52 Project #18: Thirteen (Patreon)

Trigger warnings: all of them. This story contains (nongraphic) references to child sexual abuse, rape, attempted rape, underage prostitution, and murder.

A teenage girl who's being sexually abused by her father discovers she has superpowers, and has to learn how to live with the consequences of that discovery.

***

Meg Santoro wanders aimlessly through the Brooklyn streets. The sun is coming up, and she’s tired and cold, her feet aching and her stomach growling. She has no idea where she’s going to get food, or a place to sleep. Home is not an option. Home no longer exists.

Earlier in the night she turned up her nose at a bag of McDonalds she saw sticking out of a trash can. Now she’s hungry enough to fish trash out of cans and eat it, except that the garbagemen have already come around and the city trash cans are empty. She sits down on a park bench to rest her feet, and her eyes flutter closed in her exhaustion. But when they close all the way, she sees the earlier events of the night spooling out in front of her. Her eyes snap open, trying to stop seeing, trying to stop remembering, but she’s too tired to keep walking and when she stops, the memories come back.

Tears well up in her eyes. I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to…

It’s all her fault. She shouldn’t have said no. She shouldn’t have made a fuss. If Mom hadn’t heard, none of it would have happened.

She doesn’t want to remember, but she can’t stop.

***

Dad wanted to do it with her again, but things were different since last week. Her thirteenth birthday was two months ago, and she just got her first period four days ago. In health class they took all the girls aside back in September and taught them about sex and babies and the important thing was that after you get your period, if you do it with a guy you could get pregnant. Dad didn’t want to do it with her while she was having her period, but now it was over and he wanted to do it again.

Meg didn’t like doing it with Dad. He first started asking her to do it when she was nine, and it hurt most of the time, and she’d never liked it. It made her feel dirty, and embarrassed, and even when parts of it felt good she felt bad about that too, because if she liked it that made her a gross person. As she got older she heard girls older than her in the locker rooms and bathrooms talking about girls who were sluts, and she knew that meant her because she wasn’t a virgin. But she couldn’t say no to Dad. He said she would do it if she loved him, and she did love him, because he was her Daddy and he loved her and he praised her and he took care of her. She’d do anything for him.

Now, though, she’d been sure that Dad wouldn’t want her to get pregnant, and she’d finally had a reason to say no. But Dad didn’t want to hear no. He cajoled her and flattered her and promised to get her birth control pills and told her it would be okay, and he lied and said she couldn’t get pregnant so soon after her first period, and she said she knew that was wrong, and he said her teachers just told kids scare stories because they were afraid of children enjoying themselves, and the whole time he was maneuvering her onto the bed and taking her clothes off and she couldn’t make him understand that she really meant it this time, that she had to say no. And she started to try to push him away, but he was bigger than her and he could pin her down easily and he said, you don’t really want to hurt me, do you Meg? This could get ugly, you don’t want things to get ugly, do you? And she didn’t, but she wanted him to stop because she didn’t want to get pregnant, and she was afraid and she felt betrayed because this time she had a really good reason to say no and he still wasn’t listening, and she started to cry.

And Mom heard her.

Meg had never tried to tell Mom what was happening. Dad had said that Mom would tell the police and then they would take Dad away and send him to jail and make her live with Mom, and that would be horrible. Dad only hurt her when he wanted to do it with her. Mom was mean all the time, always shouting at her or being sarcastic or cutting or cruel, and Mom used to spank her all the time even for things she really didn’t do, and nowadays Mom was always calling her names, saying she thought too much of herself and she was stuck-up and she was stupid and she was fat, and she hated the idea of being alone with Mom. And in the true life stories she had read about girls who were in the same position she was, a lot of the time their mothers blamed them for their fathers wanting to do it, and sometimes called them sluts and threw them out of the house. So she’d never wanted to tell Mom anything about it.

But Mom heard her crying, and came upstairs and threw open the door, and she saw.

Mom screamed, and dragged Dad off her by his hair, and hit him. And she kept saying, “You bastard! You filthy bastard! How could you do that to your own daughter!” And Dad kept saying it was okay because Meg wanted it, she’d asked for it, and Mom was screaming that a little girl couldn’t ask for it, Dad was a filthy child molester, how dare he try to blame Meg for his perversions, and for the first time since she was four or five Meg felt like her mother actually loved her. Mom was defending her, telling Dad how wrong it was for him to have done it with Meg and that it wasn’t her fault and she was just a little girl and it was all Dad’s fault, and it was what she’d wanted all her life to hear from her mother, that it wasn’t her fault, that she was a good girl. That Mom loved her and would protect her. And then Mom said she’d call the police. And Dad said, don’t call the police, Stacy, please. And Mom said no, Richie, you’re a fucking child molester and I’m calling the police. 

And they were arguing. And Meg tried to say no, Mom, don’t call the police, it was my fault, and Mom cried and said it’s not your fault Meggie, it’s not your fault, never listen to a man when he makes you do something and then he says it’s your fault, you’re just a little girl, it’s not your fault, your father’s an evil man and I’m going to call the police. And Dad said it would ruin all their lives if she called the police, and he was shouting and he was obviously angry and afraid. And he said don’t touch that phone or I will hit you. And she said I’m calling the police and if you hit me that’s one more thing they can arrest you for. And then she reached for the phone in the hallway at the top of the stairs, and he hit her and she fell down the stairs and her head was lying at a weird angle and she wouldn’t move even when Dad called Stacy? Stacy? and Meg yelled Mom, Mom!

Dad got down the stairs first and was cradling Mom’s head in his lap and he was moving it in ways heads should not move and he was saying it was an accident, Meg, you saw it was an accident, right? I didn’t mean to throw her down the stairs, I didn’t mean to kill her. And he couldn’t have said kill her because that would have meant Mom was dead and she just was defending Meg for the first time ever, ever in her memory, first time Meg knew Mom loved her ever, and she couldn’t be dead but she was dead because Dad had killed her because he wanted to do it with Meg bad enough to kill Mom and Meg screamed. She threw herself at him, screaming that she hated him and she wished he would die too.

