Do your homework at the library because the trailer was Dale’s space after 6:00 in the evening, and your presence in it was a provocation. Come home before dark, go straight to your room, close the door, and become furniture. She was good at it. For 4 years, she was very good at it. Then she turned 16, and everything she’d built collapsed in a single evening.
The boy’s name doesn’t matter. He was kind to her for three weeks in August, which was 3 weeks longer than anyone had been kind to her in years. He told her she was pretty. He told her she was smart. He told her he’d be around. Then he wasn’t. And Nola was left with a late period and a plastic test from the dollar store that showed two pink lines under the fluorescent light of a gas station bathroom.
She didn’t cry. She sat on the toilet lid and did math. 5 months until graduation if she could stay in school. 18 months until she turned 18 and could leave legally. She couldn’t do either of those things with a baby growing inside her. But she also couldn’t do what Charlene would demand she do, which was make it go away.
Nola knew this about herself with a certainty that surprised her. Whatever was growing in her belly was the first thing in her life that was entirely hers. It hadn’t chosen to be there, just like she hadn’t chosen to be born into a trailer with a man who hit and a woman who watched. But it was there and it was alive and she was going to keep it alive. That was the decision.
Everything else would have to build around it. She told her mother on a Tuesday evening in late September, standing in the kitchen while Dale was at the bar. She chose the timing deliberately. Charlene alone was manageable. Charlene with Dale was not. Her mother’s face went through several stages.
Shock, disgust, a flicker of something that might have been recognition. The memory of her own teenage pregnancy with Nola, maybe. And then it settled into something cold and final. You’re not keeping it. I am. You’re 16. You don’t get to decide. I already decided. Charlene’s hand moved fast. The slap caught Nola across the mouth and split her bottom lip against her teeth.
The taste of copper flooded her tongue. “Dale’s going to kill you,” Charlene said. “Not a threat, an observation. Clinical, like she was reading the weather.” Dale came home at 11 that night. Nola heard the conversation through the thin wall of her bedroom. Charlene’s voice low and urgent. Dale’s rising like a tide coming in. She had her boots on already.
She had the $27 folded in her pocket. She’d been ready since the slap because Nola Price had spent eight years learning to read the weather in that house, and she knew a storm when one was building. The bedroom door opened without a knock. Dale stood in the frame, backlit by the hallway light, and for a moment, he didn’t look like a man.
He looked like a shape, a silhouette of everything that had ever hurt her, compressed into one dark outline. “Get up,” he said. She was already standing. What followed lasted less than three minutes, but time works differently when you’re being hit. His fist caught her temple, not her stomach. Even Dale had a line he told himself he wouldn’t cross, though the distinction meant nothing to Nola as she hit the wall and slid sideways.
Her elbow cracked against the baseboard heater. She curled instinctively around her belly and his boot caught her lower back once, twice, and then Charlene was pulling him off. not to protect Nola, but because the neighbors were home and the walls were thin. “Get out,” Charlene said. She wasn’t talking to Dale. Nola didn’t argue.
