Copyright © 2019 Allana Kephart
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without written expressed permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is purely coincidental.
Cover design by Cassie Chapman of Opulent Designs
E-book design by Nadège Richards of Inkstain Design Studio
Edited by Alissa Glenn
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
for Nadège—
because she’s fearless
people who are sensible about love
are incapable of it
—DOUGLAS YATES
Racist.
One little word sets an entire room on edge. Bodies go rigid, tongue already armed to the teeth to offer defenses on how you’re so totally not a racist. I mean, we’re long past that, right? We’re not still in the days of separate water fountains and lynch mobs or anything. There was even a black person on the bus today for your morning commute, wasn’t there?
Racism is dead.
Ask any white guy, they can tell you so.
Like my dad, for example. Martin McLeon. Chief of police, married only once, father of two. Supposedly. This older brother I’ve only heard of in stories of Dad’s crazy college days, Ryker, lives somewhere off the coast of Alaska, living off the land and whatnot. Occasionally, we get a postcard to let us know he’s alive. I’ve never met him in person, though. Needless to say, we’re not close.
Otherwise, since Mom died when I was twelve, it’s just Dad and me. He’s my best friend, same as I’m his. He works impossibly long hours, sometimes gone for days at a time, but on those few infrequent off days, we do everything together. He taught me how to fight, how to shoot, how to play ball. He never confined my activities to gender specific nonsense—we just enjoyed each other’s company. I wanted to be just like him when I grew up.
He never needed to teach me how to be a girl, because I never wanted the stereotypes. I’m not artistic enough for make-up, not frilly enough for dresses and skirts. I love my old jeans, my cleats, my bruises, and my scrapes. I didn’t need to know how a lady should behave, because I really wasn’t all that much of a girl to begin with.
Until my period came. And then I didn’t really have a choice.
I was a late bloomer, over fourteen years old by the time my body caught up with the rest of my female peers. It was the only thing I ever lied about to fit in, as the only two girl friend’s I had—Paris and Carly—went out of their way to humiliate me for not being a real woman yet.
Having it—fuck. I’d rather be a little girl for the rest of my life...
It was the third day of shark week, and I came through the door in tears. Nothing happened to promote this—it just felt like there was a living garden gnome inside my uterus with a sword, trying to cut his way out of me. Was it supposed to be this horrible? This didn’t feel normal, but who was I supposed to ask? Paris and Carly thought I’d been dealing with this for years, so I couldn’t talk to them.
Tell Dad?
I’d rather die.
To my surprise, he was lingering in the doorway when I came in. I’d seen his car in the driveway but hadn’t expected him to be the first thing I saw right in the door. I quickly took my hands away from my middle and straightened my spine, swatting furiously at the tears on my face. How childish I must look.
This day could not get any worse.
“Ri Pie, hey,” Dad said, the smile on his face awkward and uncomfortable.
“Hi Dad,” I rasped, my voice wet with pain. “What’re you doing home?”
“Lunch break,” he said. “Forgot my, uh...lunch.”
I hummed. He was being weird. I didn’t have the energy for weird. “Oh. Well, I’ve got a ton of homework, so, I’ll see you at dinner?”
I tried to sidestep around him, my goal to run up the stairs and lock my bedroom door behind me like a standard teenage girl having a meltdown. But instead, he said, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
Alright, so this day could get worse. Would it be rude to say no? Yes, and I’d probably have to give him an explanation. I didn’t have a good one, so I pasted on a fake grin and said, “Sure.”
He gestured for me to go to the kitchen with him and sit at the dining table, where the hard, unforgiving wooden chairs sat like witch hunt era stakes. More tears clogged my throat as I rested on the edge, and I grit my teeth to keep my face blank. He got hour long lunch breaks, and it would take him fifteen minutes to get back to the station from here. Assuming he’d been here a moment, I maybe only had to sit here and fake it for twenty minutes.
I finished a game of football with two broken ribs. I could do this.
Maybe.
“Riley,” Dad said, his hands more focused on the steaming mugs of hot chocolate he’d set out for us.
“Are you dying or something?” I asked, hiding my uneasiness with ill-placed humor.
“What?”
I nodded my head to our positions. “This all seems really intense.”
He cracked a grin, and I felt at least a little better about wanting to run away. “No, I’m not dying,” he answered. He was silent again for a long time—I’m pretty sure it was at least a year—before he drew in a deep breath and said, “So you’re having your lady’s days.”
Any blood that was currently pooling between my legs shot up into my face so fast I thought I might faint. “What?”
He seemed to realize the stupidity of his statement, if the blush was anything to go by, but still he pushed on. “I found the pads hidden behind the cereal.”
