Calico

by Callie Hart

  I knew I shouldn’t, and I definitely didn’t feel great about it, but I realized the only way I was going to find anything decent to wear was by rummaging through the storage boxes in the attic. Mom’s old stuff. My father’s hardly a sentimental guy, but for some reason he never got around to giving Mom’s clothes to charity, or simply throwing them out. I crept up into the attic, remembering to take a fresh roll of tape with me to close up the boxes when I was done going through them, and then I went on my mission.

  Now that I’m up here, I keep imagining that I can hear the front door closing and it’s scaring the shit out of me. I don’t want to go back down the ladder into the house empty handed, though. And if Malcolm really were home, I’d be able to hear him slamming about, drunkenly walking into things as he makes his way around the ground floor. I steel my nerves and move quickly instead, holding my breath.

  Once upon a time, someone, probably Friday, packed up eight boxes of my mom’s clothes with the greatest of care. Small bags of lavender and other sweet smelling flowers were placed in between layers of the neatly folded garments, and somehow, even after all this time, the scent remains when I cut open the first of the stacked boxes. At first I find pants and button down shirts. Loose, sheer blouses and camisoles. More of the same in the second box. The third box contains sweat pants and more loose fitting clothing, work out apparel, plus a few pairs of shoes that would never fit me no matter how hard I tried to jam my feet inside. Mom was kind of short—only five foot six. I’m taller than that now, but I’m slender and willowy just like she was. I still fit in her clothes right now, though Friday insists I’m not done growing. That I still have another foot or so to grow before I’m done. I’m kind of sad about that. Secretly wearing my mom’s clothes has made me feel close to her over the years. When I can no longer do that, it will feel like I’m losing another small connection with her.

  I hit pay dirt when I open the fourth box. Inside, red, black, dark navy blue and green dresses are individually wrapped in tissue paper, a multitude of different materials and styles. I handle each dress with great care, briefly closing my eyes each time I take out a new one to see if I have any recollection of my mother wearing it long ago. Most of them, I don’t recall. Some of them I do.

  I pick out a black, short dress—one I don’t remember—and I hold it up against myself, knowing that it will fit. Heavy beading decorates the neckline, where the material plunges down. I don’t exactly have the biggest boobs, but I’ll have a noticeable cleavage in this dress. Being sexy has never been top on my list of priorities but for some reason today I want to feel good. I want to look good. Callan Cross’s devious smirk flashes into my head and I scowl, trying to reject the idea that I want to feel attractive because of him.

  I’m not a nun in training. I’m a teenaged girl, and I’ve been riding the crazy train of puberty for the past two years, so I’ve noticed boys. I’ve noticed how they’ve gone from a loud, abrasive, strange-smelling annoyance in my life to a loud, abrasive, strange-smelling distraction, but there hasn’t been one particular boy who’s grabbed my attention. I don’t even know if Callan Cross has grabbed my attention, but I suppose I’m interested to find out.

  I pack up the boxes and tape them closed again, putting them back in the exact position I found them, and I take the dress downstairs into my room. I don’t have a lock on my bedroom door. I wish I did, but Dad says a lock would be a safety hazard. I know the truth. I know he doesn’t want me to be able to shut him out. I shove the heavy ottoman from the foot of my bed up against the door, and then I strip naked and slip the dress over my head, wriggling into it and maneuvering the zipper closed at the back. Just as I suspected, it does fit. In fact, I barely recognize the girl staring back at me in my full-length mirror. I look like…I look like a woman. And my cleavage is killer.

  “Coralie!” The sound of the front door slamming closed downstairs sends a jolt of adrenalin firing through me. I drop the hairbrush I’m holding in my hand; it’s heavy, silver-plated, and makes a loud bang as it hits the floorboards. Sound travels badly in this old house. Downstairs, my father most certainly heard the crash. My heart begins thumping in my chest. Fuck.

  I haven’t gotten around to figuring out the answer to question four yet. I have no idea what I’m going to tell my father to make it okay that I want to go out after dark. I hadn’t planned on being in one of Mom’s dresses when I broached the subject with him, either. I have about fifteen seconds to get out of the dress and to hide it, otherwise I’m in seriously big trouble.

