Hormones and rage feed her decision as she grabs her cell phone and charger and stuffs them, along with every garment she can, into the faded and dirt-smudged pink JanSport pack meant for schoolbooks, when she wasn’t skipping. Her mother did not understand how this wasn’t right, this way of living, only that her daughter had skipped school, not caring how the kids pointed and pranked and made Anne the butt of their jokes and puns about how she reeked of cigarette smoke and dressed in wrinkled clothing. But she was clean—always made sure to bathe, even if out of bath soap. If she had to, she would use dish or laundry detergent that dried and cracked her flesh. Always brushed her teeth. Sometimes with baking soda when her mother was on one of her benders and her father was on the road running a delivery with the big eighteen-wheeler that kept everything afloat—food on the table, the rotted roof overhead, and booze flowing through their veins.

Anne had withdrawn from others. Words cut like serrated edges. They hurt but not nearly as much as her family’s actions, their home, where she shared a single bedroom with two sisters. The other bedroom was her three brothers’, and the living room and dining room were her mother’s, where she collected ashtrays of cigarette butts, empty beer and whiskey bottles. The TV blaring with talk shows, cable movies, and forensic docuseries, window blinds pulled down. Sleeping off her hangover during daylight on the broken-down, cat-haired, cigarette-cherried brown vinyl couch, she was up by four every afternoon, starting with coffee, moving to bourbon, then chasing it with beer. Putting pizzas or boxed lasagna in the oven for her kids’ supper every evening.

Petite and pale, with a mop of strawberry-colored tangles on her head, Anne wore rock concert T-shirts, tattered denim, hippie-handmade bracelets, and chipped fingernail polish on chewed nails. Some would label her socially awkward, but hey, who wasn’t at seventeen, almost eighteen? Anne had had enough tough love. After the heated words and the near miss with the whiskey bottle, her mother had stepped out, cruised down the street and over to the liquor store at a shopping center, for a thirty-pack of Miller High Life, another ten-dollar bottle of Jim Beam, and a few packs of Camels.

Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road” blares through the closed door of her brothers’ bedroom. Anne roots through her father’s hickory-stained dresser, knowing that the smaller piece of protection is somewhere buried beneath socks and boxers. Hefting its weight, she had forgotten how heavy the .38 revolver was. Her father had taken her and her sisters out to a trucking buddy’s farm. Let them shoot aluminum cans from a picnic table while he and his buddy Toad sipped brews and smoked reefer. Grabbing the box of cartridges, she sinks them into her pack along with the gun.