It was so easy to pretend that things were fine, that I was just like everyone else. Frighteningly easy, really. I’d go to school and walk around and I saw some of the girls making those eyes at me, whispering that they thought I was cute behind their hands. I was smart and funny and self-deprecating and maybe I said cryptic things in a class or two but no one picked up on it. I was fine. Everything was fine.

School always ended, though. The school day, I mean. Then I’d be on my own for a couple of hours but I’d always have to go back to that house and to him, with his unpredictable mood and all of that. And if he was in a bad mood I knew I wasn’t fine and I’d wonder how I could even think it in school, how I could pretend that everything was okay when it wasn’t. My dad would be yelling at me and hitting me and I was miserable, I knew it at that moment. But it would stop, the yelling or the hitting or both and I’d put the pieces back together again.

Sometimes at school, if the night before had been bad and I could still feel some sort of injury, like sore muscles where the bruises were or the skin all raw on my back from the belt, if those things bothered me sitting at the desks in school I’d look around at all those kids whose dads probably didn’t beat the shit out of them and I’d feel jealous. Like it wasn’t fair I had to put up with it and they didn’t, and it wasn’t fair that they didn’t know how lucky they were.

But there was nothing to do and nowhere to go. I couldn’t leave him. And it always seemed that things would get better, like if I tried hard enough he wouldn’t get that mad again. I didn’t get it that it wasn’t so much me as it was him. I believed this like a zealot, if I didn’t make him angry he wouldn’t hit me. But I always did and he always ended up hitting me and it was always my fault.

By ninth grade I felt pretty much like shit. Just felt bad all the time I wasn’t pretending I was fine. I was becoming a bit of a wreck at home, always jumping at sudden noises, always trying to second guess my dad’s mood. Maybe he had a hard day at the hospital and maybe if I didn’t always screw up things would be okay.

I bought locks for my bedroom door, five of them. I went down to the hardware store and bought all those locks and the salesman didn’t say one word. Of course I didn’t tell him what they were for. I went right home and put all those locks on the door and hoped and prayed my dad wouldn’t come home early and catch me doing it. I was nervous he might see them there and get mad but I had to have something, some sort of protection.

Locks on the door and I always lied about where I was, especially if I had been with Angela, who I wasn’t supposed to see. My own sister. But things weren’t always bad. I mean sometimes he was real nice. He’d help me with science which for some reason I just couldn’t seem to get, and he’d always give me money and buy me whatever I wanted and sometimes he was cool. I wished those times were the real times but I knew it could change, I knew I could screw up and he’d…he might…hit me again.

Hitting is something parents can do to a kid. Like spanking, like that. But I mean I was 14, not like some little kid getting spanked. It was getting strapped and punched and kicked. It was, that’s what it was. That’s like getting beaten.

So I was screwed up to say the least. There were things I should have been focusing on, like school, but I couldn’t. I slept in school and I missed homework assignments and I’d beg teachers to let me make them up in school and not to call my dad because if he was in the wrong mood that would warrant a beating.

My mom was dead and my dad was unpredictable and I couldn’t see my sister and I kept screwing up all across the board. My life was in this shambles and I was only 14. I couldn’t even drive yet or drink alcohol or buy cigarettes or do practically anything and things were just…sucking.

Things sucked. By ninth grade I’d pretty much reached the end of my rope and I knew things had to change. Things had to change but I just couldn’t see how they could.