  It was tricky enough getting the zipper closed, but getting it open again is even harder. I scramble against the fabric, trying to shimmy it over my head without undoing the fasteners properly. I can hear Dad’s heavy footsteps climbing the stairs, thumping slowly up each step as he gets closer and closer. I can tell a lot from how he climbs the stairs. If he’s angry, he’ll storm up to the second story, each thump of his footfall ringing out like a gunshot. If he’s tired and he’s already had a drink on his way home from work, he’ll move much slower, like he is now. If he’s already had a few beers, he could either be in a really good mood, or a supremely bad mood. It’s always a Russian roulette with him.

  I finally manage to yank the dress over my head, but he’s already reached the top of the stairs. It takes seven measured steps to get from the top of the staircase to my bedroom door, so that’s how long I have to race to my closet and pull on an oversized sweater. No time for pants. No time for anything. I’m not even wearing a bra. My bedroom door creaks as my father tries to push it open from the hallway. He swears on the other side of the three-inch wood.

  “Coralie? Open this damn door right now, young lady.”

  I slip on the floorboards in my haste to push the ottoman out of the way. I hit the ground and skin my knee—it stings painfully. No time to inspect how bad the damage is. I’m up and shoving the ottoman from the doorway so he can get in.

  The door bursts open and there he is, panting, his shoulders quickly hitching up and down. He’s only forty-two, but he looks a lot older these days. The permanent downturn of his mouth makes him look angry at all times. Which he is. There are lines at the corners of his eyes that were never there before, when my mother was alive, but it would be foolish of me to try and sugar coat how things were back then. He was still filled with fury. He was still a monster.

  “What have I told you about obstructing this door?” he snaps.

  “I didn’t mean to. I just wanted space to do some yoga, Daddy. I needed the room to—” His hand whips out and he catches me by surprise, his palm connecting with my face. He was probably aiming to slap my cheek but instead he gets my jawbone, which is agonizing for me and probably just as painful for him. I stumble backward, tripping over the ottoman I just moved out of the way, and then sitting down heavily on it. I clamp my mouth shut, knowing from experience that he’ll only grow angrier if I cry out.

  My father shakes his hand out, gritting his teeth. “Damn it, girl. What the fuck is wrong with you?” Of course him hurting himself when he hits me is my fault. It always is. “Tell me why the fuck is your leg bleeding,” he commands.

  “I—I tripped. I fell.”

  Dad glowers at me, opening and closing both of his hands into fists now. “You did it on purpose, didn’t you? You want people to think I beat you or something. You’re a devious little cunt, Coralie. You’re just like your mother.”

  It doesn’t matter to my father that he does beat me. It doesn’t matter that he has marked, scarred and bruised me way worse than this tiny scrape on my knee. He just doesn’t like seeing blood, unless he is the cause of it. I cover my grazed knee with both my hands, trying to remove the offending injury from his line of sight. “I didn’t, Daddy, I swear. It was an accident.” My voice is the hushed, quiet, penitent voice of someone used to apologizing. Someone used to their apologies falling on deaf ears.

  “Don’t give me that shit, young lady. C’mon. Get to your feet. Stand the fuck up right
now!” He’s practically roaring. I learned a long time ago that it’s of the utmost importance that I do as I’m told as quickly as possible where my father is concerned. I jump to my feet just as he launches himself into the room and pulls back his clenched fist, ready to send it crashing into my stomach or my shoulder. He looks almost disappointed that I’ve done what he told me to before he reached me. If I hadn’t been able to, I would have suffered the consequences.

  After the time he hit me in my face properly with a powerful right hook and he split my lip open, he realized how hard it was to hide visible damage like that. He’s been leaving bruises on my arms and legs since then. My stomach and my back. My buttocks. These areas of my body are always hidden from the prying eyes of the general public.

  “You have no idea how lucky you are, Coralie,” he hisses. “Other parents wouldn’t take this kind of shit from their kids. You’re lucky I haven’t sent you off to live with your aunt in Charleston.”