Damn it. Okay, sure, it was probably dumb to hide a perfectly natural bodily function from my dad. But I wasn’t ready for this, or anything that went along with it. “You don’t eat cereal,” I grumbled, unsure what else to say.
He sighed. “I’ve been thinking you’re old enough for this conversation for a while now, but I...you’re my little girl, you know? And this is so...”
Oh, wonderful. The Talk. Periods equal fertility to my father, apparently. I had boobs, and hips now, great, so what? I also had untamable acne, cramps from hell, and random hairs popping up everywhere. What was attractive about this?
Nothing. And God help any boy who tried to touch me while I felt like I was thrown in a blender and turned inside out.
“Humiliating?” I volunteered.
He winced. “You’re already becoming a beautiful young woman. I can’t expect you to just go on with your life and figure this stuff out by yourself, without your mom here.”
> I decided the lone tuft of marshmallow that had yet to melt into my drink was far more interesting than making eye contact with him while he droned on about the horrors of teen pregnancy. He fumbled over himself more than once, caught somewhere between promising to love me no matter what and preaching abstinence as the best course of action. I hummed when he paused, nodded to keep him under the belief I was listening.
This wasn’t brand new information to me. An It Girl in my year, Cheyenne Cartwright, was already the talk of the school because her boyfriend bragged to anyone who would listen about how much sex they were having. And, Carly had two college-aged brothers—she was already an aunt. At fourteen. I know how babies are made—I paid attention in that class, even when they made us put condoms on bananas.
Guy meets girl, insert Tab P into Slot V and voilà, babies. Riveting.
Still. My dad was a pale shade of green, and I didn’t want to make this any worse on us than it already was. So I kept my mouth shut.
“I know you’ll be smart, kid,” he said, finally signaling this might be coming to an end. “You’ll wait for the right guy. For someone who really loves you. Right?”
This was so embarrassing.
“Of course I will, Daddy,” I promised.
He breathed a sigh of relief.
A sharp pain lanced up my back, and I bit back an audible gasp. I swallowed past the tears in my throat. “Not to be rude, but...may I go lay down?”
He chuckled. “Yeah, sweet pea.”
I stood up slowly, doing my damnedest to fake bravery, but my knees shook, and my insides churned with the movement. Cramps are no joke. If this is anything like having a baby, sign me up for dying alone, I thought to myself. This should be a man’s problem, no doubt.
“Riley?” Dad called before I reached the top of the stairs. So close to sanctuary. “One last thing.”
Damn it all. “Yeah, Dad?”
“When you get to the age you start liking boys...dating,” he said, “never trust a negro.”
I paused. “A what?”
“Black men,” he said, a dark shadow passing over his face.
That didn’t clear anything up. Granted, Dad had seen a lot more of the world than I had. We lived in a primarily white neighborhood and, wracking my mind, I could only think of two black people I knew off the top of my head. One was a girl at school, two years my junior, who mostly kept to herself with her nose in a book. The other was the biology teacher, Miz Foxx. She was always so sweet to me. That day alone, she took the time to explain how to use a tampon when I’d run out of my pads after class.
“Why not?” I asked tentatively.
Dad’s eyes were heavy, overflowing with too much knowledge. “They’re all in on this pact, you know? It’s like a conspiracy—it’s on their bucket list. They all want to sleep with pretty white girls before they die—and they’ll say anything to do it.”
“What?” I hissed. He merely nodded, so I asked, “Why would they do that?”
He shrugged. “Lots of reasons. Sometimes it’s just to piss off the black girl they really want. Others are doing it to get back at us white men. They feel like we owe them something.”
“That’s repulsive,” I said, shivering.
“It’s a sad truth, but a truth nonetheless,” Dad said. “They’ll lie. And once they get what they want, they’ll leave you. I just don’t want you getting hurt, alright? Not for the likes of them.”
He said them like a slur. Like, of all the evils on this planet, none were worse. In all my young life, I had never consciously noticed the difference in people. I didn’t realize my family was different until that very moment. I’d never considered lighter skinned people may be better or worse, or that anyone in particular could be something to be afraid of due to the color of their skin. Had I been wrong this whole time? Traipsing through life unsafe in my ignorance?
I gulped past the lump in my throat, feeling more objectified than ever before. It seemed so cold, so heartless. Could anyone really feel that way? That me, or Carly, Paris, even Cheyenne—no, that any girl who looked like us—were nothing more than a to-do list item? Nothing more than a sex toy?
Of course they could. Dad said so. He’d seen it all, and he adored me. I was all he had left in this world. I was the light and purpose in his life. If he felt strongly enough to warn me about this, it was the truth. Period.
“Promise me?” He asked.
“I promise.”
He grinned. “Thanks, kiddo.”
