Payback: Sometimes Karma Takes so Friggin' Long, You Have to Step in and Handle Things Yourself - the Girl on Fire by Eve Rabi - HTML preview

EXCERPT FROM
BETRAYED

****

It all started with Harry Hargreaves, my stepfather.

How do I describe him?

Let’s see…smart and crafty. And mean. Very mean. That’s my description.

Now if you asked Mocha, my best friend, her description would be slightly different – “Pussy ass, hairy mudderfucking Harry.”

Harry swept into our lives when I was three-years-old. Ambitious and calculating (quietly at that), he was a divorcee with no kids and he had his eye on the White House.

My late father, Senator John Waterhouse, had been both popular and wealthy. So when Harry met my mother, the strikingly beautiful Amelia, who was also a wealthy senator’s daughter, he thought she’d look great in photographs and as arm candy, so he married her. After all, she was ten years younger than him and docile enough for him to push her around, which he did, all the time.

Most importantly, it helped that my father had left both my mother and I financially well off.

Harry pretended to be nice to me until the day he married my mother.

From that day on, he did everything in his power to isolate me from her. I was too little to fight Harry, my mother was too meek to stand up to Harry, so he succeeded – my relationship with my mother changed for the worse.

Harry had full access to my mother’s money, which he quickly squandered on cars, a yacht, extravagant holidays and by jut by just throwing money around at strip clubs and whatever else took his fancy. Throwing my mother’s money around.

I was a quiet child, loved by everyone and was always told how pretty I was with my blonde tresses and blue eyes. A replica of my mother.

“She looks like a porcelain doll,” I often heard.

But Harry, for some reason hated me. Yes, hated me even thought I was just three-years-old and by no means a spoilt child. He always accused my mother of spoiling me and when she tried to defend me, Harry became pretty vicious towards my mother with his rants and accusations. I didn’t want my mother hurt or in tears so I kept out of Harry’s way to prevent them fighting.

Shortly after they got married, my mother gave birth to twins, Ashley and Nicole who looked just liked my mother, which meant they looked like me.

Nicole and Ashley adored me and I in turn adored them. Harry hated that they loved me and tried to isolate me from them as much as possible.

By the time I was ten, I realized that Harry despised me.

He never hit me or did anything tangible where I could cry abuse – he was smart about it – excluded me in indirect ways, making me feel unwanted and in the way, like I didn’t belong. Subtle things – buy a four-pack of cupcakes, muffins, picnic set, ice-cream. (I was a kid; those things hurt like hell.)

Then when the mistake was pointed out to him, that we were a family of five and not four, he’d look at me as if he was seeing me for the first time and say, “Ah, yes, so I see. My …mistake.”

Or he’d say, “Forgot that you lived here.” Comments that would cut deep, as I was a kind and sensitive child.

As I got older, he’d say things like, “Didn’t expect to see you here. Thought you’d be out with your friends. Oh, I forgot, you don’t have any friends.”

I was a shy child, so no; I didn’t have that many friends. I was also a bookworm and preferred to spend time with my books rather than hang out with dumb friends who wanted to live at the mall and flirt with boys.

Sometimes, I’d hear Harry and my mom in their bedroom laughing and playing with the twins, with their bedroom door closed. I longed to be part of that laughter and wished he’d invite me in to romp with them, but nobody was allowed in their bedroom, unless Senator Harry invited them in.

To drown out their laughter and to staunch the flow of negative thoughts – that I didn’t belong, that I wasn’t good enough, that my mother loved the twins more than me, that my mother didn’t care, I’d slap on headphones and bury myself in my books. If I couldn’t hear their laughter, maybe it wouldn’t hurt that much.

My favorite game with Ashley and Nicole was playing school. I was the teacher and they were the students. They loved it cos I would dramatize their lessons.

My teachers told me that I would make a great school teacher one day. They said I was nurturing by nature. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I liked how they said it.

Of course, being the daughter of a Senator, I attended private schools and I managed to get great grades. Teachers waxed lyrical about me at parent-teacher meetings.

Unfortunately, Nicole and Ashley were not so lucky. They struggled in school and had to have extra lessons to keep up – a mild form of ADHD.

