him and started dancing again, but I knew this was not going in a
direction I wanted, and I resisted him. His hands dropped down. He
squeezed my bottom, pushed me onto the bed, and began kissing me.
"All right!" one friend said, and the other yelled. "Get it on!"
"I'm not that kind of girl," I said, but he ignored me. When I tried rolling
away, he pinned back my arms. Dad had said to holler if I needed him,
but I didn't want to scream. I was so angry at Dad that I couldn't bear the
idea of him rescuing me. Robbie, meanwhile, was saying something
about me being too bony to screw.
"Yeah, most guys don't like me," I said. "Besides being skinny, I got
these scars."
"Oh, sure," he said. But he paused.
I rolled off the bed, quickly unbuttoned my dress at the waist, and pulled
it open to show him the scar on my right side. For all he knew, my entire
torso was one giant mass of scar tissue. Robbie looked uncertainly at his
friends. It was like seeing a gap in a fence.
"I think I hear Dad calling," I said, then made for the door. In the car,
Dad took out the money he'd won and counted off forty dollars, which he
passed to me.
"We make a good team," he said.
I felt like throwing the money at him, but we kids needed it, so I put the
bills in my purse. We hadn't scammed Robbie, but we'd worked him in a
way that felt downright sleazy, and I'd ended up in a tight spot. If Robbie
had been set up by Dad, so had I.
"You upset about something, Mountain Goat?"