And something came up inside her, some power to wrench and twist, something responding to her desire for her father to die. She was so angry that she reached inside him and she twisted something with hands that didn’t exist, hands she’d never known she had, she went right inside him and wrenched, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and when she touched him she heard a song like an orchestra playing music and she twisted that thing because she was mad and now he sounded like a music box winding down, like a broken calliope, like a 45 played at 33 rpm on a turntable g o i n g s l o w e r and then it stopped and there was no more music. No music in Mom. No music in Dad. He didn’t move. He didn’t speak. His eyes were open and there was blood trickling out his mouth and nose and he didn’t answer her.

She broke him. With the invisible hands she broke him. She wanted him dead and she reached inside him and she didn’t even know she could do that so she didn’t know that she shouldn’t and she wasn’t even thinking and she was just angry and she broke him. And now her daddy was dead. Mom was dead and Dad was dead and Dad killed Mom and Meg killed Dad and it was all too much for her. Meg screamed, and sobbed, and pleaded with God to roll back time, let none of this be happening, let it be a bad dream, please God, let me wake up and none of this is real. 

God didn’t listen. Mom and Dad were still dead.

She didn’t know where to go, what to do. She didn’t want the police to put her in jail for killing Dad. It was an accident, she didn’t mean to, she hadn’t known she could even do that. She had to get away. Meg went back upstairs and put her clothes back on and her jacket and then she ran out the door of the rowhome, out into dark city streets and the bright spots of streetlamps, no idea where she was going but she couldn’t stay here, she couldn’t come back here ever again.

***

Meg sits on the park bench and cries brokenly. She wants her Daddy. She wants Mom. She’s thirteen years old and she knows she’ll never have them again, they’ll never take care of her again, never feed her dinner, never pet her hair. The things they did that she hated, the pain between her legs when Dad did it with her and the sting she felt when Mom screamed insults at her, she doesn’t think of those things now. She thinks of the things they did for her, the ways they cared for her, the trips to the museum and Dad telling her what a special smart girl she was and Mom making dinner and then pie or cannolis for dessert and Dad’s hugs and Mom defending her finally, and she cries.

A man sits down next to her. He’s old but not super old, like maybe in his 30’s or something. A white guy, brown hair, wearing jeans, a plain blue t-shirt and a black windbreaker with white piping. “Hey, smile, kid. It can’t be all bad.”

She looks over at him dully. “It is that bad,” she retorts. “It really is that bad.”

“Oh, that’s got to be rough then,” he says. “You running away from home?”

“Yes,” she says, because it’s sort of true, although the thing she’s running away from is more like the broken corpse of home, because Mom and Dad are dead and there will be no home anymore ever.

“Got someone to stay with?”

She shakes her head mutely. She has friends, but she can’t go to any of their houses. Not for something like this.

“Well, I tell you what,” he says. “I got a few other runaways staying at my place. I could take you in for a while, help you get a job so you can take care of yourself. How’s that?”

A job? She’s in junior high. What kind of a job could she get? But she needs one, she realizes, because she needs money. “Sure,” she says uncertainly.

“Come on. I’ll buy you some McDonald’s for breakfast and take you home, let you take a shower and get a nap. I bet you haven’t slept all night. Bet you haven’t eaten much either.”

She shakes her head mutely, because it’s true. She hasn’t slept at all, and she hasn’t eaten since dinner last night.

“I’m Rodney. What’s your name, kid?”

“Meg,” she whispers, but she doesn’t want to give her last name, because she doesn’t want anyone to find her. “My name is Meg.”

***

Rodney gets her hotcakes and sausage and scrambled eggs at McDonald’s, and she has two helpings. Rodney laughs. “Whoa! Slow down, kiddo, food will still be there later!”

Except she doesn’t know that anymore. She doesn’t know why Rodney is being nice to her, so she doesn’t know if it might spontaneously stop. “I used to be a gymnast,” she tells him, apropos of nothing. “I was really good at it. My coach thought maybe I could go to the Olympics.” 

“The Olympics? The ones last year?” 

Meg stuffs eggs into her face and talks with her mouth full. “Gymnastics, yeah. I could have been there instead of Mary Lou Retton.”

“I’m sure you could have,” Rodney says. “You look really fit. Really good shape.”

She could not have. It was never an option; her coach had thought she was good enough, but Mom made it clear that she was never going to be allowed to compete in gymnastics, saying she was too stupid to be able to keep her grades up and train. Spitefully, Meg had trained anyway, at school, and kept her grades up, because she was a lot smarter than Mom ever acknowledged –

(--but now Mom was dead--)

“I work out a lot,” Meg says proudly, yanking her mind away from where it was about to go.

“You look good,” Rodney says. “Really cute.”

Meg stiffens, because that sounds like the kind of thing Dad might say (have said), but probably Rodney is just being nice. He seems like a nice man. Who but a nice man would buy a runaway some breakfast and offer her a place to crash?

After breakfast, Rodney takes her to his house, in a car. Meg’s a child of Brooklyn; she hardly ever gets in a car, and she doesn’t like it. The streets, so clear and easy to track on foot, become so confusing when she’s in a car, and she can’t keep track of where she is.

His place is a brownstone townhouse, a big, fancy one. Meg whistles. “You have a nice-looking house.”

“Thanks,” Rodney says, unlocking four locks before he can open the door, but that’s normal in the city. Crime’s everywhere.

There’s two girls inside, both of them older than Meg. One’s white, with a spray-stiffened feathered haircut, and one’s black, with hair in cornrows and shining beads on the ends of her locks. They’re both wearing a lot of makeup. One’s smoking, and the house smells like booze, tobacco and weed. Meg knows what weed smells like because she got sent to the high school once for a week for special gifted science classes, before Mom found about it and said she couldn’t go, and the kids at the high school used to smoke and drink behind the dumpsters in the parking lot, and one of them offered her some weed one time, but she smoked it and nothing happened at all. It just smelled bad.

“Girls, this is Meg,” Rodney said expansively. “She’s gonna be joining us here.”

The white girl’s eyes narrow. “What, we’re not enough for you?” she snaps. “You need another girl?”

“Honey. Jessamyn. I’m just looking out for you,” Rodney says. “I don’t wanna make you work too hard, but we all like having money, right? So I’m just getting you some help.”

Meg doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about. Does he mean her? She’s thirteen, she can’t get a job. She looked at that once when she was actually thinking about running away. She can’t get working papers and a job until she’s fourteen. “I’m thirteen,” she says again.

