It’s the calm after the storm. Sort of. I’m just sitting around Joey’s house, not doing much, not really believing that I left my dad. I thought about those kids by the trash cans filled with fire, how their faces looked all flickery in the firelight. How they stared at me as I walked by. I was afraid, then. Afraid that I was running away alone, afraid of what my dad would do to me once I ended up back there, and I was convinced that I would end up back there. But I didn’t. I’m safe at Joey’s.

At least he’s not really drilling me about what happened. What happened, God. I was so tired of it. Just tired. But Joey likes to tell me it’s not my fault. It’s weird when he says that because I want to believe him and I kind of do believe him but not completely. Because I know that in some way it was my fault. I made my dad angry. I was a terrible kid and nothing Joey says can change that.

I’m being sort of quiet. I don’t have all that much to say. Just sort of watching Joey and Angela, watching his friends when they come over. Noticing how different it is here, how different from my dad’s house with all the tension and the anger and the…the everything.

Emma and Sean, though. They know a little more than I’m comfortable with. I kind of freaked out on Sean, standing in front of the train like that. He must think I’m a nut. I was. I had nothing going for me, I was at the end of a rope. But I feel bad that I acted like that in front of him, and then yelling at him at the cemetery, and crying, just breaking down. He’ll probably just never want to talk to me again. Too many issues. I understand. I mean, it makes sense to me.

I don’t know what Joey really expects, like what I should do. There don’t seem to be many rules. That’s good, but I’m sort of lost. I keep watching him, trying to figure it out. See if he’s mad that I’m here. He doesn’t seem to be.

When I wake up sometimes I’m not sure where I am. That first night was like that, I kept waking up in that spare bedroom Joey set me up in, kind of bolting awake, thinking my dad was mad at me, that he was going to hurt me, then I’d look around at the unfamiliar room and for a second just not know where the hell I was. Then it would come back, running away, the cemetery, and then being here. I was kind of messed up.

Angela crawls into my lap and wants me to read her books and stuff. It’s nice to be able to see her. And it’s fair, it really is. So much of what my dad was doing wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t I see my own sister if I wanted to? Why couldn’t I talk about my mother? I knew it bothered him because she left him and married Joey, I knew that. But that didn’t change the fact that she was my mother. And he was looking through all my stuff, he found that album I made. He trashed the dark room. He pushed the plate of food off the table because I was late but I didn’t mean to be late, I just lost track of time. God. He expected me to be perfect and I can’t be, I couldn’t be perfect, so maybe Joey’s right. Maybe it isn’t my fault, maybe my dad was just a jerk.

“Craig, can you bring Angie up to bed?” Joey called to me from the kitchen, and I jumped up to do it. I knew Joey wouldn’t hurt me or anything, but I was sort of conditioned to jump and to do things right away. I kept flinching away from things, everything startled me, and I’d seen the looks of pity Joey would give me. I saw it.

Upstairs and she brushes her teeth and she climbs into bed and she wants another story so I read her another one. She looks like my mother. She reminds me of my mother, and sometimes I could cry looking at her.

“Craig,” she says, her voice so little.

“Yeah?”

“It wasn’t really dinosaurs that hurt you, was it?” I close my eyes. Shake my head.

“No,” I say in almost a whisper, my eyes still closed.

“Then who was it?” I sigh, open my eyes a little bit. She’s so young.

“My dad,” I admit, like confession in her room, the only light the nightlight and the light from the hall.

“Why did he do that?” she said, and I was gonna cry, I could feel it.

“I don’t know,” I told her.