Dime (17 page)

I didn't know how to keep on being without Daddy's loving me, without me loving him. I didn't know anything anymore.

Savage,
I thought to myself all night, holding as still and as straight as possible so I wouldn't roll over the edge of the crowded mattress
.
Savage
was what L.A. had called him. And he had liked it.

L.A. and me and Brandy. We all chose him.
The shame was hot coals inside my belly. Because despite everything, that's what I still believed. That I chose Daddy.
But those girls didn't choose.
The Asian ones from the truck stop.
Hepeese. Stowen.
And the beautiful ones.
They were played.
I didn't want to remember what I saw Bird and the Russian men perpetrating on those two in that house with the seashell soap dish.
They didn't even choose,
I thought, while Lollipop's small body made mine sticky with her sleep sweat.

And Daddy was going to make me be their Bottom. He didn't even love me.
He never loved me.

*  *  *

“Could we pull over, please?” Lollipop asked as we crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. It was early, and she was squirming next to me. “I think I might be sick.”

I scrunched away from her, pressing up against Brandy. “Look the other way,” Brandy ordered. “Throw up on me and you not going to live to see Newark.”

Daddy pulled over in a spot where you could see the gray-green water chopping below at splayed bridge columns, like giants' teeth. Lollipop jumped out of the car, leaned over, and vomited more neatly than I'd ever seen. So neatly it made me admire her. I handed over a crushed napkin from the car seat, and she uncrushed it and wiped her mouth clean.

“Thank you,” she said, to all of us, buckling herself back in.

Daddy was silent. A bad silence. Angry and impatient.

I was never beautiful.
My belly burned.

He pulled back onto the bridge road. A minute or two after it dipped into a tunnel, he spoke to us in the dark. “When we home,” he told us, “I'm setting up a computer in L.A.'s room. Lollipop going to spend her first days in there. L.A., you going back into the living room. Share that couch with Brandy.”

L.A.'s face flattened, but she kept her swollen mouth shut. Daddy drove us uphill onto more bridge and thumbed his phone at the same time. A car honked and slid past us.

“Did you know you're not supposed to text and drive?” Lollipop said. “The TV says it's more dangerous than drunk driving.”

“You got an attitude, little girl,” Brandy muttered. Then she poked me. “That one need to get a piece of afraid.” I nodded, trying to act regular, the way I'd been trying to act for days. It was hard, with my insides burning up.

“I was just saying,” Lollipop said. “I wasn't sure he knew.”

Nobody spoke. She was looking anxiously at the back of Daddy's head. “Uncle Ray said you two are just setting me up in a new spot up north. Uncle Ray says it's good to travel to new spots.”

Lollipop spoke like I did.
Standard English,
Ms. McClenny explained to us once.
It's not the only way. It's just the standard way. But like it or not, it will get you further in life. And that is something worth considering.
It made me wonder about who Lollipop grew up around. About Lollipop's uncle Ray. Did he love her the way she seemed to love him?
Daddy. Never. Loved me.

“Who is Uncle Ray supposed to be?” Brandy asked quietly.

“You're going to see him,” Lollipop explained. “He's driving right now to meet us, right?”

Daddy didn't answer.

“What am I supposed to call him?” Lollipop asked me. I looked at the back of Daddy's head too. It was square. I never noticed that before. He had finally put his phone down and had one hand on the steering wheel and the other resting on his crotch. A part of me wanted him to turn around and flash his gold
D
at me. But if he did, it would only be a lie.

“Daddy,” I told her. I tried not to choke.

She smiled. “That's what all the dates tell me to call them,” she tittered. “Uncle Ray is the only one I never call Daddy.”

She was so young to be turned out already. To be talking about dates already. It was hard enough to know that now I was nothing but a
ho
. Somehow, it was harder to think of her as one.
I chose.

“Daddy,” Lollipop said in a louder voice. “Uncle Ray is meeting us as soon as we get to New York, right?”