The black girl scowls. “Rodney, damn it. That’s disgusting.”

Meg scowls back. That black girl doesn’t know her. How dare she call Meg disgusting?

“She’s a runaway, Rhonda,” Rodney says, sounding patient. “She’s got nowhere else to go now. What’s she going to do, starve on the street?”

Rhonda sighs ostentatiously. “You do what you want. You know I can’t stop you,” she says.

“That’s right, you can’t,” Rodney says. “Better remember it.”

He takes Meg up the stairs. “Here’s your room,” he says, “and here’s the bathroom. You can take a shower. I’ll get you a nightgown.”

“There’s no shower curtain,” Meg objects.

“Oh, yeah, but you can lock the door. No one’s going to come in and see you. It’s fine.”

Meg does really want a shower. Though she doesn’t like the smell of the soap, or the shampoo – they’re full of nasty-smelling perfumy chemicals. After Rodney brings her a nightgown – no underwear, he apologizes that he hasn’t got any clean ones in her size, smiling weirdly at her – she locks the bathroom door and searches the bathroom for a different soap or shampoo. 

She doesn’t find any worth using – the alternate soaps and shampoo smell just as bad, except with the kind of chemicals men like to put on instead of the ones women do. She does discover that there’s a second door out of the bathroom, that it’s facing the shower directly, and that there’s a peephole in it. Gross. Who would put a peephole in a bathroom? Especially when there’s no shower curtain? Meg smears the stinky soap all over the peephole, obscuring it.

It’s weird. The soap has a smell, but the smell has a feel. Not the feel of the soap. It just feels like soap. The smell in the soap is different from the soap itself and she can feel it when she touches the soap. It feels… sharp. But not in a way where it’s sharp on her skin. It’s sharp… inside her, somehow. Or her insides are touching it inside the soap.

She snaps off the sharp parts. She doesn’t know how she’s doing this. The same way she made the song inside Dad slow down and stop, the same way she broke him inside. But she snaps off the sharp parts and squeezes the rest until it all breaks, and then the soap doesn’t smell like anything but soap.

In the shower, she does the same thing to the shampoo she puts on her hair, and the conditioner. If she can’t make them smell nice, at least she can just make them smell soapy, not perfumey. Meg doesn’t like perfume. It smells sharp, like it’s going to cut the inside of her nose. It used to make it hard to breathe, too, and that was bad because her English teacher wore way too much of it, but she must have gotten used to it because she doesn’t feel like she can’t breathe around Mrs. Sommer anymore.

Not that she’s ever going to see or smell Mrs. Sommer again.

She dries off and puts on the nightgown. No underpants. She doesn’t like not wearing underpants but she doesn’t like the way the ones she has smell or feel. They’re crusty and yucky. They always get that way when Dad—

--she doesn’t finish that thought.

Meg’s very, very tired. She climbs into the bed, and despite the fact that this is a strange place and it’s kind of weird and the smoke smell is kind of gross, she falls asleep very quickly.

***

She wakes up with a weight on her and the overwhelming smell of man-chemicals. Like cologne or aftershave or the other nasty things men put on. “Wha—”

“Hey, baby girl,” Rodney says. “Just relax. You’re gonna like this.”

This sounds so much like something Dad might say. Meg goes completely rigid. “I don’t – I don’t want you on me. I’m trying to sleep.”

“Don’t be like that, honey,” Rodney says. He’s pulling down the blankets. She tries to pull them back up, but he’s stronger. “You can go back to sleep later if you really want to. But I gave you food and a place to sleep, didn’t I? I was nice to you. Don’t you wanna be nice to me?”

That sounds exactly like the kind of thing Dad would say. “No!” Meg squirms, trying to get out from under Rodney, but his body is pressing her down against the bed. “Get off me!” She’s hyperventilating. “You’re not my dad and I don’t love you!”

“Babe, you don’t need to love me,” Rodney says, chuckling. “You just need to be warm and soft and wet, and I’ll bet you’ve already got that covered.” His hand slips under her nightgown, where she’s not wearing underpants, and runs up her leg. Toward the place Dad used to touch her, the place where he would do it with her, and Meg screams in rage and fear. Because it’s so unfair, she thought Rodney was nice, she thought he was going to take care of her, but all he wants is the same thing Dad wanted, and he’s not her Dad. She doesn’t love him. She doesn’t have to care about hurting his feelings if she says no.

“I said get off me!” Meg snarls, and digs her nails into Rodney’s hand so he can’t keep stroking it up her leg.

Rodney yelps. “You little fucking bitch!” he says, and slaps her in the face, hard.

Meg sees red. She shoves her hands against Rodney’s chest and she can feel his shirt, she can feel it like it’s a road she can travel to get to his skin and then inside him, and she can hear the orchestra, playing a different tune than it was playing inside Dad but it’s the same kind, she recognizes it, and she makes it stop, she makes it slow dooooown. Rodney’s eyes bulge. He gasps, and pushes himself off her, his hands against his chest.

“Help!” he shouts, gasping. “Jessie! Rho-Rho! Help me!”

Meg climbs out of the bed, wide awake now. Her nightgown falls back down, covering her. “That’s what you deserve,” she snarls at him. “That’s what everyone who tries to do something to me if I don’t want it is gonna get.”

He’s turning blue, literally. She always thought that was a metaphor, but no. His lips are blue, his tongue is blue. He’s panting and gasping but it’s obvious he can’t get enough air.

Because she made something stop inside his lungs, she realizes. Whatever she did to Dad, it happened so fast and then he was gone and all the music stopped. But when she puts her hand on Rodney’s shoulder as he kneels, struggling for air, she can hear the music still slowing down and the part that’s broken is the part where his lungs should be bringing in air but she can feel them, they’re all crumpled up, the air is trying to inflate them like a balloon but they won’t straighten out and inflate, and she did that. She crushed his lungs, and now he’s dying.

Meg laughs savagely. “Yeah. Try to breathe. Go on, just try.” She kicks him. “I thought you were nice, but you’re even worse than Dad, and I – and I killed Dad.”

The white girl kicks the door open. She’s holding a gun. “Freeze!” she yells, but her voice is shaking. “Oh, God! Rodney!”