  I would love to go and live with Aunt Sarah in Charleston, but there’s no way he’d actually ever let me leave. I’ve thought about just packing a bag and getting a bus a couple of times, but then I think about the reality of what would happen when I arrived at my destination. Aunt Sarah, my father’s older sister, believes he hung the goddamn moon. She would never accept that he hurt me. She would accuse me of lying, call him and tell him what I said. He would come get me and my life would be over. He’d be so angry. He’d probably end up killing me.

  “I know, Daddy. I’m sorry. I’ll be more careful, I promise,” I whisper.

  “Get yourself into the bathroom,” he commands. Fear makes my hands and feet tingle. Bad things happen in the bathroom. It’s as though he thinks, because we’re in such an enclosed space and he can lock the door, that the world will never know what he does. I don’t want to go with him to the bathroom right now, but I’m fully aware what will happen if I refuse him. It will be very bad.

  I slide past him, my shoulders rounding in on my body as I try and make myself smaller so that I don’t make contact with him. I walk barefoot down the hallway, knowing that he’s right behind me and he’s bubbling over with rage.

  Inside the bathroom, my father spins me around and pushes me back so that I have to sit myself down on the edge of the bathtub.

  “Stay there,” he tells me. He opens up the cabinet over the sink and pulls out some antibacterial spray and grabs some cotton balls from the glass caddy on the windowsill. The alcohol in the spray stings as he applies it to my knee. He doesn’t mention the purple shadow that’s bound to be forming on my face right now.

  “Are you even sorry?” he mutters under his breath.

  “I am. I really am. I’m sorry, Daddy.” In my head, I try and be somewhere else, anywhere else but in this dark bathroom with my father gently stroking a cotton ball over my bleeding kneecap. He moves slowly and carefully, tutting when the cotton ball comes away red with my blood.

  “You’re such a silly girl. Look at me. Let me see how sorry you are.” I look up at him, and my eyes must look pretty vacant. Dad sees what he wants to see, though. “Ahh, there you go. Yes, that’s better. I can see it now. You’re going to be more careful in future. You know how I don’t like to punish you.” He traces his fingers down the side of my face, brushing my hair back behind my ear tenderly. “I’ve had a hard day, baby girl. You know how it can be sometimes.” God only knows how my father thinks he’s had a hard day, but I nod my head dutifully. He bends down and kneels on the floor in front of me, and my palms begin to sweat. “Why aren’t you dressed properly, sweetheart?” he whispers.

  “I was getting changed.”

  He nods. “Okay.” Ducking down, he places his mouth over the cut on my knee and sucks gently, making a low rumbling sound in his throat. Pulling back, he says, “Don’t look so worried, Coralie. You’re my daughter. We share blood. It’s okay for me to do this.”

  It’s not okay, though. I know well enough that no one else’s fathers are out there sucking the cuts and scrapes of their adolescent daughters. It’s wrong, and it feels worse.

  Dad sits back on his heels and stares at my knee, and he has a worrying, hungry look in his eyes. I need to get the fuck out of this bathroom.

  “I want to go to a party tonight,” I blurt out. “Would—would it be okay if I went out? Just for a little while. Everyone from my year is going.” The words come out in a rush, all blurred together. I panic halfway through saying them, and everything gets jumbled together. Dad frowns, looking less hungry and more horrified now. “You want to go out? Where?”

  “To a party. It’s only a couple of streets away. I’d be home by eleven.”

  “Will there be boys there?” I know this is a trick question. If I say no, he’ll know I’m lying because I just said everyone from my year is going. If I say yes, he’s going to lose his mind. I can tell from the wild, violent energy pouring off him that I’ve made a big, big mistake even bringing up the party. “Well?” He places one hand either side of me on the edge of the bathtub, leaning forward.

  “Yes, there will be boys,” I whisper.

  “So you want to go out and fuck a bunch of teenaged boys? Is that it?”

  “No!” I lean away from him, flinching. “I don’t want that.”

  “You little fucking liar. You want to fuck. Say it. Tell me the truth, Coralie. Tell me you want to fuck.”

