They administered a rape kit, though Veronica tried to deny that a rape could have occurred. She was angrier than ever, but at Tonya. She wanted to believe that her daughter brought this on herself and her household. She also wondered, Where the hell was Pete?

Veronica checked Tonya out of the hospital, but it took a whole lot of talking to convince the doctors that she was actually going to the police. Veronica and Tonya spent the following days avoiding each other as much as they could. Each stayed behind the closed door of their bedrooms or the bathroom. Tonya longed for her mother to say something or to touch her. Veronica’s ego wouldn’t allow her to be a mother and do what she could to make things right for her child.

Months later, Tonya came home from school and thought her home had been burglarized. The apartment was empty. It wasn’t until she saw that everything was gone except her clothes that it occurred to her that her mother had moved out. There was no note, no forwarding address left for Tonya. She was on her own.

TONYA WOULD HAVE FIRST GONE to her grandmother but she had died. So she bounced around from family member to family member for months, looking for a stable home. She found no takers. Her mother had dragged her name through the mud, ruining the girl’s reputation with their family. She told the story of how her household was broken and made Tonya the villain.

Tonya’s aunts and female cousins saw her as a threat to their own happy homes and relationships. To them, she was just another hot freak. If she did it with her own mother’s man, then she’d do it to anybody’s, they reasoned. In the absence of her maternal grandmother, there was no one left to give any motherly guidance and love.

Her uncles and male cousins became predators, trying to get in her pants every chance they got. They wanted to believe the rumors about her being a freak. They even propositioned her with money.

Tonya rode the L train back and forth, as much as she could. Otherwise, she would catch a few z’s at the Greyhound bus station, until she was run out of there. Wherever she could get some shut-eye, in peace, she laid her head. She ate at soup kitchens with total strangers. Then she began to trade food and shelter for sexual favors.

The neighborhood boys began passing her around, sneaking Tonya into their bedrooms late at night, feeding her, having sex with her, and getting rid of her by morning. Having sex brought back the rape and her mother’s sudden departure every time she did it. Pete and her mother took her innocence, shattered her heart and threw her away.

“TONYA, DANCE FA ME,” Todd said as he sat back on the bed.