood. After a few minutes they were around the corner and out of view. The boy sighed in relief.

“You ought to go,” Katie mumbled.

“I’ll see you home.”

“No. My dad already thinks badly of you on account of being Clyde’s boy. Here I am, welt on my face, no panties, bleeding between my legs, and smelling of liquor. I don’t want to go home like this. I’ll go to Samantha’s house and clean up. Her mom works ’til seven.”

“Your wrist is broken.”

“I’ll go to the emergency room after I clean up—say I took a spill on my bike. I need to clean up. I don’t want to walk in looking like a…” She paused. She couldn’t get the word out. “No one has to know.”

Daniel restrained his surprise. He simply asked, “You’re not pressing charges?”

Her eyes locked with his. “
No one
will ever know.”

“Katie, what about the next girl Josh…”

“GODDAMN IT, DANNY!”

“Okay. Okay.”

They walked in silence until they came to the fork that split their destinations.

“You know I don’t have feelings for you the way you want me to,” Katie said.

“Yeah.”

“I do love you, though. More today than ever. You’re a true friend. You’re my hero.”

Before Daniel could think of a response, Katie kissed him on the mouth. It was warm and lasting, or appeared to be. She tasted his lips before pulling away.

She moved on and never looked back. Daniel had the strangest sensation that he’d never see her again.

5

Daniel sprinted up to his room. He filled his backpack with underwear, some shirts, an extra pair of jeans, his toothbrush, and his copy of
We Can Build You
by Phillip K. Dick, which he had just started. In a tin that came with his X-Men trading cards, he pulled out seventy-eight dollars that he’d managed to hide from the step-monster. After his statement to the sheriff, they would likely place him in a temporary foster home. The thought scared him, but how much worse than Clyde could things actually get?

He crammed his duffel bag with some more clothes and as many course textbooks as he could. It was only three years until graduation. Then he could go anywhere, do anything, including the Navy or college on the West Coast, away from Rita, Clyde, Conklin, Adrian, Katie, and the state of Maryland. Three years until the rest of his life began. He would see it through, all aces.

From his pin collection, he chose the Green Lantern logo pin. He wanted to take everything, but space would be limited in foster care, and young couples were never in the market to adopt a thirteen-year-old. He looked around his room and wondered how much of his stuff he could reclaim one day. His library, his comic book collection, his clothes—it could be replaced. The only precious item was a Gil Kane original Green Lantern pencil sketch, which he had framed and hung on the wall. He wrapped it in a T-shirt and gingerly placed it in the duffel bag.

The hallway floorboards creaked outside his room, and he froze.

“Where are you going?” Rita asked.

“Away.” Daniel resumed packing.

“Away where?”

“You told me not to came back if I walked out the door. So I’m out of here.”

“To live where? What are you going to do?”

“Katie said I could stay at her house. I need time away from here.”

“You’re going to the sheriff, aren’t you? You’re going to lie. You’re going to screw your family.”

The family was screwed already. Denial was Rita’s way of coping with her life. Daniel was just collateral damage—expendable. This made him angry.

“Lie? I lied earlier today to protect this freak show of a life,” Daniel said. “You never lifted a finger to help me. Now I’m telling the truth.”

“You ungrateful little bastard,” Rita continued. “You don’t know anything. How much we’ve sacrificed for you …
I’ve
sacrificed for you. Do you know how much easier it would have been for me to find a husband if I didn’t have a brat clinging to my skirt? I kept you even after John died. That’s right, you little shit. I’m
not
your real mother. John wanted a family, but he couldn’t have kids. So we adopted you. Then he died and left me stuck with you.”

Daniel was shocked. Not at the news, which he’d known for years thanks to Clyde’s drunken rants, but the manner in which Rita chose to tell him. Like Clyde, she tried to poison his link to John Hauer, the only father he had ever known. Nothing of John endured in her anymore. Her transformation was complete—she was Clyde’s handiwork, body and soul. So, Rita wanted to play the “truth” game.
The truth shall set you free,
he thought.

“I saw Clyde earlier,” Daniel said. “He was having sex with that woman from the hospital in the cab of her pickup. Turns out she’s Principal Conklin’s daughter. I think they’ve been
friends
for a while.”

Rita’s fists were balled. She filled the exit with her enraged presence. Daniel recognized a new crossroad in his life. One where Rita would start pounding on him, too, if he stuck around. More than just unwilling to let her hide reality from herself any longer, he challenged her place in the hierarchy, such as it was. Daniel was coming into his own, butting heads with the top, and she would either have to find some way to reclaim her station or yield to him. He felt sorry for her. She was a victim, a creation of Clyde Knoffler’s, but he could no longer submit to her skewed view of the world.

“I’m tired, Mom. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be a punching bag. I can’t keep getting slammed for doing the right thing. This family is killing me, and I want out.”

Rita walked up to Daniel and tried to slap him, but he grabbed her wrist and twisted until she was off balance, then he pushed her away. She lost her balance and hit her head on the bureau on the way down. She was dazed. A wave of guilt suddenly hit him. Daniel tried to help her up but she batted his hand away. He gave up, grabbed his bags, and walked out.

Descending the stairs, he stopped halfway just as Clyde wobbled in through the front door.

“Where the hell are
you
going?” Clyde said. His breath preceded him.

Clyde only ever returned home early to get money or beat his family. The fear that had paralyzed Daniel in the past, however, was kept in check this time. His decision to leave, to let loose the pretense of this family and all the chains that bound him to this existence, spurred him to new possibilities. The start of a new chapter in his story brought with it new reactions to old stimuli. Clyde no longer dictated the narrative. Cowering in fear in the face of his stepfather’s wrath was an archaic response. If anything, catching Clyde in a crude act of adultery, in its prosaic glory, emphasized the man’s base character. No one who spent the majority of his life staggering and stumbling as his primary mode of mobility could be the threat Daniel had envisioned him. Even Clyde was vulnerable.

Looking down on him from the middle of the stairs, Daniel said, “I’m out of here. That’s what you wanted, right? You don’t have to look at my ugly face anymore.”

“Just like that? You think you can leave?”

“Yeah. Just like that.”

“Think you can just leave and stick us with the bill for your lawsuit? That’s right, I heard all about it. Uh-uh. No way.”

“All the money we’re paying out, the school desks, my expulsion, the lawsuit, it’s all because you stuck your dick into Principal Conklin’s daughter.”

Clyde looked around nervously. “Shut your mouth, boy. You say one word about that to anyone and I’ll kill you.”

“Mom knows, but she’s too beaten down to ever divorce your ass.”

Clyde ascended the stairs with clenched fists. “You little shit…”

Daniel slammed him square in the face with his bag full of texts and sent the man reeling backward, grasping for the banister but too drunk to find it. Clyde landed on his back on the edge of the first stair and floor. Sprays of spit shot from his mouth as he yowled.