For years, I took those words as gospel. And the older I got, the darker his words became. More “harsh truths”, he said. Any monster a child’s mind could imagine was nowhere near the horror of these “niggers” who wanted to taint his baby girl.
Out loud, I never questioned him. It would break his heart to know I may have doubted his word. I had no reason to, really, my classmates never changed over the semester. No negros tried to pick me up or date me, or any of my friends, so how was I to know they weren’t the scoundrels my father insisted they were?
That being said, I had no reason to believe him, either.
But he’d never lied to me before, so it must be truth. Of course, Daddy always knows best.
Right?
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and I’m covered in his blood.
My ears still ring from the deafening gunshots, and my hands are slick with it, red and trembling. His cold eyes stare at me with rage, while his corpse stumbles after me before falling to the ground. His blood spilled onto the carpet, and all I could think was he was staining the floor.
The numb that took over me was what frightened me the most. A cold indifference that washed over me, pushed me through the situation and didn’t really go away until the cops smacked me with charges. I killed someone and the effect didn’t hit me until almost two weeks later.
Therapists tell me that’s shock and completely normal for someone of my age. I repeat that to myself on nights like this, over and over and over again. It never helps. My roommate, Rhett Buchannon, is the one who insisted I go talk to someone. He’s just as fucked up as I am—has to be, to move in with a murderer, right?—and preached it helped him come off the brink of suicide.
Granted, I haven’t given it a fair shot yet. Six months of repeating the same story and telling myself it was no one’s fault but his own could never trump five years of wardens treating you worse than pigs destined for slaughter.
One shouldn’t make better friends with cellmates than they do with the cops who are supposed to serve and protect you. Then again, I guess they’re meant to serve upstanding members of the community.
Protect them from criminals like me.
Five years in a fucking hole, and I had it easy. When I was finally brave enough to hear people out, I couldn’t help but be thankful. There were dozens of people in there for weed possession, prior to it being legalized, already in for longer than my whole sentence. One man got twenty-five-to-life for killing his wife—who had stabbed him seven times before he got the upper hand.
He truly was thrown under the bus for defending himself. Me, I got half a decade thrown away and couldn’t get over it. I couldn’t get over him.
His name was Royce.
He was the friend of a friend of an ex of my mother’s, one that we owed money to. He’d been around half a dozen times, stalking me to school and her to work. He spent hours at the diner where my mom waited tables, watching, bothering, loitering. Mom’s ex always claimed to call him off, but still he lingered.
I was home alone, doing my homework and forging the same answers for a girl I liked, and the door swung open with a crack. The molding split to the low ceiling, and Royce stood in the doorway with a menacing sneer and a baseball bat.
“Where’s your mom?” he snapped.
I didn’t answer, or move, or even acknowledge he was present. I figured he was only there to destroy the house, maybe smash the television or the pictures. We didn’t deserve the simple things when he cou
ldn’t afford his own drug habit on top of supplying his buyers, so he believed. He’d torn up the house half a dozen times before, and it only got worse when we fought back. So I stayed silent.
Mistake. He grabbed me by the collar of my shirt and threw me to the floor, swinging the bat in front of my face on its way to the wall. Chips of plaster shot into my eyes, dust flying back in my face.
“Speak up, nigger,” Royce barked.
“I don’t know!” I squawked. I tried so hard to sound indifferent, but to my horror the fear choked its way out.
He pressed the end of the bat against my throat, pinning me to the ground while he looked down at me. His pale skin was dark with shadows, hollowed out cheeks making his green tinted flesh all the more menacing. He curled his lip, his teeth glowing yellow in the kitchen light. “That ain’t good enough.”
“Sh-She’s at work,” I choked out. “She won’t be home ’t-’til later.”
It was a boldfaced lie, and I only hoped Mom was running late ‘cause maybe her harpy boss had made her stay to finish a table or help clean the dishes. She should be home by now, if everything had gone to plan.
“Well, I’m gonna have you pass on a message to her,” Royce said. He raised the bat above his head, and I feebly threw my arms over my face like I could possibly defend myself.
“NO!”
I spend more time in the shower than I do in any other part of my home, hoping to wash off the night terrors that haunt me to this day. I crank the water so hot it scalds until every inch of flesh tingles from the burn even hours after I step out. I scrub my skin like a rusty kitchen pan, thinking maybe, just maybe, this time I’ll be clean.
It hasn’t worked to date, but fuck, I keep trying.
I haven’t slept right since it happened, but it’s only gotten worse since getting out of prison.
I didn’t have a choice. My shrink has taught me that much, engrained it into my brain, but that doesn’t ease the overwhelming guilt. One would think knowing I took a life to save another, that if I hadn’t acted as I had I’d have lost my mom, would make it easy to sleep at night.
It doesn’t.
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