Rodney’s breath rattles a final time, and he falls onto the floor, limp. “Rhonda! Call 911!” Jessamyn yells, still pointing the gun at Meg. 

“What’s going on?” Rhonda yells from downstairs, and Meg hears her running up the stairs.

“What did you do?” Jessamyn screams at Meg. 

“He tried –” She can’t say it. She’s never been able to say it. “He did something I didn’t like, and he wouldn’t stop.” She kicks his body again. “I said no.”

“What the fuck! You bitch, you killed him just because he wanted to fuck you? You’re supposed to let guys fuck you if they do something nice for you!” Meg is fairly sure that this is not true. She doesn’t have time to say so. “You fucking bitch!” Jessamyn screams, and fires the gun.

The pain tearing through her chest and abdomen enrages her, and without any conscious awareness of what she’s doing, she knits torn flesh back together, healing herself, even as she leaps at Jessamyn. The older girl barely has time to scream before Meg is on her, making the symphony of her life slow and stop in a jangled mess of missed notes, disharmonious and desynchronized.

Rhonda’s there, standing in the doorway. Meg doesn’t know how long she’s been there. “Is she dead?” Rhonda asks, her voice more calm and even than it probably has any right to be, given that Meg has just killed two people. “Am I next?”

“Not if you don’t mess with me,” Meg says, and then it occurs to her that if she wants to sound tough, she needs to use stronger language. “Don’t fuck with me,” she says, tasting the harshness of a word good little A-student Margaret Santoro has never before said, “and you’ll be fine.”

“You healed yourself,” Rhonda says, still even and calm. “And you killed Rodney and Jessamyn. Can you heal them, too? Can you bring them back?”

“Why should I? Rodney tried to-“ She should be able to say it. She’s a killer. She’s murdered three people, she should be a badass. But she’s not tough enough, yet, to say what Rodney tried to do. She’s too used to never using the words to say what Dad used to do. “And Jessamyn just shot me.”

“No one’s gonna cry for Rodney,” Rhonda agrees. “But Jessamyn just got scared. She thought Rodney loved her, you know. Do you have the ability to save her, or do you just kill people?”

What if she does? She healed herself. What if she can make the symphony start up again? Can she fix what she’s broken? She touches Jessamyn again, and easily identifies what it was she broke. She doesn’t know the words to describe it, but she can feel it, and she can perceive how to put it back together again.

The music starts up again, the orchestra playing the symphony of Jessamyn’s life, slow at first and then gathering strength, gathering rhythm. The young woman’s eyes flutter open, and Meg feels a keen sense of power and triumph. “Don’t fuck with me,” she says again, as the girl’s eyes go wide. She’s liking that phrase more every time she says it. “I just killed you and brought you back to life. You try shooting me again or anything, and I’ll kill you for good. Capisce?”

“Yeah,” Jessamyn says hoarsely, eyes huge, with the whites showing around the edges.

“Good, then we get each other.” She stands up. “Get me something to eat. I’m hungry.”

While she’s waiting for her food, she puts her clothes back on. They’re dirty, but she hasn’t got anything else, yet. She leaves Rodney’s body in place as she heads down the stairs to the kitchen.

Only when she’s eating the sandwich Rhonda brings her does it occur to her. If she brought Jessamyn back, maybe she could have brought back Mom and Dad. Maybe she still can.

She finishes choking down the sandwich quickly. “I’m going out. Gimme bus fare,” she demands of Jessamyn, who shrinks away.

“I ain’t got any money,” Jessamyn whimpers.

“Rodney never let us have our own cash,” Rhonda says. “But I know where his lockbox is. Gimme a sec.”

She comes back with eleven dollars in singles. Meg says, “Thanks,” without thinking, because she was taught to be polite. A badass killer shouldn’t be thanking people for obeying her orders. She scowls at Rhonda. “I’ll be back,” she says, pocketing the money, and heads out.

She doesn’t know where she is, exactly – Rodney brought her here in a car. But she’s in the city, and she knows how to find her way. Orient to the nearest street corner. Find a bus stop. Read the bus map, find a subway station, ride the bus there, read the subway map. Between the bus and the subway she’s back home in an hour and a half.

There’s police all over her apartment building. And yellow tape. And all the police have guns. What if they know she’s the one who killed Dad? What if they think she killed Mom, too? Jessamyn’s bullets hurt like hell, but there were only two of them. Can she really heal herself if she gets shot by a lot of cops? What if they shoot her in the head? And then she sees an ambulance pulling out from the front of the building, no siren on. If Mom and Dad’s bodies are aboard that ambulance, she’s missed her chance. She knows dead bodies get locked up in drawers in hospital morgues. She can’t do anything, now.

Meg runs three, four blocks before she can’t run anymore because she’s crying too hard. She knows, now, that she has the power to undo what she does, when she kills. She could have fixed Dad. And she healed herself from gunshot wounds.  Maybe she could have healed Mom, too. But it’s too late. She’s found out too late. Her parents are dead and she can’t fix it anymore.

***

She returns to the apartment a few hours later, having wandered around in a park crying for half an hour and then spending the rest of the time trying to retrace her route back. “Yo, bitches,” Meg says, because that’s what badass people say. “There any dinner yet?”

Rhonda isn’t there. Jessamyn trembles. “Rodney always ordered food,” she whimpers. “I don’t know how to order food. I was waiting until Rhonda gets back.”

“Where’d she go?”

Despite her obvious fear, Jessamyn manages to pull a disbelieving look. “You that naïve? Did Rodney even tell you what we do here?”

“He said you were runaways, that was all.”

Jessamyn rolls her eyes. “We’re whores,” she says. “Rhonda’s out on the street or fucking some guy for money. She said I could stay home tonight because of – because of what you did.”

Meg sneers at her. “What? Does it still hurt where I brought you back to life?”

“You fucking killed me!” Jessamyn gets off the sofa and backs away from Meg.

“Yeah, well, you shot me.”

“Because you killed Rodney!”

Meg musters up everything she has to be able to say the words without choking. “Rodney was gonna rape me.”

“You’re supposed to let them fuck you if they take care of you and give you food and shit! That’s not rape! That’s what you’re supposed to do!”

