Before You Begin

You’ve read the tags. You’ve read the warnings.

Here’s what that means.

This is a one-shot in the Prison Daddy universe, told entirely from inside the head of a fourteen-year-old girl who knows exactly what her father is — what he did to her mother, what he does to her sister — and gets on the bus anyway.

That’s the part that’s meant to sit wrong. Not that it happens to her. That she wants it. That she walks in clear-eyed, certain she’s too smart to end up like the others — and that certainty is the exact handle he takes her by.

There is no rescue. No one stops it. The one person who sees it clearly says nothing, the way he’s said nothing for years. She isn’t tricked, and she isn’t saved. By the last page she’s already decided to go back.

This is written to arouse you and to horrify you in the same sentence. If that combination isn’t something you want in your head, this is where you stop.

If you’re looking for:

A narrator who doesn’t want it

Someone to intervene

A line the story won’t cross

Any version of this that lets you off the hook

Not here.

If you’re here for:

First person that doesn’t blink or look away

The specific horror of a child narrating her own grooming as a choice

Desire and disgust that refuse to separate

Dark content written at full strength

Then you’re in the right place.

Last chance to back out.

Still here?

Then let’s begin.

— Kinjite

The sofrito from this morning was still in the walls when I got home.

I could smell it from the hallway — Carmen had the rice going already, the lid hissing. I let myself in with my key and dropped my school bag by the coatrack.

“How was school.”

“Fine.”

Carmen was at the counter cutting onion, eyes down. She nodded and kept cutting. I washed my hands at the sink.

Diego was at the kitchen table with his tablet propped against the fruit bowl. One earbud in, the other dangling. He’d pushed Carmen’s place mat aside for his elbows.

“Move those.”

He moved them without looking up.

I took an apple from the bowl and ate it standing at the window. The fire escape. The building across the back. A shirt on somebody’s line that had been there for three days now — still there, still damp-looking.

My phone lit up on the counter. I glanced at it. Jessica. The group chat. I turned it face down.

In the lobby on the way up I’d passed Martinez from 2C coming out of the mailroom. He’d held the inner door. I said thanks and crossed to the stairs and felt him watching me go. Something went warm at the back of my neck. I hadn’t looked back.

Mateo came out of his room around five-thirty.

He got water from the filter, drank it at the sink. He said something to Diego about Diego’s sneakers in the hallway. Diego said something back. Mateo put his glass in the drying rack and headed back toward his room.

He didn’t look at me when he came through the kitchen.

He hadn’t not-looked at me the same way twice in the past two months. This time he had somewhere to be that happened to take him past me.

“Rice is almost,” Carmen said.

The four of us at the table. Carmen served. She asked Diego about homework. Diego said he’d done it. Carmen looked at him. Diego looked at the ceiling. The TV in the living room was still on from earlier and nobody had turned it off.

From down the hall: the 3A door. The squeak of it. Then quiet — Luna going out, or coming back in. I didn’t get up to check.

I passed the rice when Mateo asked for it.

“Thanks,” he said. To the table.

The call had been this morning.

7:15, bathroom, door locked. I’d run the shower low so it sounded like something. Three minutes, maybe a little over.

I’d told him what I was reading for English. He’d said good — not like I’d answered correctly. Like I’d handed him something without meaning to.

I’d thought about it twice on the bus home and once in fourth period and now I was eating rice at Carmen’s table and thinking about it again.

I cleared the plates when Carmen stood up.

Diego disappeared the second the dishes moved. Mateo helped with the leftover rice and then went back to his room. Carmen washed. I dried. Same as every Thursday.

My room was at the end of the hall. Small — the desk under the window, the alley view, the poster I’d had since I was eleven with the corner lifting. I kept meaning to press it down.

I changed out of my school clothes. Sweatpants, the old sleep shirt with the faded lettering. Sat at the desk and opened my laptop.

The bag was under the bed.

I’d packed it Tuesday night after Carmen went to sleep. One change of clothes per day. Underwear. Toothbrush. The purple hoodie. I’d zipped it and slid it under the bed in the dark. I hadn’t touched it since.