“Newark,” Brandy said. “New York the next one up.”

“Nah,” Daddy called back to Lollipop. “Your uncle Ray going to visit you some other time.” Lies.

I was never his best. I was never his anything.

Lollipop's forehead wrinkled, and she pressed her lips together. “You said he was meeting me up in New”—she glanced at Brandy—“Newark.”

“Plans changed,” Daddy said. “He got business.”

I watched Lollipop's face become a wall. A pretty little sandy-colored wall.

“Ohhh,” L.A. said suddenly. She smiled at Daddy, her lip fat and her gap black and big in her mouth. It made her seem silly, if you forgot a minute that she was L.A. “You going to put me indoor in my own motel room, huh?”

Brandy and I looked at each other. Was that it? Were we all going to our own rooms in a motel somewhere? While in the apartment Lollipop pranced around naked in front of the computer camera?

Indoor or outdoor,
I thought.
It doesn't matter. There are no big plans for me. I'm not special. I never was.

“Shut it, all a you,” Daddy said. “You going to see when you see.”

IT'S BEEN ABOUT a month and a half since I understood what I'm going to have to do. Over these past few days I've been settled on using Money. But the more I write in my head, the more I worry Money might disgust readers so much that they would turn away from my note almost as soon as they begin it. And then my plan would fail.

So I start all over, looking at the problem every possible way, trying as hard as I can to come up with a better idea. What voice could I borrow? What could work that I haven't already considered? Maybe I should go back to the idea of using an actual person instead of a concept. But I can't think who. I wish I could somehow be inside
The Color Purple
and write a letter to Nettie:
As you can see,
I could say
, I need to make this note perfect, and I would very much appreciate your advice. . . .
I ruminate on it while I'm in the shower and while I'm eating and lying or standing or crouching under or over or sideways whatever john happens to be there. I think and think some more while I'm riding in the back of the Escalade, and while L.A. and Brandy snap at me to pay attention, to stop spacing out.

Then, finally, driving by the track, seeing Whippet up on the curb screaming at a new turnout down in the street, it comes to me: Truth. Doesn't the Bible, or Atticus Finch, or somebody else important say,
The truth shall set you free?
If I do it right, it could be perfect.

*  *  *

I respect the fact that you might not like me,
Truth could begin
. But I'm hoping you are the kind of person who wouldn't want to ignore me either. Please hear me out. I will try to be quick. I know it's too late for the girls involved, but I still need to tell you some of me about their lives.
It's a pattern I think I've noticed. And the more of the pattern I realize is there, the more important it seems.

The one called Brandy had a grandmother in the very beginning. After that grandmother died, Brandy lived in seven homes over eleven years. Most of those places were just training for the street. The ones that weren't couldn't keep her long for one reason or another. At twelve they shot her up with heroin. After that she got lost in the life, chasing that high. She chose up or was sold from pimp to pimp until she was saved by her Daddy.

L.A. was raised by her own family.
By now I think Brandy had told me everything there was to know about L.A.
Everybody in L.A.'s family was messed up worse than you can imagine. She was confused and scared and bruised and sore and mad all the time. At fourteen L.A. ran away. She survived the only way she knew how—by sex. At sixteen she was rescued by the Daddy she'll never willingly leave.

The girl who attached this note,
Truth would explain about me,
did live at first with someone who loved her. But she mainly remembers only a worn-out foster mother. During those nine or ten years, she slapped off boys inside her own home and also two school security guards, two bodega owners, and one neighbor. She was already lonely and cold often, but when her foster mother began to drink, this girl felt scared, too.

In many ways, these girls were different from each other,
Truth would say—because that's true.
But the things they wanted made them the same.
I've been noticing this ever since down south. Noticing the pattern and how it makes us the same even though we are all different.
The things they wanted led them to the same household, to the same life inside the life. The things they wanted were not what they got, regardless of what these girls believed. But they were things other people had and seemed worth hoping for.

