Whisper to Me

“Okay. So don’t be late.”

I nodded and turned to leave—he was already facing the screen again, typing something on the keyboard. Then he smacked his fist down on the table.

“And clean your ******** room, Cass. I’m not going to ********* tell you a-*******-gain.”

This is living with my dad:

He says nothing nothing nothing nothing all day long

and then sometimes he says millipedes blah centipedes blah stick insects blah blah blah

and then

flash

like a camera going off, he hits you with something like that.

The only good thing is he doesn’t actually hit me. Like, with his fists. Just with his words.

It isn’t like he doesn’t have excuses, for his anger. I have to admit. His wounds, I’m talking about: the ones you can see and the ones you can’t. He didn’t have armor, like a millipede; he couldn’t roll himself into a ball. We’ll get to that later.

Also, he curses a lot. And I don’t really feel comfortable with writing down those words so I’m using stars, which I like, because it means when he’s really, really pissed—and that will happen later in this story—the page will be filled with stars, like a constellation.

I got out of there quickly, left him with his stupid forum. I went out into the little front yard with its grass brown already, even though it was only May, and over a month of school still to go. It was shaping up to be a hot summer, the air sticky and close, though the ocean was still cool—I knew that because I had gone for a swim the previous day and nearly froze my fingers off. Not that it was stopping the vacationers: I had seen the buses unloading blinking college kids into the sunlight, and the boardwalk filling up with people in T-shirts, crackling with the energy of being released, from work, from normality.

Only this place is the reality for me.

And there were still fewer vacationers than the year before, a continuation of an ongoing trend that was the source of pretty much all of