perfect punishment,” he said. “I simply won’t see her. All I have to do is
not see her, and she will suffer.”
He was right. When he didn’t return her calls, Sadie became
desperate. She told the boys at school not to walk with her, for fear
Shawn would see, and when Shawn said he disliked one of her friends,
she stopped seeing them.
Sadie came to our house every day after school, and I watched the
Snickers incident play out over and over, in different forms, with
different objects. Shawn would ask for a glass of water. When Sadie
brought it, he’d want ice. When she brought that he’d ask for milk,
then water again, ice, no ice, then juice. This could go on for thirty
minutes before, in a final test, he would ask for something we didn’t
have. Then Sadie would drive to town to buy it—vanilla ice cream,
fries, a burrito—only to have him demand something else the moment
she got back. The nights they went out, I was grateful.
One night, he came home late and in a strange mood. Everyone was
asleep except me, and I was on the sofa, reading a chapter of scripture
before bed. Shawn plopped down next to me. “Get me a glass of water.”
“You break your leg?” I said.
“Get it, or I won’t drive you to town tomorrow.”
I fetched the water. As I handed it over, I saw the smile on his face
and without thinking dumped the whole thing on his head. I made it
down the hall and was nearly to my room when he caught me.
“Apologize,” he said. Water dripped from his nose onto his T-shirt.
“No.”
He grabbed a fistful of my hair, a large clump, his grip fixed near the
root to give him greater leverage, and dragged me into the bathroom. I
groped at the door, catching hold of the frame, but he lifted me off the
ground, flattened my arms against my body, then dropped my head
into the toilet. “Apologize,” he said again. I said nothing. He stuck my
head in further, so my nose scraped the stained porcelain. I closed my
eyes, but the smell wouldn’t let me forget where I was.
I tried to imagine something else, something that would take me out
of myself, but the image that came to mind was of Sadie, crouching,
compliant. It pumped me full of bile. He held me there, my nose
touching the bowl, for perhaps a minute, then he let me up. The tips of