Forget It

I am the son and the heir
Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
I’m the son and heir
Of nothing in particular

You shut your mouth, how can you say
I go about things the wrong way
I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does
--Love Spit Love, How Soon Is Now

I don’t want to be white trash anymore. I don’t want to be seen as the girl that jerk Chris Hooker laid and dumped – ever again! I don’t want to be poor. I don’t want my stepfather in my life again, either.

Wearing an Aisan silk bathrobe, Nancy Downs was sitting on her bed, her dark eyes holding nothing but contempt – contempt for everything in her life.

Her mother, she knew, was an alcoholic. All too often Nancy had seen her mother stumble around inside the trailer, drunk. She could smell the whiskey on her mother’s breath, and she disliked her for it as well.

Her stepfather, Ray, was a different story altogether. Nancy disliked him with a passion as well – a hot, burning passion, to be exact. Once, she thought there was nobody like Ray – lecherous, evil, and a bastard to boot.

This time, she knew she was right about that.

“I gave you money. You told me you paid the bill. You can’t pay a bill? What are you good for?”

“You know what I’m good for.”

Great. After that kind of speech, the last thing she wanted to hear was them having intercourse. It was disgusting, in her point of view. She didn’t like it, not one bit.

Mommie Dearest and Stepdaddy Dearest, she thought wryly. Sort of makes a so-called ‛perfect’ idea for what I’d call ‛My So-Called Trailer Trash Life’.

Nancy shook her head to rid herself of almost every one of those thoughts. The ‛My So-Called Trailer Trash Life’, however, sounded quite oddly a good description for her home life, anyway.

If only I can invoke the spirit of Manon.... then everything would change for me, and in a good way, I mean. Things would be different. I would be OK, for one thing. I would be rich, and live in a palace of some sort, and all of these problems of mine would be over. I wouldn’t have to wake up in the middle of the night from feeling that bastard’s hands all over my skin... his fingers crawling over my flesh like bugs and making it tingle all over...

Again Nancy shook her head as though to rid herself of all those thoughts, now different. She shuddered all over at the images the thoughts had conjured up in a spell-like fashion. Her hands clenched into fists, and she was barely able to keep the anger deep down inside her.

She disliked – no, hated – them with a passion. Her mother, her stepfather. They would all feel her rage, her anger. They would feel the exact same way she had all too often felt when she would suffer abuse.

Now, she felt, was the time when she would show them she wasn’t to be pushed around anymore...