Meg lunges at Jessamyn. Despite being significantly shorter than the older girl, Meg slams her into a wall and pins her, because when she feels Jessamyn’s muscles inside starting to move, like maybe she wants to fight Meg, Meg just makes them stop doing that. Jessamyn’s eyes are wide, and she’s whimpering. “You listen up, bitch,” Meg says. Bad words make her feel so powerful. Why did she go her whole childhood being a good little girl and never using them? “My dad used to fuck me, and I let him do it because he was my dad, and I loved him.” And because he wouldn’t take no for an answer. But Meg wasn’t going to mention that. “But then my mom caught him at it, and now they’re both dead. You think I’m gonna fuck some total stranger just because he gave me McDonalds’ and a place to sleep? My dad gave me everything.” And she took it all from him, she made him stop and she’ll never be able to fix it even though it turns out she can fix it when she kills people and if she had known – no. No. She has to stop thinking about this. She can’t cry in front of Jessamyn. “Any man who thinks I’m a whore and I’ll fuck him just because he gives me stuff, I’ll kill him. Rodney or anybody else.”

“Please don’t kill me,” Jessamyn whimpers.

Meg lets her go. “I told you. Don’t fuck with me, and you’ll be fine.” 

There’s milk in the refrigerator and cereal in the pantry. Cheerios. They suck, but they’re food. Meg loads them up with sugar to the point where her milk is almost a sugar sludge and gulps them down. Then she finds the lunchmeat Rhonda used to make her a sandwich, and she makes one for herself. The tomatoes in the fridge are sad and pathetic, and there’s no lettuce or spinach or anything green, but there’s ham and turkey and bologna. No cheese worth eating, only American, which in Meg’s opinion is not a cheese. She loads up a sandwich with some of every lunchmeat, and eats that. Then she moves on to the canned food, and makes herself a can of Chef Boyardee Ravioli. It’s hardly worthy of even calling ravioli – Meg’s Italian, she knows what good ravioli tastes like – but her stomach feels like a bottomless pit. She’d even eat the American cheese at this point if she had to.

“Your food sucks, you know that?” she says to Jessamyn.

“Well, excuse the fuck out of me, I never did the shopping,” Jessamyn snaps. “That was Rodney, who is still dead by the way, and upstairs, and what are we gonna do about that? If we call the cops they’ll arrest all of us. They’re not gonna believe some little kid did it.”

“I’m not a little kid,” Meg says. “I’m thirteen.”

“Oooh, you’re such a big girl,” Jessamyn mocks her. “I’m sixteen. You’re a little kid.”

“I’m a kid who can kill you by touching you and then bring you back to life. How about you stop calling me a little kid?” Meg grabs a Chinese menu off the fridge. “Find the menu for a pizza place, and find some cash.”

“I told you! I don’t get to keep any of the cash!”

“You didn’t look when Rhonda went to the lockbox to get some?”

“No!”

“You’re a moron,” Meg says. “I’m not gonna starve because you can’t find Rodney’s money. I bet he’s got a wallet.” She goes back upstairs. Funny, she’s read that bodies get stiff when they die, but Rodney is still as flexible as a living person. And he does in fact have a wallet, and it does in fact have money in it, lots of money. Meg takes the money. She’s a badass killer. She’s in charge now.

She demands that Jessamyn order pizza, while she writes a grocery list on the back of the Chinese menu. Meg knows how to cook eggs, grilled cheese, French toast, and spaghetti. That’s about the extent of her cooking expertise. She puts the supplies she’ll need for those things on the list.

“Are you even listening?” Jessamyn whines at her, after calling for pizza. “We can’t just leave Rodney dead upstairs! Someone’s gonna come around to find out what happened to him! And he’s gonna start stinking!”

“I’ll figure something out,” Meg, who has no idea how to dispose of a body, says.

***

Rhonda gets back in while they’re eating the pizza. Her eyebrows go up. “I hope you saved some of that shit for me,” she says.

“Of course we did,” Jessamyn says. “I wouldn’t order a pizza without getting enough for you.”

“You wouldn’t order a pizza at all,” Meg says with her mouth full. She finishes swallowing. “I had to find the money and then make you do it.”

“Well, I’m glad you both got a pizza ordered, because I’m starving.” Rhonda takes two slices of the Supreme pie and one of the pepperoni. “What’d Rodney say your name was? Meg, I think?”

“Yeah.”

“You got anyplace else to stay? Relatives you can go to? You don’t want to get involved in the business. You’re way too young.”

Meg scowls. “I don’t want to be a prostitute, if that’s what you’re saying. If you guys want to, then fine. You can give me part of your money and I can kill anyone who tries to hurt you or doesn’t want to pay you.” She’s pretty unclear on exactly how prostitution works, but she knows it’s having sex for money, and she knows that having sex can hurt if the guy’s not careful. She’s looking forward to killing guys who aren’t careful.

“Uh, yeah, no, that’s not how this is gonna work,” Rhonda says. “Rodney’s boss is named Mike. He’s gonna come by tomorrow or send someone over, and they’re gonna expect to see Rodney and they’re going to be pissed that he’s dead. And if we tell them you did it, they’ll shoot you.”

“And then I’ll kill them,” Meg declares.

“Maybe, but I dunno. Can you heal up a head shot like you did when Jessie got you in the chest?”

It occurs to Meg that she doesn’t know the answer to this, and she doesn’t want to find out, in case the answer is ‘no.’ “I could just kill them first, before they can get their guns out.”

“You can’t just keep killing people, girl!” Rhonda shakes her head. “I ain’t gonna cry for Rodney. He was a motherfucker and he got what was coming to him.”

“Rhonda!” Jessamyn sounds horrified.

“Sorry, but it’s the truth. He tried to fuck a thirteen year old girl who didn’t know jack shit. No offense to you, Meg, but you didn’t know Rodney was gonna fuck you and make you turn tricks, did you?”

“No,” Meg says, the reality of it hitting her. It sobers her, what would have happened if that power hadn’t come up inside her and made Rodney stop the way it made Dad stop. On the other hand she wouldn’t be in this situation without that power. 

“And I was fourteen when he got me. Fucking pedophile. But he’s gotta be the last one, okay? Mike, he’s like, Mafia or something. He got pimps answering to him and they give him most of their money and he gives them drugs. And Jessie and I need those drugs. I’m hooked on smack, girl, you know what happens when I run out of it? So we gotta play nice with Mike.”

