“Monica Anne Preston!”
Mike didn’t go with Travis and James to wherever the hell they had planned but instead he came home an hour later. I heard the truck pull into the driveway along with the slam of a single door and the violent entry he made into the house.

I had locked my door after I came home and he slammed his hand on it.
“What the hell was that for!”

I didn’t answer as he continued to bang his fists into the wood. Fortunately, it was a solid door and my brother’s ability to slam it open would be met with an equal and opposite reaction from Dad.
“Thanks for being a bitch!”
I refused to open the door.
“I’m telling Mom and Dad everything.
“Then so will I.”
“Dammit, Monica! Why in hell?”

I ran to the door unlocked it, and threw it open. “It’s your ‘friends’, Micheal,” I said, using air quotes.
“You hate them. What a shock.”
“You should too. Do you see that everyone on that team are like, assholes?”
“For what? Being a guy?”
That comment alone was a good indicator that I was on the right track with rooting for the other team.

“Okay, do you have any idea on how the girl, guy thing works?” Mike had the audacity to ask and I held onto my next to pissed-off look. “Guys sometimes have problems with reading emotions.”
“I think I conveyed my emotions quite well. Perhaps I should have slapped or punched him?”
“He was just tying to get your attention.”
“So what’s it going to take for you to see that what he did was-.”
“Okay, it was inappropriate.”
Not the word I was looking for, but I was fourteen at the time and hadn’t yet thought of the term serial-pedo-rapist-in-training.

“Do you want me to throw him into the river? Maybe, drag him down the ‘M’?”
The ‘M’ was a large letter “M” near the interstate and as much as I thought that it would be funny to see the scene Mike would have to do to the same thing to himself.
I shook my head and pointed at the door.
“Of course, your majesty.”

Mike left the room without saying an apology and without any anger toward James at all. Did that kind of scare me? No, not at the time. I could only wring my hands and hope to not have bother with his friends over the summer.

Wouldn’t be too much of an issue with the exception of Travis who would sometimes come to the house and stay over the weekend—usually when Mike had an off weekend with whatever girl. Travis would come home with him after school or practice on a Friday and he would be there until Monday. I had two options I could take: lock myself in my room except to eat or go to the bathroom or stay over with Casey or Melissa.

Travis came to the house two hours later so I turned the lock on my door and spent my first school free weekend writing depressing poetry in yellow ink so it was hard for anyone else to read and easy to scribble over with a large permanent marker.
I had several notebooks filled with blackened-out pages of poems and wandering thoughts. Lines upon lines about finding that one person for myself; that opposite soul who could look past the superficial see the cowering and shy girl within. She didn’t have to look like anyone in particular nor have to agree with everything I said—actually I would love the challenge of the debate if she fought against me and disarmed me of my weapon of choice, sarcasm, by being greater at it.

So, yeah, I had a few missives about her and each one was scrubbed; sometimes I’d feel light-headed from the fumes of my marker as I wiped out the ode to the dream child I could never meet in Missoula