Just One Night, Part 2: Exposed by Kyra Davis Read Free Book Online Page B

parents, Dave?”
    “I am so incredibly angry with you.” Again I’m not sure if the words are meant for me or God, though undoubtedly they ring true for both of us. “I’m not going to let you go, but I can’t let it go, either. They say love and hate are the opposite sides of the same coin but I never understood that expression before. I never got it. Now I do.”
    I withdraw my hand. If this is what’s beneath the force field, it’s not worth my time. “This isn’t a coin toss,” I say. “If it was, I’d pick it up and flip it back to love.” I snap my fingers and then smile down at them wistfully. “It would be that easy.”
    He doesn’t say anything and keeps his eyes on the highway. “I told them you were acting like Melody. I didn’t need to say much more before they speculated on the details themselves.”
    I freeze. That bullet hit. My throat begins to constrict. But . . . “If you had told them that, they would have called me.”
    “I told them not to. I told them I’d set you straight . . . or not.”
    “I don’t understand.” And if it doesn’t make sense then it can’t be true, I want to add. It can’t be true. I won’t allow myself to even entertain it.
    “Your mother thinks she did this to you. Maybe she did. She’s hysterical. Your father probably agrees but he won’t say as much. Since they think they’re the cause of the problem, they’re letting me be in charge of the solution.”
    I feel myself color. “You think you’re in charge of me?”
    “Yes. They’re disgusted with you, Kasie. They think you’re nothing better than a common slut fucking her way to the top. After we spoke, your father actually speculated that you might have been granting favors to some of your professors.”
    “Shut up.”
    “Tell me, how did you get an A in physics when you don’t know the difference between fission and fusion? Did you stay after class? Crawl under his desk, rub yourself against his leg like a dog in heat?”
    “I earned every grade I got.”
    “But how did you earn them? In sweat? Was it the papers you put on the professors’ desks that pleased, or was it the view of you bent over their desks, arching your back, offering your body as a door prize?” He shakes his head. “I think the saddest thing I ever heard was your father saying that it might have been better if they hadn’t had children. I don’t know, Kasie—they could be done with you. Just like they were done with the disappointment they spawned before you, even before she died.”
    I can see my father sitting at the kitchen table with my mother. I hear him running through the filthiest of possibilities as my mother gets smaller and smaller in her chair. They don’t know I’m there, standing outside the room, peeking in. I only turned nine a few days earlier; my birthday party had ended badly right after my father had caught my sister and some man together in her bedroom.
    “She was high, Donna,” he says to my mother. “My guess is that he gave her the drugs. That’s what she was doing, she was paying him with the only currency she has. And she did it during Kasie’s birthday. She taints everything she touches. We have to kick her out. I won’t have that kind of depravity in my house.”
    “She’s our daughter.” It takes me a moment to realize it’s my mother speaking. She sounds so different. The polish has faded from her perfect diction and her words are laid bare, the desperation on display for all to see.
    “She stopped being our daughter when she became a whore.”
    Is there a tremor in his voice? Is he struggling with his proclamation? I don’t know. All I hear is the definitiveness of the sentence. I hear the condemnation. Only yesterday we were innocent, my sister and I. Her oddities were eccentricities; she was a handful. My father needed to take her in hand; that’s all.
    But now she’s a whore.
    Whores are nothing.
    Whores can be cast out, punished, hated. I’m watching my