Daddy's by Lindsay Hunter Read Free Book Online Page A

hair around Daddy’s nipples. How Daddy has nipples in general. The word nipples or any word starting with the letters N-I-P. How Momma farts when she’s doing her exercises and no one reacts. The VHS that’s been sitting on top of the TV since last summer labeled For Adults Only. Adults in general, and how they seem unaware of things like fate and magic and daughters who are losers and music that is current and candy that ain’t Hershey’s. How God is I guess an adult too.
     
    How attractive Jesus is in his pictures. And anyway, I said in this letter, I hate how Momma buys store-brand feminine products with names that always end in O. TampOs. MaxOs. And then also how you answer everything with Oh. It’s 8:30, where’re your school books? Oh. That boy you shut in your bedroom the other day was manhandling a girl that wasn’t you over behind the library. Oh. Your face is a shiny clock without no hands. Oh. And alright, I hate the following things about myself: big boat feet, mosquito-bite chest hints, plague of freckles, can’t sing, brain feels swole all the time, but least I don’t go around offering up my tater on a platter for a cocktail party of wieners to lay up against, and least the cat ain’t got my tongue when I see you in the halls, and least I can look at a jar of buttons and see it for what it is whereas you look right at something and see all them dances to come and boys to kiss and stars to count while you laying in the driveway looking up and I’m laying in bed looking nowhere.
     

PEGGY’ S BROTHER
     

    We play truth or dare and it keeps getting worse. I run down the driveway and back up again with a hot dog in my teeth and my bikini bottoms in a wedge, I am on all fours, my naked butt in the air, a turd-like swirl of toothpaste on the small of my back, my best friend Jessica licking it off and gagging, I am dared to eat one of the twins’ boogers. This I don’t do. I take one look at it, dark red in the center, both dry and glistening, and I run to the bathroom and lock myself in.
     
    Peggy’s mom’s soaps are shaped like seahorses; the one in the bathtub dish has been worn down into a featureless grubworm. I hold it in my hand, its underside slick and cold, while the other girls knock on the door, say, Come on you don’t have to eat it, and Shelley wiped it on Peggy’s brother’s door so don’t worry, and, from Jessica, You’re being boh-ring.
     
    After I hear them walk away and pad down the hallway, I come out. Peggy’s brother’s door is open slightly, I can hear the low tones coming from his television. The last time I was over at Peggy’s he’d woken me up and I’d had to step over the other girls as he led me into his room and then he just held my hand, rubbing my knuckles with his thumb so hard that the next day my knuckles were red and chapped and my mother rubbed Eucerin on them for a week. That was all. He’d held my hand and then he’d dropped it and opened his door, waited for me to leave, and then closed it behind me. In the morning we ate cereal across from each other and he told Peggy he’d farted into her box of Corn Pops.
     

    I hear Grace say, I am seriously going to vomit, which means the game is still going on. I knock on Peggy’s brother’s door and then, when I hear one of the girls coming down the hallway, I duck in and shut the door gently behind me. Peggy’s brother is watching The Shining , waves of blood rushing down a hallway, two dead girls laying askew. I’d watched it many times at Peggy’s house, and it had always seemed funny, too dramatic, we roared with laughter at the little girls asking Danny to Come play with us, forever. But here, in Peggy’s brother’s room, it is suddenly terrifying, Danny’s face frozen in fear, the stifling browns and gold of the hotel, Danny’s mother’s crowded, gnashing teeth.
     
    Hey, Peggy’s brother says. Come over here.
     
    My face is hot, I feel goldfish in my stomach and I trip on a basketball