This didn’t sit well with Harry – he took it as a personal failure and became angry at me. Whenever I was reading, he’d call me to do something that didn’t need to be done, nag me about the state of my room, about my music being too loud, pick on me about my hair, my shoes, my clothes, my nails, the fact that I was too quiet at the dinner table, mock me when I said something at the dinner table.

I lived in a state of stress when Harry was around and I particularly hated dinner times when we were in close proximity to each other.

He had a voice that he used on the twins, an endearing one, and a separate one that he used on me, blunt, curt, irritable. He could reduce me to tears with just a few words and one look.

I was a cry-baby – cried easily, cried buckets when Simba’s father died in The Lion King.

As I got older, to cope, I dressed my hurt and confusion in a coat of arrogance – a don’t-give-a-damn attitude. That made things worse as I gave him ammunition to use against me.

“You are just arrogant and disrespectful,” he’d complain.

Where was my mother in all of this?

She was around but shit-scared of him. He’d have a serious go at her if she gave him lip. Threatened to divorce her and leave her destitute many times.

She was especially scared of that, as she had no working skills and came from a family that never encouraged women to work. Also, she no longer had money and had to rely on Harry to support her.

“Mom, he’s horrible to me,” I complained. “He’s mean to you too. Let’s leave him. Let’s take Nic and Ash and go live far away, Mom. We can do it. I will help with the twins. We’ll be happy, mom, I promise you.”

“Okay, Kat,” she said as she wound strands of blonde locks around her fingers and tugged out clumps of hair, adding to the bald patches on her scalp. “Do you want some chamomile tea? It’ll calm you down.”

After seeing that, I decided never to do bring that up again.

I loved my mother, but quietly I resented the fact that she didn’t do enough to protect me from Harry.

But my sisters were great – they hated it when Harry put me down, and being the feisty little things they were, they stood up for me. They never hesitated to tell Harry off. After an episode of Harry being mean to me, they’d bring me treats and give me hugs to cheer me up.

They hated Harry more when he was mean to my mom, and often told him that they didn’t love him and that they wished that Uncle John, his kind friend, was their daddy.

He didn’t like that at all and accused my mother of having an affair with Uncle John, which was not true.

I also think he was scared of losing the love of his daughters, but he was doing a good job of doing precisely that.

By the time I was sixteen, I had had enough of Harry’s meanness and bullying ways and tried to find a way out of my house.

Most of my school friends were from society homes, privileged girls that were as superficial and mean as the girl next to them.

I felt trapped, alone and unwanted.

I was an affectionate child by nature, but I seldom got hugs from my family. Untouched. That’s how I felt.

One day, in the year 2002, on a chilly winter’s day, while crying at the bus stop over Harry’s nastiness – his insistence that I take the bus to school in future and not get my mother to drive me to school, I met Mocha.

For a while she watched me cry silently from a distance, then she approached me.

“Gurl, you got boyfrien’ trouble?”

I shook my head.

“School?”

“Step-father,” I murmured.

She nodded and gently tucked my hair behind my ears, a sympathetic look on her face.

“Okay, okay, you can tell Mocha,” she said. “Go on.”

“Mocha?” I said through my tears.

“Yeah, ain’t too coffee, ain’t too hot-chocolaty,” she said, circling her thumb and her forefinger. “Jest right.”

I smiled.

Mocha, who I learned attended public school whenever she felt like it, which was about thrice a month, was sixteen too, but older than me by a couple of months. Her mother was black and her father, who she didn’t know, was white, but she was one hundred percent hood and refused to be anything else.

She was pretty – dark, tight curls that fell around her shoulders, liquid brown eyes, caramel skin, a curvy soft body, big boobs, big ass, Angelina Jolie lips and a smile that made her eyes sparkle.

After glancing around, she dropped her voice and said, “My mama name me Jane, but you tell anyone dat and I will throw you under dat bus.” She winked. “Have a rep to maintain and Jane, dat name, it don’ cut it cos I ain’t gon get me no Tarzan anytime soon.”

I laughed.

“And I is drunk enough right now to do it,” she boasted.

“You are?” I was fascinated. Never met a drunken person before, let alone a school girl who was drunk at that part of the morning.

