Page 65 of Such Sharp Teeth

“She shouldn’t have been invited,” I say. “And she definitely shouldn’t have come.”

“It’s her grandchild.”

“Yeah, well, she did a bang-up job with her son,” I say. “She shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the kid.”

“That’s not how it works,” she says, adjusting the heat. “Would it kill you to be nice?”

“No,” I say. “Pretty sure only a silver bullet can do that.”

“I appreciate that you feel protective of your sister,” Mom says. “But as I’ve said, it’s not your place to be angry at Joann. Or Matty.”

“Right,” I say. “I shouldn’t be protective. You’re right. Absolutely right. Why try to protect my family? What could possibly happen?”

“Aurora.”

“Never mind,” I say. “I don’t want to get into it.”

“You hold such resentment,” she says, suddenly on the verge of tears. “And you won’t talk about it. How can we put it behind us if you won’t talk to me? I don’t understand. It was like a switch. Out of the blue, you hate me. It wasn’t always like this.”

She’s not wrong. Right after, I wasn’t angry. I was mostly confused. Confused and tired. I just wanted to pretend like it never happened.

She picked me up from school, and the first thing she said to me when I got in the car was “Why didn’t you tell me last night?”

“I tried.” Even if I had, would she have believed me?

“You should have told me. You should have said.”

She didn’t say that she was sorry. She didn’t comfort me. She started to cry. I wondered if it was because she was sad about what happened to me, what I’d been through, what I’d seen, or if she was sad about losing Dave. He’d been arrested. He was still on probation for his first offense, which was—surprise, surprise—also for exposing himself to a minor.

I was so desperate for it to be over, so desperate not to have to think about it anymore. The more I acted like I was fine, the more I believed it. They believed it. Mom and Scarlett were just as desperate to forget. Better for everyone to just sweep it under the rug.

For years I never told anyone, the exception being Mia. We were drunk at one of Tommy Haskins’ bonfires, the two of us off sitting on the hood of someone’s car, passing a bottle of 99 Bananas back and forth. She listed every guy at the party, figuring out whom she wanted to go home with.

“I can’t go back to my dad’s tonight,” she said.

She told me, through casual laughter, that he had called her a whore and kicked her out. Then she showed me. The marks. Bruises. Scars from cigarette burns.

“He’s sweet when he’s sober,” she said.

Not quite knowing how to respond, I told her about Dave.

When I was a sophomore in college, I was hanging out in my friend’s dorm. There were seven of us, and we were all talking, smoking a bowl, and I forget how it came up, but suddenly there were stories. I was horrified by the stories, by how we all had them, every one of us. Compared to what some of them had endured, to what Mia had endured, what I’d gone through wasn’t even that bad.

That’s what I told myself. It wasn’t that bad.

It was another excuse to not give myself permission to be upset. To dismiss it.

“Therapy helps,” one of my friends said.

It took me another few years to see a therapist. I was too busy with school and side jobs and internships and then working full-time. When I finally got around to going, I was twenty-four and more motivated by the fact that everyone I knew had a therapist than thinking I actually needed the help. I thought I’d vent about office politics and subway manspreading.

I liked my therapist. Her name was Stella; she was soft-spoken and compassionate and she wore wooden jewelry. Before I knew it, I was telling her about my past, about my mother, about how I had been raised. When I started saying these things out loud, that’s when I realized how fucked-up it all was.

She recommended books. Books about being the child of immature parents, about healing from trauma. It gave me all this perspective I didn’t know what to do with.

And it hatched this anger. There was suddenly so much of it. Too much.

I didn’t know how to experience it. I didn’t know how to hold it, where to put it.