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the table. My father’s brown pajamas with the frayed cuff, and my mother’s calves poking out from under her nightgown. Her feet are bare, her ankles crossed.
    My mom is pleading, please let him stay, he’s your son, flesh and blood. Whatever. I know I’m out; I’ve done the unthinkable—I fought back. Next time, I might win.
    I put my hand to my head and feel the stick of blood. I try not to groan, but the sound escapes.
    “I’ll go,” I say. My voice is clear.
    He grabs my elbow and hauls me to my feet. The ceiling lights slide down the walls and blur on the table. Where is the floor? I grab the counter and try to let my stomach catch up. I blink. He shoves something into my hands—my camera bag.
    “Walter, no. He can barely stand.”
    He grabs my arm again and pulls me toward the front door, through the dining room—my last look at our glass table; through the living room—last look at the big couch that I liked to nap on; through the foyer, where I yank away from him so I can walk out under my own power.
    “I need my keys,” I say.
    “Get out.”
    “Keys, Dad. Keys.”
    When he starts to reach for me again, I step over the threshold on my own. The September air immediately makes my skin break out in goose bumps.
    “Mom! Need my keys!” I yell around him before he slams the door.
    Forehead cuts are gushers. The blood, which flowed down the side of my head into my hair when I was on the floor, has rerouted its course, and I have to brush it off my eyebrow. I walk around the side of the house to my car.
    The car door is locked.
    I cross my arms, rub them, and stand, stumped, until I remember the extra set of keys in my camera bag. My mom insisted on it. And that almost undoes me, that little gesture. I want to cradle my head in my hands and sit down and bawl, but my dad has already gotten enough out of me. I dig my keys out and start the car.
    The blue dashboard lights glow contentedly, as if nothing has changed, as if tomorrow I would wake up here, go back to my school, see Lauren, and shoot soccer balls with Edward. A door slams, and my mother hurries to the car. She stands on the passenger side in the circle of light under the streetlamp. I can’t see a mark on her from earlier tonight. My dad’s that good.
    I roll down the passenger window. She leans in and hands me an envelope and my keys.
    I put my keys on the seat and find a stack of bills—ones and fives—in the envelope.
    “Did he give you this?” I ask.
    She shakes her head. “I keep some hidden in a tampons box in our bathroom.”
    I nod. All this time, she’s been squirreling away change, small bills that would go unmissed; she has learned from her mistake, from the last time we tried to leave and she made that large withdrawal that brought him home before we got out.
    “Go. He will help you.”
    For a second, I think that she’s referring to the Almighty, but her eyes are fixed on the envelope. I push it toward the light and see an address, but no name. I look at her, confused.
    “Christian,” she whispers.
    I stop breathing. “Where did you get this?”
    “He sent it to me,” she says, and flushes. “Go to him.”
    “Come with me,” I say. “Come on. Get in.”
    I reach across the seats and pull the latch so the door opens. She leans against the door, pushing it closed. Her eyes brighten with tears. She blinks them out, and they go shining down her face.
    “Go,” she says, “and I’ll come to you.”
    I want to ask her when—before he takes her to Orchestra Hall, before they spend a dinner at Russian Tea Time and a weekend at the Drake, or after the next beating, when the cycle starts over again. I know my dad’s fuse is only two months long, at best. So as I’m about to say “within the month,” my dad comes out of the house, his bathrobe tied tight around his hips.
    He slams the door, then glances over his shoulder at the light in Professor Coe’s study next door. Paranoid-at-all-hours Prof Coe moves to the