Deliver Me From Evil by Mary Monroe Page B

over Daddy’s racket.
    â€œNaw,” Mama said, with a grunt.
    There was a rolled-up Enquirer in Mama’s hand that she had been reading off and on for over a month. She glanced in my direction as she swatted a fly the size of a nickel on the arm of her chair with the old Enquirer . Then she unrolled it and started reading stuff that was so old by now, it no longer mattered. Like the two stars on the cover celebrating their lavish wedding. They’d already gotten divorced. But that didn’t matter to Mama. She had magazines that were older than me that she was still reading and using to swat flies.
    I dragged my feet to my room, hoping that I would never have to introduce Wade to my parents. It was bad enough that he had a strange mama to deal with, too. Just thinking about Miss Louise, with her greedy self, made me smile as I flung myself across my unmade bed. I always stuffed a few spare dollars into my sock every time I left the house because I never knew when I was going to run into Wade’s mama. She had paid back the hundred dollars that she’d borrowed from Mama three days after I’d delivered it to her house, leaving it with Wade. But she’d come to borrow it back two days later.
    I was so confused about my relationship with Wade that I could hardly think about anything else. Even though almost every girl I knew had told me at least one story about some boy fucking her, then disappearing. I never thought that one day it would be my story, too. But that’s just what it turned out to be. Wade had disappeared so completely from my life that it was like he had never existed. There were even a few times that I found myself wondering if I’d imagined the whole thing. I even went so far as to kick off my panties, straddle a mirror on the floor in my room, and stick my finger inside myself, checking to see if my cherry was still in place. But my innocence was gone. Just like Wade.

CHAPTER 17
    A s dull and out of touch with reality as my parents were, I was surprised that Mama bought me a blue suede jacket that was too stylish and cute for words for Christmas this year. It was a nice change from the mammy-made, dull-colored things she usually bought for me off the discount-store racks. That was the main reason I got so caught up in shoplifting.
    My parents rarely came into my bedroom, and when they did they had no interest in what was in my closet, but I kept it locked anyway. When I wanted to wear one of my stolen outfits, I waited until my parents were in bed. When they stayed up later than they usually did on a night I had a party to go to, I left the house dressed in one of the frumpy outfits Mama had bought for me. But my party clothes were in my backpack. Half of my closet was full of hot “hot” outfits.
    It was a cold and dreary Saturday evening, with puffy black clouds sliding slowly across a sky that looked like a gray blanket. I had just gotten over a cold that had been so serious, I hadn’t even been able to crawl out of bed for the last two days. But on the third day, I was well enough to hit the streets again.
    â€œMama, can I go over to the skating rink and hang out? I want to show my friends the new jacket you got me for Christmas.”
    My mother was in the kitchen, washing dishes. She turned and looked at me with a blank expression on her face, which had become so familiar over the years. “Ummm,” she muttered. “You can do whatever it is you want to do.”
    I already knew that. But out of respect and because I knew that it was the right thing to do, I asked, anyway. Neither one of my parents really cared about what I did. No matter what it was. I could skip school, ignore my household chores, eat junk food for days, stay out all night if I wanted to, and not have to worry about any consequences. Even though some of my friends lived in neighborhoods rougher than mine and had parents that drank, fought, and abused them, they had curfews and