Chapter 7
Evil

My Monday morning started at the football field. Official practices were only a couple weeks away, so the turnout was improving. We had full teams—eleven-on-eleven plus some subs. It felt like someone was watching me the whole time even though Coach’s truck never showed. The constant pulling on my chest distracted me, and I didn’t play well. It was a frustrating morning.

Luiz dropped me at home afterward. We made plans to find some trouble to get into later with the other jeeks, and he took off. I walked into the house and knew something was wrong. If my muscles had slightly trembled Saturday at the Jordanelle Reservoir, they were downright crawling now.

Am I sensing . . . evil?

As I walked upstairs, I could hear my mom’s muffled curses at John over the hum of running water in the background. The water came from the bathroom in the hall, not the master. Sis must be awake and showering. Mom and John fight all the time, but it seemed different today. John wasn’t really fighting back, which was way out of character. Also, my mom should have been at work.

“Keep your dirty mind in your den, you filthy—” my mom continued on cursing at him viciously but keeping her voice down. “I spill coffee on my shirt,” Mom continued in a low growl, “and I come home to this. If I ever catch you looking through that hole again, I’ll report you, and we both know that between my call and what’s on your computer, you’ll go to jail.”

Looking through what hole? I wondered.

I heard the shower turn off, and Mom stopped talking abruptly. Normally, I fled from their yelling matches, but this one drew me in. My mom started talking again even more softly but her voice still growled at John, making it just loud enough that I could hear her from right outside their bedroom door.

“If anyone ever found out the kind of filthy Peeping Tom you are—” She rattled off a few more expletives, all directed at John. Then there was another two seconds of silence before she spoke again. “We won’t tell anyone,” she snapped. “It never happened.”

Oh!

John had been caught looking through a hole in the wall—from the master bathroom to ours—while my sister showered.

I froze in place.

At that moment, Mom and John both stepped out of the master bathroom and into view of the hallway where I stood like a statue staring into their bedroom. My mom flinched when she saw me, and she stopped breathing, her mouth hanging open. She composed herself, walked to the closet, and pulled a shirt from a hanger. Then she started walking toward me.

“Don’t you mention a word of this to Justine,” Mom growled through clenched teeth and pointed at my nose. “I have to get to work,” she spit the words out as she slid out the doorway past me. I listened to her walk downstairs and go outside. The car started and drove away. I turned back to John. His upper lip twitched up in disgust—whether disgusted at what he’d done or just disgusted at getting caught, I’d never know. He started toward me too.

“Listen to your mother.” He frowned all the way down to his double chin as he walked passed me. I listened to his loud footsteps as he headed downstairs. Then I heard a door close. He’d locked himself in his den.

My mom was going to bury this. She wanted to pretend it never happened—just like her rape. She should know by now that bad things don’t unhappen. I was her proof of that. Every muscle tensed up inside me, fueled by hate toward John for what he had done and anger toward my mom for wanting to bury it. Too late, my fists clenched. I should have punched John while he was still in the room. Instead, I had done nothing. I didn’t move for several minutes. The blow dryer turned on in the bathroom, pulling me out of my daze. I finally stepped toward our bathroom and knocked.

“Jake, is that you?” Sis yelled over the blow dryer.

“Yeah,” I managed.

The blow dryer turned off, and she opened the door—a pink towel wrapped around her. Only a small section of her blond hair was dry. Images of John watching her forced their way into my mind—my muscles crawled under my skin again. My sister was completely unaware of what had just transpired. I should have told her, but my mouth remained shut. She smiled at me. The smile made me feel even guiltier for not punching him—or telling her what he’d done.

“I’ll blow dry in my room,” she offered, crinkling her nose at me. My grass-stained tank top clung to my still-sweaty chest. I’d just returned from football and did need a shower, but I was too distracted to even think about that. I opened my mouth to tell her what had just happened. I wanted to tell her she had just been violated, that this house was not a safe place for her anymore. My mouth started moving.

“Thanks,” it was all I could say.

She unplugged her blow dryer and grabbed a few things and carried them to her room.

My stomach turned like I was about to throw up, but it didn’t happen. That was the closest I’d ever come to throwing up since . . . well, I couldn’t remember ever throwing up. I stood just inside the bathroom door for some time before I finally moved to the shower.