I opened my homework and did the math first. Then history. At eight-thirty I picked up my phone — seventeen new messages in the group chat, Jessica about the weekend, Jaylin about something that had happened at lunch. I scrolled through it. Sent a laughing emoji to the thing Jaylin said that was actually funny. Put the phone down.

Through the wall: Luna’s TV, low. A laugh track, distant. Then Sienna’s voice — one bright sound, brief — and then quiet again.

At nine I brushed my teeth. In the bathroom mirror I looked at my face. Dark eyes. His eyes. I’d known that a long time. Below that: my shoulders, the line of my throat, the way I’d started to take up space in a mirror differently this year. I knew what that was too.

I rinsed. Clicked the light off.

In bed I set the alarm for six-fifteen. I lay on my back in the dark. The building made its sounds — the elevator, someone crossing a room upstairs, the pipes in the walls doing whatever they did after ten. Mateo’s light still showing under his door, thin strip of it.

Good.

I turned onto my side. Under the bed the bag was where I’d left it.

Six-fifteen. I’d be up before it went off.

I was awake at six-ten.

The alley still gray through the window. My phone said six-ten, then six-eleven. I waited until six-fourteen and turned the alarm off before it went.

The bag came out from under the bed the same way it went in — no light, just my hands knowing where it was. I set it by the door. Changed in the bathroom. My face in the mirror: same face.

Carmen was already up. The kitchen light was on, Carmen at the table with her coffee, phone flat in front of her the way she kept it in the mornings. She looked up when I came through.

“Jessica’s,” I said.

“The mom’s home?”

“Yes.”

“You have your charger?”

I held it up.

“You need money for food?”

“I’m good.”

Carmen looked at me for a second. Then back at her coffee.

“Text me when you get there.”

“I will.”

I set my phone on the table without being asked and turned the screen toward Carmen. The thread with Jessica — real messages, me asking three weeks ago if Jessica could be the cover for a weekend, Jessica saying sure lol, the thumbs-up after. Carmen looked at it for maybe two seconds. Not long enough to read anything.

Carmen trusted phones the same way she trusted locked doors.

I was zipping my bag in the hallway when 3A’s door opened.

Esme stood there. Sienna on her hip, one sock on, the bear pajamas she’d almost grown out of. She’d kept the door cracked — the way she did in summer so she could hear — and now she was in it, looking at the bag.

Sienna reached toward me immediately. Both hands open, fingers working.

I touched her palm. One second.

“Up early,” Esme said.

“Jessica’s. I mentioned it.”

Esme shifted Sienna to her other hip. Her free hand moved on Sienna’s back. She didn’t say anything for a moment.

“You can call me,” Esme started. “If anything—”

“I’ll see you Sunday,” I said.

I picked up my bag.

“Sofia—”

But I was already going. Down the hall, past the elevator that was always broken, to the stairs. Behind me Sienna started to fuss — a sound that built and then softened as Esme shifted her, said something low. I took the first flight. Then the second. The sound fading above me.

I pushed through the lobby door.

Luna was on the stoop.

Eighteen, hair down, the empty carrier across her chest, already eating something from her bag. Everything sorted before I even reached the bottom step.

“Ready?” Luna asked.

I looked back at the entrance. Nobody there.

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go.”

The 8:15 ran on time.

I had the window. I watched the city thin out — apartment buildings giving way to big-box stores, then the on-ramp, then the highway opening up north. The skyline shrinking in the side mirror. Fields after that, wide and flat, the kind that went on longer than you expected.

Luna had the aisle. Snack bag on her lap, one earbud in, the other out. Her thumb moved on her phone. She didn’t look up when the skyline disappeared from the window.

Somewhere past the hour mark Luna reached up and took her hair down. No mirror. Not looking at anything. She pulled the elastic, shook her hair out once with one hand, let it settle. Slid the elastic onto her wrist. Went back to her phone.

“Nervous?” Luna asked.

“No.”

Luna glanced at me. “You will be.”

I didn’t argue.

We rode in silence for a while. The highway. The flat fields. A water tower with a town name on it I didn’t recognize.

