In the house in your aunt’s presence resolutely not looking at you. At mealtimes scarcely acknowledging you where once he’d been at least civil, friendly. Now stiffly polite, grimacing. Lowering his head as he eats noisily masticating his food.

And then, when your aunt isn’t close by, openly staring at you. Tongue protruding on his lower lip. Glistening smile.

Dirty girl. Think I don’t know you!

Coarse flushed face. Swollen nose riddled with broken capillaries.

Gradually, since Sandman. Since the arrest, headlines in local papers.

Gradually over the past year your uncle (in-law) Oscar Allyn has begun to stay away from the house weekday evenings. Returning late from work. Missing meals without calling your aunt beforehand.

Aunt Irma is acutely aware of this change. Baffled, hurt. They’ve been married for so long!—twenty-six years. Difficult for her to believe that the mild-mannered reliable/responsible husband she’d believed she knew so well is becoming a different person.

On the stairs, in the upstairs hall as he passes, breathing audibly, not minding if you hear, trailing a hand across your back—just a touch! Small of your back—phantom touch. That look in his (heated) face. Quickness in suet-colored eyes like flies alighting on something rotted and delicious.

In your room, on your bed, when you return after school, to your surprise/shock a magazine with a naked, big-breasted blond woman on its cover—Hot Eye Kandy.

(Quickly you dispose of the magazine. Do not page through it to see what Oscar has marked for your particular attention.)

Your textbooks, library books, Oscar seems to have leafed through, underlining isolated and seemingly random words in red pencil, in an indecipherable code. Even your math text.

You have begun to be afraid of him. Your uncle (in-law) who’d been so taciturn, courteous, not very engaged with you but friendly enough, for years.

That look of sick yearning. And resentment, anger beneath.

The slack lips. Wet smile. Meat-smile.

Letting his shirt fall open—exposing the rounded, fatty stomach covered in hairs. Matted hair on his chest, rosy nipples.

Male nipples! You’d wanted to laugh wildly.

Pushes open the bathroom door you think you have locked—(has Oscar tinkered with the lock?)—desperately you try to cover yourself with a towel—“Go away! Leave me alone! I hate you.”

Red-faced the uncle-in-law mutters his lame apology—Sorry. Quickly backed away guessing this time he has gone too far.

As you have gone too far, past a point of no return. Instead of shrinking away in silence loudly crying I hate you.

AND NOW, NO TURNING BACK.

Thinking it has to be your fault. It is you, not Oscar Allyn.

Your fault, your aunt’s husband has so altered. This past year. Now that you are seventeen and “older”—not a child. Those months since Arnold Sandman was exposed in the papers and people had spoken of little else reacting with shock, disgust.

That girl! How could she . . .