Chapter Text
There was a man in Nat’s kitchen. The latest in a string of her mother’s boyfriends. Vera’s attempts to fill the hole left by her husband. A hole Nat thought was better left gaping than filled, but who was she to judge. Everyone knew she was trying to fill a hole, in one way or another.
Anyways, she wanted this man out of her kitchen. John, or Luke, or Pete, whatever one of the ironically biblically named pieces of shit this one was, Nat wanted him gone. She was coming off a high, and starving. The last of the sun’s rays were streaming in through the windows, and she swore they illuminated the box of cereal she was craving with an angelic light. She couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten. God.
The man was drinking a beer and rummaging through the fridge. More empty cans were scattered around. Her mother was passed out already. His frame seemed to fill more of the kitchen than physically possible. The cereal box was on the counter to his right.
When her father had been in the kitchen it had transformed into a minefield. One wrong move and he would turn vitriolic, spewing comments about how much she ate, how she was leeching off his hard work, how she just took and took, how she would get fat and nobody would love her.
Later, he would throw plates alongside the insults.
Maybe it was the hair, maybe it was the way he held himself, but for a moment the man in her kitchen becomes her father. The remnants of the drugs in her system working with her traumatized mind and the last of the sun’s light to convince Nat. For a moment she believes, believes that he scooped his brains off of the pavement and put them back in his head and was now searching for the last of his beer, which he wouldn’t find because he drank it last night, and in a moment he would turn around and blame her for drinking it.
He turns around.
The man in her kitchen is not her father. Relief and disappointment fill her in equal measure.
Her brain, still mushy from the summer heat and drugs, forgets the danger and remembers the hunger. Nat moves to grab the cereal box. The man catches her arm.
“You’re Vera’s brat!” The man exclaims, slurring. He’s sort of laughing, and Nat’s not sure what that means. This is not her father. She doesn’t know what it means when he laughs. The grip on her arm is not painful or rough, but it's firm. When she tries to pull away he holds tighter.
“You look so much like her, but younger. And blonde,” He continues, and his other hand reaches to touch her bleached hair. The second he makes contact the stupor of the drugs lifts, and Nat violently slaps the reaching arm away and tries to yank herself from his grasp. Every muscle in her body is tensed, and her posture becomes reminiscent of a cat with all of its fur standing up in an attempt to seem bigger. Stronger.
“Let me go, you fucking asshole!”
“Relax…I’m not gon’ do nothin’ to ya sweetheart.”
But he’s looking, looking down at her breasts through the tank top she wore to combat the heat, looking at her exposed legs, clad only in shorts for the same reason. There’s a moment where Nat considers where the knives are and how fast she could reach them. Where she looks back at the man in her kitchen, at his weakest parts, his eyes, his neck, the tiny dick she’s sure he has.
“I said, let go of me,” and this time he must see something in her eyes because he lets go of her and stumbles out of the kitchen. Nat watches him go, tracking his movements as he moves toward the couch looking like he wants to pass out right there. Her dad used to pass out on that couch.
“Get the hell out of here.”
He wavers, body still aimed at the couch.
“Get the fuck out of my house!” Her voice cracks when she raises it and Nat wonders if he can tell how close to sobbing she is. But still. But still. She can’t cry yet.
He grunts some sort of response she can’t make out and then careens out of the trailer. As soon as he’s out the door Nat runs to the door and slams it shut, then quickly locks it and sinks to the floor.
She hates this. She hates this! Why is her life always always like this? Why can’t she ever get a fucking break? It's always one goddamn thing after another. Oh, she doesn't have to worry about her dad at home anymore? Her mom will bring home the sketchiest men in Wisayok so Nat doesn’t ever have to worry about feeling safe in her own fucking home. She makes it onto the soccer team? She feels like an outcast on a team of kids who grew up in mansions. She finally starts to feel like one of them and stops caring so much about how shitty her life is? She spends a year barely coherent and pissing every single one of them off. Actually that last thing might be her fault. Whatever.
She cries until she can’t feel anything and then she gets up and smokes until everything is funny.
When Nat’s mom gets up in the morning she complains that the man didn’t spend the night, and glares at Nat like she knows it's her fault.