“My step-father, he also a prick. Big one. But it don’t matter, I jest steal all his money and his booze. This morning, I stole his vodka.”

A prick? Wow, I loved the way she talked. It was so Boyz in da Hood. I was sheltered, remember? Never got out much, wasn’t allowed to watch much TV either.

“You did?” My eyes were wide with wonder, my tears forgotten.

She nodded.

She had tattoos – an angel on her arm, a love heart on her shoulder, a butterfly on her ankle, a set of paw-prints on her boob, ‘Loyalty’ and ‘Respect’ written on the back of her thighs and the words Slippery When Wet on just below her navel. Her cousin worked in a tattoo parlor so she got free ink and she made the most of that.

Mocha lived about five minutes from me, but in a less affluent section of Early. Her house was shabby, with peeling paint, overgrown grass and a few broken windows. Her room was at the back of the house and it was the size of our main bathroom. We entered and left through a side window.

Even though the house was dilapidated, they had a make-shift bar and tons of booze. I later learned that her mother’s boyfriend was a barman at a club who stole booze from work and sold it to friends at a reduced rate.

“What’s your favorite drink?”

“Eh, um, whisky,” I said, mainly because Harry drank whisky. I had never drunk alcohol in my life but I wasn’t going to tell her that. “A bit of everything.”

“A bit of everything?” she snapped her fingers, “Long Island Tea.”

“Tea, okay. Got any chamomile? My mom drinks chamomile.”

“Suuuuure, I got tea.”

With a wicked smile, she began pouring different drinks into a beer glass – vodka, whisky, rum and about six other drinks. Just throwing it in without measuring. Finally she cracked open a can of coke, added some to the concoction and handed it to me. “Long Island Tea, Mocha’s version.”

Gingerly, I tasted it and screwed up my face. “It’s awful, coffee. Doesn’t taste like tea at all.”

“It’s Mocha, not coffee, and jest down it, gurl!”

I couldn’t get her name right and I couldn’t down it either, but with her prompting, I managed to finish it. My face spasmed, so to get rid of the taste, she gave me some Irish crème, which took away the awful taste in my mouth, but the crème was, well, it left me feeling really queasy.

In spite of how much I drank, I was as sober as anything. “I’m not drunk yet,” I complained to my new friend. “Don’t know what the hype is all about.”

“Say whaaaat?”

“Don’t know what the big deal is,” I said, mindful of Mocha’s limited vocabulary and the fact that she went to school only three times a month.

Then I stood up and the ground floated. “Whoa, coffee!” I shouted.

“Mocha!” she corrected and helped steady me.

Okay, I was tipsy and it felt deliciously good, so I wanted to dance.

“Hey, coffee, you got any Teenage Dirtbag?”

“Say what?”

“Wheatus? Hits of 2001.”

“Wheat whaaaat?”

“Oh. Can’t Fight the Moonlight? By LeAnn Rimes?”

She shook her head slowly.

“Murder on the dance floor? Sophie Elle…Eeeeehhh…” I started to laugh at my thick tongue.

She shook her head even slower.

After some eye-rolling and muttering, she put on Let me Blow Your Mind by Eve.

“Gurl whachu doing?” she asked when she saw me dance.

“I’m dancing,” I said as I jumped around with my hands in the air.

“Dat ain’t dancing. You dance like dat and it’s gon rain in here. Dis is how we do it.” She indulged in some serious booty shaking. “Drop it low, gurl. See?”

“Got it!” When I tried to drop it low, I dropped alright – I lost balance and fell.

She laughed. Hard. But she had a laugh that reminded me of musical chimes, so I didn’t mind her laughing at me. I just wanted to drop it really low.

As we were having fun, Sia snaked into through the window.

Sia, Mocha’s cousin, was seventeen and she too had tattoos, but piercings were her thing – on her upper lip, her lower lip, her nose, her eyebrows, her ears and her belly button.

(I was both fascinated and repulsed when she later declared that she planned to pierce her nipples and her vagina soon.)

She wore a back hoodie, black tights, black lace-up boots and had about twenty silver earrings in total. She was around 5’8, caramel skin, green eyes, black hair, but with ginger roots and she didn’t look like someone you wanted to make eye-contact with on the subway.

