Page 93 of My Girl

I need to go.

I need to leave this place.

But your father is alive,my brain argues.He’s here. He’s protected you all of this time. He’s helped you embrace who you really are.

“No,” I say out loud. “He’s been manipulating me this entire time. He’s just messing with my head.”

He wants you,my brain says.

I dial my mother. I blink, then squinch my eyes shut. With each drumming ring, my skin gets clammier. I’ve been clinging to the name Michael Hall since my mother first spoke that name.

But Michael Hall is not my father. My real father—Craven Gaines—may have killed the real Michael Hall.

The phone clicks. “Sweetheart?” my mother asks. “Are you okay? Thank god you’re?—”

There are a million things I could say to her about what I’ve been up to. About why I’ve been avoiding her phone calls. I could explain that I needed some time to myself to figure out who my father really was.

And fuck, I did find out.

“He’s not the father,” I say. “Is he?”

“Who’s not?”

“Michael Hall,” I say, raising my voice. “When I left, you said that I acted just like my father, Michael Hall. You meant the same Michael Hall who killed his wife, then killed himself in Pahrump the year I was born, right?”

My whole body vibrates with shock. I don’t know if what I’m doing is right, but I have to know. I have to confront her.

“There are other Michael Halls, right?” I say. “Someone else who you had sex with. It can’t be him.” The tears gather in my voice. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

There’s a long pause that pulls at my insides, each nerve ripped from the threads of my spine.

My mother clears her throat.

“Yes, that’s the same Michael Hall,” she says in a quiet voice. “Your father wasn’t a good man, sweetheart, which is why I didn’t want you to know who he was. But heisyour father. Why doesn’t that make sense?”

I tell her that I’ve been in Pahrump since I left Vegas. That I got a retail job here. That I’ve got an apartment. I tell her about the murder-suicide anniversary party, about interviewing locals, about wanting to know more about my father. I tell her about Ned and his brother, and how the sheriff canceled his appointment with me. I tell her about how someone stole DNA samples from the police department. I tell her about the paternity tests. I tell her I wanted to find out where I belong and why I am the way I am.

I don’t tell her about Crave. The fake identities. The masks. I don’t tell her that if the paternity tests are real, then I’ve been fucking my own father.

Tension coils inside of me like a spring, ready to smash into a wall.

“Then there’s a chance that whatever you had tested isnothis DNA, right?” my mother says, her voice so gentle, so trusting, that it scrapes my ears like nails on a chalkboard. “Even criminologists make mistakes, sweetheart. I wouldn’t hold onto that knowledge like it’s the absolute truth.”

Truth.

I hate that word.

Are you afraid she’ll find out the truth about you?Crave had asked.

That’s the only truth that helps me make sense of this stuff,Penny had said.There is no reason. No nature. No nurture. It is what it is.

“Who is my father?” I ask, raising my voice again.

“Michael Hall,” my mother says, her tone filling with aggravation too. “I told you that.”

My eyes water. Panic fills my veins all over again.

I couldn’t have slept with my own father. It’s?—