“Why do you keep going?” I asked.

Luna turned her water bottle in her hands. She looked at the seat back in front of her for a moment.

“Come and find out,” she said.

I turned back to the window. The fields going past.

Past the second hour I put my forehead against the window and closed my eyes. I hadn’t planned to sleep. The bus hit a rough patch of road. My reflection doubled in the glass and then steadied.

I slept.

I felt the bus decelerate before I was fully awake.

The engine changing, the road getting slower under me. I lifted my head from the glass. My neck stiff where it had been pressed against the window, a faint ache at the base of my skull.

Outside: a parking lot. Chain-link at the perimeter. Razor wire catching the noon sun.

I’d remembered it wrong. Bigger in memory, more of everything. It was just a lot.

The walk from the bus stop was longer than I’d expected. Luna set the pace — not fast, just even. Chin slightly up. Eyes on the building ahead. I fell into step beside her and matched it without thinking. The air was warmer out here than the city. Flat. The smell of cut grass and something under it — hot fence-metal, or just the lot itself.

Security took a while. Forms first. I printed my name, signed where indicated. Luna went through it without looking at the page — her pen moving through the signature in one motion, not looking down.

The guard at the ID window took my card, looked at it, looked at my face. Then back at the card. He handed it back and waved me through. Luna he’d barely glanced at.

The officer who patted me down was a woman, efficient, both hands moving from my shoulders down to my waist and along the outside of my thighs. I stood with my weight even, arms out. The tank. The pale cotton shorts. My bare arms and thighs in the May heat. I’d put these on that morning without thinking about them.

Luna went through the same process ahead of me, already on the other side of it before I finished — weight even, arms out, chin level, already somewhere else.

Then the corridor. The yellow line down the center. I walked the left side of it.

Crossing the yard the windows had men in them. Not one — several, different floors. Someone called out from above, not words exactly, just sound shaped like something. Then a voice from further left, lower. Luna’s pace didn’t shift by a beat.

I kept my chin level. The sun on my arms and the backs of my thighs. I kept my eyes on the building ahead.

One of the voices shifted when it got to me — lower, slower. Different from what it had been a second before. Heat at the back of my neck — brief. Luna’s pace didn’t change.

Different from what it was for Luna. I kept moving.

The trailers were at the far end of a row. Beige, rust at the steps, a fake plant by the door of number eight.

Luna knocked.

The door opened inward.

He was taller than I’d been accounting for.

I knew his height as a number. Two years of his voice every morning in the locked bathroom had given me a lot and none of it was this. His voice had never once told me how much space he actually took up. Before the calls there’d been one visit, the April they let the family in, four years back: a big shape at the far end of a room I’d spent looking at the wall behind his head. A number, a child’s blurred version of him, Luna going careful whenever his name came up. None of it had the proportion of him in the doorframe.

My eyes ran it fast: the height, the width of his shoulders — years of nothing to do but work his body, and it showed. His sleeves were pushed to the elbow — forearms heavy with ink, old work, some of it blurred at the edges the way tattoos go after years. A name in script along one forearm, something else on the other I didn’t catch before my eyes moved on. His hands at his sides.

My eyes moved on.

“Mis princesas.”

Luna went to him. One step, no hesitation. He folded her in — her face against his chest — and his other hand settled at the small of her back, below where a father’s hand goes. She let her weight into him the way you do with something you’ve been waiting for.

He didn’t let go right away.

When she pulled back she tilted her face up to him. He looked at her for a moment. Then his mouth pressed to the top of her head and his thumb settled just below her ear.

I stood in the doorway and watched this happen.

I knew what those hands had done to my sister. I was looking at them now.

Over Luna’s shoulder his eyes found me. They moved — down once, back to my face — and settled. Not what he expected, I thought. I held still and let him look.

I’d known about the wall.

Luna had mentioned it — not directly, more around it. The photos. How he kept them.

I hadn’t expected this many.

Every surface. Luna at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Luna here, in this room, against the door I’d just come through. Luna with Sienna as a newborn, the unfocused look of someone still in a hospital. The same face at different resolutions of itself.