Pretty underneath that black eye-liner and black lipstick, but scary.

“What the fuck, Mocha?” she asked eyeing me as if I was road-kill. “A snot-nosed private school, priss…?”

“Relax, Sia,” Mocha said in a voice as soothing as the chamomile tea my mom drank. “Kat here is …” She shook her head slowly, “her pussy ass step-daddy, he abuse her, Sia. All da time.”

Sia’s frown lessened.

“Likes to sticks his dick in her, Sia.”

“What?!” I was mortified by what Mocha had just said. That wasn’t true at all.

“Eh, Mocha, that is not …”

Mocha’s head snapped to look at me, the look on her face telling me to zip it.

I did and sipped on more Irish crème.

“Harry, dat’s his name, Sia. Pussy ass Hairy mudderfucking Harry dey call him.”

Where she got that from, I had no idea. Harry wasn’t hairy at all.

He was always impeccably dressed – clean shaven, slicked hair, with a cardigan around his shoulders that tied loosely in front. That kind of a guy.

“What?! The fucker!” Sia glared at me for a moment, fury flashing in her emerald eyes. She whipped out a blade from inside her boot and flicked it open, scaring the daylights out of me.

“You tell pussy ass hairy mudderfucking Harry that I will cuuut off dick, slice off his nuuuuts, punch fucking holes in him if he ever does that again, you hear me?”

As if Harry had done all those terrible things Mocha spoke of, I nodded meekly, mesmerized by the blade in Sia’s hands.

“If I ever see Hairy in the street, he best turn and run or I swear I gon punctuate the ma’fucker!”

Silently, I prayed that Harry never encountered Sia in the street so that she could never punctuate him.

Mocha the shit-stirrer, nodded her approval at Sia’s vow. “Das my homegurl.”

“Puncture,” I corrected.

They both looked at me.

“Punctuate is a verb,” I explained. “You use it to intersperse or interrupt a sentence or…”

“Gurl, you need a ’nother jug of tea,” Mocha said.

“Oh, okay. Did you have any green tea?”

“Sure,” she said as she threw different drinks into the beer glass, added coke and handed it to me. “Here’s yo green tea, Mocha’s version.”

“Oh, thank you so much,” I said as I accepted it.

So wound up was Sia about Harry, that she brought out a cigar. Except that it wasn’t a cigar, it was a blunt.

I had never smoked weed in my life, (let alone a cigarette) but in an attempt to fit in, I did what they did, I smoked it. It tasted like crap but I was too wasted to care.

Shortly thereafter, to their amusement and disgust, I vomited. Retched.

When I finally stumbled home hours later, I vomited some more on the road.

Then throughout the night, I hurled till my stomached burned, my head ached and my body shook. I was convinced that I was dying and vowed never to drink tea again, no matter which island it was from. Only coffee. Or maybe Mocha.

The next morning, I was shaking and dehydrated and wasn’t able to go to school.

Sia, Mocha and I became friends. I hung out with them all the time and was exposed to a world I didn’t know existed.

Their obtuse world, which I was rudely introduced to, was different, fascinating and dangerous at the same time. But as long as I stayed close to them, I was okay.

I hated weed, I decided, but of course, I never told anyone that.

It would have destroyed my new-found rep as a badass who imbibed in drugs and alcohol.

At the bus stop, I used to be pushed to the end of the queue by some mean girls name Jenny Coltier and Samantha Bailey. They used to bully me and make fun of me. I was a pushover so I didn’t nothing about it.

One day over a nice cup of tea in Mochas establishment, as she called it, I mentioned Jenny and Samantha.

“Is datafact?” Mocha asked as she sipped on her beer. “I got yo back,” she said.

I had no idea what she meant, but I liked the way it sounded.

The next afternoon, before I could get to the bus stop, Sia and Mocha were already there scaring the bejeebers out of the school kids.

“I don’t care how rich you bitches are,” Mocha said as she circled the terrified girls with a knife in her hand, “Kat here’s my homegurl and any of you hoes fuck wid her and I will beat yo ass, then stab you with dis.” She flicked her blade several times. “You feel me?”

