The Unspoken Rule

She’s six years old in a hotel room giving way to darkness on the way down to Florida. They’re fighting again, but this is common enough now. She kneels in front of the small screen and presses the button on the TV itself. The remote doesn’t work.

Little claws prick at her stomach, her heart, her mind. She keeps flipping through the same dozen channels, pretending she doesn’t hear them berating each other. She keeps flipping because there’s nothing on that they would approve of her watching. She flips and flips for what feels like hours until her father comments on how “even the kid knows we’re fucked up” and the argument turns to her.

She leaves it on the weather channel and insists she’s fine when they look at her.

She’s learning to lie.

~

She’s about to turn seven years old and they’re coming to a decision for her. She will be homeschooled starting this fall. Her mother sits on the back deck and lights a cigarette, saying a thousand things that equate to the reality that she does not like this idea.

The idea sounds like a good idea, but somehow, it makes her feel hollow, like a tree with its heart rotted out. She doesn’t like school, but some small part of her is afraid of this path, too.

~

She’s twelve years old and she’s given fifty dollars from her grandparents for Christmas. It’s nothing short of a fortune in her tiny hands.

No more than two weeks go by before they’re standing in the kitchen. He has that tight look on his face.

“Hey, can I borrow the money you got from Mema and Papa? I really don’t want to put this week’s groceries on the credit card. I’ll pay you back.”

Feeling good, feeling like she’s helping, she agrees.

They stop at his high school friend’s house on the way to the grocery store. She stays in the car with her mother. She never goes inside.

In the checkout line at the grocery store, he pays with a credit card. She’s confused but afraid to ask questions and elicit his fury. Every penny that slips away on food seems to wear on him and his meticulously calculated lists of expenses.

~

She’s eighteen, technically an adult, but her wings have never felt more clipped. They pull away from their dilapidated, 600 square foot house, propped up on pilings since they live in flood zone. Some part of her hates this place, though she should be calling it home. Her parents aren’t fully arguing in the front seats, but her father is on one of his rants. Her mother says little.

She promised herself at twelve that she would leave the day she legally could. She sits in the back seat of her parents’ car, on the way to that same damned grocery store, with another neurotically crafted grocery list of canned goods totaling up to only $20 for the week to feed 3.

She’s seeing now how she lied to herself. Even as hard as she has worked, she has nothing but community college and meager savings that would burn in an instant if she left.

It’s not just the escape—she’s finding herself lost in this desperation to see more of the world.

Even as he tells her “you’ll fucking die if you drive to Baltimore alone,” and “you’ll get raped if you go north of Toms River,” “you can’t fly, the plane will blow up and you'll die,” and a thousand other fear-mongering warnings, she understands some things.

She knows his father abandoned him. She knows her grandmother worked so much that he doesn’t know what parents are supposed to be like, according to the tales of white picket fences. She knows he’s broken.

But she still can’t excuse these endless attempts to break her. The woods they drive past may be hers, but the house they left certainly is not.

~

She’s still eighteen and she’s been working and saving for so long that she loans her father money by the thousand when he badgers her for it. Her mother’s parents give them more money than he earns. He flies off into a rage when someone points this out but preaches about the pride in not “mooching off the state.”

“But it’s okay to bleed your in-laws dry because they’re kind enough?” are the words she’ll never dare speak.

~

She’s nineteen and she’s over the moon when she’s offered a job that pays minimum wage. She’s never made that much money in her life. She drives down the road lined in trees to when it breaks open into the marshlands.

She can’t remember his words. But she remembers his face. His fury, his disapproval, no matter how she tries to persuade him it’s good work experience.

He disapproves but she insists. This is her first big defiance. Deep down, she knows he’s angry because this is her biggest step out of the door.

~

He’s told her a thousand times that money doesn’t grow in trees. He’s told her to value money, to treasure it, to be so careful with it.

She realizes that day, when she was a child, and she first loaned her father money—there was a reason he paid for groceries with a credit card.

They weren’t visiting his friend. They were visiting his dealer.

She’s embarrassed she didn’t come to understand her father better sooner. She supposes lying is hereditary.

~

She enters the student ID numbers, inputting the transcript request forms to run in the day’s batch. This task previously was given to a 40-hour-a-week employee. She’s only 29 hours, the maximum legally allowed for someone to work and not get health insurance. She barely manages to get that full-time load done in her part-time hours. Every minute counts if she’s going to keep up.

She’s felt love before, albeit always unrecruited since her existence was a surprise to her parents and that pattern of being unwanted persists in life. But as much as she doesn’t want to be alone, she’s afraid of it too. After all, she’s sure her parents were in love once, too. She doesn’t think this kind young man would hurt her. He doesn’t show the signs to have that capacity for cruelty. But she sees the worst in everyone because that’s how she has learned to protect herself. She can’t help but fear for the future, even if he feels as strongly as she does for him.

She runs the job and loads the special transcript paper into the printer.

She’s still thinking about him.

She wants to hold on to this feeling, as precious and all-consuming as it feels. She knows where love stories go, how they end in screaming and cursing and hurting each other—

Smoking cigarettes, quitting, going back, lying, hiding the receipts, sneaking out when the other is at work—oh, she knows how love stories go.

She watches as the printer spits out black text onto the paper, printing peoples’ quantified accomplishments with credit numbers and grade valuations that may or may not be fair. She tidies a few things while she waits.