To be touched gently.

To be seen clearly.

To be part of a family.

To be fed regularly.

To be protected.

To be loved for free.

I know it must be hard to listen to me. And as I've said, I know I'm not all that likable. But I am Truth. And this is important information for you to have. Maybe it will convince you to do what I am asking.

*  *  *

Things happened so quickly after we arrived home. Lollipop got the bedroom. Daddy made us take everything out of it except for the bed and a lamp and the chest of drawers. He made us put Lollipop's clothes—and she had a lot—in those drawers. In the living room, we piled cardboard boxes filled with our clothes and with soap and shampoo and razors. Underneath the coffee table became where we could find our hair product, extra toilet paper, makeup, and smaller clothes like socks and panties and bras.

The other boxes with our shirts and skirts and jeans and sweats were lined up along the hallway by the front door and also bookended the head and feet of my sleeping bag in the alcove.

Lollipop kept asking when Uncle Ray was coming, but it was the bald-headed Russian from down south who arrived instead. He just walked in with Daddy three days after we got home and went right to work on Lollipop's brand-new computer. Daddy called him Eagle. He spent a day and a half in Lollipop's room, swearing in Russian and asking Daddy for new passwords every hour. I guess displaying a naked little girl on a live feed must be much more complicated than just setting up a regular camera.

The rest of us were banned from that room completely. “Can't have no recognizing nothing in there. No people. Blank wall. That's it.” Daddy even painted over in white so there weren't marks anywhere somebody could identify in the future.

Once the computer was ready, Lollipop was not allowed out all day except for an hour on the front steps after schools let out. Daddy wasn't worried about the neighbors. Nobody asked anybody questions much anyway, and people were used to seeing nieces and girl cousins or family friends come and go.
She shy,
he told us he was planning to say if he had to.
Real shy, so we homeschooling that one.

Even for peeing, Lollipop had to squat over a bowl in her room, in front of the camera. She was supposed to empty and wash it herself the next morning.

When Brandy heard that, she clicked her tongue with disgust. “Perverts want to see you pee?” she asked.

Lollipop shrugged. “I don't know,” she said. “I just go when I have to go.”

“Your room going to stink.”

“I don't usually pee much anyway.” Lollipop shrugged.

“Don't you get sick of being stuck in there?” Brandy asked when the four of us were eating breakfast together the second morning after Lollipop's computer was set up. Daddy was out.

“Somebody might snatch me if I go out,” Lollipop said. “One of my fans might.”

I flipped my spoon over and over. My insides hadn't unclenched since down south. The hot fists in my belly made it hard to eat, and the truth made it hard to think.

“Your fans?” L.A. said. “You serious?” Her lip was almost down to normal size now. She poked her tongue in the space where her tooth used to be. It was a new habit of hers.

The locks on the doors turned and Daddy walked in. L.A. looked at him. “What about school for her?”

“I don't go to school,” Lollipop answered.

“They going to come looking,” Brandy said.

“Shut your mouths.” Daddy sat at the table. L.A. poured Lucky Charms for him. I noticed a new chain around his neck and a watch I'd never seen on his wrist. They weren't extra large or flashy, but L.A. once showed me platinum on a date during a three-way we had to do, and I'm pretty sure Daddy's new jewelry was platinum too.

“She only ten,” L.A. pointed out. “They going to come looking for a ten-year-old.”

“Actually, I'm eleven,” Lollipop said.

I tried to keep my expression normal, the way I had been trying for days. It was difficult not to let my face crumple every second for wishing the truth wasn't true.
I have nothing.

“Nobody know nothing about Lollipop.” Daddy poured his own milk when he wasn't eating his cereal dry. It had to be just the right amount, and none of us could ever do it correctly for him. While he poured, his watch caught the sun from the windows and threw jerking lines of light onto the ceiling. “Quit nagging at me.”