‘Just say no to drugs’ had been most of Meg’s education when it came to drugs. She knew smack was heroin and that it was very very very bad. “Why don’t you quit it? It’s gonna kill you one of these days if you don’t.”

Rhonda rolls her eyes. “What they teach you in school, white girl? You get hooked on smack, you ain’t quitting. Rich guys who can go to expensive rehab clinics can maybe quit. Some people get themselves on methadone and they manage to quit. But ain’t no one gonna help a couple of whores get off it.”

“What are we gonna do with Rodney?” Jessamyn asks again. “He’s gonna start rotting and stinking if we don’t do something.”

“Huh. Can you help me get him to the car, Jessie? I wanna make it look like he was partying hard with us and now he’s drunk, but I can’t carry him myself.”

Meg thinks about an experiment she read about in her science textbook but never got to try, about frog legs and electricity. She pushes back from the table and runs upstairs.

Rodney’s symphony is gone, and in its place there are occasional instruments playing jarring discordant notes, too slowly. Meg reaches into him. She made Jessamyn not move a muscle. Maybe she can make a dead man move one.

Under her command, Rodney lurches, and falls over immediately because she’s not touching him anymore. It looks like this only works when she touches people. His shirt didn’t get in the way, so it’s okay to touch their clothes, but if she’s not making contact at all, she can’t keep controlling their bodies. She tries again. It’s hard to make a man stand up by manually making his muscles move. Meg has her arm wrapped around his middle, but he’s still lurching and jerking all over the place.

Rhonda comes up the stairs and sees what Meg is doing. “Wow. Shit, you can do that?”

“Yeah,” Meg says. “I’m not gonna get him to get down the stairs this way, but if you hold him up once we get him downstairs, I can make him walk.”

“Okay. Here’s the plan. We get him into the car. I drive him to the East River. We point the car at the river, get him into the driver’s seat, tie his foot to the gas pedal, turn the car on and jump loose as soon as it’s in drive, and he drives it straight into the river. When they find his body they’ll assume he was drunk and he had an accident.”

Meg shrugs. She’s never disposed of a body before. “Sounds fine to me.”

“But then we won’t have a car!” Jessamyn whines.

“You can’t even drive it anyway,” Rhonda says. “And who the fuck needs a car in New York City? We can manage.”

***

It’s Meg, in the end, who turns the key in the ignition, coached by Rhonda while she’s sitting on Rodney’s lap, and then puts the car in drive – it’s not a stick shift, whatever that is, so she doesn’t need to use a clutch, whatever that is—and then makes Rodney’s leg press on the gas, hard.

The car lurches forward. Meg jumps out of the window, which is rolled down all the way. It’s a big car, one of those big old boats from the 70’s, not one of the small gas-conserving little boxes driving around today. She has no trouble getting clear of the car and rolling on the pavement. The car drives directly off an empty dock and into the water.

It’s 3 am, but New York City never sleeps. There are bystanders who see it happen. Rhonda screams theatrically. “Rodney! Nooooo!”

People gather on the docks, five or six people who saw the car drive off the dock. One guy offers to jump in the water and try to rescue Rodney. “Thanks, mister!” Meg says, and hugs him… and gives him an asthma attack. His lung spasms won’t last long, a moment or two. Not like Rodney’s, that didn’t stop until he was dead. But he’s not jumping in the water and rescuing anybody.

She and Rhonda slip away as soon as they can, after some more theatrics from Rhonda, and return to the house.

***

When the cops show up in the morning, Jessamyn identifies herself as Rodney’s girlfriend, and throws convincing hysterics when the cops tell her he’s dead. She doesn’t appear to be a suspect; it’s probably impossible for the cops to imagine that anyone could have gotten Rodney to drive into the river after he was already dead, considering that they’d used Meg’s powers and not Rhonda’s original plan of tying his foot there. Meg and Rhonda stay upstairs, and the cops don’t search the house.

After the cops are gone, Meg goes to Rhonda to get her to go to the grocery store. Rhonda, however, is blissed out, drug paraphernalia next to her. Irritated, Meg touches her, trying to identify the differences in the symphony of Rhonda’s body from what she had been like before she’d shot up. She didn’t touch Rhonda earlier for a baseline, though. So she checks on Jessamyn, who has also shot up, and from her, Meg can identify what parts of the body symphony are caused by heroin being there.

She goes back to Rhonda and turns those parts of the symphony off.

Rhonda jacks forward, gasping, and stares at Meg with wide bug-eyes. “What did you do? What did you do to me?”

“I wanted you to go to the grocery store, and you can’t do it if you’re high,” Meg says. 

“Jesus fucking Christ. Did you just – shit. You just got rid of my high! You just – god fucking damn you, I paid for that shit!” Rhonda gets to her feet, wobbling, and screams at Meg. “Do you have any goddamn idea how many cocks I had to suck to get that shit, and you just – you just made it fucking go away because you want me to go to a goddamn grocery store!”

Meg just listens to the rant, arms folded. If Rhonda hits her, Rhonda will regret it. But as angry as she is, Rhonda seems to remember not to touch Meg.

“You done being a big baby about it?” Meg says, trying to sound bored. “Get me groceries so I can cook spaghetti, and I’ll give you your high back.” She doesn’t actually know if she can do that, but the offer pacifies Rhonda.

“Yeah, okay. Goddamn you fucking procks anyway.”

“Prock?” Meg blinks. She’s heard a lot of slurs in her life, but that one’s new. “What’s that?”

“Shit, no one ever called you that before? You have superpowers.”

“Yeah, so? What’s a prock, someone with superpowers then?”

Rhonda sighs. “It’s short for Proxima. You hear proxy sometimes too. How are you one but you never heard this?”

Meg considers revealing that she’s only had these powers for a couple of days, and decides not to. It would make her look weak and maybe make Rhonda think she can challenge Meg. “Maybe I just don’t hang out with shitheads who call people names, most of the time,” she says, which is completely untrue, because the girls in her class call other girls bitches and sluts and whores, and sometimes the white ones use slurs for the black ones, and occasionally someone gets called a dyke. “What’s Proxima got to do with superpowers? Proxima means ‘next.’” She knows this because her Catholic middle school is big on teaching kids vocabulary by connecting it to Latin, and she read ahead in her textbook and got the words ‘proximate’ and ‘approximate’ at one point.