“Yes,” all the girls murmured.

“That goes for you bitches too,” Sia said, waving her knife the boys looking on. “I will cut off your nuts and make a coin purse out of it. Don’t think I won’t, cos I just got out of Juvi.”

The kids at the bus stop were …kids, and they were shaking in the boots at the sight of these tattooed and pierced girls brandishing knives and threatening to stab them and cut out their family jewels.

“Now, who da fuck be Samantha and Jenny?” Mocha demanded.

About twenty hands pointed at Jenny and Samantha.

Mocha walked slowly up to them.

Jenny and Samantha held onto each other and began to tremble.

Mocha eyed them with narrow eyes. “I wid stab you both right now, jest like dat, but I don’t wanna get bitch on my knife,” she said.

“I’m ain’t worried ’bout that,” Sia said, her green eyes, blazing.

Both Jenny and Samantha started crying. Sobbing.

“Apologize to my homegurl,” Mocha said.

They did. Profusely.

After that incident, it was as if I belonged to the Mafia. Nobody fucked with me. I got a seat every time in the bus and I was always at the beginning of the queue. In fact, kids greeted me all the time without making eye-contact with me.

****

The one thing I had that they didn’t have was money – my mother was always generous with me, so I was able to provide money for the entertainment, which loosely interpreted was weed.

And booze at clubs.

They loved that about me and schooled me in the ways of the world. First lesson – how to roll Harry.

I was to nip into the room (when he was in the bathroom) and help myself to his wallet. Not all of it, but just some of it. Never take the largest note or the smallest note, just in-between. Take a mental snapshot of it before you pick it up, help yourself, then leave it exactly the way you found it.

Next lesson – how to crack open the safe at home.

“His daughter’s birthday,” Mocha said.

“His wedding anniversary,” Sia added.

“His ex-gurlfriend’s birthdate dat he can’t get over,” Mocha said.

“I don’t think Harry has one,” I said.

“Gurl, Hairy’s a lying, cheating ma’fucker and he’s porking someone else right now, trus’ me.”

“Okay,” I said, astounded that Mocha knew so much about Harry when she hadn’t even met him.

But they were right about the safe – after about seven attempts, I got it opened and helped myself to some of his cash. I never took anything belonging to my mother, just Harry. After all, he was a lying, cheating motherfucker who couldn’t get over his ex-girlfriend.

My favorite colors were pinks and peaches. And sometimes soft yellow. Oh, and beige. And white. Sometimes a mother-of pearl white.

Now my favorite color was black.

Actually, I didn’t really like black – made me look like I was from the Addams’s Family, but hey, to conform, I caved – black tights, black top, black shoes, black lipstick and black nail polish. Just like Sia, minus the tattoos and piercings.

Once when I was really tipsy, I allowed Mocha to pierce my ears with a sewing needle and cotton. (Yes, my ears weren’t even pieced, much to the amusement of my friends.)

I fainted when I saw the blood, but when I came around, I felt cool. As cool as Christina Aguilera in her Dirty video and for a while, I didn’t walk, I strutted.

Talking about music, Mocha looked at me listening to my iPod and frowned, “Gurl, whachu listenin’ to?”

“Eh, Brittany.”

“Say dat a…gain,” she said in a tone that made me hesitate to repeat what I just said.

“I said, I …was listening to Hit me Baby One …”

She leapt up and clamped her hand over my mouth. “Gurl,” she whispered, her eyes darting around the room, “you listen to music like dat and dey gon’ beat yo ass. Why you say dat? Huh?”

“Say …what?”

“’Sup?” Sia asked from across the room.

Mocha removed her hand from my mouth, turned to Sia, dropped her voice and pointed to my iPod. “Brittany. Can you believe it?”

“Nasssssty!” Sia said, shaking her head.

“But…but…it’s Brittany Bitch!” I pointed out.

“Gurl, she ain’t no bitch. She in da Mickey Mouse Club – Mousketeer! She ain’t never gon be a bitch.”

“O …kay.” I scrolled down my iPod. “Genie in a Bottle? Christina…?”

She shook her head. “Mouse…ke…teer.”

I scratched my head.

