How about that night that I’d spent preaching to my parents, telling them how good you were for me? That night when I told them all about you, and how every shitty thing you’d ever done was because your dad didn’t know any other way of punishing aside from using his hand. How your mom was an alcoholic, but you weren’t going to hit the bottle because you didn’t want to spend the rest of your days drifting from guy to guy, halfway-home to halfway-home. You guys lived in a double-wide because your dad lived off the government and your mom stripped, but that wasn’t a big deal to me, because your room was always clean and smelled like vanilla candles (even if your parents were always chain-smoking or burning things on the stove).
Maybe they were convinced, maybe they weren’t. But, their tacit compliance when I left the table to go meet up with you, meant at the time, that they were okay with what we were.
Little did I know that during all the dinner talk, where I’d been up against the strictest panel of all—you were in the back of your dad’s pick-up truck, making a bed out of the bed, and sucking on the mouth of some kid you knew I didn’t like. Telling him in little whispers that he was the only one who’d be able to get you out of here, the same god damn line you pulled on me earlier that winter.