As I looked at the bathroom, I realized the state of disrepair it was in. Besides cracked paint and moldy corners, the drywall had a couple fist-sized holes that had been there as long as I could remember. I had a vague memory of John trying to fix a pipe back when I was just a kid. But the holes were only in the sheetrock on our side of the wall. I didn’t remember being able to see all the way through to Mom and John’s bathroom or surely we would have patched them by now. I examined the holes closely. There were holes on the other side but they were just small, nail-sized holes. But then I remembered the pinhole camera we’d made in science class a few years back. Just like a pinhole camera, nobody could see through the tiny holes unless they were in Mom and John’s bathroom and put an eye right up next to one. I wondered how long the nail holes had been there.

Oh, crap! John probably hadn’t been caught on his first offense. The muscles under my skin crawled even more.

As I showered, a numbness took over and swelled up from somewhere inside me, pushing away the crawling under my skin. I finished up and went to my room and dressed. The need to protect my sister took control of me. I thought about running away with her, but I had nowhere to go, and she was barely sixteen. Maybe if she was almost eighteen like me that would work.

I could fix the wall.

I latched onto that thought. I grabbed my backpack, walked out the door, jumped on my bicycle, and rode for three miles until I reached the nearest home improvement store. I spent every spare dollar I had on stuff to mud and paint the bathroom. I fit most everything into my backpack—except the paint can. Riding back with a heavy paint can hanging from one handlebar was awkward. It fell to the ground twice and dented before I finally made it home.

The house was eerily silent. My sister had gone to her friend Kendra’s house, and John was hiding in the den, so I didn’t have to explain the paint to anyone. Without waiting, I got started. I wasn’t very good at patching the drywall. I couldn’t get the mud to smooth out, but I didn’t care, I just slapped more on. The mud was supposed to dry for over twenty-four hours, but I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow, so I went to my sisters room and retrieved her hair dryer and rigged it to blow on the splotches of mud, then I moved everything I could out of the bathroom. The waiting was killing me, so I went to the master bathroom and patched similar holes.

It took me a couple of hours to get everything that wasn’t supposed to be painted taped up and protected. I didn’t have enough plastic, so I used some trash bags to finish covering some edges. Another hour later I gave up waiting for the mud to dry and painted the first coat in our bathroom. After that, I painted the first coat in my parents’ master bathroom.

One coat looked crappy, but I didn’t have any more paint or any more money. I don’t know where I got the courage, but I walked into John’s den without knocking. He was at his computer, and he quickly minimized whatever had been on his screen. His desk was a pile of papers and junk food wrappers that he hadn’t thrown away. I had to step over a few things to approach him.

“I need two hundred dollars.” I impressed myself by not allowing my voice to waiver in the slightest.

He swiveled in his computer chair and gave me the eye like he was going to tell me where I could shove my request. But his eyes shifted from my face and he took in the splotches of white paint all over me. It was hard to tell with his double chin, but I think he gulped. Maybe he was nervous I’d turn him in.

He turned back to his desk and opened the top left drawer. He rifled through it before pulling out a checkbook and a pen. He wrote me a check right then and there. The creep didn’t say a word. He just handed me the check and swiveled his chair, turning his back to me. I should have asked for more.

A little over an hour later, I was back home with enough paint for two more coats. I immediately put the second coat on. I didn’t want to wait hours for the paint to dry, so I used the blow dryer again, this time by hand, moving it up and down the walls. Unfortunately, I started smelling the blow dryer overheating, and shortly after, it suddenly stopped. I had to go searching but I found a desk fan in the pile of junk that took up one spot in our garage. I plugged it in and held it up, letting it blow against the wet paint.

Driven by the need to protect my sister, I didn’t care about the tediousness of the work. I kept at it for hours. It was the only way I could cope with not punching John and not telling my sister. I felt dirty. I questioned my lack of action because it made me feel like an accomplice.

I’d just started the last coat of paint when the floor creaked. I looked out of the bathroom, paint roller in hand. My sister appeared in the doorway.

“Jake?”

I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it. My mind wanted to say this: “I had to fix the holes in the drywall because your creepy stepfather gets his jollies by watching you shower.” However, my mouth fumbled and didn’t really say what my mind thought. Instead, only one word came out.

“Hey.”

It’s a good thing I didn’t say anything else because Kendra stepped into the doorway next to Sis. I couldn’t help but glance at Kendra’s blue eyes and long golden brown hair. She was about four inches taller than my sister and almost just as thin. It dawned on me that she had stayed the night here dozens of times over the past few years. How many times had she used the shower? Had John ever . . .

