Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,65
in the beautiful houses on the screen where people spoke but you couldn’t hear their muted words. At some point, Iridian fell asleep to that beauty. She woke when a lamp clicked on—more like, she jerked awake. Her long legs bucked against the tangle of her blanket. Iridian blinked and saw her father at the far end of the couch. With a dried crust of spittle at the edge of his mouth, he was the opposite of the beauty on the screen.
“What?” Iridian asked.
Rafe said nothing. A little knowing twitch played at the corner of his mouth, right next to the spit.
Iridian looked down and, there, clutched in her father’s hand, was her notebook, the new one with the yellow cover. She exhaled hard and fast, and before she could even really think about it, Iridian launched off the couch. She collided with Rafe, and her notebook flipped open, its ink-covered pages fanning out. Iridian’s nails dug into the skin of Rafe’s wrist and the backs of his hands. Her attack worked—sort of. Rafe pulled away, but all Iridian was left with was a tiny scrap of paper with the word ravage written on it.
“This is what you think about?” Rafe demanded. “What kind of girl are you?”
“It’s nothing,” Iridian lied, because it was, of course, everything.
“It’s filth! It’s trash!”
Rafe waited for his daughter to respond, maybe to apologize, and Iridian waited for Rafe to do what he always did: say something terrible and then try to twist things to make it seem as if Iridian had been the one to force him into saying something terrible.
Rafe took a step forward, and, out of the corner of her eye, Iridian saw Rosa creep down the stairs. Iridian steeled her nerves, took a breath, and remembered how diligently she had practiced for this sort of thing. It was rare he could hurl an insult at her that she hadn’t hurled at herself already.
“I know why you do this,” Rafe said. “You’re trying to make up for the fact that you aren’t beautiful like Ana, talented like Jessica, or kind like Rosa. You are just . . .” He paused, trying to find the right words. “You are a nothing person. Not beautiful. Not talented. Not kind. I thought I raised you better, but I guess I was wrong.”
Before, when this had happened at school, when her secrets had been plucked away and shared by and to her awful classmates, Iridian had been so humiliated she hadn’t been able to move. She’d heard the jeers and laughter, but only over the white-noise roar in her head.
For a long, long time, Iridian had wanted to be completely inconspicuous, homebound, so introverted she was practically invisible. But nothing? Iridian didn’t want to be nothing, and when she heard her father say that to her, she exploded like a star.
With a sharp cry, she lunged for the notebook again, but Rafe held it above his head, toward the overhead light and out of his daughter’s reach. Iridian tried to claw her way up his arm, but Rafe pushed her hard—right in the center of her chest—and she fell back against the couch and then bounced onto the floor. Rafe started to flip through the pages, just like Evalin had done, like he was going to read from them. She couldn’t bear the thought of her words coming out of his mouth, so she screamed. Still on the floor, she folded herself into the tiniest ball possible, closed her eyes, covered her ears with her hands, and screamed.
Rafe started reading. Iridian couldn’t hear everything, but the worst/best phrases seemed to rise over her screams: suck, smack, salty. She screamed louder. Eventually, Rafe grabbed her by the arm and tried to pull her up, but Iridian was dead weight, a shrieking heap. Rafe was dragging her across the carpet. Her shoulder twisted, threatening to wrench out of joint, but Iridian kept screaming. She vaguely heard Rosa telling Rafe to let go, but Rafe wasn’t listening. He bent over Iridian and told her—shouted—into her ear, “If only your mother—God rest her precious soul—could see this.”
“Stop!” Rosa yelled.
Iridian was able to turn her head and see that her sister had pulled a nearby lamp