Three Little Words by Ashley Rhodes-Courter Read Free Book Online Page A

near the driveway, but it was pouring near the house. I skipped between the wet and the dry side of the yard a few times, calling for Mrs. Potts. “Come and see the miracle!”
    She said, “If it rains when the sun is out, it means that the devil’s beating his wife.” This scared me, so I came inside.
    After dinner I would sit on the porch swing and wait for the first star so I could make my eternal wish: to be with my mother. My yearning was like an insect bite. If I left it alone, I would stop noticing it; but if I focused on it, it would drive me crazy. I had sucked on my fingers as a baby, so when something bothered me, they still fluttered into my mouth. The more anxious I was, the more intensely I gnawed on my fingernails, sometimes making my fingers bleed. Then I could concentrate on that rather than the feelings inside.
    I could not help worrying about Luke. He lived only about twenty minutes away, but we rarely saw each other. His foster parents had a three-bedroom mobile home on a property that also had a plant nursery. On one visit there were eight foster kids, and my brother shared a room with five other boys.
    “We have more room at our house. Why can’t he come and live with us?” I asked Mrs. Potts.
    “That’s not my decision.” She closed off all further discussion on the matter.
     

     
    My favorite activity was watching a television that I did not have to share with other children who hogged the remote control. I would get up early and flip to Care Bears or Adventures in Wonderland. I wished I could go through the looking glass so I could find my mother.
    Then there was the video.
    The last time I had watched a movie, it had been a Disney tape, so I pressed the play button on the Pottses’ VCR remote. This was not a cartoon, but I could tell it had something to do with history. Thinking it was educational, I curled up in Mr. Potts’s chair. A female Nazi commandant was torturing some of the prettier female prisoners with electric dildos because she was jealous of them. I knew I should turn it off, but I kept hoping that the good guys would prevail so I wouldn’t have to go to bed with the frightening images etched in my mind. I shuddered as the story became even more gruesome. The commandant forced guys to make love to her, and she castrated those who did not satisfy her insatiable lust. An American prisoner was the only one who was able to pleasure her, so she spared him. In other frightening scenes she tortured women sexually and drunken German men doused women with beer and then raped them.
    I wished that one of the Pottses would catch me so I would not have to watch it until the end, but they had gone to bed and left me on my own. The worst scene in the movie came when the commandant gave a dinner party. A woman was ordered to stand on a block of ice with a noose around her neck. By the end of the meal the ice had melted and she had hanged herself.
    For years scenes from that movie have haunted me, and the images still bubble to the surface whenever I remember my time at the Pottses’ house. I eventually learned the name of the movie, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS , and I learned something else, too: Mr. Potts had been accused of molesting children.
    I saw that movie only a few weeks before I entered first grade. Walden Lake Elementary was the most beautiful school I had ever seen; it even had a fountain in the courtyard. My only friend in the neighborhood was an older boy named Fernando. He promised he would not let anyone harass me on the school bus, which I appreciated until he showed me a knife he had hidden in his backpack. I was afraid we both would get in trouble. I liked some of the girls in my class, but—without any preparation—I was moved from the Pottses’ foster home to live with Irma and Clifford Hagen in October. I already knew Mrs. Hagen because she was Mr. and Mrs. Potts’s daughter, but I begged to stay where I was because I did not want to leave my new school