If he wishes he will push open the door. If there is a chair dragged in front of it, Oscar could (probably) send the chair flying. His body has gone soft and slack and yet Oscar Allyn is strong, you have seen him lifting heavy objects for Irma, a stone bench in the backyard she’d asked him to relocate, bags of fertilizer, salt for the winter driveway.

Easily, Oscar outweighs you by one hundred pounds. He has been drinking, he is summoning his strength. His desperation, chagrin. How you have unmanned him with your shrieking laughter. If Oscar wishes he will burst upon you and cause you to scream another way. Your jeering laughter the man has not been sensitive enough to understand is the laughter of hysteria will be permanently silenced. He will hurt you between the legs however he can, plucking at you, his fingers crude, fingernails sharp. Or possibly something he will grab, your hairbrush. The handle of your plastic hairbrush, shoved up inside you.

Dirty girl. This is what you like.

Or, if indeed the man has an erection. If the man can sustain an erection. That will be his triumph, annihilating you utterly.

Whatever it is, this revenge. You will not register it fully, you will not live to recall it. In his jubilance he will snuff out your young life, a pillow snatched from your bed as you thrash in desperation, screaming mouth mashed against the pillow, pleading and begging, mute.

All this is the male prerogative. You’d known, watching from a doorway your brothers at their video games. Kill! Kill! Kill the enemy! Certainly you’d known, when Lionel shoved you down the icy steps with a prayer you’d crack your skull.

Outside your door the man listens for the sound of your quickened, frightened breathing. Eagerly the man listens to the silence of your fear which is a kind of reverence, an acknowledgment of his power.

Will he smother you, or will he strangle you. Will he force himself between your legs, will he rape you, or will he merely pluck and pinch at you with his fingers, in a fury of impotence, and toss you back down onto the creaking bed, leave you your debased life as if it isn’t worth taking from you . . .

In a trance of terror you have not breathed for some time. One of your comforting fantasies since you have come to live in exile has been that you are a soft boneless sea-creature protected inside a shell and (perhaps) it is a beautifully striated shell that camouflages itself amid seaweed surroundings so that it is not visible to the eyes of predators nor could the creature inside the shell hear anything of the outer world, concentrating on its own heartbeat and the coursing of its blood . . . This fantasy you have only to shut your eyes in school, in a classroom. And when you are alone.