She thinks of her mother hiding in the bathroom since it’s the only place she has piece and quiet.

With a thick stack of transcripts quite literally hot off the printer, she returns to her desk. She has a stock of the special envelopes with a window in just the right spot and dives into her academic origami. She folds them like an expert. She is an expert at paper, though she doesn’t get to write on it here. She folds them with such speed of trained hands that do the same task every day.

She thinks of her mother secretly reading or journaling when pretending to grade her homeschool work. She gets to the task eventually, but she has to hide any bit of enjoyment. She and her mother are so, so alike sometimes.

She keeps an eye on the clock, knowing it’s almost her time at the front desk. She folds the transcripts, carefully, ensuring everything is in perfect alignment. They must be professional and perfect. Her peers’ dreams could be riding on these requests. She holds them with efficiency and reverence.

She promises herself she will never be a kept pet afraid to leave like her mother. It feels cruel to think about things in such stark terms, but if she lies about being an animal in a cage, she’ll start to feel comfortable in the cage again. She’ll get hope that her father could change.

But she suspects with grim sincerity that people don’t change. They just don’t.

~

One day, rising for work, she opens her eyes to a notification on her phone.

This is a notification to let you know that family tracking has been enabled on this line.

Her heart pounds. Careful calculation of miles, wrapping the EZPass in tin foil, and refueling in increments can’t hide from this. She knows he mustn’t know that she’s seen this. She deletes the messages and goes about her day.

They dance an uncomfortable waltz of small talk and breakfast preparation. Toast, of course, but don’t waste too much butter, that’s expensive.

He has that tight look in his face that comes out when he lies.

“Make sure you charge your phone at work,” he says. “Don’t let it go dead.”

He knows what he did. He isn’t admitting what he did. She can’t admit she knows. This dance is so much harder, she’s learning the steps moment to moment—

“Sure, I will,” she says with a pleasant smile.

“It’s important for safety. In case you get a flat tire or something,” he lies and lies and lies and lies and lies—

He only speaks so gently when he’s lying.

~

She’s executing her greatest trick, her greatest deception—her greatest escape. She has ten thousand dollars, earned at increments of $3 and $7.25 per hour, that she’s managed not to lend to her father. She had to hide it. She’s had to lie about it. Thousands of hours of effort leaving her hands in one week. But she’s going to leave.

She has a three-step plan. She leaves early for work and prepares herself in an emotional hazmat suit for the fallout of what she’s about to do. That fallout will choke anything still living in the forest of her mind.

Step one: ditch the tracker and get her own phone line.

She checks her bank account as she walks into the Verizon store. She has just enough with her latest paycheck. She wonders if this will be the last time she has hundreds of dollars in her bank account.

As she stands at the counter and the person kindly applies a screen protector to the most expensive thing she’s ever bought, her old phone starts vibrating madly.

DON’T DO THIS, the first text says. Because he knows precisely what she is doing and what it means. He may be cruel more often than he’s kind, but he is not a fool. He understands that this is the first ceremonial cutting of the ropes that bind her to him.

There’s something hollow in her heart. There’s a smugness in addition to the clawing anxiety. He’s back at home, watching her, watching her little blip stop for an errand and go into the Verizon store.

He’s furious. He won’t stop texting and making calls she won’t pick up.

He keeps calling. Calling. Calling. She sends a few texts, apologizing that she didn’t tell him, but that she really needed a better performing phone. And how great it is that he can cancel her old line and save money.

He keeps calling, raging into the texts, cursing and cursing like a toddler who learned profanity. She’s just praying the store finishes so she can get in the parkway before he decides to drive there and stop her in person.

I have to go to work, if I’m late, I’ll get written up, is all she texts back before turning off her old phone.

She drives and drives with that shiny new phone sitting on her passenger seat.

He can’t track her anymore. She’s at least reclaimed the latest bit of freedom he took.

~

Step two: acquire reliable transportation to get to both jobs so she doesn’t immediately end up homeless upon leaving.

She speeds down the parkway going 90 to the last appointment at the dealership. This is the joy of working two jobs—there’s never time for appointments with polite society. Or doctor’s appointments. But she doesn’t have insurance anyway, so what’s that matter? She can’t see a doctor for the pain in her wrists and hands. So she wears a handbrace whenever she can and applies a topical pain killer to ease the ache.

The horsepower of the car roars, the little commuter vehicle that just isn’t meant to drive so fast. She thinks it must be strange to see such a conservative car driving so fast, all the way until she reaches the dealership to navigate the uncharted waters of making a deal.

She clings to the certified check she had to get for the down payment. Her life’s savings are burning up so fast.

When she gets behind that steering wheel she’s never touched before, she plays her favorite song and sings at the top of her lungs as she drives that long, dark road home.

“The future doesn’t scare me at all.”

~

Step three: acquire lodging for not much more than her father already makes her pay in rent.

It takes an incredible amount of lunch break apartment hunting to find something she can afford.

The next day, she works her day job, then takes a shift off from her night job with her newly-unlocked PTO after a slow six month probationary period. She lives her life in these stark corporate terms. She doesn’t remember how to write poetry, but by god or goddess or spirit, she’s going to be free.

Once the lease is signed and the certified check handed over, she stares at the new keys in her hand. They’re brass. New. Shining in the dimness of her new car’s interior lights.

This is it. This is hard-won, hard-bought freedom.