Her lips are pink and full and her cheeks warm. If she weren’t so scared of me, I’d try to steal a kiss. But she’s terrified, and that just seems wrong. Like something Earl would do. I shudder at the thought.

Then the problem lady, aka her stepmom, stomps into the hall and grabs her arm. They are going to be late and she is in a lot of trouble, little lady. Why is she wearing that dress? She told her not to wear that dress. It’s too chilly. She’ll just have to freeze. Maybe she’ll learn a lesson.

Anger bubbles up inside me, and Dutch’s eyes grow wider and wider. The lady looks at me, too, but she all she can see is the wall at my back. Nobody but Dutch can see me in these dreams.

They are married now. Dutch’s dad and the problem lady. Dutch was happy about it at first. I don’t know why. The woman has never liked her. And Dutch is like me. She can feel indifference. Apathy. Contempt. But she doesn’t understand why her stepmother has such harsh feelings for her. She hasn’t seen what I’ve seen. Some people are just bad.

When the woman doesn’t see anything, she whirls Dutch around to face her. “You have to stop this. I mean it.”

Her fingernails dig into Dutch’s tender skin and my lungs stop working. I shake. I snarl. I want to kill her. I want to bash her face in.

“I’m not putting up with it, Charlotte. There’s nobody there, and you damned well know it.”

But Dutch won’t quit looking at me, so the lady pushes her down the hall toward the front door.

My anger consumes me. Rises and swells until the walls ripple around me with the force of it. I knock a vase off a side table, and the lady turns. Stares straight at me. Pulls her eyebrows together until they make an ugly line down her forehead. Then she clenches her jaw, turns once more, and hurries out the door.

5

By the time I get back, Earl is finished. I crawl to my closet and hide for a few days. Kim hides with me. She has long red hair and pale skin with a light dusting of freckles across her nose. She brings water and washes what she can. Then she makes me soup and we talk about what we are going to do when we grow up.

Kim is the most timid, soft-spoken person I’ve ever known. So when she tells me she wants to be a fighter pilot, I laugh till my stomach hurts. It hurt already, so it doesn’t take long. I wish she were my real sister. But that would make Earl my real father. Fuck that.

We left our TV behind at our last place because we had to sneak out a window in the middle of the night. The colors were off and the picture wasn’t quite in the center, but that didn’t matter. It was something.

But the landlord wanted the rent and he wanted it now. Nobody tells Earl Walker what to do. Nobody gets in his face and orders him about. He leaves for a couple of hours and then we sneak out. I feel like something bad has happened, but I don’t ask Earl about it. I never talk to him if I don’t have to. I get enough unwanted attention.

But Kim is asleep, and without a TV, I have to think. I think about Dutch. Why she saves me and doesn’t let me die. I think about her light. How bright it is. How nourishing. I think about Earl. I’m pretty sure he wants to kill me. He threatens to “put me in the ground” all the time, and I wonder why I’m even here. On earth. Why I even exist.

Sometimes Earl takes pictures. The kind that roll out of the camera and slowly come into focus. It is the bane of said existence. He hangs them on a line in whatever room constitutes our family room. I think that’s why Kim walks with her head down all the time. Her shoulders concave. He leaves the pictures up unless he’s seeing someone. Then he stuffs them in a sock in his drawer.

I used to wonder why he took them. I don’t care anymore. No one can ever see them. Earl knows how I feel about them and he laughs. He keeps them until we move again. And then he knocks a hole in a wall, dumps them in there, and patches the hole. He just leaves it like that. A big white spot on the wall. A reminder of what he has on me. He’s too stupid to know the photos are way more damning to him than me.

It takes me awhile, but I figure out why he hangs them up. I think he does it so I won’t bring any friends over. Like I have any. I do get to know some of the neighborhood kids, because he lets us go out sometimes, but only if I have no visible bruises. So I concentrate on healing. He says I heal fast. I say I don’t heal fast enough. Any time spent indoors with him is too much.

Sometimes he gets a job and we’re home alone. That is what heaven is. We get to do whatever we want and eat whatever we want. Well, whatever we have. He is working today, so Kim gets the last can of ravioli and I eat a package of crackers and mustard. We find a bunch of books in a box the last tenants left behind. I learned to read from abandoned books and magazines and from closed-captioning when we had a TV. And I taught Kim to read years ago. But today, I read to her until she falls asleep, the afternoon sun stretching across the floor and lighting her hair on fire. I eat more crackers. Lick the mustard off my fingers. And celebrate the good life.

He’s gone and we can breathe.

I close my eyes and find Dutch. She’s at a park near her house, riding bikes with another girl whose hair is almost as red as Kim’s. The sweater Dutch is wearing swallows her whole and is barely a shade lighter than her long coffee-colored hair. Her cheeks are flushed and she laughs when her tire almost slides down the side of an arroyo. The same arroyo she almost died in.

She doesn’t come here often anymore, but it was her stepmother, Denise’s, favorite place to take her before she started kindergarten.

On one particular occasion, she’s playing hopscotch with her friends, a group of older girls. Dutch is only three. Way too young to play by herself. But Denise is too busy chatting with the other girls’ mothers to be too concerned.

Some boys are watching the girls play. I remember being jealous of them. They throw sticks and run. The girls chase them until Denise yells at Dutch to stay where she can see her. Then she turns and continues her story, completely ignoring her stepdaughter.

A girl about thirteen years old calls Dutch over to where she is standing on the edge of a cement arroyo. They have had a lot of rain and it is half full of raging water. The current is strong enough to drown anything caught in its path.

The girl summons Dutch closer. She is dead. The girl. Dutch ignores her stepmother and wanders toward her. The girl is lost. I can see it in her eyes. She is scared and desperate and confused, but that doesn’t give her the right to kill anyone. I can see a bad thing about to happen from a mile away. I think it’s the hellfire in me. The brimstone in my blood.

I step between them. Shake out my cloak. Glare at Dutch until she backs away, her lids round, her face bright pink from the cold weather. After a moment, she runs back to her stepmother and gets yelled at for going too far. For once, I’m right there with the crazy bitch. Better yelled at than dead.

I turn to the girl. She’s old enough to know better. Old enough to know what she just tried to do was wrong on several levels.

She stares at me. Hypnotized. Enchanted. I lower my hood and she wants to touch me. With her fingers. With her mouth. I touch her instead. I grab hold of her throat. Pull her closer.

“This is my world,” I say from between clenched teeth. “Go anywhere near the reaper again, and I’ll send you to a place where your skin will bubble and your face will melt and you will scream in agony for all eternity.”