I’ll kill him. I squeezed the handle of the paint roller until my knuckles went white.

“I didn’t know you were planning on painting our bathroom today.” Sis actually pouted her lips a little like she used to do when we were kids. “You didn’t even let me pick the paint.”

My mouth fell open. John had been watching her naked in the shower for who knows how long, and she was worried about the color of paint. The plastic handle to the paint roller cracked in my hand and I felt it cut into me. It wasn’t her fault; she didn’t even know. I was the jerk who wasn’t telling her.

“Sorry,” I managed.

“No worries,” she conceded. “It looks great anyway. Doesn’t it Kendra?”

“I like the shade of white you picked,” Kendra spoke up, the sound of her voice shattering my numbness. “Get his picture with your phone,” Kendra laughed. “You should see yourself, Jake.”

I glanced in the mirror. My hair, my face, my shirt—everywhere was covered in white dots of paint. Click. I heard Sis’s phone snap my picture.

“Mom’s home,” Sis added. “She’s cooking dinner, and it’s a Monday. She never cooks on Mondays.”

My reply was nothing more than a grunt. If Sis or Kendra noticed something was wrong with my mood, they didn’t say anything. They just continued on to Sis’s room.

“You have to send me that picture,” I heard Kendra say.

I skipped dinner and kept working. Mom saw what I was doing and decided to avoid me and just let me do it. Luiz called. He was with the other jeeks, but I blew them off. I couldn’t get the thought of what John did out of my mind. Nobody wanted to have the image of their sister naked running through their head all day, let alone deal with the added creepiness of a peeping stepdad. My muscles writhed under my skin with a renewed frenzy, and I wanted to scrape out the evil that caused it.

It was midnight before I finished the bathrooms. As I scored the tape with a box cutter and pulled it off, I realized what I’d accomplished. I had patched the holes and put three coats of paint on both bathroom walls. I could see a few paint drips in the corners where I’d used too much paint. Brush lines were visible where I’d tried to paint behind the toilet. I’m sure a professional painter would say I’d done a terrible job. Still, it was a huge improvement on how it looked before.

As I stepped in the hall, the silence of the house settled over me. I walked downstairs. The lights were off. A blanket covered a body on the couch. It was Mom. She had probably slept there to avoid interrupting my work. I decided against trying to wake her.

Light escaped the edges of the door to the den. It seemed John was still hiding out in there. Sis, who had gone out with Kendra and some other friends, was due back at any time.

The urge to protect my sister still possessed me, though, and as much as I had done, it didn’t feel like enough. I needed to do more.

I felt driven back upstairs, past my room, and into my sister’s bedroom. She was vulnerable there too. I looked at every wall, in every corner. No holes in the drywall. Nothing that John could use to spy on her. I turned the light on in her closet and checked every inch of it. I breathed a sigh of relief. It was stupid of me to look in her room. Two walls were exterior walls, one separated her room and mine, and the other was partially the linen closet and the hallway. I just hadn’t thought it through.

“What are you doing in my closet?”

I jumped. I hadn’t heard Sis come in.

“I . . . uh . . . I’m thinking of cross dressing,” I tried to make a joke to deflect her curiosity, but my voice—which came out flat—wasn’t really in it.

She eyed me as she walked toward me. She stopped just inches from me, reached her hand past me into the closet, and lifted out a dress. She held it up to me. “Jake, you’re over six feet and two hundred pounds. I’m five-two and a hundred and fifteen pounds. It would get shredded,” she laughed.

I didn’t laugh back. I couldn’t. The compulsion to protect her overwhelmed me and took hold of my mouth.

“Be careful of John from now on,” the words finally came out. “Never be alone with him again. Ever.” The guilt flowed out of me with each word.

Sis froze. Her eyes seemed to fixate on my paint-spattered body, then they slowly dropped to the floor. It didn’t take a jeek to figure out why I’d patched and painted the bathrooms. She crossed her arms over her body defensively. I watched her eyes dampen. I wanted to say more, but I didn’t want to talk about it. Just seeing her made me think of what John had done, which led to mental images, which made me want to get away from her as soon as possible, which sucked because she needed a hug, and I couldn’t give it to her.

I walked to my room and closed the door.