“I don’t fucking know, I ain’t no dictionary.” Rhonda seems to think about it. “I guess, it’s like, ‘next human’. You know how Homo sapiens means smart man, right?”

Meg blinks again. “Yeah, but how do you know that?” Rhonda has seemed to her like the kind of girl who would fall for the ‘are you a homo sapiens’ joke where the target thinks it has something to do with ‘homosexual’ and says no.

Rhonda snorts. “White bitch. You think I don’t know nothing? I went to school too. Probably more than you did; I was fourteen when I ran away. You even in high school yet?”

The answer to this is ‘no’, but Meg’s not going to admit that. “Okay, fine. You went to school, you’re smart. Great. Peachy.”

“Yeah, well, you asked. Homo proximus means ‘next man’ or something like that. So it’s like you’re more evolved or something because you got superpowers.” She shakes her head like that’s the dumbest idea she ever heard. “You know you ain’t more evolved than me just ‘cause you got powers, right? That’s a dumbass idea. The way you’re acting, you’re just like any thirteen-year-old white girl.”

“Any other thirteen-year-old white girl wouldn’t’ve been able to kill a pimp like I did.”

“Yeah, but then you still wanna eat a pizza and brush your teeth. Why don’t you go to the grocery store? Why you want me to do it so bad? Just ‘cause you don’t feel big unless you pushin’ someone else around?”

This was uncomfortably close to the truth. Also, Meg had never gone grocery shopping, in a supermarket, by herself. Drugstores and convenience stores, yes, but she didn’t even know where the grocery stores were in this neighborhood, or if there even were any. Some places in the city didn’t have them. “I’m not from this part of town. I don’t know where the grocery store around here is, and no way I’m gonna go back to my old neighborhood. Fuck that.”

“Then I tell you what. I’m gonna go to the grocery store, because you ruined my high, so fuck, I got nothin’ better to do. But you’re coming with me.”

“And what if I don’t want to?” Meg sneers. “You gonna try and make me?”

“No, I just ain’t goin’ to the grocery store for your white ass. You gonna kill me ‘cause I won’t do your goddamn shopping like I’m your maid?”

“I could if I wanted to.”

“Yeah, and I could dance in the toilet if I wanted to, but fuck that.” Rhonda sits back down, but she’s still looking at Meg, holding her gaze. “Listen up. You, a white girl, just asked a black chick to do a chore for you, and then threatened you could hurt me if I don’t. So you a racist or just ignorant?”

Meg glares. “I’m not a racist! I’d do the same thing if you were white! Jessamyn’s an idiot and I don’t trust her to get what I asked for.”

“Well, here’s some knowledge for your ignorant little ass. If you told a white girl to do it then fine, that ain’t a problem, but you tell a black girl to do it, you don’t get out of the implications just because you’d have done the same if I was white. ‘Cause I ain’t white, and both you and me gotta deal with that. In a world where your great-great-great-granddaddy might’ve had mine as a slave, you don’t get to treat me like you’d treat a white girl, because it means something different when it goes from you to me than from me to you or you to Jessamyn. You get me?”

“My great-great-great-granddaddy came over on a boat from Italy and slavery was already over by then, so no, none of my ancestors had yours as slaves.”

“Yeah, no, if your family’s been in America a long-ass time you probably got some long-term old-timer white in you somewhere. You too pale to be all Italian.”

“Northern Italy. Naples.”

Rhonda laughs. “Who told you Naples was northern, girl? That’s like, north if you’re from Sicily.”

“How do you know that?” Meg demands.

“’Cause I’ve looked at a map of Europe once or twice in my life.” She shakes her head as if she’s disappointed in Meg, somehow. “And it don’t matter anyway. You gonna come with me to the grocery store, or you gonna decide to be a racist bitch?”

This is how Meg ends up accompanying Rhonda to the grocery store. The plus side is that she gets to pick out the exact groceries she wants – the specific brand of spaghetti Mom used, the right brands of tomato sauce and tomato paste, the freshest green peppers and mushrooms, the ground beef with the lowest fat content. Also, she gets ice cream, which she hadn’t put on her list, and toothpaste and a toothbrush, because Rhonda reminded her during their chat that yes, actually, her teeth were gross and she hadn’t brushed them since --- well, since. The minus side is that she feels like she’s losing control of this situation, because Rhonda refuses to be scared of her. She can push Jessamyn around all day, but Rhonda apparently doesn’t think the fact that someone can kill you is a good reason to do what they say.

Rhonda picks up groceries Meg didn’t think of or didn’t know they needed – fresh cereal, milk for lactose-intolerant people, sliced cheddar cheese, wheat bread, several more packets of lunch meat, and so on. “So I got a business proposition for you,” she says, loading the cart with shampoo, conditioner, and some hair care products Meg doesn’t recognize that have pictures of black women on the boxes.

“Yeah?” Meg is wary. Also embarrassed. She hopes Rhonda doesn’t start talking about being a prostitute here in the grocery store.

“The way things worked before, Rodney made sure other girls who wanted to use our corner would step off, and kept other operators from trying to take us over... but he took all our money. If we wanted to buy Pop-Tarts, we had to ask for the money.” She puts five boxes of Pop-Tarts in different flavors into the cart. “He gave us drugs, and booze, but only when we worked. You don’t work, you don’t bring in cash for Rodney, you don’t get to get high or even drunk.”

“I can see why you don’t care what I did about him,” Meg says, carefully choosing words that don’t sound like she’s even euphemistically implying that she killed him. This is a grocery store. “Maybe we should save this conversation for when we get back to the house?”

Rhonda looks at her. “Rodney said you had nowhere else to go. That true?”

She has cousins in the city. She could go live with them. But she doesn’t want to. How is she going to go back to being a kid, going to school and going to bed when Aunt Carlotta says and watching sitcoms with laugh tracks and lame cartoons that are just trying to sell her dolls, when she’s killed? When she’s controlled someone who’s older than she is? She may not be able to fully control Rhonda, but she can control Jessamyn. When she’s brought someone back from the dead?

“True enough,” she says.

