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“Kids today,” he mumbled. We drove without speaking the remainder of the trip.

I felt certain Aunt Mae Louise would get rid of me now. With all she was telling Daddy and me about how important she and Uncle Buster were in the school community, she would surely be too embarrassed to keep me around. In a way I felt relieved. Daddy would have to take me back, and we would have to find a way to make it work.

When we pulled into the driveway, the front door opened and she stood there with her hands on her hips, shaking her head. The policeman got out and approached her with me trailing behind.

“You her aunt?” he asked.

“Unfortunately, yes,” she replied.

He asked her to sign some paper on his clipboard, which made me feel like a package being delivered.

“Good luck,” he sang as he returned to his car.

“We’ll need it,” she called after him, and looked at me.

“Not here two days and you do something like this?” she asked.

“I want to go home,” I said.

“Believe me, that’s what I want, too. Get in and stay in your room until Buster calls. He’s trying to locate your daddy right now.”

“Good,” I said, marching past her.

I went into my room and shut the door. All the while I hadn’t noticed how gray the sky had become. The room grew darker and darker until I heard raindrops tapping on the window with a sound that made me think of tapping witch’s fingers, long and bony with sharp, hard fingernails. It was something I heard and saw in recurrent nightmares all my life, only now the witch’s face I imagined was Aunt Mae Louise’s face.

More often than not, when I was younger and I had a bad dream, there was no one there to comfort me. I would put on my lights and catch my breath, but I distrusted every shadow, no matter how small. Nightmares hid themselves in shadows. They waited and watched until they were confident I was asleep, and then they crossed through the light and came into my head through my ears or my nose or my open mouth. That was what I used to believe and, although I never told a soul, still believed. Even when I was little, I sensed that if I told Mama, she would either ignore me, yell at me for being stupid, or maybe even laugh and tell one of her friends what I had said and embarrass me. She had done something like that often enough.

Now I sat here, unable to stop the trembling inside myself, despite the angry brave front I had put on in front of the dean, the policeman, and Aunt Mae Louise. It was one thing to be alone in a world where there were other girls like myself who were as alone or almost as alone as I was, but to feel like I felt here was harder.

This is all Mama’s fault, I thought. If she hadn’t been so selfish, she would have considered me and what would happen to me after she had run off. I hated Aunt Mae Louise, but she wasn’t all wrong when it came to my mama, I admitted to myself. And she wasn’t wrong about Daddy either, about him ignoring all the warnings and about him being too weak.

But he was all I had and I was all he had now. Lucky people had lots of choices for themselves. I had none. Wherever I was in my life, I thought, there would always be bars on the windows. There would always be shadows waiting to pounce on me. Lie back and take it, Phoebe, I told myself. Stop trying to go against the wind.

I closed my eyes and listened to the rain and fell asleep. The sounds that woke me were the sounds of Barbara Ann and Jake returning home. I heard Aunt Mae Louise chastise them for making too much noise, and I heard her warn them to stay away from me. The tone in her voice made me sound like I could contaminate them.

The drizzle turned into a heavy downpour. It went on and off for what seemed like hours and hours. I left the room only to go to the bathroom, and when I walked through the hall, I was struck by how quiet it was in the house. Both Jake’s and Barbara Ann’s doors were shut tight, and Aunt Mae Louise wasn’t nearby. All I could do was wait. Finally, she came to my room.

“Your uncle Buster has not been able to locate your daddy yet. His company is trying to contact him for us, but he hasn’t gotten to his scheduled stops, I guess. Anyway, you might as well come out and help me get the dinner ready. Uncle Buster is on his way home.”

“Are you sure you want me touching things?” I asked sullenly.

She paused and furled her brow.

“No, I don’t want you touching things, but I don’t want you doing nothing either. Idle hands get into mischief.”

I followed her out and set the table. The truth was, I was getting cabin fever in that tiny room anyway. Even her grouchy face and bitter comments brought some variety. When Barbara Ann came out of her room, she looked at me with different eyes, eyes not so full of herself as they were fearful of me. What did Aunt Mae Louise tell her, I wondered, or what had she heard from the other students on the bus?

As if she could read my thoughts, Aunt Mae Louise decided to tell me immediately why Barbara Ann was looking at me askance.

“The other kids made fun of her on the bus, I’ll have you know. Seems the news about you and that boy spread like a bad rash through the school. All of our friends are going to hear about it now. Fine thing to do to us.”

I didn’t say anything. My tongue stayed glued to the roof of my mouth even though the words were scratching away at the base of my throat. I finished what I had to do and then, when Uncle Buster came in, I sat with my head down.

“Your daddy’s going to be very disappointed to hear about this when I contact him,” he said. Surprisingly, that was all he said. Aunt Mae Louise said grace, and then we ate in relative silence. Every once in a while, I looked up and saw Jake staring at me wide-eyed.

Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer and I slapped my fork down on the table and stood up.

“I didn’t kill anyone, you know,” I screamed, and marched out of the dining room.