Chapter 2: Toilet Paper Rules

You want to know how desperate I was?

I stole a roll of toilet paper from the shelter bathroom. The good kind, too, two-ply, with those little embossed flowers. I stood there in the stall, unwinding it, trying to figure out how to write on something that wasn’t even paper so much as compressed fluff.

This is insane, I thought. You’re going to write your entire future on toilet paper.

But the shelter’s computer was in the common room, and there was no way I was typing out my secret fantasies where anyone could see. My tablet had juice. I’d charged it overnight in the one outlet that wasn’t broken, but I wasn’t about to hand that over to a stranger. The tablet was mine. My rules, my stories, my porn. The only thing I owned that no one could take.

So toilet paper it was.

I sat on the closed toilet lid, balanced the roll on my knee, and tried to remember how to hold a pen. I’d barely written anything by hand in years. Everything was thumbs and screens.

“Plan A,” I wrote. The ink bled. The letters looked like they were drowning.

I stared at the page. What did I want? A place to live. Food. Cigarettes. Privacy for Emily and me. Maybe some cash.

So I wrote that. A list of demands. Then I wrote down everything I thought a guy like him, that quiet, weirdly confident air-conditioner man, would hate. Things like “I will be addressed as Mistress Amber,” and “My daughter will have her own suite with cable TV,” and “You will provide menthol cigarettes, brand name only.”

It was a joke. A test. If he agreed to any of it, he was a fool, and I’d own him. If he laughed in my face, at least I’d know I hadn’t missed anything.

Internal: Who are you kidding? You wrote that crap because you’re scared. You’re always scared. So you push first. Make them reject you before they can disappoint you.

I rewound the toilet paper, careful not to smudge the ink, and stuffed it in my hoodie pocket. Then I went to find Emily.

She was in the TV room, of course. The queen of the broken recliner.

Emily, at sixteen, looks nothing like me. Thank Christ. She’s got dark hair, almost black, and these sharp, Slavic cheekbones from her father’s side. Her eyes are gray, not brown. She’s a small five-two, maybe a hundred pounds, but she moves like she owns every room she walks into.

She was sprawled in the recliner, bare feet on the armrest, eating something that might have been a granola bar but looked older. The TV was playing a rerun of Modern Family. She wasn’t watching. She was glaring at a man across the room who’d had the audacity to sit in her designated space.

The man, an old guy with a beard and one shoe, was studiously ignoring her. Smart man.

“Mom,” Emily said without looking at me. “This asshole took my spot. Tell him to move.”

“That’s not your spot, Emily.”

“It is now. I sat in it yesterday.”

“That’s not how it works.”

She finally looked at me. That gray stare. Cold. Calculating. And underneath it, underneath all that armor, a flicker of something that might have been fear.

Internal: She’s always been like that. Ever since she was three, I caught her stealing candy from a baby. Not metaphorically. An actual baby. She reached into the stroller and took a lollipop right out of the kid’s hand. I was so proud that I bought her ice cream.

“We might be moving,” I said.

That got her attention. She sat up. “Where? Not with one of your losers, I hope.”

“Some guy. He offered us a place. For a week, maybe. If I agree to some rules.”

Emily snorted. “Rules. Like you’ll follow rules.”

“They’re my rules. I’m writing them.”

She stared at me for a long moment. Then she smiled that sharp, knowing smile that reminded me of a knife. “So you’re gonna be the boss, then? Make him do what you want?”

“Something like that.”

“Good.” She swung her legs off the armrest and stood up. “I’m in. But if he tries anything, I’ll kick his nuts into his throat.”

She said it so casually. Like that was just something sixteen-year-old girls said.

Internal: I raised her wrong. Or maybe I raised her exactly right, for the world we live in. You can’t tell anymore.

The afternoon crawled by. I sat in the corner of the common room, pretending to scroll through my tablet, and tried to figure out what I actually wanted.

Not the toilet paper demands. That was bullshit, and I knew it.

What I actually wanted was someone to stop me. Someone to see through the bitch act and call me on it. Someone who wouldn’t flinch when I screamed or spit or threatened.

Someone like a boss.

Boss was the only man who’d ever made me feel ... not good, exactly. But right. He’d grabbed my hair and forced me to my knees, and instead of fighting back, instead of doing what I always did, I’d just ... stopped. Stopped thinking. Stopped planning. Stopped trying to control everything.

And for a few hours, I wasn’t a bitch. I wasn’t a thief. I wasn’t a failure.

I was just a woman on her knees, doing what she was told.