“And you don’t wanna be in the business Jess and me are in. And that’s fine, but you gotta do something to earn your keep, you know? But I got some ideas.”

“I’m not doing what you do.”

“And you don’t have to. You got a talent, girl. Ain’t no one else I know of can do what you do. So I’m gonna ask you some questions about what you can do.”

“Okay.”

Rhonda stops her as they’re heading toward the cash register. “That thing you did to me. Could you make it so I don’t even want that shit anymore?”

“I -- yeah, maybe?”

“’Cause I was craving really bad, and you made my high just, go away, just like that, so I should still be craving hard. But I’m not. I’m really not. Maybe you can make it so I’m never craving again. So I can do it if I want to but I never have to.”

“I never tried that before, but it sounds maybe doable.”

“’Cause if you can do that, shit, we’ve got no fucking use for Mike and his pals. We can be independent. You said some shit earlier about protecting us, like Rodney used to. You can do that, right?”

“I think I know how to hurt people without killing them, yeah. And if you need someone killed, I can totally do that.”

“Can you fix Jess and me up? Like, a john gets rough, you fix up the bruises? If we get a cold, you can make it go away? Or that AIDS shit. That’s scary stuff. You never know when a guy goes for other guys on the down low unless you see him in the park with the gay guys, and Rodney would’ve made us go with them even then.”

All Meg knows about AIDS is that it’s a horrible fatal illness that only gay men and drug users get and that is why you’re supposed to just say no to drugs and not be gay, also because you’ll go to Hell if you are, but it’s occurring to her now that with the murders, she’s going to Hell anyway, and maybe she doesn’t know enough about what Rhonda is talking about and maybe she needs to go to the library and read up on this. “Never tried that either, but if you can find me someone who’s got it, maybe I can find whatever’s causing it and stop it.”

“HIV. It’s a virus called HIV.” She shakes her head. “You’re just a kid, ain’t you? You learned what they taught you in school but not much else.”

“That’s not true! I read a lot!”

“Well, maybe you’re gonna need to read a lot more, ‘cause you ain’t going to school anymore if you’re staying with Jess and me.”

“Yeah, well, am I?” She meant that to be a sneering challenge, but it comes out uncomfortably close to a genuine question.

“That’s the business proposition. Anything Rodney could do to drive folks off our corner or keep some other operator from taking over... you could do. They wouldn’t be scared of you, looking like a cute little schoolgirl like you do, but if you kill someone’s ass or make ‘em freeze up like you did to Jess or you could probably even beat them up, but like, from the inside... and then they’ll be scared. Other thing is, if you can fix someone who got shot I bet there’s a lot of shit you can fix.” She’s speaking quietly, and putting rustly crunchy bags of chips and pretzels in the cart, and this is New York so no one’s paying attention anyway, but it still unnerves Meg to have her talking about any of this openly, even with euphemisms. And ‘kill someone’s ass’ is hardly a euphemism. “So, here’s the deal. You live with us as a roommate. You can cook your spaghetti, and we order pizza or Chinese or we cook if we feel like it. We pay for everyone’s food out of the take, and the rent and shit. And then we give part of the take to you. Not as much as we gave Rodney, but Rodney had to give a lot of it to his boss.”

“Mike?” She seems to recall Rhonda or someone telling her about a guy named Mike who was Rodney’s boss.

“Yeah. Him. He comes around trying to get us back under his thumb, we tell him to fuck off ‘cause we’re independent operators now... and if he doesn’t like it, you hurt him. Make him run squealing back to his momma. So Jess and I pay you to protect us, and fix us up if we get hurt. And if it turns out you can get rid of that AIDS shit? Gonna be a lot of guys I know willing to pay big money to get some of that.”

It sounds good. It sounds good enough that Meg’s afraid there’s a catch. “I gotta do experiments,” she says. “Like when I made it so you weren’t, uh--”

“High. You can say it. Ain’t no cops shopping around here,” Rhonda says, grinning.

“Yeah, okay. I had to feel you and Jessamyn to find what’s the same in both of you that’s different from Jessamyn before. You want me to fix a bruise or a cut or something? Pretty sure I can do that, no problem. Disease, though, I gotta find the disease. I gotta compare someone with it with someone who doesn’t, and then someone else with it, because people are a lot different from each other on the inside. But I bet I could do it. I made the soap stop smelling like chemical shit so I can probably do anything.”

“I get that. And there’s gonna be issues with you looking like a kid, so maybe we try out some makeup on you, see if we can figure out how to make you look older. You should dress punk. Those clothes need a wash and they’re too preppy besides.”

Her clothes are the school uniform she was wearing before Dad came to her and wanted... what he’d always wanted. He didn’t make her take it all the way off, so she’d pulled it up and straightened it out and gotten her shoes on before she ran. “Yeah? Where’s a good place to buy clothes around here?”

“Let’s get this shit back to the house and into the fridge, and then we can go out and I’ll show you some good places to buy clothes. Not the kind Jess and I wear, you’re not about that. We’re gonna make you look like a badass.” 

“I am a badass.” 

“Sure are, but you got to look it, too, because we can’t be driving every fucker’s car into the river who looks at you funny. You gotta not kill people unless there’s no other way, you get me?” 

“Yeah.” She doesn’t have to kill people if she can figure out how to hurt them without killing, and how hard could it be? She’s already figured out how to paralyze people; she did it to Jessamyn. 

“So how about it? We got a deal?” 

She offers her hand for Meg to shake, there in the snack aisle, and it occurs to Meg that this woman is really brave. Like, almost stupidly brave. Meg can kill by touching people and Rhonda is offering to touch her, to shake on a deal where she’ll pay Meg to be her protector.

Meg wants people to be afraid of her. But not everybody. She’s too alone. No parents, no friends from school, no family, and she’s been thrust into a world she knows she doesn’t really understand, straight from Catholic middle school to living with prostitutes who abuse drugs, and also, murdering people and dumping the bodies in the river. She always figured she was harder and tougher than her classmates because they were probably all virgins and she hadn’t been since she was nine, so most of their problems just sounded stupid and trivial... but in comparison to Rhonda, she’s an innocent little baby. 

She wants a friend. She wants a mentor. She wants someone to show her how to live with what she’s become.

Meg takes Rhonda’s hand and shakes it. “Deal,” she says.