“Put some Eve and …lil Kim and …and TLC…”

“Okay.” I never heard of most of these singers. “Destiny’s Child?”

“Nah, nah, not Destiny’s Child, but maybe Kelly Rowland! Work with Missy Elliot? Dat one.”

I didn’t know that song, but I said, “Sure.”

“Hey, can I keep Pink? I know she’s white and all, but she’s pretty bad. She’s got tats and piercings …”

They conferred for a moment and I heard the words Family Portrait and finally they turned to me and nodded.

My smile was one of relief.

“And put some Fifty Cents in there too, cos …” Mocha looked at Sia.

“…He a mudder fuckin’ P.I.M.P!” they chorused.

So out went Brittany Spears and Christina Aguilera and No Doubt, and in came G-Unit, Missy, Ciara, Lil Kim, Tupac and a whole lot of rap. I just hoped my mother didn’t get a hold of my iPod. Somehow, I knew she’d be very disappointed if she listened to the lyrics.

I felt really bad now – Michael Jackson bad and I loved it.

Wanting to appear even more hip, I bought a batch of fake tattoos and whenever I went out with the Sia and Mocha, I plastered them all over me.

Both of them laughed at me, but, having no choice, I confessed that I hated needles and couldn’t stand the idea of one on my skin.

I think that because of the steady stream of dough I provided, they didn’t tell anyone my secret but just sniggered behind my back.

I loved being with Mocha and Sia. In spite of them getting drunk every night and smoking weed and skipping school and getting into fights with other girls, life was always entertaining.

Sia had spent a year in Juvenile Hall a few years ago. Apparently, she knifed one of her mother’s boyfriends who wanted to tuck her in at night, if you know what I mean.

That was why she was so sensitive to my plight – the plight about Harry that Mocha had manufactured.

Sia was a quiet one – she loved to get high. She lived for that. She just wanted to get high all the time and often, it was as if she wasn’t in the room with us.

I didn’t need to get drunk and high to have fun, I was just happy to be with people who wanted me around and who didn’t make fun of me and treat me like crap.

Mocha, although she was sixteen, and just five months older than me, slept around with anyone and everyone.

She thought like a guy and wanted to just score, fuck any guy and then say, “See dat ass, been there, done dat.”

She dressed like a slut – the tiniest skirts and the skimpiest tops, even though she was chubby and spilled out of her clothes. She had amazing confidence when it came to her body and always believed that hers was the best in the world. In her mind, everybody wanted a piece of her ass.

Later on I found out that had been abused when she was a toddler, but she never talked about it. As young as I was, I figured that her tough-chick exterior was simply a defense mechanism.

Getting out of the house at night became a problem. Not to Sia and Mocha – they just taught me to how to creep out at night through my bedroom window. How to keep a screwdriver under a shrub in case I needed to break into the house.

Because of that, I was able to attend to a number of wild parties at night with them, where I hung out with bikers, druggies and ex-cons. At first I was really scared of these men and women, who used the foulest of language, drank till they passed out on the floor, threated to knife each other for disagreeing about a thing as simple as to who was the original singer of Wild Thing.

But Mocha shoplifted me a penknife and together, she and Sia showed me how to use it if the situation arose.

“Don’t forget now, you must hold it like this when you flick it.” She turned to Sia to demonstrate, “And look here,” she waved two fingers in front of her eyes.

Sitting on both my hands, I paid careful attention.

She held out the knife, her eyes bulging, her face twisted in a snarl as she slowly skirted Sia. “You wanna FUCK wid me, ma’fucker? Huh? HUH?”

“Nah, nah, nah!” Sia said in scared voice. “I’m sorry, man. Don’t cut me, man!”

“See?” Mocha said, her face returning to normal. “Like that.”

“And say things like, ‘I gon’ slice off yo nuts, ma’fucker!’ See dudes don’ like it when gurls talk ’bout cutting off der nuts or dicks. Not even in a joke. Dey keep’away from you cos dey think you’re …” She whistled as she twirled her finger next to her temple.

“But you have to practice,” Sia said as I was leaving. “In front of the mirror.”

“Okay, I’ve got it,” I said accepting the knife from Mocha and trembling with excitement over my new toy. I had barely ever used a knife, except maybe to