Kylie listens in fear to the doorknob being jostled. She knows it’s her father trying to get in. She expects to hear the sound of breaking glass at any moment. She inches up cautiously to a window, staying low below the bottom edge, and carefully rises up just high enough to peak out. She needs to see, to know where he is. She is terrified he might see her.
He tries the front door first, and then moves around the house. He tries a side window.
Kylie skulks through the house, following him around. She almost steps into a bedroom doorway, catching the dark motion at the window barely in time and darting back, pressing herself against the wall. Her heart is pounding so hard in her chest it feels like it’s going to come right through her rib cage and out through her chest.
His face is pressed against the window, looking in. He moves on to the back of the house.
Kylie sneaks into the bedroom and looks out, trying to see where he went. She moves on, following him to the back of the house, going into the kitchen now. She wants more than anything to look out and see what he is doing, but is terrified he will see her.
“Please don’t let him know I’m home,” she pleads silently. “He hasn’t tried yelling through the door and pounding on it, so maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe he thinks the house is empty.” She crouches against the back door, below the window level, listening.
She can hear him out there, tipping things over, letting them fall, while he searches for a hidden key. She almost jumps and screams at the sudden shaking of the back door when he tries to open it, rattling the doorknob and shaking the door in its frame.
Kylie fights the tears, trembling, and holding her hands tight over her mouth to keep her whimpers from being heard on the other side of the door.
The rattling-shaking of the door stops. She can hear him muttering, but not what he is saying. He walks off, back around the house, trying another window.
Kylie scrambles away from the back door, staying low, peeking around a bedroom doorframe before scampering past the open doorway. She sees the dark shape of his form moving past and scampers into the room, ducking beneath the window.
She breathes deeply, holds her breath, and slowly rises up to peek cautiously out the window. She just catches her father moving out of sight, continuing on to the front.
Kylie scampers through the house to the front. She slips into the living room, staying down and against the wall, inching to the front window. She rises up against the wall beside the window where she is hidden by the partially open curtain, peaking through the small crack between the curtain and window frame.
She holds her breath, watching him walk away and get back in his car. He turns his head and looks back at the house, and just for a few heartbeats Kylie is positive he sees her, that he is staring at her. Then he starts his car and drives away.
She feels sick with fear and weak with relief. She sinks to the floor and sits there sobbing.
“I wish I was dead. I wish I was never even born, that I never even existed,” she whimpers miserably.
After that, Kylie sits in a dark corner waiting for her mother to come home, scared her father will return and break into the house. It feels like time has stopped and will never move again while she endlessly waits.
“I’m going to have to explain to Mom how I lost my coat and boots,” she moans. “I have another hat and mitts I can wear. They’re old and worn out, and Mom fixed the mitts a few times, but that was my only coat and boots for winter. What am I going to wear tomorrow?”
Kylie is startled by a sound at the door. She freezes; her stomach knotting and her heart pounding hard in her chest and feeling like it skipped a beat. “Is he back?” She is terrified.
Relief floods Kylie when she hears the familiar jingle of the way her mother always jingles her keys just before she unlocks the door, followed immediately as the door opens by her mother’s voice calling her and her younger sister’s babbling mid-sentence about what she did today.
“Kylie, what are your coat and boots doing on the front step?” her mother calls out as she comes in the house.
Kylie is confused. “Coat? Boots?”
She gets to her feet and goes to see what her mother is talking about. She stops, staring in confusion at the clothes her mother is holding out to her. “I can’t believe it,” she thinks numbly, “there is no way any of those girls would have brought back my clothes. So how did they get there?”
“Well?” her mother insists impatiently. “Why are they on the front steps?”
“I don’t know,” Kylie says, staring in wide-eyed confusion at the bundle that is her coat wrapped around her boots and stuff. Tears pop to her eyes. She can’t hold them back.
“How did they get there?” she thinks wildly. “Did he leave them? But, if Dad left them, that means he was following me. He followed me to the park, watched them beat me up and take my stuff, and he did nothing. Nothing to help. He left me walking home like that. No, even Dad wouldn’t just watch and do nothing, would he? Would he leave me to maybe die walking home in this cold? No, I don’t think he would. Then who? How?”
Seeing her distraught look and her red swollen eyes, her mother knows immediately that something is wrong.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, concerned.
Kylie looks up at her mother, her face twisted with all the fear and sadness she has been feeling for the past few hours and it all pours out about being beaten up at the park, how her coat tore, and the three girls stealing her clothes and leaving her to walk home without them in the cold. She chokes on her tears and stumbles over the words when she starts telling her mom about her dad trying to get into the house.
Her mother listens, horrified. She is more upset about her ex-husband coming to the house than about the girls in the park, but she can deal with only one of the problems.
“We’ll go to the girls’ houses and talk to their parents,” she says.
“No!” Kylie is stricken by the idea. “That will only make them bully me worse!”
“We can’t just let them get away with this,” her mother insists. “And, they left you without a coat or boots in this cold? Something has to be done about it!”
“Please mom, no,” Kylie begs. “Don’t you remember the last time? Their mothers believed them, not us. They wouldn’t believe those girls were bullying. They were even worse to me for months after!”
Her mother looks at her, taking in the strain and fear no mother wants to see in her daughter’s eyes, and realises she’s right. Saying anything will only make things worse for Kylie at school.
When she had confronted the girls’ parents before they had sided with the girls, believing their story and saying Kylie made it all up and that she was the bully. The bullying did get worse after that. When she complained to the school, the principal pretended to sympathize and promised to talk to the girls and did nothing about it. But she could tell the principal believed the three girls stories that Kylie made it all up.
“I wish I could pull her out of that school and send her somewhere else,” she thinks unhappily, “but how would she get to school? The other schools she could go to are full and wouldn’t take her when I tried. We would have to move and I just don’t have the money for that.”
She sighs, feeling helpless to protect her daughter.
“Well, let’s take a look at that coat,” she finally says, closing the discussion about dealing with the bullies. She is relieved because she doesn’t have to deal with a confrontation with the other girls’ parents. But she still has the bigger problem, keeping them safe from her ex-husband.
One thought just doesn’t fit, however. She cannot reconcile how the coat and boots ended up on the front steps.
“Kylie, if those girls took your coat and boots then how did they end up on the steps?”
“I don’t know,” Kylie says miserably. “I guess someone must have seen what happened.”
“And they did nothing to help?”
“They brought my stuff back at least.”
Kylie’s mother frowns, not satisfied with that explanation. She unrolls the coat and together they look for the tears. It won’t look very good, but it will have to be mended so Kylie can wear it to school tomorrow.
THE LATCHKEY KIDS IS AVAILABLE ON KINDLE AND IN PAPERBACK ON AMAZON
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