  If my life were a movie, this would be the part where the camera pans back away from my father and me. It would be the part the director wants to spare the viewer, because it’s just too graphic and violent and disgusting to be seen even in an R rated movie. You’d see the back of my father’s head. You’d see the tears welling in my eyes. My lip wobbling. They’d use some fancy special effect so that the lens of the camera somehow pulled back through wood grain, and then you, the viewer, would be standing out in the hallway, on the other side of the locked door. You’d hear me crying. You’d hear the unmistakeable sound of skin slapping skin. You’d hear my father screaming at me. Me screaming in general. You’d be able to tell by the way the camera finally fades to black that something terrible is happening to me in the bathroom, and you would feel uncomfortable and scandalized, and then we would move onto the next scene.

  Sadly, this is not a film, and there’s no camera to spare the details. This is my life. This is my father, sliding his hand up my thigh, leaning into me, growling and baring his teeth.

  “Say. It.”

  I can’t placate him and give him what he wants this time, though. I just can’t. If I utter the words he wants to hear coming from my mouth, I’m in so much trouble. For the past two years, he’s been skating toward an eventuality that I know will happen one day. I know, beyond the hair pulling and the slapping and grazing touches, there’s more to come. I’ve managed to avoid it up until now, but I see the way he looks at me. I’ve felt his eyes on me when we’ve been eating dinner. I’ve kept my head down, my eyes on my plate, and I’ve prayed so hard that today isn’t the day I find out how far he’ll go. Now, with a few beers in him and fire in his veins, I know without a doubt I’ll be signing off on something if I say the word fuck.

  “I don’t want to have sex until I get married,” I whisper. “I don’t look at boys like that.”

  My father grabs hold of my hair and yanks my head to one side, shoving his face into mine. Once upon a time, my mother looked up into his eyes and saw love and affection there, I’m sure, but all I see is hate and anger. “You should know by now that I can tell when you’re lying, Coralie. I’ve seen you grow from a baby into the beginnings of a deceptive little whore. I know exactly what’s going on in that head of yours, and it’s fucking filth. Every time you see a boy on the street, I know what you’re thinking. You. Want. To. Fuck.”

  I shake my head. “No, no, no. I don’t. I promise I don’t.”

  My father leans in so close to me that the end of his nose is touching mine. I can see the fine spider web of purple veins that spread across his cheeks, and I can s
mell the alcohol on his breath. “Look me in the eye and say it again. I want to believe you, okay? I want to believe you, but you make it so goddamn hard.”

  I can barely see him through my tears; I blink them away, too scared to lift my hand and wipe my eyes. “I don’t ever want to have sex,” I say. “Not until I’m married.”

  “Not without my blessing?”

  I nod sadly. “Of course, Daddy. Never without your blessing.”

  He pins me under his gaze for a minute and it’s the longest minute I’ve ever lived through. I see a succession of emotions play across his face—anger, sorrow, curiosity, desire—and it’s like I’ve just spun the wheel on some sort of game show. I don’t know which emotion he’ll land on, and my heart is beating out of my chest like a jackhammer just thinking about what will happen if he settles on lust.

  Finally, he reels back, shaking his head as though he’s majorly disappointed in me. I’m relieved, but I’m also still very worried. Disappointed is better than turned on, but this is still my father. He still does terrible, terrible things when he’s disappointed.

  “You may not go to a party, Coralie. You may not socialize with teenaged boys. They’re only after one thing. It makes me sick to think of them undressing you with their eyes. I’d fucking kill anyone who tried to touch you. You know that. And I know there’s always alcohol at these parties. Those little shit heads would all be wandering around with their dicks hard, their brains addled with beer, and you’re so innocent, Coralie. You’re so sweet. They would take advantage of you, okay?” He stands, running his hands back through his thinning hair. “So no. You’re going to stay here with me. Come on. Stand up.”

  I stand, and my legs feel like they’re about to collapse right out from underneath me. I’m so full of adrenalin and panic that my vision feels like it’s narrowing, blurring around the edges. He goes from crazy to overly affectionate sometimes, and that’s what I think has happened for a moment. I think it until his fist comes flying at me out of nowhere and hits me on the side of the head. My brain feels like it rattles around the inside of my skull like a pinball, hitting every single bell on its way around. Staggering back a step, I hit the side of the bath, and there’s nowhere else for my momentum to take me but down. My back spasms with pain as I collapse into the tub, all of the air rushing out of my lungs in one agonizing grunt.