blood, what it didn't even take fury to incite in him, that slow, smoldering craving for the darkness, madness, and, maybe murder. He could have frightened her with it, he was sure. He had done it before. Janey had packed her bags when faced with the storm of it, small difference that it was not directed at her, nor could it ever be at any woman. It was not a woman's face or voice that ignited Nicholas's black rages.
But he couldn't do it. After Janey, he had worked so hard to get that part of him under control. He could not now use his latent madness as a weapon, no matter how Beth provoked him.
When she demanded money from him to end her pregnancy, he refused. He saw that tiny life within her as a chance. For both of them.
But he hadn't really been surprised to come home to find her gone with only the note for her goodbye. His life would go on without her. In this form or some other.
Trissa
At sixteen, Trissa's body betrayed her, buckled under to the assault of hormones that had set her emotions into rages for so long and succumbed to the curves and shapes she had envied in others and yet feared in herself. Finally, no amount of round-shouldered slouching or shapeless sweaters could disguise it. And without her willing it, the same food she had always eaten, magically transformed itself into round, firm breasts, slim but curving hips, and a slender waist.
If she still saw a wide-eyed, scrawny monkey in her mirror it was because she refused to see anything else. In her heart, she feared others who cared to look saw quite a different reflection.
On the city bus she shared daily with other commuting students, the same boys who had ignored her for her more precociously ripe classmates now cast their less-than subtle eyes in Trissa's direction. What the eyes beheld, the hands sought to confirm, and only her cold looks and her well-placed clutch of books saved her from the worst of the poking and pawing
In April, her mother rallied her dormant interest in Trissa long enough to express her wonder why she had heard no plans for the Junior Prom.
"I can't believe you won't be going," Edie Kirk said one afternoon. "Did you know I was princess at my junior prom? Your father looked so handsome in his tux and boutonniere! I knew I would marry him from that very day. These are memories that you can never replace. You have to go, Trissa."
"I don't want to go. In case you didn't notice, I don't have boys lining out the door begging for the opportunity to escort me," said Trissa, swallowing the comment that she never realized she had a carnation and a rented suit to thank for her miserable life.
"You go to an all-girls' school. Of course, you have to take the initiative to find some one. Maybe one of Lonny's old friends has a little brother who..."
"No! I don't want you to manufacture a boyfriend for me. That is not the kind of memory I want."
In the end, her mother won and she went off to the prom in pink tulle with Steven Maher, somebody's cousin's friend. After detailing his financial outlay for tux rental and flowers, and gas for the car he'd borrowed from his brother, and pizza after the dance, Steven told her she owed him the opportunity to create a few memories of his own.
And so Trissa found herself in one of the parked cars on Calvary Drive on a rainy predawn in May, hidden from view behind steamed-up windows. Trissa tried to imagine herself watching the old Buick from her place on the other side of the tracks, as she had watched so many other old cars and their young occupants the lonely summer before.
It was like watching someone else's dream with Steven supplying what she had only imagined could be going on in the slightly swaying cars. She marveled at the ease at which the intricate hooks and eyes and fastenings of her dress succumbed to his nimble fingers. These same pesky closures had required ten minutes of her mother's fussing while Trissa got dressed. She laughed out loud at his facile cajolery while the barrier of her bra yielded to his onslaught.
"My God, your tits are so soft and sweet. Like ripe, little peaches. If I could just look at them... If I could just touch them... If I could just